Penn Libraries Online Exhibits

Ashley Bryan—renowned artist, writer, storyteller, and humanitarian—has created thousands of drawings, paintings, collages, and linoleum block prints over the course of his long and productive life. This exhibition highlights Bryan’s portrayals of strong and resourceful women in his art. Many of these works were made for books of poetry, including Freedom Over Me, ABC of African American Poetry, and Aneesa Lee and the Weaver’s Gift.

The domestic life of Jews, their homes, houses, and households, was the subject of the 2019-20 Katz Center research theme. This exhibition highlights examples of this most formative and intimate of contexts for Jewish life drawing from texts in the Penn Libraries’ collections and from around the world. These contributions interpret Jewish domestic culture, architecture, clothing, landscape, and material evidence through the lens of archaeological, anthropological, historical, legal, literary, and visual research. The eras covered span 3,000 years from the ancient Near East to modern times.

This research portal provides online access to more than 2,500 items from the collection of Marian Anderson, one of the most celebrated singers of the twentieth century. The body of primary sources in the collection — including letters, diaries, journals, interviews, recital programs, and private recordings — spans the Philadelphia-born musician’s six-decade career as an opera singer and advocate for social justice.

The author, artist, and humanitarian Ashley Bryan, whose archive was recently acquired by the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, responded to Civil Rights protests about police bias and brutality in the 1960s with this series of drawings, made from his studio overlooking Tremont Avenue in the Bronx. The signs carried by these protesters speak to today’s issues as well: “Stop Police Brutality Now,” “End Police Bias Now,” “Jim Crow Must Go,” “Freedom Now,” “We Demand Decent Police Now,” and “Justice Now.”

The concept of the liberal arts prevalent in higher education today has its roots in the seven liberal arts (grammar, rhetoric, dialectic, arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy) that formed the basis of the medieval system of education. Central to the study of the liberal arts in the middle ages were the works of Boethius (ca. 477-524). This online exhibition “A Liberal Arts Education for the (Middle) Ages: Texts, Translations, and Study,” explores the study of the liberal arts, the texts of Boethius, and the intellectual life of early medieval monasteries through a selection of manuscripts from the collections of the University of Pennsylvania Libraries.

Drawing on the wonderfully diverse collections of Philadelphia institutions, this exhibit attempts to encompass the broadest possible scope of ideas and material manifestations associated with the European Renaissance. Through a selection of extraordinary manuscripts, cuttings, and incunables, it explores the intellectual and artistic depth of a time of political, religious, and technological transformation in Europe.

The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica teaches us about the everyday lives, families, communal institutions, religious organizations, voluntary associations, businesses, and political circumstances of Jewish life throughout the western hemisphere over four centuries. It also provides a unique window into the changing character of colonial and early American life and culture in the United States. The collection is more than the sum of its parts. It is the constellation of unlimited potential connections among its thousands of items dating from the time of colonial settlement in the sixteenth century into the era of mass migration at the end of the 19th century.

Following the 1917 Revolution, Russian authorities encouraged the development of book design as a means of communicating official Soviet ideology. Many artists—both famous and unknown—were commissioned to create book illustrations. This exhibition focuses on four of them: Zoya Kruzhkova, Alexander Samokhvalov, Nikolay Ushin, and Nikolay Sheberstov, whose works reflect the three stages of the art form’s development: the 1920s, 1950s, and 1980s. The exhibition features book covers, original prints, and draft designs for Soviet-era novels as well as 19^th-century reprints.

The study of Jewish life in modern Islamic contexts during the 2018-19 Fellowship year at the Katz Center delved into the meaning of modernity in North Africa, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, Central and South Asia. In their work, the Fellows broke new ground by looking beyond the more familiar paradigms of modern and contemporary Jewish history in European, American, and Israeli contexts to explore complex relationships between Jews and their Muslim neighbors, or with members of other non-Muslim communities in the Islamic world.

