Slave Streets, Free Streets: Early Baltimore On-Line

Anne Sarah Rubin discusses her digital project "Slave Streets, Free Streets: Visualizing the Landscape of Early Baltimore." This website allows users to virtually stroll the streets of Baltimore circa 1815, while exploring the lives of free blacks and enslaved workers. She will also discuss the on-line games her students made about the Pratt Street Riots of 1861, suggesting some of the ways that modern technology can reconstruct the past in newly engaging ways.

Professor Rubin joined the UMBC History Department in Fall 2000. Her teaching and research focus on the American Civil War, the U.S. South, nineteenth-century America, and digital history. Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman’s March and America, which explores the way Americans have remembered Sherman’s March, was published in 2014. Her first book, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy, 1861-1868, won the 2006 Avery O. Craven book prize for the best book in Civil War history. The book focuses on Confederate nationalism and identity. She has also worked extensively with electronic media and is co-author of a CD-ROM, The Valley of the Shadow: The Eve of War. This project won the first eLincoln Prize for the best digital project in American Civil War History and The James Harvey Robinson Prize which is awarded biennially for the teaching aid which has made the most outstanding contribution to the teaching and learning of history in any field for public or educational purposes.