The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins

The Life and Legacy that Shaped an American City

by Antero Pietila

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Pub Date Nov 15 2018 | Archive Date Nov 15 2018

Rowman & Littlefield

Biographies & Memoirs | History

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Description

Johns Hopkins destroyed his private papers so thoroughly that no credible biography exists of the Baltimore Quaker titan. One of America’s richest men and the largest single shareholder of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, Hopkins was also one of the city’s defining developers. In The Ghosts of Johns Hopkins, Antero Pietila weaves together a biography of the man with a portrait of how the institutions he founded have shaped the racial legacy of an industrial city from its heyday to its decline and revitalization. From the destruction of neighborhoods to make way for the mercantile buildings that dominated Baltimore’s downtown through much of the 19th century to the role that the president of Johns Hopkins University played in government sponsored “Negro Removal” that unleashed the migration patterns that created Baltimore’s existing racial patchwork, Pietila tells the story of how one man’s wealth shaped and reshaped the life of a city long after his lifetime.

Antero Pietila's thirty-five years with the Baltimore Sun included coverage of the city's neighborhoods, politics and government but also seven years of reporting as a correspondent in South Africa and the Soviet Union. A native of Finland, where he graduated from Tampere's School of Social Sciences, Pietila became a student of urban racial rotations during his first visit to the United States in 1964. He later obtained a Master of Arts degree at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. He is the author of Not in My Neighborhood: How Bigotry Shaped a Great American City (2010). He is a contributor to The Life of Kings: The Baltimore Sun and the Golden Age of the American Newspaper, as well as an ebook, Race Goes To War: Ollie Stewart and the Reporting of Black Correspondents in World War II. He resides in Baltimore, MD.

Johns Hopkins destroyed his private papers so thoroughly that no credible biography exists of the Baltimore Quaker titan. One of America’s richest men and the largest single shareholder of the...

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Advance Praise

"Antero Pietila has woven a rich tapestry of Baltimore history that vividly interweaves the legacy of the elusive Johns Hopkins with the warp and woof of twentieth century politics, the torturous aftereffects of slavery, and gritty personal reporting that never shies away from the disturbing questions posed by long-ingrained racism and poverty."
— Fergus M. Bordewich, author of "The First Congress: How James Madison, George Washington, and a Group of Extraordinary Men Invented the Government"

"Hard-hitting and occasionally outrageous, this book gives us Baltimore by way of its most influential citizen and the institutions he created. Pietila also offers up plenty of digressions— from guano to grave robbers, mobsters to medical experiments—that are as revealing as his central subject. Picking up where his groundbreaking Not in My Neighborhood left off, he again powerfully demonstrates how racism has shaped Baltimore, even down to the legacy of the abolitionist Hopkins. Once again Pietila has written a book that should stimulate much discussion among those who care about Baltimore and its history."
— Deborah R. Weiner, co-author of On Middle Ground: A History of the Jews of Baltimore

"Post-industrial Baltimore is fertile ground for coming to terms with the nation’s history of innovation and invention but also of forced labor, segregation, lynchings, eugenics and 'socioeconomic rotation'.

In his latest book Pietila uses Johns Hopkins as the lens to focus on the high and mighty who pulled the strings and shaped Baltimore. He weaves the dealings of luminaries, power brokers, hustlers, police, and even Russian hackers, into a captivating story about his adopted hometown. Covering 200 years, the book ranges wide and far until a comprehensive picture emerges in which heroes and villains are thoroughly intertwined. Many strands lead to Johns Hopkins, the person, the university and the hospital bearing his name, adding up to what is today a 'global premium brand.'"
— Klaus Philipsen, architect and author of Baltimore: Reinventing an Industrial Legacy City

"Antero Pietila has woven a rich tapestry of Baltimore history that vividly interweaves the legacy of the elusive Johns Hopkins with the warp and woof of twentieth century politics, the torturous...