This exhibition shows how people in nineteenth-century Holy Land photographs were visually represented and how these images met or challenged contemporary conventions about that most contested of places. It also brings back to life the faces of local inhabitants otherwise lost to history. By addressing both the photographer's and subject's points of view, these images draw the viewers closer into the image-making process and demonstrate the experience of photographing and of being photographed. The images on display here come from the extraordinary Lenkin Family Collection of Photography at the Penn Libraries.

During its 2017-2018 fellowship year, scholars at the Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies asked new questions about how the history of science, medicine and technology may be seen from the perspective of Jewish culture. Among the highlights featured in this web exhibition are studies of ecology and the environment, astronomical science; calendrical systems; geographical knowledge; medieval and early modern natural philosophy; the history of medicine; evolutionary biology; Spiritualism; contemporary research in genetics; as well as modern industrial technology.

In honor of the 350th anniversary of Jonathan Swift's birth, this exhibition, based on the collections of the Penn Libraries,  explores the many facets of Swift's life and legacy through an examination of his many voices; his complicated relationships with both men and women; his ever-evolving politics; his many travels; and his views on the role of religion in society. A Raging Wit provides an opportunity not only to explore Swift but also to celebrate the collectors whose materials are at the heart of this exhibition: Herman Teerink, Archibald C. Elias, Jr., Geoffrey Denison, and John Irwin Fischer.

This exhibition focuses on Penn Libraries' manuscripts and printed materials from South, Southeast Asia, and Tibet, which is the largest collection of its kind in North America. The Buddhist, Hindu, and Jain traditions displayed here represent the core of the collection. Manuscripts and objects are here arranged to highlight common threads of mutual influence, exchange, and integration: iconography, myth, literature, astrology, Tantra, and materiality.

Catalogers are always behind the scenes, where they delight in finding previously lost or hidden secrets and making them available to the public.  Join the catalogers of the Kislak Center to learn about their favorite behind-the-scenes moments found between the covers of rare books and deep in the folders of archival collections. Exhibits include Back to the Drawing Board, Behind the Curtain, Between the Covers, Into the Unknown, and The Inside Story.

The 2016-17 Katz-Penn Libraries Web Exhibition brought together scholars working in a variety of fields of theory and praxis to unsettle regnant paradigms of power, authority, political action or inaction, law, human rights, gender inequalities, territorial sovereignty, and statehood. They drew upon a wide variety of sources and interdisciplinary methodologies to challenge established understandings of Jewish political history.

This exhibition explores the many and varied ways that people have reacted to, and acted upon, manuscripts from the Middle Ages up to today. Reactions take many forms. They include the manipulation of physical objects through, for example, the marking up of texts, addition of illustrations, the disbinding books or rebinding fragments, as well as the manipulation of digital objects, thanks to new technologies involved in digitization, ink and parchment analysis, virtual reconstruction, among many other processes. Both the exhibition and symposium will also tackle how popular culture has reacted to manuscripts over time as witnessed by their use and appearance in books, games, and films.

Focusing on the experiential, the sensual, as well as philosophical and theological reflections that occur within and beyond the rational dimension of human life, our scholars showed how emotions like love, anger, anxiety, joy, fear, empathy, sympathy, sadness, desire, pain, and pleasure—though rooted in neurological and physical responses—are shaped by culture.

On October 15, 2015, the staff of the Special Collections Processing Center saddled up for a bibliographic safari in the Kislak Center. Feathered friends, ferocious beasts, and even a cute cat or two leaped, slithered, and flew off the pages of our favorite books, manuscripts, and archival materials. Here, images of animals discovered in some of our newest acquisitions are displayed in this Abecedarium bestiary, including items from the collection of Dial Books art director Atha Tehon, and the Caroline F. Schimmel Fiction Collection of Women in the American Wilderness, as well as materials from the Kislak Center’s archives, medieval manuscripts and incunabula.

