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Fort McHenry sits at the entrance to Baltimore's harbour on a star-shaped peninsula, and on the night of September 13, 1814, the British bombarded it for twenty-five hours. Francis Scott Key watched from a ship under a flag of truce and was moved enough by the American flag still flying at dawn to write what became, by 1931, the national anthem. The Star-Spangled Banner that flew that night is in the Smithsonian in Washington now, but Fort McHenry remains, with its cannon emplacements and earthworks intact. Baltimore served briefly as the nation's capital in December 1776, which is the kind of historical footnote the city tends to keep to itself.

Edgar Allan Poe lived on Amity Street in the 1830s and died in Baltimore under circumstances that were never properly explained.

He is buried in Westminster Hall churchyard at Fayette and Greene Streets, and someone has been leaving three roses and a bottle of cognac on his grave on his birthday, January 19th, anonymously, since 1949. The Baltimore Museum of Art holds the single largest collection of works by Henri Matisse in the world, largely because Etta and Claribel Cone, two sisters from the city, were buying Matisse when no one else was. Camden Yards, opened in 1992, broke with the concrete multipurpose stadium era and designed a baseball-specific retro park that influenced every stadium built in the United States afterward.