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News, events, updates, and tidbits from the Presbyterian Historical Society. Use tags to read related articles or sort by author for similar posts written by PHS staff members and volunteers.

The Shedd Family Papers: Documenting Dedication in Urmia

May 31, 2024

Memorial Service for Armenian Catholicos, 1907. [Pearl ID: 139161].

A woman floats in Lake Urmia. An American doctor poses next to a Kurdish leader. A group of Assyrian women gather in a home in Urmia.

This spring, descendants of the Shedd family prepared boxes of records and delivered them to the Presbyterian Historical Society archives. The records, which were...

Author:

Kristen

Tags:

Presbyterian Heritage, From the Archives, Mission History

Archives Sneak Peek: Anna Criswell Papers

March 22, 2024

Each month, the Presbyterian Historical Society is diving deep into the archives and sharing stories from the family and personal papers in our collections. This month, we’re highlighting the Anna B. Criswell Papers.

What better way to celebrate Women’s History Month than by exploring an archival collection that illustrates the life of a woman dedicated to her church, her pupils, her family, and her own happiness?

Record...

Author:

McKenna

Tags:

Womens History, From the Archives

Through a Lens: Nuns' Dress Reform

March 19, 2024

In 2023, PHS was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to digitize 22,500 photographs and supporting documents from the Religious News Service Photograph Collection. Learn more about the project.

The Religious News Service Photograph Collection includes images that were shot between 1945 and 1982. To kick off the RNS Photographs Digitization Project, we prioritized appraising and scanning images from 1964...

Author:

Megan

Tags:

Religious News Service, From the Archives, Womens History

Our Work in the Archives, Fourth Quarter 2023

February 28, 2024

Let's dig in to the work of your archivists in the fall and winter of 2023!

We had a quiet quarter of new accessions to end the year: 60.54 feet in 83 groups, among them 29 feet of records from 32 active and dissolved congregations. We brought in seven feet and 250MB of personal papers in the quarter, including the work of Liz Knott, a Presbyterian advocate for Palestine, an oral history with Rev. Cedric Portis of Third Presbyterian Church (St. Louis, Mo.), and records from Rev. Jude Michaels, a Presbyterian minister active in the...

Author:

David S

Tags:

Quarterly Reports, From the Archives

Newsletter Archives: Building Plans 1965

February 10, 2015

Fifty years ago, PHS was in the process of planning for a move from Philadelphia's Witherspoon Building to a new (faux Colonial) building at 425 Lombard Street, our current location. Below is a brief write-up that appeared in the Presbyterian Key, our newsletter at the time, showing the planned-for second floor. The write-up and image were located and scanned by Stephanie Becker, the Society's reformatting technician.

There are plans, and then there are plans that get made. Former staff...

Author:

Fred T

Tags:

From the Archives, Ask the Archives