CCAHA's Director of Conservation is our veteran staff member—here for 35 years! She looks back on favorite projects and tells us how CCAHA has changed over the past four decades.
One of the earliest projects CCAHA Senior Conservation Assistant Jilliann Wilcox remembers from her 30 years at CCAHA is a series of 18th-century anatomical drawings by Dutch illustrator Jan van Rymsdyk. “They were so, so beautiful,” she says, “The detail was exquisite. I loved thinking about their...
Published in 1493, the Nuremberg Chronicle is part Biblical paraphrase, part world history. Modeled on the “Six Ages of the World” outlined by Augustine several centuries earlier, the book traces human history by relating it to the Bible. Printed in both Latin and German, it features language taken...
The Mennonites were one of the persecuted Anabaptist German Protestant groups who emigrated to the United States in the 18th century, seeking religious freedome. Today, the Mennonite Historians of Eastern Pennsylvania manage the Mennonite Heritage Center (MHC). Its collections illustrate and...
By the turn of the twentieth century, Algeria’s Biribi —a colloquial term for the French military police regime—was under increasing scrutiny. In 1909, news of a 22 -year -old soldier’s fatal beating at the hands of three superiors incensed the French people. As a wave of popular sentiment called...
In World War I, American soldiers served in segregated regiments. Like many troops of color, the men serving in the 369th Infantry Regiment, commonly called the “Harlem Hellfighters,” were sent to France to serve under the French Army. It was there, on the Western Front, that two American privates...
Every treatment project at CCAHA is the result of conversations between client and conservator. Some, like a recent project with the Rosenbach Museum & Library, inspire particularly exciting collaboration. The Rosenbach brought a rare Hamishah Humshe Torah , or Bologna Pentateuch, as it is more...
The 1830s were a dynamic time in photographic experimentation. On either side of the Atlantic, scientists and amateur hobbyists alike traded techniques and guarded discoveries as they sought to capture the world around them in a still image. The first widely-used method of photography was introduced...
