Story by Max Cole

The Special Collections department of the Albin O. Kuhn Library, in partnership with the history department and the Center for Digital History Education, is happy to announce that the Joseph L. Arnold papers are now open for research use. The collection will be a valuable resource for researchers and students of Baltimore history.

The Joseph L. Arnold papers contain more than three decades of research on Baltimore history by the urban historian and longtime UMBC History Department faculty member. Within this collection are Dr. Arnold’s manuscripts for two works on the history of Baltimore, one organized chronologically and another thematically by ethnic/social groups. The bulk of the collection is Dr. Arnold’s extensive Baltimore subject files, mostly containing reproductions from 19th century editions of the Baltimore Sun interspersed with his hand-written notes on various topics.

Joseph Larkin Arnold (1937-2004) was a prominent urban historian and a key leader at UMBC for most of his career. Dr. Arnold joined the faculty of UMBC—then a very young institution—in 1968 after earning a PhD in social history at the Ohio State University. In his three and a half decades at UMBC, Dr. Arnold fulfilled a variety of campus leadership roles, including a term as Acting Librarian in 1979-1980.

For more information about the collection, click here.