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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.

May 1, 2023

Each month, the Presbyterian Historical Society is bearing witness to the lives of African American leaders throughout the history of the PC(USA). Click here to learn how PHS is collecting records of the Black Presbyterian experience through the African American Leaders and Congregations Initiative.

Additionally, a free bulletin insert about each figure is available for download at the end of...

April 25, 2023

Mary Jane Patterson was born on February 12th, 1924, in Marietta, Ohio. At that time in southern Ohio, very few African American families lived there. Mary Jane spoke of this time fondly and noted that she was not very aware of race relations growing up because she lived in an integrated town. After her high school graduation, she moved to Columbus, Ohio, where her worldview changed drastically. It was her first encounter with more extreme forms of segregation, and she became more acquainted with the blooming civil rights movement taking hold in the 1940s. 

She enrolled in...

March 13, 2023

While piecing together the background of a museum collection object found in the basement storage of the Presbyterian Historical Society, I found myself growing very familiar with a young woman whose dream in life was to become a missionary. Her name was Annie R. Houston, and she chased her dream—going to school to study medicine, interning for three years post-education, and gaining the trust and encouragement of her family—until she caught it. Grasping her dream tightly, Annie traveled to China in September 1891, where she became the first woman physician sent there by the...

March 7, 2023
Barber-Scotia students in college library, circa 1960s. Pearl ID: islandora:309464

Now available in Pearl are photographs of Barber-Scotia College, a historically Black women’s college in Concord, North Carolina. Spanning 1928 through the 1960s,...

December 1, 2022
Rev. Dr. Katie Geneva Cannon, circa 2000s. Pearl ID: islandora:171117

The Presbyterian Historical Society is excited to announce the completion of the second phase of an inter-institutional effort to publish the personal records of the founding voice of womanist theology, Katie Geneva Cannon. Researchers can now view the entirety of records from The Burke Library at Union Theological Seminary (Columbia University Libraries) in the...

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