Hard Histories at the Walters Art Museum
Join us live (and in-person!) for a discussion on "navigating institutional legacies."
Until now, our history has been hidden in plain sight. — Julia Marciari-Alexander, Director of the Walters Art Museum
History binds us to each other. Baltimore in the years before the Civil War was the nation’s third largest city. It was also a place of slave trading and bound labor, including enslaved people held for life and for terms. By 1861, Baltimore was also home to a prominent cadre of secessionists, men who might very well have aligned Maryland with the Confederacy if they’d had the chance. (You can read more about this in the recently published The Civil War in Maryland Reconsidered, edited by historians Jean H. Baker and Charles W. Mitchell.)
At Hard Histories, our work is a kind of reckoning with our place in this story. And we are not alone. Since 2021, Baltimore’s Walter’s Art Museum has been reckoning with its own connections to men — William and Henry Walters — who supported the Confederacy and remained cloistered away in Paris for the duration of the war. After their return to Baltimore, this father and son promoted veneration of the Confederacy even years after the conflict settled. The museum was established in 1934, but its initial holdings were acquired decades earlier in large part through the efforts of William and Henry Walters.
On Sunday afternoon April 3, 2022, from 2-3 pm ET, Hard Histories director Martha S. Jones will talk live (and in-person) with Julia Marciari-Alexander, the Andrea B. and John H. Laporte Director of the Walters Art Museum, and Kirt von Daacke, Assistant Dean, professor of history and African American studies and managing director of Universities Studying Slavery at the University of Virginia. As part of the Museum’s “The Depths of History” series, we will explore what it means for museums to become more transparent about their institutional histories. You can register to join us here.
In recent weeks, here on the ‘stack we’ve chronicled reckonings with the past at the McDonogh School in Owings Mills and at the Baltimore Sun. In many of Baltimore institutions, their roots run deep into the mid-19th century. For some among the prosperous it was a time for slaveholding, and for others it was a time to defend slavery against the will of enslaved people and the anti-slavery forces that ultimately turned the Civil War into a war for abolition. At Johns Hopkins University and Medicine we share these very same roots. At Hard Histories we value the chance to surface our own difficult past and to join with our neighbors such as the Walters Art Museum in paving a way for the reckoning still to come.
— MSJ.
Photo credit: Allen C. Browne, February 19, 2018, for hmdb.org.