If you’re a fan of Edgar Allan Poe or F. Scott Fitzgerald, or take interest in the lives of Thurgood Marshall and Harriet Tubman, then “The Hidden Heart of Charm City” is your kind of book. In this riveting piece of non-fiction, author Katherine Cottle showcases the city’s evolution through the eyes of its residents, some of whom were notable figures in American history. Like a museum, “The Hidden Heart of Charm City” allows the reader to travel through time and learn about Baltimore by interacting with its history.
Q: Writing a historical account of Baltimore with both preserved and unpreserved letters is a unique way of telling a story. How did you decide on this approach?
A: I actually tried to allow the approach to unfold by itself, at least as much as I could. I went into the project without any specific expectations of whom or what I might find. There were some entrance expectations, such as the existing traces of Baltimore’s intimacy history via the Mencken/Haardt and F. Scott/Zelda Fitzgerald letters that I knew I could access, but the project was really a full dive into the unknown. What I realized very quickly was that the unknown — both literally and figuratively—was just as much a driving factor in the formation of Baltimore’s heart as the known. The challenge then became how to represent unpreserved material through my own preservation process.
Q: What inspired you to write The Hidden Heart of Charm City?
A: I was inspired by my years in Baltimore County and Baltimore City schools: as a K-12 student, an undergrad and doctoral student, and as a professor. All of the maps and timelines that I had seen of Baltimore never seemed accurate to me. They signified places and people within those places and dates, but not in a way that I could feel or truly connect to them. The mapping that I knew was perpetually unfolding around me contained the words of the past, the present, and the future—with human desires driving the directions, layers, and imprints within those routes.
Q: How did you choose which historical figures to include in the book?
A: It was a challenge to narrow the scope of the book down to a defined number of correspondents. I could have included many more, and I could have included less. I decided to aim for 10-15 sets of correspondents, but the organization of the correspondents went through several formats, including categorization by desire, type of letter, and by geographical placement in a more traditional mapping. In the end, the heart won the battle.
Q: What about Baltimore’s history do you find most interesting?
A: Baltimore holds so many contradictions, hidden influences, and unexpected turns. It is hard not to find something interesting about its history! I tried to pull several histories together in this project, so that a wide range of readers could see the wide influence of people, places, and words which have contributed to the city we call Baltimore.
Q: What were some of your unexpected discoveries during the research process?
A: There were many exciting and unexpected discoveries during my research process. Two of my favorites were the vast stash of unpublished letters between Eleanor Roosevelt and Lorena Hickok kept at the FDR Presidential Library, which have never been fully “translated” or publicly accessed, and the letter Mark Twain wrote to his wife, Olivia, during his last trip through Baltimore in 1884. Twain’s clever word play regarding the irrelevance of political and institutional titles, particularly at Johns Hopkins, is especially satisfying to read in 2019. The letter is only accessible through direct archive appointment at UC Berkeley or through paid mail order copy. These are only two examples of Baltimore’s hidden history that is still waiting to be discovered and/or made accessible to the public.
Q: How did the map of Baltimore unfold over the course of the 5+ years of research required for the book?
A: The map of Baltimore slowly transformed from an initial list of separate people, places, and letters to an anatomical view and reading of intimacy. My work with a recent NEH/NLM funded advanced workshop, Viral Networks: Connecting Digital Humanities and Medical History, influenced the vision of the “heart” as an anatomical reading and visual lens versus a traditional urban geography. (See attached: Viral Networks Workshop Draft and the Final Draft: https://publishing.vt.edu/site/books/10.21061/viral-networks/ -Chapter Six ). The published book showcases the potential for further networking, via data analytics and anatomical reading, for this project and other epistolary projects.
Q: How do you envision this project influencing other cities and/or researchers?
A: I hope to continue “mapping” the heart of other geographical settings through networking vehicles which provide accessibility and interdisciplinary connections for residents and visitors. I just started planning for another project in this vein, tentatively titled “The Mount Hope Project,” which will provide preserved representation of historical influences of a small former mining community in West Virginia, as well as an online resource where community members can share unpreserved materials and previously unpublished stories to enhance this mapping. I hope that The Hidden Heart inspires other scholars to utilize primary, unfiltered, and unpreserved materials (especially personal letters) in new visions of former history.
Q: Did your understanding of any of the included Baltimore figures change from writing this book?
A: I definitely appreciated the sacrifices that all of the figures took in risking their lives, reputations, careers, and personal needs to reach out to someone and something larger than themselves. The figures became correspondents and, subsequently, life-lines in Baltimore’s historical heart. I could hear their voices on the pages or in the distance, as if they had just written the words and sent them, with faith, in hopes of a brighter future.
Q: How do you define someone as being “a Baltimore figure or writer”?
A: I was continually challenged in determining who was a Baltimore writer/figure. While my initial draft of the project focused on residents, it did not take long for me to “figure” out that many of the city’s visitors had made significant routes of impact that also needed to be documented. The recognition and purposeful inclusion of unpreserved letters helped in defining my project as just one quick and partial view of a much larger scan of Baltimore’s hidden heart and the many writers (residential and visiting, preserved and unpreserved, known and unknown) who have contributed to its sustenance.
Q: Why is it important to utilize letters in today’s scholarship?
A: The standardization of instant communication in academic, professional, and personal realms, while providing speed and enhancing productivity, has inadvertently devalued long-term processes and connections. The letter form remains the most active and unfiltered example of a communication which placed faith, optimism, and desire in the hands of the process of its delivery, as much as in its content. This transporting quality makes it a “new” form, as we now struggle to relate to or experience this same communicative “wait” time we knew so well, only a couple of decades ago.
Q: How might future readers and students incorporate this type of research and mapping into current and future communicative technologies?
A: It feels like a very exciting time to be researching letters. We can now view them as a past artifact/genre in a way that we could not, even a few year ago. Yet, we are still discovering letters and redefining current letters as we speak. The archival, digital humanities, and networking potential intersection is prime for current and future scholarship. We are in the early stages of new researching methodologies, databases, and accessibility practices, especially when it comes to private communication and geographical connections.
Q: Were you always a fan of time travel?
A: Yes! I could feel the transporting influence of words at a very young age. The personal letter exemplifies time travel, but in a way that allows us to simultaneously experience the past, the present, and the future–and leaves its writers, readers, and researchers transformed from a glimpse of this hidden passage.
