Parkway Central Library Department of External Affairs 1901 Vine Street Philadelphia, PA 19103-1189 Phone: 215-567-7710 Contact: Alix Gerz Free Library to Present We the Detectives, Exhibitions and Immersive Theater Exploring the History of the Mystery Special exhibitions at the Rosenbach and the Free Library’s Rare Book Department merge with theatrical performances by New Paradise Laboratories …
The game is afoot to ferret out the realm of detective and spy literature at the Rosenbach. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to explore items including The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Charles Dickens’ unfinished novel), early editions of Sherlock Holmes, and an album belonging to a female Civil War spy. Synchronize your watches to 1500 hours and join us!
As we wrap up the year, here are a few vintage Christmas and New Year’s cards to enjoy from the Rush-Biddle-Williams family papers. Some of them are quite different from our modern cards. To my eye, the 1910 example sent by Mary B. Deedes to Marion Biddle seems more spring-like than holiday, and the idea …
Whenever I give presentations involving 19th-century manuscripts, people are always fascinated by the practice of cross-writing. This is the practice of writing a letter and then turning it 90 degrees and writing the opposite way. We have a number of examples of this from our collection, such as this Civil War letter from Alexander Biddle …
Although Thanksgiving wouldn’t be formally established as an official annual holiday until 1862, the practice of setting aside days of Thanksgiving goes back much further. Colonial legislatures, especially in New England, issued periodic Thanksgiving Proclamations and the Continental Congress designated a day of Thanksgiving every year from 1777 to 1782. You can find the full …
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 …
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 …
Today marks the 100th anniversary of the National Park Service, which was created on August 25, 1916. In celebration, here are two great National Park items from our collection. Yellowstone was established in 1872 as the first National Park (there were individual parks before the system to administer them was created). Drawing on the precedent …
The past year has been a busy year for religious events in Philadelphia. Last September the city hosted the World Meeting of Families, capped off by the pope’s visit, and now the Latter-day Saint community is welcoming thousands of visitors to an open house in advance of the September dedication of its new Philadelphia Pennsylvania Temple. …