Countdown Clock Bloomsday is almost here! Although Bloomsday itself is Monday, June 16, at the Rosenbach and the Free Library we’re celebrating from now through next Wednesday, with a great slate of programs. One of them is an author talk on 6/18 at the Free Library by Kevin Birmingham, author of The Most Dangerous Book: …
In honor of the 70th anniversary of D-Day, I’m posting today about the Rosenbach’s our most significant World War II document: the Atlantic Charter. The Atlantic Charter was not a formal treaty but a statement by Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill to “make known certain common principles in the national policies of their respective countries …
News outlets are abuzz today with the news of a tie for the winner of the Scripps National Spelling Bee–Sriram Hathwar and Ansun Sujoe will share the spelling crown, the first time since 1962 that there have been co-champions. All the news about spelling put me in mind of the various spelling books here in …
Happy Memorial Day weekend to all our Rosen-readers. Since Memorial Day began as a holiday to remember and decorate the graves of the Civil War dead, it seems appropriate to remind everyone of our ongoing Today in the Civil War blog, which commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Civil War with objects from our collection. …
This week’s post is not about famous literary sequels (although we have plenty of those here–Through the Looking Glass, anyone?), but instead provides sequels to a couple of blog posts from the archive. Back in 2011 I wrote about our acquisition of an early American copy of John Polidori’s genre-creating tale, The Vampyre. As a …
It’s time for another check on the Networking before the Net exhibit. About six weeks ago I posted about the exhibit and offered some selections that visitors had contributed to an exhibit commonplace book. As I explained previously, commonplace books, or personal miscellanies, were blank books used to collect quotations, poetry, bits of wisdom, etc. …
When giving tours or talking with people about the Rosenbach, I often get questions about “autographs” and whether the Rosenbach collects them. The word “autograph” comes from the Greek for “self” and “write” and when we talk about an “autograph document” here at the Rosenbach, we are talking about an item that is handwritten by …
We’ve written before on this blog about Dave Burrell and his ongoing five-year series of compositions for the Civil War 150th (see here, here and here); this year’s performances, Listening to Lincoln, will take place next week on Thursday April 10 and Saturday April 12. But this year there’s more–a companion installation, entitled Four Scores …
This February the Rosenbach sent a three-inch object on a three thousand mile voyage. 2014 marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Doménikos Theotokópoulos, better known to the art world as El Greco. The city of Toledo, El Greco’s home for almost 40 years, is celebrating with the largest El Greco exhibition ever, entitled …
The current tensions over Crimea perhaps inevitably bring to mind a previous Russian/European conflict over the Black Sea area–the Crimean War of the 1850s. Although the war has generally been little remembered in the West (although apparently in Russia it is another story), one aspect has resounded in popular memory: the charge of the Light …