Do you want to learn more about Johns Hopkins history? Hopkins Retrospective has helped with the creation of online and physical exhibits that explore different aspects of the history of our university.  

These exhibits—all of which have been developed by students, archivists, curators, and historians—have uncovered aspects of our university’s history and highlighted the experiences of our community members. They combine historic photographs, documents, and interviews to make this history accessible. 

Hybrid Exhibitions

A graphic with a photo on the left and a slanted color background with white text on the right. The left is a photograph of the Homewood Estate, a two-story neo-classical home. The text on the right says, "A Sense of Place Hidden Stories of the Homewood Campus".

A Sense of Place: Hidden Stories on the Homewood Campus

In 2014, students from the Hopkins Program in Museums and Society explored the history of the Homewood campus alongside experts in heritage studies. In a hands-on, exploratory course, they developed “A Sense of Place,” a series of ten interpretive signs that highlight locations around campus and explain their significance in Hopkins and Baltimore history. The signs, produced through a partnership with environmental design students at the Maryland Institute College of Art, were installed in September 2014.

Online Exhibitions

A banner for an online exhibit with the title "Hopkins and the Great War". A red star sits in the center of the title. Behind the title are black and white images of soldiers in uniform sitting on marble steps.

Hopkins and the Great War

Before, during, and after America’s entry into the conflict, World War I challenged Johns Hopkins intellectuals’ ideas about the international world order, the problem of war, and the role of the university and hospital in wartime. This exploration of World War I at Hopkins draws together materials that demonstrate the war’s impact on those who lived and worked on the Homewood and East Baltimore campuses.

Four fair skinned students sit at a wooden table, all smiling in as the converse with one another. Overlaid is stylized text that says Jews at Hopkins A Digital History.

Jews at Hopkins: A Digital History

This student-curated project exhibits different aspects of Jewish life across Johns Hopkins University’s history.  It gives a sense of what it meant for different students to be Jewish on campus, and how their identity affected other Jewish students and the University at large. 

Graphic with text and black and white photograph. Text at the top reads Activist Campus in red letters and Johns Hopkins University in the Age of Protest in white smaller text. The photo behind shows wooden structure spray painted with words such as "Free Mandela" and "JHU Divest Now". Two students stand nearby.

Activist Campus: Johns Hopkins University in the Age of Protest

This student-curated exhibition tells the story of how Johns Hopkins University, during a dire financial crisis and located in a Baltimore resistant to certain changes, sought to navigate through the late 1960s and early 1970s era of rising social consciousness and student unrest. 

A graphic with text on the left and a photo in the shape of a circle on the right. The text reads Defining Letters The Correspondence of Daniel Coit Gilman. In the photo on the right, a black and white photo shows Gilman sitting at a table reading a letter he holds in one hand.

Defining Letters: The Correspondence of Daniel Coit Gilman

This exhibit highlights select items from the complete series of founding Johns Hopkins President Daniel Coit Gilman’s digitized correspondence available from the Sheridan Libraries of Johns Hopkins University. Gilman’s correspondents include prominent educators, scientists, politicians, and literary figures. 

Graphic of text overlayed on a image. The text reads The History of Student Life at JHU in all caps. Behind the text a black and white photo with blue tint shows a group of Chinese and Asian students sitting on bleachers smiling.

The History of Student Life at JHU

This student-curated project explores the history of Johns Hopkins through the lens of the undergraduate student experience, tracing the development of an institution through a population that spends only four years on campus but has an extraordinary influence on the university.