Even today as you walk on the Johns Hopkins campus at Homewood in Baltimore, the fingerprints of its first president, Daniel Gilman, can be found everywhere. From the physical forms of classroom buildings and laboratories to the current undergraduate curriculum, Dr. Gilman’s intellectual contributions and legacy as a higher education genius are still intertwined with one of this country’s most distinguished research institutions.
But there is one part of this legacy that has gone missing from this narrative for many years. Beyond the countless ways that Gilman put Baltimore on the map, it was his other contribution, his daughter Elisabeth, that Ross Jones, author of the newly published Elisabeth Gilman: Crusader for Justice, believes she deserves much more attention.
To document Elisabeth’s life, which eventually led her to become one of the country’s best-known leaders of the Socialist party, was an easy task for Jones. A product of Hopkins himself, who eventually rose to become one of the school’s senior vice presidents, Ross immediately took up the biography project after his retirement. He believes that Elisabeth was the centerpiece of the socialist movement in Maryland.
The result is a book which is not only well-researched record of one of the country’s first truly independent women in the country’s political life, but documents a time when religion and socialism were strange bedfellows in the pursuit of American justice. He also tells the charming story of a progressive family at the beginnings of America’s modern century.
This video is approximately four minutes in length. Elisabeth Gilman: Crusader for Justice is published by Secant Publishing and is available on Amazon here.
Write a Letter to the Editor on this Article
We encourage readers to offer their point of view on this article by submitting the following form. Editing is sometimes necessary and is done at the discretion of the editorial staff.