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Featured Collections
John Addington Symonds Project
THE John Addington Symonds Project investigates the life and work of the Victorian scholar and writer John Addington Symonds (born Bristol 1840, died Rome 1893), with particular emphasis on his study of classical antiquity.
Explore the websiteThe Peabody Ballroom Experience
An arts & humanities collaboration between Johns Hopkins University and the nearly century-old performance-based culture known as ballroom.
Explore the websiteMaking Maps of Mexico
Students in this course worked with Prof. Lurtz to clean and map data from a 1900 Mexican agricultural statistics and the Mexican censuses from 1895 and 1900. The StoryMaps below include an overview of the coursework as well as students’ final research projects. Right click on the StoryMap and open in a new tab to view in more detail.
Explore the websiteUnderwriting Souls
Underwriting Souls is an interactive archive and set of online exhibitions that examine the role of insurance in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
The materials are drawn from the collection of Lloyd’s the Insurance Market. These collections at Lloyd’s, likely the only of their kind in the world, shed light on the wider economy of slavery, its importance to British society and the British Empire. This project explores and presents these materials within that wider context.
American Prison Writing Archive
The United States holds nearly two million people in its prisons and jails — a larger share of its population than in any other nation on earth. Yet there remains widespread ignorance of conditions inside. Amid the unprecedented American experiment in mass incarceration, the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) hopes to disaggregate this mass into the individual minds, hearts and voices of incarcerated writers.
Explore the websiteBlack Press Research Collective
The Black Press Research Collective is dedicated to generating print and digital scholarship on the Black Press.
Explore the websiteReading Early Medicine
Explore early modern ideas, values, and experiences through the lens of health and healing with this robust bibliographic database of English-language medical texts published from 1480 to 1700.
Explore the websiteDigital Library of Medieval Manuscripts
This manuscript library celebrates this advancement in digital humanities by gathering volumes from libraries around the world to compare related manuscripts side by side in a digital environment.
Explore the websiteArchaeology of Reading
The Archaeology of Reading in Early Modern Europe (AOR) uses digital technologies to enable the systematic exploration of the historical reading practices of Renaissance scholars nearly 450 years ago.
Explore the websiteEthel Ennis and Earl Arnett Collection
Ethel Ennis (1392-2019) was an acclaimed jazz artist who graced some of the most prominent stages in the nation while maintaining a commitment to her hometown, Baltimore. Her husband and partner, Earl Arnett (b. 1940) is a former Baltimore Sun reporter, theater critic, and instructor at Peabody Conservatory. This collection documents their careers, their production company, ENE Productions, and their restaurant/cabaret, Ethel's Place, through recordings, musical arrangements, photographs, artifacts, and other materials. This extensive collection (155 linear feet) is partially processed and will open for research in 2024.
View selections on FlickrAmerican Prison Writing Archive
The United States holds nearly two million people in its prisons and jails—a larger share of its population than in any other nation on earth. Yet there remains widespread ignorance of conditions inside. Amid the unprecedented American experiment in mass incarceration, the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) hopes to disaggregate this mass into the individual minds, hearts, and voices of incarcerated writers. By soliciting, preserving, digitizing, and disseminating the work of imprisoned people and volunteers, the APWA aims to ground national debate on mass incarceration in the lived experience of those who know prisons best.
Visit the archiveJohn and Linda Greene Map Collection
The John and Linda Greene Map Collection contains over 2,000 maps dating from the 1500s to the present. Its multi-century, global focus makes the collection a particularly rich resource for those who study maps used for diplomacy, education, and news.
View selections on FlickrRomance Comic Book Collection
While iconic characters like Batman and Spider-Man were mesmerizing readers, an alternate comic book timeline was booming, featuring the adventures of airline stewardess Bonnie Taylor, tragically unhappy actress Lisa St. Clair, and countless other female characters seeking love and fulfilling relationships in the pages of romance comic books. Popular from the late 1940s to the mid-1970s, romance comic books introduced teenagers to the joys and heartache of love. The Sheridan Libraries holds over 200 issues, including such titles as "Falling in Love," "Girls' Love Stories," "Teen-Age Romances," and "Young Romance."
View selections on FlickrThe Frary Collection of Ezra Pound
Ezra Pound (1885-1972) was an expatriate American poet, literary critic, highly influential figure in the development of Imagism, and a major contributor to the early modernist poetry movement at the turn of the century. This collection of materials, created by or relating to Pound from 1909 to 1986, were compiled by collector and Johns Hopkins alumnus Richard S. Frary.
View in FlickrComedias Sueltas Collection
The Comedias Sueltas Collection is a remarkable assortment of more than a thousand ephemeral editions of Spanish plays from the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries.
