On Moving and Movement

Abstract

On Moving and Movement Sarah E. Chinn, Editor and Brigitte Fielder, Editor On the cover of the 11.1 issue, you’ll see a plan of the city of Baltimore from 1822. This hand-colored map was commissioned by the city, and it shows the deliberately demarcated grid, including street names and boundaries of the city’s twelve wards. The bottom of the map shows the north, middle, and main branches of the Patapsco River, which flows into Chesapeake Bay. The larger map features a key of references to the city’s various institutions: churches, markets, banks, factories, and educational institutions, as well as the location of a courthouse, prison, penitentiary, and government offices, as well as a theater, museum, and type foundry. The map includes a separate list of its fifteen fire and hose companies, along with dates of their founding. This nineteenth-century representation of the city gives us an idea of its geography as well as its institutions and infrastructure. Baltimore is the home of Johns Hopkins University, another nineteenth- century institution, founded in 1876. Two years later, the university established Johns Hopkins University Press, now the oldest continually operating university press in the United States. Click for larger view View full resolution Plan of the city of Baltimore, 1822. Library of Congress. As J19 moves its home to JHUP with this issue, we wanted to recognize this move by attending to the physical spaces in which our institutions and their corresponding infrastructures reside. When our organization holds an in-person conference, we are reminded very distinctly of the specificities of place, as issues of proximity and access govern our experiences. When we’ve attended virtual events, we get a glimpse into our individual locations, sometimes all at once, juxta- posed in grid-like fashion that often obscures these distinctions of geography, institution, and even time zone. Like nineteenth-century readers, we also inhabit a shared reading landscape, via our organization’s journal. Brought together, as we are, by print and digital publications like this one, our conversations traverse space and even time. Seldom, it seems, do we think about the physical location of print or digital production. And the institutional location of a journal may register more keenly when we renew membership on an online point-of-sale site than when the volume arrives or the PDF file is accessed. The map of Baltimore does not, of course, present the whole picture of the city. Within these physical spaces and their various institu tions and supporting structures were people. While the map shows dozens (hundreds?) of rectangles representing the city’s buildings, whether residences or businesses, it does not give a clear image of the city’s inhabitants. The map’s Table of Population gives a figure of over 62,700 people by 1820. But much is obscured by this scale of counting and this representation of space. The city was built on the unceded lands of the Piscataway and Susquehannock Nations. The city’s port was a significant point of immigration during the nineteenth century. And by 1820, Baltimore’s population included numerous enslaved and free Black people. The histories of various people’s relationships to places and institutions continue to have bearing on our own moment. Baltimore is not only a place but a place marked by the intersections of travel and trade. As we move to JHUP with this issue, we must not only tarry in this fixed place, but acknowledge the movement within it—of people and institutions—not static but continually shifting within this space, as well as flowing in and out of it. Just five years after the making of this city map, the oldest carrier railroad in the nation—the Baltimore and Ohio Rail- road—was founded. In 1830 it built its first railroad station in Balti- more. As can be seen from this map from 1876, the railroad expanded over the course of the century. Not only connecting to cities in neigh- boring states of Ohio and Virginia, it reached cities to the west, such as Chicago and St. Louis. The railroad is just one infrastructural development for movement in the nineteenth century, but it was an iconic...