Today! "How a Highway Map Wrecked a City: Learning from Baltimore’s Road to Nowhere" 4:30pm - 6:00pm PST - Miller Hall, 102

[Jessica Kleiss]

If you have interests in urban planning, social action, transportation, historical perspectives, or grassroots organizing, you may want to come to the History Distinguished Lecture TODAY 4:30-6pm in Miller 102.

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Dear L&C Community,

Please join the History department today at 4:30pm in Miller 102 to welcome author and historian Emily Lieb who will discuss "Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore." (U. of Chicago Press, 2025). Drawing on land records, oral history, media coverage, and public documents, Lieb demystifies blockbusting, redlining, and prejudicial lending, highlighting the national patterns at work in a single Baltimore neighborhood. She tells the story of the deliberate decisions that produced racial inequalities in housing, jobs, health, and wealth—and of the ingenuity of the residents who fought to stay in their homes, down to today. More details below the poster. All are welcome to attend; please share widely.

Emily Lieb is a Seattle-based writer and historian. She has her AB in U.S. History from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island and her PhD in U.S. History from Columbia University in New York. After completing her PhD, she taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than 10 years; now she funds her life as a historian by writing about global health and climate change for a small writing firm in Seattle, Derfner and Sons, where she is the editorial director. Her scholarly work focuses on the building, rebuilding, and unbuilding of American cities, schools, and neighborhoods in the 20th century: Road to Nowhere: How A Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, published by the University of Chicago Press in November 2025, is her first book. She lives in an old-ish house in a new-ish city with her husband and the best dog in the world, a black Lab named Orvy.

Free. Open to the Public.