Please join us at the Evergreen Museum & Library for an exhibition entitled, An Invisible World Made Visible: The Infrared Landscapes of Phyllis Arbesman Berger. It runs through September 11, 2016 and is included with guided museum tour admission: 11am–4pm Tuesday–Friday, noon–4pm Saturday–Sunday (last tour departs at 3pm). Visitors can expect to be transported in time, to […]
Drawing and Believing: Blindfolds and Blind Faith
by Alicia Puglionesi, PhD Recipient (History of Medicine) and former fellow, Special Collections Research Center In Drawing and Believing, part 1, we met George Albert Smith, a British psychic medium, and the drawings that he supposedly produced using his telepathic powers. Those drawings would lead to a long argument between William James and Simon Newcomb on […]
Selected to Taste: The 18th- & 19th-C Reception of Still Lifes from Pompeian Frescoes
Shana O’Connell (History of Art) is a graduate student in the Interdepartmental PhD program in Archaeology. Currently working on her dissertation in the cool confines of Special Collections she has spent less-temperate summers in the past traveling in Italy and Greece as well as excavating at Pompeii, Rome, and Southern Turkey. In the Spring of […]
Drawing and Believing: Questions of Draftsmanship in 19th c. Psychic Science
by Alicia Puglionesi, Ph.D Candidate in the History of Medicine It was important to draw well in nineteenth-century America, at least if you hoped to appear cultured and refined. Drawing belonged to the set of impractical but socially-valuable skills cultivated in elite preparatory schools for men, and finishing schools for women, which also included singing, […]
What’s Happening in Special Collections this Summer?
Let’s face it – on these beautiful summer days, it can be hard to force ourselves to come inside. Whether your office has windows or not, nothing can quite compare to being out in the sunshine. That is, until the mercury hits the 90s and the humidity and heat index are off the charts. Luckily, […]
John Pendleton Kennedy: Author, Statesman, Patriot
The following blog post was written by David Farris of The Sheridan Libraries Reserves Department. While a graduate student at the Peabody Institute, David worked as a student employee at the Peabody Library. There, he spearheaded a project to identify and inventory all of the titles included in the gift by John Pendleton Kennedy. John […]
Beyond the Bookplate: Fire and Philosophy
“On the evening of September 17, 1908, the library suffered a loss…on the building [and]…contents by a fire which started in the south end of the so-called ‘stack-room,’ occupying the northwest corner of the fourth floor of McCoy Hall…The corridor leading to the Main Library and also the loft and tower above this floor were ablaze, […]
Beyond the Bookplate: Small-timore, 19th-Century Style
It is 1850, and an unidentified chronicler sits amidst the Greek Revival architecture of the Mondawmin Estate, awaiting the start of the third auction to empty the 10-year-old mansion of its contents. The multi-day auction had been advertised in the Baltimore Sun, and the prior days have seen the sales of considerable collections of furnishings, fine art, wines, […]