Welcome! I’m Cynthia Heider, a public history graduate student at Temple University. I look forward to filling this blog with lots of musings, etc. but I’m afraid it’s rather empty at the moment.

Stay tuned for more (hopefully) interesting content, but for now enjoy this 1880 E. Sachse & Co. lithograph of Baltimore facing south from the Washington Monument.

1880 Lithograph by E. Sachse & Co. Digitized by the Library of Congress: https://lccn.loc.gov/96512994

I love this bird’s eye view because I can’t figure out how it was made in an era predating the airplane. It also provides a rare glimpse at a landscape that has changed so much in the intervening years. In fact, there is no longer any trace of many of the buildings in the background- they burned to the ground during the Great Baltimore Fire of 1904.