I remember as a child being fascinated with my baby book; I would periodically pull it off the shelf in my mother’s study to look at it and compare it with my brother’s. When I became a parent, I, in turn, bought baby books for my children, although I wasn’t always consistent in filling them …
This small French flag is a nearly 100-year-old souvenir of the visit of an important World War I figure to Philadelphia. According to its envelope, this is a “Flag thrown from Marshal Joffre’s automobile while visiting Phila. Pa- May 9-1917.” Joseph Jacques Joffre had been commander of the French army during the Battle of the …
Between the crazy drama of this election season and the crazy popularity of the musical Hamilton, it seems an apropos time to look at some on-the-spot reporting from the crazy election of 1800. For those of you who have seen or listened to Hamilton, or just remember your history books, you’ll recall that the election …
Many years ago, I worked as a ghost tour guide in New Orleans and struck up a deal with one of the palm-readers who set up tables along the periphery of Jackson Square. I led my group to his table at the beginning of my tour, and he would choose a volunteer and read the shape …
The Rosenbach collection has numerous connections with the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland. Our library houses some manuscripts of poems by William Butler Yeats, who was a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre. Yeats became close to an Irish-American lawyer and arts patron, John Quinn, who was the defense lawyer in the obscenity trial over the …
Here at the Rosenbach we celebrate all things bookish. Our latest exhibition, The Art of Ownership: Bookplates and Book Collectors from 1480 to the Present, celebrates the many wonderful bookplates throughout our collections and uses them to delve into the biographies of book collectors/owners. I happened to stumble upon another curiously self-referential book about books …
Unless you come from the Midwest or from Amherst, Massachusetts., the name Eugene Field may not instantly ring a bell. However, you probably know some of the works of this poet and newspaper columnist best remembered for his sentimental pieces for children and about childhood (although he also translated Horace and wrote an erotic story …
The Freedom Train 1947-1949 exhibition at the Rosenbach is arranged to encourage visitors to walk a narrow path bordered by panels set in a zig-zag pattern, mimicking the original Freedom Train experience of traveling through train cars mounted with diagonal displays. Our “train” conducts visitors through the triumphs and challenges of the original exhibit, and when visitors …
I’ve written before about our current Freedom Train exhibition , but one element I ran across in my research and was unable to include in the exhibition was an episode of the popular Cavalcade of America radio show promoting the train. At a half-hour long, it was too long for exhibit audio, but I thought …
Following up on last week’s post on our cockfighting chair, I thought I’d highlight another interesting set of chairs in our collection in anticipation of next Thursday’s conversation on the history of the chair with Witold Rybczynski. If you’ve been on a Rosenbach house tour, you’ve seen these English mahogany chairs around the dining room …