Like many throughout the country, staffers of the Sheridan Libraries and University Museums are turning to books and other media in an effort to better understand the ways in which white supremacy and anti-Blackness have shaped American life—and the ways in which these destructive forces can be dismantled and counteracted. As we head into the […]
As our daylight hours dwindle, I am always reminded of Dylan Thomas. Not because he wrote “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” but because of his poem “Do not go gentle into that good night.” Thomas of course was writing of a much more permanent darkness, not the perennial shrinking of the day’s sunlit hours, but […]
This blog post comes from one of our four Freshman Fellows, Sarah Elbasheer, who is researching the ways people valued books at and after the time of print, and how we treat those books today. [Click here to learn more about our Freshman Fellows program] The first time I stumbled across JHU’s “Cathedral of Books,” […]
Science fiction and fantasy continue evolving. A rich and massive current wave is Afrofuturism. Books Afrofuturism — Africans have been writing science fiction since around the 1920s. Some of the newer voices in Afrofuturism are N.K. Jemisin , Nnedi Okorafor, Lesley Nneka Arimah, and Deji Bryce Olukoton. These authors’ titles include: Jemisin’s The Broken Earth […]
You can’t have Maryland without the Blue Crab! They go together like peanut butter and jelly, milk and cereal, JHU and lacrosse… You get the picture. Did you know that the Blue Crab is the official crustacean of the State of Maryland? Did you know that the Maryland Blue Crab’s Latin name (Callinectes sapidus) translates […]
Not convinced that Maryland is the Land of Pleasant Living? Then you need to experience summer on the Chesapeake Bay. If you can’t find time to leave the library, we have some recommendations to at least engage your imagination. A good place to start is James Michener’s Chesapeake. Michener’s epic tale weaves a fascinating story of life along […]
Annie Tang is an archivist in Special Collections in the Milton S. Eisenhower Library at Johns Hopkins University. She loves to travel, a good bowl of Vietnamese pho (pronounced ‘fuh’), discussing intersectionality, and waxing nostalgic about California weather. “Not all those who wander are lost.” This line from J.R.R Tolkien’s first installment of The Lord […]
College basketball is heating up; have you made your bracket yet? There aren’t quite as many movies out there about basketball as there are about football, but the Libraries does have a few to keep you company for those times without basketball. Hoosiers is a must-see for any basketball fan – it has the whole […]
Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst Are full of passionate intensity. These lines, excerpted from the William Butler Yeats poem The Second Coming, aptly describe my […]
As you start your Spring Break festivities, please include a moment of acknowledgment for pi. Irrational? Maybe, but I’ll take any excuse to have a piece of pie. To see how others celebrate and calculate pi, follow these links: Overview from The Chronicle of Higher Education Longest calculation of pi Squidoo Celebrates Pi Day One […]