The fall the Orioles won their first World Series, I was rooming off-campus with three other Towson State College freshmen in a three-story house on Evesham Avenue. The Baltimore of the mid-1960’s was not as much ashamed of its
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Joyce Bennett
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What Dr. Mudd Saw
“I have lost all confidence in the veracity and honesty of the Northern people,
and if I could honorably leave the
country for a foreign land, I believe
our condition would be bettered.”
—Letter to Frances Mudd,
by Samuel Mudd,
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Give Me That Old-Time Religion
In my 1950’s childhood, boys and men, hair slicked down with tonic, girls and ladies in mantillas and hats primly veiled with mesh worshiped at small country churches against which lapped the green and white fields of late-summer tobacco. On
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The Andersonville of the North
After the Battle of Gettysburg, a prison camp was established in occupied Maryland on a low peninsula lapped by the waters of the Potomac River and Chesapeake Bay. All told, 52,000 people—Confederate soldiers, Maryland and Virginia civilians, blockade runners, and
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Maryland, the South’s Forgotten Cousin
As recently as the 1930’s, elderly black people in rural Maryland were still keeping headstrong children in line with the admonition that something called “pattiroll” would “get” them if they didn’t behave themselves. “Pattirolls,” or patrols, were gangs of Union
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Courtesy
She is a middle-aged grocery clerk, and I have seen her working at Food Lion on Sundays and holidays and late into the evening during the week. Standing at her register, she warmly greets her customers, but she could as
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The American Redneck
There ain’t no shame in a job well done,
from driving a nail to driving a truck.
As a matter of fact, I’d like to set things straight,
A few more people should be pulling their weight.
If you want
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That Demon Weed
When I hear all the talk about tobacco, I think of my Uncle Rollins, a green-visored straw hat on his salt-and-pepper head and a two-day stubble on his seasoned farmer face. He is standing in a field or by an
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