The Moldovan family Holy Land Map Collection was built over several decades by Dr. Alfred Moldovan and his family. It consists of 94 discrete maps dating from 1480-1797, printed in 23 distinct locations across Europe. The majority of the maps were printed in the 17th and 18th centuries in Amsterdam, Antwerp, Basel, Lyon, Paris, Rome, Strassburg, Tuebingen, and Venice. There are over fifty cartographers and engravers represented, including Adrichem, Bunting, Calmet, Hole, Mercator, Munster, Ortelius, Visscher, Wit, and Ziegler. It also features the unique surviving copy of Antonio De Angelis’s map of Jerusalem, printed in Rome in 1578.

The 1973 tour of China by the Philadelphia Orchestra marked an important milestone in relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China. Following on the heels of Richard Nixon's trip to visit Mao Zedong in 1972, the tour was a successful attempt at cultural diplomacy—the first visit to China by an American orchestra. In recognition of the fortieth anniversary of this historic tour, "Ormandy in China" reexamines the ten-day visit and places the tour in the context of the political and cultural climate of the time.

This past year's Fellows explored critical questions about the way in which academic categories and methodologies have framed how Jews and Judaism are understood—be they in parallel with Christian theology, political science, history, classical philology, or in relation to traditional learning contexts. In this exhibition, we find examples of the fruits of their intellectual labors in reconstructing the history of the academic study of Judaism from these early, diverse seedbeds.

During the 16th century and continuing over four centuries, Jews and their descendants forged extensive networks of kinship, commerce, and culture around the Atlantic coasts of Europe, Africa, South and North America, and beyond. The history of these Atlantic Jewries spans generations of colonization, revolutionary wars, cultural transformations, and continental crossings. The Arnold and Deanne Kaplan Collection of Early American Judaica teaches us about the everyday lives and businesses of these Atlantic Jewries and their changing perceptions and experiences of space and time - both as Jews and as members of their larger societies.

When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation by executive order, on January 1st, 1863, it was not entirely clear what the document would come to mean. In 1864, as the significance of the Emancipation Proclamation began to crystallize, both for the millions in bondage and for the country at large—as words became things—forty-eight copies of the Emancipation Proclamation, autographed by Lincoln, were offered for sale in Philadelphia. The Great Central Fair, a fundraiser for the United States Sanitary Commission, raised over one million dollars for the Union cause. The relics that remain from the Fair speak not only to the monumental scope of the Proclamation, its dissemination, and its place in the minds of wartime Americans but also to the power the document’s words would come to represent.

In order to probe the meaning of an early modern era of Jewish history on its own terms, scholars came together in 2013-14 to bridge often disconnected areas of scholarship. Borders and boundaries were understood geographically, but also as social, cultural, legal, political, and economic realities. In the year's web exhibition, the concept of the boundary is presented both as a dividing line and as a place of meeting and mixing between different groups (Jewish and non-Jewish) in an effort to illuminate the contexts and meanings of shared histories.

The selected original sources featured in this exhibit reflect scholarly efforts to develop a more integrated account of Jewish, Christian, and Islamic societies during the Middle Ages. They include a rich variety of Hebrew, Latin and Arabic manuscripts and early printed texts which illustrate a range of topics such as medieval liturgical poetry, law, rhetoric, philosophy, science, magic, social history, gender relations, inter-communal contact, conflict and other forms of entanglement both positive and negative.

The Zucker Holy Land Travel manuscript, though not based on direct observation, is the work of an unidentified 17th century scholar, in all likelihood from the Swiss city of Bern, who takes his readers on a tour of the sacred sites mentioned in the Bible. The text is based in large part on Olfert Dapper's Asia, oder, Genaue und gründliche Beschreibung des gantzen Syrien und Palestins... (1681), a German translation of a 1677 Dutch original. Nevertheless, all the maps of the Zucker Holy Land Travel Manuscript as well as some of the illustrations have additional sources. The manuscript author also added his own notes, comments, and Hebrew and Greek renderings of various words to Dapper's text.

