Featured Collections

Ethel Ennis (1932-2019) was an acclaimed jazz artist who graced some of the most prominent stages in the nation while maintaining a commitment to her hometown, Baltimore. Her husband and partner, Earl Arnett (b. 1940) is a former Baltimore Sun reporter, theater critic, and instructor at Peabody Conservatory. This collection documents their careers, their production company, ENE Productions, and their restaurant/cabaret, Ethel's Place, through recordings, musical arrangements, photographs, artifacts, and other materials. This extensive collection (155 linear feet) is partially processed and will open for research in 2024.

The United States holds nearly two million people in its prisons and jails—a larger share of its population than in any other nation on earth. Yet there remains widespread ignorance of conditions inside. Amid the unprecedented American experiment in mass incarceration, the American Prison Writing Archive (APWA) hopes to disaggregate this mass into the individual minds, hearts, and voices of incarcerated writers. By soliciting, preserving, digitizing, and disseminating the work of imprisoned people and volunteers, the APWA aims to ground national debate on mass incarceration in the lived experience of those who know prisons best.

There is a thin evidentiary record of archival materials relating to the life of Johns Hopkins. For years, leaders and community members have centered their story of our founder on his benevolent gift to the city of Baltimore: a university and a hospital, and the accepted narrative that he was an early abolitionist. Under the auspices of Hopkins Retrospective and through the Sheridan Libraries, this archive explores and publicly presents archival materials related to the life of Johns Hopkins and his family, including newly discovered census records that provide evidence that Johns Hopkins was a slaveholder during the mid-1800s.

Documents the Hopkins history through recordings and transcriptions of interviews with members of the Hopkins community. The collection includes both audio and video interviews, and continues to grow as new oral histories are recorded and added.

University Archives holds over 20,000 photographs documenting the visual history of Johns Hopkins University from its founding to present.

Broadcast to television sets across America from 1948 to 1960, the Johns Hopkins Science review was created by the university to present scientific discovery--in particular the discoveries of Johns Hopkins University faculty--to a popular audience.

Johns Hopkins University's first president, Daniel Coit Gilman served from 1875 to 1901. Widely regarded as an education innovator, Gilman's pioneering vision established Johns Hopkins as the United States' first research university.

The Johns Hopkins News-Letter is one of the oldest student organizations at the university. Since its founding in 1897, the News-Letter has published news, opinions, literary features, advertisements and more that document life at the university for the past 120 years. This digital collection includes digitized issues of the News-Letter ranging from 1897 to 1990.

An influential and controversial figure in our university's history, Isaiah Bowman was Johns Hopkins University's President from 1935 to 1948.

The Black and Blue Jay is a Johns Hopkins University student-run humor publication first published in the 1920s.

The Dreyfus Collection includes contemporary journals documenting the case. The majority of the examples are from Le Petit Journal, a daily Paris newspaper/magazine founded by Moïse Polydore Millaud, and published from 1863 to 1944. The weekly illustrated supplement of Le Petit Journal depicts events related to the Dreyfus Affair during the period 1897 to 1899.