View selections on Internet ArchiveJohns Hopkins Biographical Archive
There is a thin evidentiary record of archival materials relating to the life of Johns Hopkins. For years, leaders and community members have centered their story of our founder on his benevolent gift to the city of Baltimore: a university and a hospital, and the accepted narrative that he was an early abolitionist. Under the auspices of Hopkins Retrospective and through the Sheridan Libraries, this archive explores and publicly presents archival materials related to the life of Johns Hopkins and his family, including newly discovered census records that provide evidence that Johns Hopkins was a slaveholder during the mid-1800s.
Explore the archiveOral History Collection
Documents the Hopkins history through recordings and transcriptions of interviews with members of the Hopkins community. The collection includes both audio and video interviews, and continues to grow as new oral histories are recorded and added.
View in CatalystWomen of the Book Collection
The Women of the Book collection contains more than 425 books, manuscripts, and other printed ephemera produced between 1460 and 1800. The collection centers on the lives of nuns and holy women in Europe and parts of South America and offers a rare look into the lives of early modern women. It includes details of their daily devotions, records of their entrances into convents and religious orders, mystical accounts of their encounters with saints and angels, and even public announcements of their symbolic marriages with Christ. Through their association with the church, these nuns were granted access to tools of the printed word that would enable them to preserve their histories.
View the collection on Internet ArchiveHistorical University Photographs
University Archives holds over 20,000 photographs documenting the visual history of Johns Hopkins University from its founding to present.
View MoreLester S. Levy Sheet Music Collection
The Lester S. Levy Collection of Sheet Music contains over 29,000 pieces of American popular music from the 19th and 20th centuries.
View MoreThe Hinkes Collection of Scientific Discovery
The Hinkes Collection of Scientific Discovery is composed of hundreds of rare books and manuscripts documenting the trajectory of scientific thought from the 15th to 20th centuries. Highlights include the first edition of Galileo’s illustrated treatise on the discovery of sunspots (1613), the first appearance in print of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, in a rare paper printed by the Linnaean Society (1858), and a hand-colored copy of Johann Gabriel Doppelmayr's Atlas Coelestis (1742).
View the collection on FlickrJohns Hopkins Science Review
Broadcast to television sets across America from 1948 to 1960, the Johns Hopkins Science review was created by the university to present scientific discovery--in particular the discoveries of Johns Hopkins University faculty--to a popular audience.
View in CatalystWomen’s Suffrage Collection
View selections from our collection of ephemera, books, and journals documenting the women's suffrage movement in both the United States and England. Materials include publications produced by or in collaboration with pro-suffrage organizations, as well as commercially made items that present a negative or ambiguous message regarding women and voting rights.
View in FlickrJohn Clark Mayden Collection
Black-and-white street portraits taken over four decades by Baltimore photographer John Clark Mayden, capturing the ordinary joys and sorrows, quiet moments, and daily realities of the city's African American neighborhoods.
View in FlickrExploring the Avant-Garde
Our rare books collection has a strong showing of periodicals and manifestos illustrating major European art movements of the 20th century, such as Futurism, Surrealism, and Lettrism. Of special note is our collection of periodicals documenting Dada, including Bulletin Dada and Z.
View in CatalystBibliotheca Fictiva
Bibliotheca Fictiva: The Arthur & Janet Freeman Collection of Literary & Historical Forgery offers a tremendous overview of literary forgery from the classical age through the twentieth century, including religious texts, "unknown" works by Shakespeare, and histories all meant to deceive the reader.
View selections on Internet ArchiveThe Enigmatic Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore and Beyond
A digital exhibition of books and objects associated with Edgar Allan Poe, highlighting his innovations and breadth as a writer. The exhibition includes rare books, manuscripts, and artifacts from the Susan Jaffe Tane Collection of Edgar Allan Poe.
View Online ExhibitionAfrican American Real Photo Postcard Collection
This collection of approximately 1,018 “real photo” postcards, dating from circa 1905 to circa 1946, portrays African-American individuals, couples, and families. “Real photo" postcards are made from personal photographs printed in tiny editions on postcard stock. In the present collection, a few have been mailed as postcards, with messages and postage on the reverse.
View the collection guideThe Dorothy McIlvain Scott Collection
Housed at the George Peabody Library, the Dorothy McIlvain Scott Collection is composed of over two hundred books featuring fine binding and fore-edge painting. Hidden renditions of beloved characters like Winnie-the-Pooh, mysterious city views, and scenes of everyday life are revealed to the reader when the text block is carefully fanned out.
View the collection on FlickrBook Arts
Book arts encompass a wide variety of objects, from limited-run pop-up books to one-of-a-kind sculptural pieces. They are represented in our collection by artists such as Julie Chen, Karen Hanmer, and Hanne Matthiesen, as well as from collectives and fine arts presses like Ediciones Vigía, the Women's Studio Workshop, and the Flockophobic Press.
