Religious Communities, Charity, and City Government in Baltimore, 1865--1905

This dissertation addresses the growth and expansion of religious charitable institutions in Baltimore between the Civil War and the fire that destroyed the city in 1904. Women and men from many religious backgrounds worked through their church or synagogue to address issues of poverty, disease, sanitation, and education within their communities and citywide. This dissertation demonstrates the ways that religious and ethnic organizations interacted with the city government as it expanded its role in welfare provision in the late nineteenth century. Baltimore's municipal government began funding private charities to care for the poor, elderly, and orphans in the 1830s, and continued this type of funding throughout the rest of the nineteenth century. Men and women from various religious communities sought public funding for their institutions and participated in debates about the role that the municipal government should take in providing social assistance.;This dissertation draws upon primary source material from charities, personal papers, municipal records, and published books and articles to understand charity in nineteenth-century Baltimore. It considers men and women as charitable actors and the ways that race, gender, religion, and ethnicity influenced public funding decisions regarding charities in a diverse and complex city. The dissertation engages the historiography of charity and public welfare by connecting public and private forms of social assistance. By studying the unique roles that women and men played in urban philanthropy and their evolving relationships with the state, it deepens our understanding of gendered charitable life in the nineteenth century and the growth of public welfare.