Although Eugene Ormandy is best remembered for his forty-four-year tenure as music director of the Philadelphia Orchestra, for five years during the early 1930s he was conductor of the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra. Ormandy worked hard to build the orchestra and improve its musicianship, and by 1936, through tours of the East and South and landmark recordings for RCA Victor, he had established an international reputation for the orchestra and positioned himself for his appointment in Philadelphia as Leopold Stokowski's successor.

Initiating freshmen into "college life" was, for upperclassmen, a long-standing ritual at many of this nation's institutions of higher education, including Penn. Some of these traditions eventually came to be considered forms of hazing and were banned. While they lasted, however, they gave rise to a fascinating documentary genre, the Freshman Broadside. This exhibit presents dozens of the most interesting and unusual from the collection of Peter Zinman as well as a number of Penn-related items from the University Archives.

Likely produced in London in the third quarter of the fifteenth century, the Genealogical Chronicle of the Kings of England, to Edward IV, known as UPenn Ms. Roll 1066, is a compilational tour de force of the greatest hits of medieval historians, assimilating the work of Geoffrey of Monmouth, William of Malmesbury, and Ranulf Higden, among others. The roll is an imposing physical presence: a staggering thirty-seven feet and thirteen membranes long, it chronicles the lineage of Yorkist king Edward IV beginning with Adam and Eve and ending with Edward IV (1461). This Chronicle also has a complex illustrative schema containing 174 bust-length portraits in color, five mandorlas with tinted full-length portraits, and eighty roundels containing crowns as well as several classic chronicle type-scenes including the Temptation of Adam, Noah after the Flood, and the city of Jerusalem.

The subject of travel and its complex range of practices and representations have provoked intense scholarly interest in recent years. Historically, Jewish travel has taken on many forms and is documented in a wide array of primary sources: merchant records; legends of the Wandering Jew; travel itineraries; pilgrimage accounts; photographs; postcards; journalistic reportage; motion picture footage. What cultural and ideological work is performed by these texts and what kinds of images of self and other are generated through them? A sampling of these sources, and scholarly discussions of these questions by the 2011-12 Katz Center Fellows, is displayed here.

Robert Montgomery Bird (1805/6-1854) was a writer of considerable note. Born in New Castle, Delaware in 1805 or 1806, he entered the University of Pennsylvania in 1824. He graduated from Penn's Medical School and College of Pharmacy in 1827. The present exhibition reveals yet another aspect of Dr. Bird's creative life: his art. His later works, the core of what we show on this occasion, record scenes and impressions of Philadelphia, America, and Europe garnered during many travels.

This exhibition surveys European book illustration during the sixteenth century. Examples include the very best—but also the most typical—and all come from Penn's rich collections of sixteenth-century European printing. Their wide variety of styles and subjects illuminate what early modern book illustrators provided readers in an environment visually far less rich than the one we take for granted. Religion, labor, science, warfare, costume, medicine, portraits, exotic places, and more—all these topics found their way not only into words but also into pictures. Opening up Penn's books not for their texts but their illustrations offers an entirely new way to see them.

Philadelphia bandleader and composer Francis Johnson (1792-1844), a free African American, achieved extraordinary renown and respect through performances of his band. This exhibit includes a selection from the over forty pieces of Johnson sheet music from the collection of the late Kurt Stein.

Taking Turns takes as its starting point the idea of converts and conversion - an unstable subject, in the double sense of a topic very much in need of definition, and a model of individual and group life that does not presume a fixed or univocal "identity." Through the study of conversion, our understanding of the very meaning of "Judaic," "Christian," and "Islamic" identities has been complicated and even transformed.