View the collection on FlickrDaniel Coit Gilman Papers
Johns Hopkins University's first president, Daniel Coit Gilman served from 1875 to 1901. Widely regarded as an education innovator, Gilman's pioneering vision established Johns Hopkins as the United States' first research university.
View in CatalystJohn Barth Collection
The John Barth Collection, spanning the years from 1930 through 2014, includes a variety of materials such as correspondence, photographs, notebooks, and typescript drafts that document the life and writing process of the National Book Award winning author. Shown here are the manuscript title pages for the novel LETTERS, published in 1979.
View in CatalystBirney Anti-Slavery Collection
These anti-slavery pamphlets were assembled by the American abolitionist James G. Birney. The original collection was expanded by Birney's son William to include examples of pro-slavery, African colonization, and campaign literature. The collection spans the years 1784 to 1909, and includes important letters and speeches by key abolitionist figures such as Frederick Douglass, reports by abolitionist societies, and periodicals.
View in Internet ArchiveLes Fleurs Animées
We have a growing collection of games and pre-cinematic toys that serve to illuminate 19th and early 20th century material culture, such as Les Fleurs Animées (The Animated Flowers). This circa 1850 French paper doll game was inspired by the popularity of J.J. Grandville's caricature book of the same name in which the personalities of society women are associated with flowers. The hand-colored game includes its original box, twelve costumes, and moveable scenery.
View in CatalystAmerican Literature
American literature is richly represented. Holdings include first, limited, illustrated and special editions of works by major literary figures from the colonial era through the present; correspondence, notebooks and manuscripts of Baltimore and Hopkins-affiliated authors, editors, publishers and critics; works by women, African-American, ethnic, “minor” and “popular” authors; anthologies, textbooks and works of criticism; juvenile literature; broadsides, periodicals and other forms of ephemera.
View in CatalystHopkins and the Great War
An exhibition exploring the impact of World War I on the Johns Hopkins community, including members of the Homewood campus, the hospital and School of Medicine, and the School of Nursing. By looking at the lives of students, faculty, and patrons, we can understand the complex and far-reaching ways the Hopkins community both contributed to and was affected by this devastating global conflict.
View Online ExhibitionOttenheimer Joke Books
Baltimoreans Ike and Moses Ottenheimer entered the book trade in 1890, and made a lasting contribution to the study of American humor through their joke books. Featuring colorful covers and priced to sell, their pocket-sized tomes became a hit nationwide. Today, these books are representative of Baltimore's history as a book production center and are rich resources that reveal how humor is used to address social change, from the invention of the automobile to the rise of the flapper.
View the collection on FlickrElisabeth Gilman Papers
Elisabeth Gilman was much more than just the daughter of founding Hopkins president Daniel Coit Gilman. Social justice advocate, Socialist Party gubernatorial candidate, world traveler, and YMCA wartime volunteer, her life was one of service to her strongly held beliefs. The Elisabeth Gilman papers document her remarkable life through photos, correspondence, diaries, speeches and more.
View in ArchivesSpaceThe Johns Hopkins News-Letter
The Johns Hopkins News-Letter is one of the oldest student organizations at the university. Since its founding in 1897, the News-Letter has published news, opinions, literary features, advertisements and more that document life at the university for the past 120 years. This digital collection includes digitized issues of the News-Letter ranging from 1897 to 1990.
View in JScholarshipRoland Park Company Records
The Roland Park Company records document the corporate history of the Roland Park company, which developed the neighborhoods just north of Homewood campus, in the process inventing the modern garden suburb as we know it.
View in CatalystIsaiah Bowman papers
An influential and controversial figure in our university's history, Isaiah Bowman was Johns Hopkins University's President from 1935 to 1948.
View in CatalystThe Black and Blue Jay
The Black and Blue Jay is a Johns Hopkins University student-run humor publication first published in the 1920s.
View in CatalystThe Alfred Dreyfus Collection: Journal Covers
The Dreyfus Collection includes contemporary journals documenting the case. The majority of the examples are from Le Petit Journal, a daily Paris newspaper/magazine founded by Moïse Polydore Millaud, and published from 1863 to 1944. The weekly illustrated supplement of Le Petit Journal depicts events related to the Dreyfus Affair during the period 1897 to 1899.
View the collection on FlickrPolitical Cartoons
Since the proliferation of Benjamin Franklin’s infamous “Join or Die” drawing in the 1750s, the political cartoon has enjoyed a significant presence in American history and politics. Iconic historical events, figures, and debates have been chronicled through the lens of various cartoonists’ work, serving as a form of documentation, commentary, and in some cases, protest.
View the collection on Flickr