Hopkins History Roundtable

Liz Beckman, Hopkins Retrospective's Processing and Research Archivist, reprocessed the Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve papers (MS.0005). Read her third blog post installment on Fannie Gildersleeve Tonsler, the reprocessing project, and what taking a reparative lens to archival papers can reveal.

Dr. Ken Lipartito, along with Dr. Patricia Watson, is writing a biography of John McDonogh, a prominent nineteenth-century enslaver and slave trader. McDonogh’s estate provided the money that ultimately founded the namesake McDonogh School just outside of Baltimore. Dr. Andy Jewett is writing an institutional history of Johns Hopkins University. He is in part researching the university’s founding and its namesake’s role as an enslaver, as well as the university’s relationship to Blackness, slavery, and discrimination more broadly.

Started in December 2020, the Hard Histories at Hopkins Lab undertakes research into the history of race and racism at Johns Hopkins University and Medicine.

Through the experiences of hard history practitioners in the city’s schools, museums, cultural institutions, and faith communities, four roundtables explored how participants researched their institutions’ pasts of racism and discrimination.

In May 2023, Hard Histories at Hopkins organized a memorial installation that featured the names of girls once resident at the Johns Hopkins Hospital Colored Orphan Asylum. One hundred and seventy six signs were installed across the Wyman Park Building lawn, at the JHU Homewood Campus, adjacent to where the asylum once stood. What follows are the remarks delivered by lab members on the occasion.

Join Hard Histories at Hopkins for a virtual discussion about the methods of uncovering new institutional histories at Hopkins and beyond. This conversation will feature Liz Beckman and Dr. Heather L. Cooper. Both are working innovatively to reprocess and rewrite the descriptions that help researchers know about and access JHU’s archival collections, making it possible for the public to learn more about the links between Johns Hopkins University and Medicine and histories of race, slavery, gender, and sexuality.

"..when Johns Hopkins University announced in December 2020 that research had found census documents listing the university’s founder, Johns Hopkins, as having enslaved people in his home in Baltimore in the mid-1800s, the Peabody Institute embraced that moment in sync with the university’s commitment to better understanding its history."

Written by Sarah Thomas as part of a Hugh Hawkins Fellowship for the Study of Hopkins History, this paper and web exhibit examines Peabody's exclusion of African-American students. With a focus on the years 1924-1968, the paper also reflects on more recent efforts to increase diversity at Peabody. The online exhibit of the same name serves as a digital appendix to the paper, displaying images and documents from the Peabody Archives.

(Re)Valuing Black Baltimore explored the history of three Black settlements in North Baltimore: Bare Hills, Cross Keys, and Hoes Heights. It drew on historic maps, photographs, and oral histories of community members, the installation reflected upon the founders of these settlements and their descendants who faced and withstood the racial forces at play in the nation.

The Johns Hopkins Libraries, Archives, and Museums have a responsibility to the people and communities who create, use, and are represented in the collections in our care. Part of this responsibility is to describe materials in a culturally responsive and respectful manner, and to repair descriptions that contain inappropriate language.