The 1611 English translation of the Bible—known as the King James Bible or Authorized Version—was unlike any that had come before it in both the scale of its production and the breadth of its influence. A landmark political event in the reign of James, the "Authorized Version" has figured in every major debate concerning the nature of Scripture, translation, and the development of the English language itself for over 400 years,

At 5:00 p.m. on 20 March 1948, the Philadelphia Orchestra made broadcasting history as the first American orchestra to perform on network television. The exhibition reproduces correspondence and photographs related to Eugene Ormandy's television appearances and his efforts in the 1950s and 1960s to gain more exposure on the "small screen."

This exhibition about secularism and its discontents examines the complex interplay and often permeable boundary between the religious and the secular in modern Jewish history.

This exhibition on Jewish economic history argues that economics is not solely materialist and quantitative in nature but is rather an integral part of the larger fabric of Jewish religion and folkways.

In this exhibition, scholars of late antiquity grapple with the complex and multifarious material sources and received texts upon which are understanding of the Roman empire and its minorities is built.

Where do we read? And how do those places affect our reading? Reading a newspaper by the fireplace is quite a different experience from reading it on a noisy street corner or in the social setting of a coffeehouse. Considering the physical surroundings in which readers encounter books, manuscripts, and other forms of printing and writing, this exhibition turns background into foreground.

The exhibition features items from the collections of Jean Kislak and the University of Pennsylvania Rare Book & Manuscript Library. It includes rarely shown portraits of Emma and Greville by Romney, images of Nelson, books about Emma, Sir William Hamilton, and Horatio Nelson, and original manuscripts that detail Emma's life as Greville's mistress, wiife of Sir William Hamilton, and Nelson's love.

This exhibition reexamines the formative period in Islamic history between the 7th and the 11th century in order to understand how both Muslim and Jewish societies were shaped in this period, and how the presence of the majority of Jewish population worldwide under Islam modified Jewish life profoundly.

This exhibition on the history of material texts investigates how the materiality and formatting of texts from antiquity to the present shaped authorship, transmission, reception, and interpretation; how the business of Jewish book production and the market forces of book consumption affected Jewish life and culture; how the visual art and design of Jewish books shaped reading habits, legibility, recollection, and signification.

Book production is a business as well as a craft, a trade and an art form. Since the invention of moveable type in the fifteenth century, Jews as well as non-Jews have been engaged in the printing and sale of a surprisingly diverse array of editions of Judaica. This exhibition offers a small sampling of that vast panoply of creativity, based on the University of Pennsylvania’s distinguished library collections at the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies and at the Walter and Lenore Annenberg Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The materials selected highlight not only the production but also the consumption side of the business of the Jewish book: who bought and sold printed Judaica. In this exhibit, you will see in particular how these precious books came to be part of Penn’s library collections. Each item label explains from whom books were purchased or who donated specific treasures, and otherwise documents how Penn continues to develop one of world’s largest and most important Judaica collections.

Benjamin Franklin was instrumental in organizing and shaping Penn from its inception. He was President of the College, Academy and Charitable School of Philadelphia from 1749 to 1755, and served continuously as trustee until his death in 1790. The partnership of Franklin and Penn is played out against the background of the creation of both a new republic and of higher education in America. Penn in the Age of Franklin provides access to original documents and manuscripts, printed books and artifacts from both the Penn Libraries and the University Archives - whether it be a letter from Franklin, an issue of Poor Richard, or minutes of the earliest meetings of the Trustees.

In 1749, Benjamin Franklin published his educational call to arms, Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pensilvania. This slim pamphlet led to the creation of the University of Pennsylvania, the fourth oldest institution of higher education in North America. But what were schools like in the early Delaware Valley? Who received an education, how, and where? Who were the teachers, and what was taught? The Libraries' 2006 exhibition surveyed the educational landscape of the period and investigated the importance, originality, and ongoing relevance of Franklin's vision.

Nineteenth-century America saw the rise of a new kind of subscription publishing and a new approach to marketing. Once a relatively genteel means of seeking financial support for an expensive publication project with uncertain sales prospects, subscription bookselling expanded during the nineteenth century into a door-to-door solicitation of commitments to purchase particular titles. Drawing on the resources of the Zinman Collection, this exhibition explores what has long been a relatively unknown and inadequately documented aspect of the American publishing industry in the nineteenth century.

