NEWS
By Sarah Fisher | August 30, 2009
History is often a word that people associate with textbooks and professors speaking in monotones. But with the Naval Academy Museum's complete renovation and redesign, the history of the U.S. Navy has become something real and vibrant to academy visitors and midshipmen. The museum reopened two weeks ago after undergoing an $11.6 million head-to-toe makeover. "We completely gutted this building," said Scott Harmon, the museum director. The only things left standing at one point, he said, were "the outside walls and the concrete floors."
NEWS
By Julie Scharper | March 24, 2008
GETTYSBURG -- Two days after the last shots of the bloodiest battle of the Civil War were fired here, a 16-year-old neighborhood boy named John H. Rosensteel walked onto the battlefield to help bury the dead. There he found the body of a Confederate soldier, a boy about his own age, and picked up a rifle lying near him. The rifle was the first item in what would become the largest private collection of Gettysburg relics, as well as a family legacy. Since that day in July 1863, Rosensteel's descendants have acquired and preserved tens of thousands of battle artifacts and shared them with the public.
NEWS
By Glenn McNatt | July 22, 2005
A new museum of Islamic art and culture will open in December in downtown Baltimore as part of an effort by Maryland Muslims to promote greater understanding of their religion in the aftermath of attacks such as this month's bombing of the London subway. Plans for the museum, to be called the American Museum of Islamic Arts, will be announced during a launch today of a new Islamic community center inside a former bank building at 240 N. Howard St. Mayor Martin O'Malley is expected to be on hand for the 1:45 p.m. ceremony.
NEWS
By Ed Waldman | May 8, 2005
Despite his excitement over the new Sports Legends at Camden Yards, museum director Mike Gibbons has no fears that the original Babe Ruth Birthplace & Museum at Emory and Pratt streets will become a forgotten child. "We are returning it to its original theme of being the Babe Ruth shrine," Gibbons said. "Babe Ruth is America's No. 1 sports icon. That won't go away. Babe is the real deal." Gibbons has started a campaign to raise $750,000 to restore the 7,800-square-foot birthplace and make it compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act. He obtained $250,000 from the state during the last legislative session, but needs another $250,000 to begin the project.
NEWS
By Ann LoLordo | March 19, 2005
FOR ANYONE encountering the Holocaust, the black-and-white photographs of ghettos, concentration camps and crematoriums stand out. For those who didn't live through the war, it's the images - more than history books - that have conveyed the story of the systematic destruction of European Jewry. But as these photographs have been displayed again and again, a sense of immediacy has been lost. Jews in the Krakow ghetto awaiting deportation, emaciated survivors in a camp barracks, smoke spewing into the skies over Auschwitz - these photos you have seen, this tableau you recognize.
NEWS
By John Woestendiek | September 19, 2004
The National Museum of the American Indian, whose opening this week is expected to draw the largest number of Indians ever to visit the nation's capital, was positioned to face the rising sun, in accordance with Native American traditions. The museum also faces the U.S. Capitol, which is not in accordance with anything at all. In that old building, less than a block away, as recently as the 1950s - some might argue even later - laws were still being passed to strip Indians of their land and suppress their culture, the same culture that the new, government-supported museum has been built to preserve.
NEWS
By Michael Pakenham | February 29, 2004
Born in 1946, John Waters has lived much of his life in Baltimore, site of most of his films. He wrote and directed his first movie, Hag in a Black Leather Jacket, in 1964 while he was still in high school. By the time he was 27, he had put out eight films, including Pink Flamingos (1972) and Female Trouble (1974) and was a considerable camp celebrity -- dubbed by William Burroughs as "The Pope of Trash." He is still making films, productive for 40 years. The latest, A Dirty Shame, will be released this summer.
NEWS
BY A SUN STAFF WRITER | June 21, 2003
William Fell, the English colonist who gave his name to the Fells Point waterfront, was no admiral, not even a captain, perhaps not much of a seaman at all. "I don't think they themselves -[the Fells] - were masters of any vessels," says Lesley Humphreys, the exhibit coordinator at the new Fells Point Maritime Museum that opens today on Thames Street. "They built the ships, but I don't think they sailed them." Even how many ships they built is problematic, says Geoffrey Footner, a maritime historian who lives on Fell Street.
NEWS
By Carl Schoettler | June 12, 2003
WASHINGTON - The words carved deeply into the marble of the terrace before the entrance proclaim the grand old Carnegie Library on Mount Vernon Square to be "A UNIVERSITY FOR THE PEOPLE." These days they should perhaps read A MUSEUM OF THE PEOPLE. The 100-year-old Beaux Arts building on the square where New York and Massachusetts avenues intersect has just reopened as the City Museum of Washington, D.C., of the Historical Society of Washington, D.C. It sits among the glittering edifices of the new Washington Convention Center like a dowager at a brassy musical.
NEWS
By Edward Gunts | May 26, 2003
For decades, a carved wooden eagle was the centerpiece of the extensive maritime collection on display at the Maryland Historical Society's Mount Vernon campus. It came from the stern of the Hornet, a Revolutionary War-era frigate led by a Baltimore native, Commodore Joshua Barney. Starting next month, the eagle and other nautical artifacts will sail to a new museum designed to tell the story of Baltimore's maritime heritage, right where it all began. The Fells Point Maritime Museum will open June 21 inside a former trolley barn at 1724 Thames St. in Fells Point.