Working with historic sheet music, I come across autographs almost every day. This doesn’t surprise me, as most of the books on my own bookshelf have my name written inside. […]
Sheet Music Deep Dive: Lithograph or Autograph?
Sheet Music Deep Dive: Homing Pigeons
Growing up in Arizona, my family would often travel out East to visit relatives. A highlight for me was always New York City, where I developed my childhood love of […]
Sheet Music Deep Dive: Blue Glass
As the curator of the Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection, a phrase I hear often is “I didn’t know sheet music could be used to study…” Levy collected 30,000 songs […]
Black History Month at Homewood: Honoring Enslaved People at Homewood Museum
The story of Homewood and slavery did not end when Harriet Carroll left Homewood in 1816, taking the Ross family with her to Philadelphia. Homewood remained in the hands of the Carroll family until 1838, during which time many of the individuals enslaved by Charles Carroll of Homewood were relocated to another Carroll estate, Doughoregan […]
Black History Month at Homewood: Meet William Ross – Father, Fugitive, and Freedom Fighter
Homewood Museum tells the story of three families who lived and worked in this federal-period house between 1801 and 1832. Two of these families, the Rosses and Conners, were enslaved by the white Carroll family who owned the estate.When visitors tour Homewood Museum they are confronted by the juxtaposition of beautiful eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century […]
Finding African American Composers in the Levy Sheet Music Collection
Before the Lester Levy Sheet Music Collection was donated to JHU in the 1970’s, it was already a heavily consulted resource. Levy was regularly contacted by book publishers and magazines […]
A Vintage Vegetarian Thanksgiving Brought to You by Nut Turkey
Meat substitutes are having a bit of a moment, with popular products like the Beyond Burger introducing more and more people to plant-based meals. But “fake meat” is nothing new […]
Scribbling Women: Reclaiming the Bible in Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Forest Leaves
Posts in this series were written by undergraduate students in the spring 2020 Museums & Society class Scribbling Women: Gender, Writing, and the Archive. We used rare books, archival materials, […]
Scribbling Women: The Complex Legacy of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft
“America is now wholly given over to a damned mob of scribbling women, and I should have no chance of success while the public taste is occupied with their trash,” […]
Evergreen Obscurus #5: John W. M. Lee – Evergreen’s First “Curator”?
JHU Press‘s 2017 book Evergreen: The Garrett Family, Collectors and Connoisseurs contains a short reference to a man named John W. M. Lee (1848-1896), who was hired in the 1880s […]