Emily Lieb w/ Margaret O'Mara, ROAD TO NOWHERE

Writer and historian Emily Lieb visits the store to discuss her new book, Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore, which traces the birth, plunder, and scavenging of Rosemont, a Black middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore. She is joined in conversation by Margaret O'Mara, UW Professor of American History

In the mid-1950s Baltimore’s Rosemont neighborhood was alive and vibrant with smart rowhouses, a sprawling park, corner grocery stores, and doctor’s offices. By 1957, a proposed expressway threatened to gut this Black, middle-class community from stem to stern.

That highway was never built, but it didn’t matter—even the failure to build it destroyed Rosemont economically, if not physically. In telling the history of the neighborhood and the notional East–West Expressway, Emily Lieb shows the interwoven tragedies caused by racism in education, housing, and transportation policy. Black families had been attracted to the neighborhood after Baltimore’s Board of School Commissioners converted several white schools into “colored” ones, which had also laid the groundwork for predatory real-estate agents who bought low from white sellers and sold high to determined Black buyers. Despite financial discrimination, Black homeowners built a thriving community before the city council formally voted to condemn some nine hundred homes in Rosemont for the expressway, leading to deflated home values and even more predatory real estate deals.

Drawing on land records, oral history, media coverage, and policy documents, Lieb demystifies blockbusting, redlining, and prejudicial lending, highlighting the national patterns at work in a single neighborhood. The result is an absorbing story about the deliberate decisions that produced racial inequalities in housing, jobs, health, and wealth—as well as a testament to the ingenuity of the residents who fought to stay in their homes, down to today.

Emily Lieb is a Seattle-based writer and historian. Her 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 is her first book.

Margaret O’Mara is the Scott and Dorothy Bullitt Chair and Professor of American History at the University of Washington. Margaret is a leading historian of Silicon Valley and the author of two acclaimed books about the modern American technology industry: The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America (Penguin Press, 2019) and Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search For The Next Silicon Valley (Princeton, 2005). She also is a historian of the American presidency and author of Pivotal Tuesdays: Four Elections that Shaped the Twentieth Century (Penn Press, 2015). She is a coauthor, with David Kennedy and Lizabeth Cohen, of the widely used United States history college textbook, The American Pageant (Cengage). Margaret's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, WIRED, MIT Technology Review, Foreign Affairs and other outlets. She is an active public speaker, appears regularly in national and international broadcast media, and has contributed her expertise to development of Mattel's American Girl dolls. Margaret is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer and a past fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the National Forum on the Future of Liberal Education. She is a series editor of the Politics and Society in Modern America series at Princeton University Press, serves on the editorial board of Modern American History, and is a member of the Board of Trustees of the Computer History Museum. She received her MA/PhD from the University of Pennsylvania and her BA from Northwestern University. She is an alumna of Little Rock Central High School. Prior to her academic career, she served in the Clinton Administration, working on economic and social policy in the White House and in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Margaret lives outside Seattle with her husband Jeff, their two daughters, and world's best dog.

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