This special exhibition at Penn celebrates the anniversary of Marcus Jastrow’s famous rabbinic dictionary and honors the centenary of its creator for his contributions to the distinguished tradition of rabbinic learning and lexicography.

This exhibition on Jewish Literatures in the Modern Age takes literature itself as a site of intense struggle around the question of Jewishness and modernity in which all the resources of the linguistic imagination were called into play to negotiate the passage from traditional society to contemporary life.

The Morais Ledger belonged to Sabato Morais, a Sephardic Jewish leader, Hebraist, poet, historian, lecturer, teacher, and the leading representative of enlightened Orthodox Judaism in 19th century America. The scrapbook he kept - digitized and searchable here - is a unique record of the path he charted, the time through which he lived, and the highly charged controversies in which he became embroiled.

This exhibition examines the multi-faceted life and career of Edgar Fahs Smith (1854-1928), whose long and dedicated service to the University of Pennsylvania culminated in a decade-long term as Provost—then the highest position in the University. We focus on specific aspects of Smith's life—his "nine lives"—in order to reveal the distinct role each played in his larger "life."

In this exhibition, scholars of Jewish history and anthropology explore the dynamic tensions that exist in the way religious traditions instruct people to live their lives and the way people go about living them, between the presumably normative and actually lived experiences found in Jewish culture and history.

The Lorraine Beitler Collection of the Dreyfus Affair comprises over 1,000 items documenting the history of the Dreyfus Affair and its impact on the art, society, and politics of France and the modern world. Assembled by Dr. Lorraine Beitler as a resource for scholars, as a teaching collection for students, and as a traveling exhibition designed to stimulate discussion of the issues of prejudice, racism, and social injustice in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, it has been exhibited around the world.

Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch) was the author of Italian-language love poems that served Italian and European writers as models of love poetry for the next half-millennium. To mark the seven hundredth anniversary of Petrarch's birth in 1304, the libraries of Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania created an exhibition, Petrarch at 700, that included some of the most important of Petrarch's works in North American libraries.

This exhibition considers Eastern Europe as home to the greatest living reservoir of Jewish civilization in the world for over three centuries and how it served as the location for key religious, intellectual, artistic, and political currents that shaped Jewish life across the modern period.

Chef Fritz Blank's culinary library helps to illustrate how a homegrown Jersey boy became one of America's foremost French chefs. After surviving a 1987 dumpster fire that otherwise gutted Blank's restaurant, Deux Cheminées, at its original location, his collection grew to over 10,000 volumes of cookery books plus recipe pamphlets, menus and other culinary ephemera. "A Chef & His Library" examines a paper trail of the influences—from his grandmother's cooking lessons to his career as a clinical microbiologist—that shaped Blank's culinary education and sensibilities.

This exhibition provides an overview history of the emergence of modern computing as seen through the eyes of one of its two principal inventors, John W. Mauchly (1907-1980), who worked at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering between 1941 and 1946, and whose papers are held at the University of Pennsylvania.

This online exhibition gives an overview of an exhibition from the Penn Libraries displayed at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, the oldest university in the Low Countries, in 2003, to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the current library building. Humanist works from Italy, France, Germany, England, and the Low Countries were on display, including some that are beautifully bound or that feature hand-colored images.

For three decades, Lawrence Schoenberg has been collecting in an area reserved for the few: illustrated manuscripts from the medieval and early modern periods. What is most striking about the collection is its breadth. Stretching from the eleventh to the eighteenth century, it includes monastic, university, and lay texts. Here one can study the contrasts between public and private devotion, the evolution of the school curriculum, the practices of history, and some chapters in a yet-to-be written history of science and technology.

