Meg Loncharic: Hagen History Center inviting the community to A Night at the Museum
Erie Times-News
For the past three years, there have been preparations for a new day at the Hagen History Center, according to a statement from the organization. If you have driven by the campus on West Sixth Street, you have seen the progress.
Old buildings have been restored, and a new building has been constructed. There’s been an investment of more than $11 million during the past three years, and the eight new professionally designed exhibits are sure to inspire you, according to the statement. In addition, a national exhibit, which will be unveiled this summer, will make the Hagen History Center a major tourist destination.
Shiva Baby
Writer-director Emma Seligman s debut film takes on the anxiety and awkwardness involved in Jewish family gatherings. Danielle (Rachel Sennott) rushes to meet her parents and various relatives at a family shiva. While being interrogated about her future (or lack thereof), she runs into her successful ex-girlfriend, Maya. Also at the gathering is Danielle s sugardaddy, his accomplished wife and their new baby. The comedy-drama will be out on VOD and in select theaters on Friday, April 2.
Explore more than 50 acres of flowers and blooms at the Flower Fields in Carlsbad, a working farm with views of the Pacific Ocean. (Jason Rosenberg, licensed under CC BY 2.0)
Elizabeth Keckley, Thirty Years a Slave, Four Years in the White House
By Stacy M. Brown NNPA Newswire Senior National Correspondent
Published March 4, 2021
Elizabeth Keckley (Courtesy Photo)
A Black woman’s memoir published 153 years ago still tops Amazon’s books sales chart.
The historical work was perhaps the bluntest and most controversial of its era. Keckley detailed her life as a slave who purchased her freedom and then worked in the White House for two U.S. first ladies – Mary Todd Lincoln, the wife of President Abraham Lincoln, and Varina Davis, the wife of President Jefferson Davis.
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A seamstress to both Davis and Lincoln, Keckley practically lived in the White House during the Civil War.
Few stories in
Encyclopedia Virginia are more dramatic than that of Elizabeth Hobbs Keckly. Born into slavery in Dinwiddie Courthouse, in the Piedmont region of Virginia, during the presidency of James Monroe, by the time that Abraham Lincoln entered the White House in 1861, not only was Keckly a free woman, but she was also Washington, D.C.’s most celebrated dressmaker.
It was Keckly’s talent with the needle that allowed her to buy her freedom and become a leader among the free Black community in Washington. She first found a following among Washington’s elite women after a silk dress she designed for Mary Randolph Custis Lee, the wife of Robert E. Lee, was a big hit at a reception for the Prince of Wales. It was a time when upper class women were fiercely competitive about the dresses they wore to balls and teas and receptions. It may seem like all vanity now, the hoop skirts with their ruffles and flounces and the yards of lace and other trim that bedecked the dre
First Ladies As curator of an exhibition at the Smithsonian s National Portrait Gallery, Penn s Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw tells the stories of the women who supported U.S. presidents while in the White House. Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, associate professor of history of art, was the curator of the exhibition “Every Eye Is Upon Me: First Ladies of the United States” at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery. Shaw returned to Penn this semester after taking an 18-month leave to serve as the Gallery’s senior historian and director of history, research, and scholarly programs.
In a glass case in a Smithsonian Institution exhibition is a small cape, the ikat-dyed pink silk and fine black lace fanned out around a high collar in the center. The pleated taffeta fabric makes an almost perfect circle, except for an edge flipped over to reveal an interior inscription by the maker to the wearer.