Fondly, Pennsylvania

The summer is in full swing at HSP, and in archives that means we have welcomed two new interns into the ranks: Arek and Allison.  Both have been working hard on numerous projects, including updating our free space inventory and assisting Project Archivist Willhem Echevarria on collections he's processing for the NHPRC Civic Engagement Collections project.  They've also been hard at work inventorying and processing collections of their own.  Here's a rundown of those collections.  Links to the finding aids will be posted once their work is complete, but all these collect

It's tough being a holiday in June.  Just ask Flag Day.  Between Memorial Day and July 4th, people are out and about, vacationing, ending classes, and celebrating the beginning of summer.  Nobody has time to pay the ol' Red, White, and Blue any mind. 

As an intern for the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, I have been reading through the Albert M. Greenfield papers and researching the key figures connected with the Bankers Trust Company – a large Philadelphia-based bank associated with Greenfield which closed in December 1930. A couple of weeks ago, I came across some documents of Bryn Mawr College sent to Edna Greenfield (née Edna Florence Kraus), Albert’s wife from 1914 to 1935 and BMC alumna from the class of 1915.

If an event takes place, but leaves no evidence of having occurred, did it really happen? Recently, I found myself pondering this historical variation on the age-old question “If a tree falls in a forest, does it make a sound?” when I digitized several items from HSP’s collection of Theater Posters [V06]. As historians and archivists, our understanding of the past is so dependent upon the evidence left behind and some events are so ephemeral they are simply lost to the passage of time.