Insights
Alumni Take Us Deeper into the Hopkins Past
April 11, 2024
Baltimore’s local schools were again in the news this past week; Reckoning with the slaveholding past continues. Reported by Rona Kobell for the Baltimore Banner, Goucher College hosted a two-day long gathering — a Descendant Engagement Symposium — part of its accounting for how its “wooded campus … was once part of one of the largest plantations in the state of Maryland, where the Ridgely family enslaved hundreds of Black Marylanders. There was no one to relieve them from the harsh conditions they endured; their enslaver, Charles Carnan Ridgely, was also governor of Maryland from 1815 to 1818.”
The Collapse of the Key Bridge
April 4, 2024
When news broke of the tragic collapse of the Francis Scott Key Bridge, the Hard Histories Lab was in the midst of a workshop week, in discussions between Paris and Berlin with colleagues confronting the difficult past of the U.S., the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa. Details first came to us via social media, but over the next days stories appeared in our local papers, including Paris’s Le Monde – “State of Emergency Declared After Baltimore Bridge Collapses” – and Berlin’s Der Spiegel – “Brücke in Baltimore Bricht Nach Kollision mit Schiff Zusammen.” This blow to Baltimore’s infrastructure, economy, and everyday life-blood was world news.
Our Universities, Our Cities, Ourselves: A Webinar
March 25, 2024
This week, the Hard Histories Lab and its guests are meeting in Berlin, hosted by the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin, Institute for Advanced Study. Our feature event is a live webinar with historians Ariela Gross (UCLA) and Leslie Harris (Northwestern) to talk about the complexities of how questions about history, memory, and reckoning surrounding legacies of racism and discrimination operate across and between national borders. As always, registration is easy and free, here.
Hard Histories is Live in Paris
March 19, 2024
Hard Histories is live in Paris, Thursday, March 21. Congratulations to our organizer and Hard Histories predoctoral fellow, Malaurie Pilatte, and thank you to our partners, Mondes Américaines at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, our presenters, and discussants! For more, follow our QR code.
Faith Communities and Hard Histories
March 7, 2024
When in 2016 for The New York Times, journalist and professor Rachel Swarns shared the story of the 272 enslaved people sold to ensure the future of today’s Georgetown University, she could not have known how the work of Georgetown researchers, of the community descended from “the 272,” and her own reporting would influence the work to come through projects like Hard Histories at Hopkins. Through the Georgetown example, we learned that it was possible to blend rigorous research with ethical and even moral reflection, that our revelations about slavery and the university were of interest far beyond the university campus, and that the work of reckoning and reconciliation demands long term commitments rather than quick fixes.
Sleuthing the Card Catalog
February 29, 2024
After our last post — on the changing terms of catalogs and finding aids — a follower, Chris Aldrich, posed this question:
A New Face for an Old Library Catalog
February 15, 2024
We were at work in the Johns Hopkins Libraries “ArchivesSpace,” reviewing materials in the “Hopkins Family Collection,” and came across this message: “We are committed to correcting and contextualizing these records as we identify them, and we invite you to contact us at specialcollections@lists.jhu.edu if you encounter harmful language in our finding aids or collections.” A bit more searching and we landed here at the Johns Hopkins Libraries “Statement Regarding Harmful Content.”
