Emily Lieb

writer · historian · emily@emilylieb.com

Road to Nowhere: How a Highway Map Wrecked Baltimore

(University of Chicago Press, Coming November 4, 2025)

I am an historian of U.S. cities, schools, and segregation. I have a PhD from Columbia and an AB from Brown, and I taught history and urban studies at Seattle University for more than 10 years. I’m also a writer (of speeches, op-eds, white papers, and anything else a person might need) at Derfner & Sons. My forthcoming book, ROAD TO NOWHERE, traces the birth, plunder, and scavenging of Rosemont, a middle-class Black neighborhood in Baltimore.

@emlieb.bsky.social

Publications

“The Most Peculiar City in America”

Journal of Urban History (February 2020)

“Who Broke Baltimore? We Did.”

The Nation (August 2019)

“The 'Baltimore Idea' and the Cities It Built”

Southern Cultures, Vol. 25, No. 2 (July 2019)

“‘Shove Those Black Clouds Away!’: Jim Crow Schools and Jim Crow Neighborhoods Before Brown”

Nicole King, Kate Drabinski, and Joshua Clark Davis eds, Baltimore Revisited: Stories of Inequality and Resistance in a U.S. City (Rutgers, 2019), pp. 24–36

“Slum Clearance a la Mode: The Battle for Baltimore’s Tyson Street”

The Metropole (November 26, 2018)

“‘Baltimore Does Not Condone Profiteering in Squalor’: The Baltimore Plan and the Problem of Code Enforcement in an American City”

Planning Perspectives 33:1 (2018), pp. 75–95

“Location, Location, Location! Mobility and Opportunity in East King County”

Bedrosian Center, University of Southern California (September 19, 2017)

“Context Matters: Accessing Opportunity in Seattle’s Eastside Suburbs”

Bedrosian Center, University of Southern California (August 11, 2017)

“How Segregated Schools Built Segregated Cities”

CityLab (February 2, 2017)

“Fortress Seattle: Why the Fight Against the New Police ‘Bunker’ Matters”

Crosscut (October 5, 2016)

“Baltimore Killed Freddie Gray”

Politico (May 5, 2015)

“‘White Man’s Lane’: Hollowing Out the Highway Ghetto in Baltimore”

Jessica Elfenbein, Elizabeth Nix, and Thomas Hollowak eds, Baltimore ’68: Riots and Rebirth in an American City (Temple, 2011), pp. 51–69

Media

"Even Freeways that Don't Get Built Leave a Scar"

Liam Dillon, Los Angeles Times (February 21, 2022)

"The Other Side of MLK Boulevard"

Tanvi Misra, Bloomberg CityLab (April 11, 2018)

"Seattle U Historian: Will the Parkland Shooting Youth Movement Bring Lasting Change?"

KIRO7 (February 22, 2018)

"Efforts to Salvage Baltimore City Archive Get A Boost"

Van Smith, Baltimore Sun (July 3, 2013)