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Lost City: Baltimore Town
Sitting down in a field or on a city bench, pulling out a sketch pad, and drawing a building or cityscape is today a lost practice, largely left to artists. In an era when you can access a digital map of the entire world, and then zoom in on practically any building on earth, a [...]
Morris A. Soper Papers – Coming Soon! (or 25 years late…)
Several months ago while pulling a collection from our sub-basement, or coal cellar, under the south end of the Keyser building here at MdHS, I became intrigued by a box labeled Soper Papers. Most curious were the words “Don’t catalog until 3/88” scrawled on it. Being quite familiar with the fact that most archives—including MdHS—have [...]
Big Stories in Small Pieces of History: President Andrew Johnson’s Impeachment Trial (March 13-May 26, 1868)
On Monday, May 13, the FBI and NARA returned twenty-one of the documents stolen from the Maryland Historical Society Library on June 15, 2011.* Among the invitations and announcements were several pieces of political ephemera, including tickets to President Andrew Johnson’s congressional impeachment trial in the spring of 1868. Johnson (1808–1875), seventeenth president of the [...]
Everyday People: Paul Henderson Collection Goes to City Hall
It’s been a crazy couple of weeks here in the Imaging Services Department at MdHS. Through some wild confluence of ambition and scheduling, I agreed to curate and deliver a 48-piece photography exhibition the very week of the debut of my new documentary, HIT & STAY, at the Maryland Film Festival. I can’t really [...]
Baltimore’s Clothes Horse: David Abercrombie
Abercrombie & Fitch – the name brings up images of young, scantily clad men and women staring out from advertisements with smoldering eyes and pouty lips. But the store known today for its teen apparel as well as its controversial ideas about how to dress children was originally a much different enterprise, offering clothing and [...]
AV Report: Attention All Filmmakers
With the fifteenth annual Maryland Film Festival underway, many Baltimoreans have no doubt noticed that filmmakers from around the globe have converged on the city. You may have seen them drinking our best beer, eating in our finest restaurants, partying in our hotels, and swaying MFF swag bags. Naturally we thought this would be a [...]
Lost City: The Regent Theater
The theaters, night clubs, and restaurants that once made Pennsylvania Avenue Baltimore’s center for African-American entertainment are today a receding memory. In the segregated Baltimore of the early to mid twentieth century, the Avenue was where African-Americans went to see the latest films, have a drink at one of the many nightclubs and bars, and hear [...]
The Gypsy Queen of Baltimore*
In 1904, Baltimore was buzzing with scandal – Jessie Key Habersham had disappeared again. This was not the first time that Habersham, the daughter of a Baltimore canned goods broker, had gone missing. The young debutante had once escaped to Europe for several months with family friends, before her father convinced her to return [...]
Let’s hear from O’s manager Paul Richards: “A keen baseball mind”
Who cares what the so-called experts predict for the Orioles this season? The Ravens did okay last season, the O’s looked pretty great in spring training, William Nathaniel “Buck” Showalter III has our confidence, and spring is sprung. No so-called sports expert or weatherman or even Mark Reynolds is going to rain on our enjoyment of tomorrow’s [...]
A Whale of a Tale: the Mysterious Case of the Tolchester Whale*
It’s hard to work at the Maryland Historical Society and not be familiar with the R.H. Eichner & Company color lithograph entitled “Go See the Whale at Tolchester, 1889.” An original of this iconic print lives in our library, and posters depicting it grace the halls of the Education Department and the offices on the [...]
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