In 2019 we welcomed three new members to our board, including a new representative of the Free Library of Philadelphia Foundation Board of Directors. Emily Cavanagh, Lisa Washington, and Gene LeFevre each bring their own expertise and passion for our mission. We hope you’ll join us in welcoming them to the board and The Rosenbach community. …
This blog post was written by Andrew White Could a poem inspired by an obscure folly, no matter how beautiful, hope to be anything but an obscure folly itself? Case in point: the masterful sonnet written by Robert Browning in honor of Helen’s Tower, a 19th century architectural folly built by an Anglo-Irish aristocrat in …
This post has been adapted from the Free Library of Philadelphia’s blog. See original post here. Two months ago, I spent an evening in a dimly lit room scrutinizing the handwriting of a long-dead person with a group of mostly strangers. Scraps of 150-year-old paper were passed around for us to hold in our own …
The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines Manumission as ‘formal emancipation from slavery’ (note that The Rosenbach has two first editions of Noah Webster’s landmark Webster’s Dictionary!). Manumission was one vehicle that enslaved Africans leveraged to gain their freedom. Slave laws made manumission difficult, however, requiring large sums to legally manumit slaves. Here at The Rosenbach we have …
When you walk into a museum’s gallery space, the site that meets your eye is usually quite serene: a calm, quiet space all set up for you, the visitor, to explore, enjoy, and learn from artworks and artifacts. But this final product comes only at the end of many months, if not years, of planning, …
If you’ve ever been to Bloomsday at The Rosenbach, you know how exciting (and slightly surreal) it can be to hear a book read aloud over many, many hours. Bloomsday 2020 is still months away but for those craving the opportunity to test their literary endurance, we have just the thing! We are teaming up …
Mexico: Race and Revolution in the Borderlands will be offered with live English-to-Spanish translation for Spanish-speaking visitors. The border between Mexico and the United States has been at the heart of trade, politics, art, and spirituality for centuries. A new Behind the Bookcase: Hands-on Tour at the Rosenbach titled Mexico: Race and Revolution in the …
This summer, we welcomed a wonderful group of interns into our collections, education, and marketing departments. Our interns worked on creating new tour content with previously uncatalogued materials, developed teacher workshops on Native American history, helped install our program galleries, and much more. Keep reading to learn more about their experiences interning at The Rosenbach. …
August 1, 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of Herman Melville’s birth. In honor of his bicentennial, we are proud to present American Voyager: Herman Melville at 200, a new exhibition that will explore the life, works, and legacy of this iconic but under-read author. To celebrate his birthday, we’ve asked The Rosenbach staff to share their …
We often think of the abolition movement beginning in the early 1820s with people like Frederick Douglas, Sojourner Truth and Charlotte Grimke. But since the beginning of slavery in the United States, there were people whose lives were devoted to ceasing and ending it. A few of these early anti-slavery advocates are here at The …