History Graduate Students Preserve History

University of Delaware students helped preserve history in a course Professor Julie McGee, associate professor of Africana Studies and Art History developed around a collection of forgotten photos donated to the University of Delaware by art history alumna, Jessica Porter. The interdisciplinary seminar course, “Curating Hidden Collections and the Black Archive,” included 11 students from Africana Studies, History, Museum Studies, Art History and the Winterthur Program in American Material Culture.

The photographs of African Americans in the late 19th and early 20th century in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, New Jersey, and Washington, D.C., now known as the “Baltimore Collection,” included a variety of photograph types such as tintypes, albumen prints, matte collodion prints, silver gelatin printing-out prints (POP), silver gelatin developing-out prints (DOP) and one halftone.

The facinationg story of how Professor McGee and her students helped to preserve history and tell the story of marginalized people is detailed in an artice written by Beth Miller: "The Baltimore Collection," in The University of Delaware Research Magazine, Vol. 8, No. 1.

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