An exhibition from the collections of the Jay I. Kislak Foundation (now at the Library of Congress), the Rosenbach Museum and Library, and Penn's special collections. Grouped into six broad categories, "Cultural Readings" demonstrates colonization's impact upon indigenous peoples and Europeans from the 15th through the 19th centuries.

[Web archive version created on December 30, 2019]

The Aresty Collection of Rare Books on the Culinary Arts spans five centuries and represents cultures from nearly every part of the world. The books written by both men and women provide us with material enough for many culinary and social histories from many points of view. he exhibition focuses on women's writing and use of cookery and househ old books.

Website for an exhibit held in 1997 with selections from the Ruth & Marvin Sackner Archive of Concrete & Visual Poetry (now part of the University of Iowa Libraries). This exhibition focuses upon artists, writers, and printers who developed alternative distribution networks for their experimental art and literature in the 1960s.

[Web archive version created on October 24, 2019]

This exhibition presents the common scriptural heritage of Judaism, Christianity and Islam while highlighting the distinctive traditions that each of them has developed for interpreting the Bible and what they believed to be its message and meaning.

A collection comprising pamphlets, books, broadsides, cartoons, clippings, paintings, maps, and other print memorabilia about America from circa 1830 to 1880. Items are drawn primarily from the collection of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Links to other catalogues and collections are also available from this site.

Unexpected riches from among the Penn Libraries' music-related collections of books and scores and from the letters, papers, photographs, and printed and manuscript music that together document the career of an individual or the history of a cultural organization. These samplings reflect the breadth and depth of the collections in music history.

This exhibition presents work in a rich diversity of cultural media and genres in an effort to illustrate and explore the characteristically modern features of Jewish aesthetic production and performance beyond the traditional texts that have defined Jewish identity and existence.

An exhibit from 2000 marking the one hundred year anniversary of the publication of Theodore Dreiser's novel Sister Carrie. The novel remains vital for many reasons: as an historical marker for the turn away from sentimentality, romance, and moral rectitude in the American novel at the brink of the twentieth century; as a text that influenced—pro and con—succeeding American novelists over the next several decades; and as a conundrum that never ceases to provoke debate for readers both general and professional.

This exhibition focuses attention on the relatively unknown intellectual movement called Christian Hebraism, an offshoot of Renaissance humanism whose devotees — biblical scholars, theologians, lawyers, physicians, scientists,philosophers, and teachers in Latin schools--borrowed and adapted texts, literary forms, and ideas from Jewish scholarship and tradition to meet Christian cultural and religious needs.

Eugene Ormandy dedicated his life to music, from the age of three, when he first picked up a violin, to shortly after his 84th birthday, when he conducted his last concert with the Philadelphia Orchestra. It is with this orchestra that Ormandy's name will forever be associated, by virtue of his serving as its Music Director for 42 years.

Web archive version (created on October 24, 2019)

One of the most influential conductors of his generation, Leopold Stokowski was at the same time one of the most controversial. His unorthodoxy is perhaps his greatest legacy, for it was his willingness to take risks and challenge convention that occasioned his most significant triumphs. Drawing from the Leopold Stokowski Collection at the University of Pennsylvania, this exhibition focuses on the conductor's passion for all things musical and his life-long dedication to sharing his ideals with the public.

[Web archive version created on October 24, 2019]

This exhibition examines how the transmission of Judaism has always been heavily dependent on written texts as well as the oral traditions surrounding them through the presentation of one of the critical moments in the transformation of the Jewish book from manuscript to print in the early modern period.

• The exhibition catalog is available for review in the LKCAJS Library
• The catalog is also available online.

The Keffer Collection of Sheet Music at the University of Pennsylvania contains over 2500 scores from ca. 1790 to 1895. The great majority of the items were published in the United States, and approximately 1,150 items were produced by publishers in Philadelphia. Many scores include illustrations. The musical content of the collection consists largely of American popular songs and piano music, but also includes works by famous European composers published in the United States.

[Web archive version created on October 24, 2019]