Uncovering Our History Through The Relics Left Behind
Posted in Black history, Figurines, and history
The first thing I saw in the etagere was a beautiful Lladro grouping of a mother reading to her two daughters. One daughter was seated on a bench next to her, listening intently, and the…
Posted in Architecture/Buildings, Culture, history, and Signs
“We got under our desks and covered our heads – like that could stop the radiation,” I overheard the woman say to the two other women with her. They were standing in front of an auction…
I wasn’t sure what to take with me – the male and female anti-slavery tokens or the fragile Abraham Lincoln engraving. I knew some of the history of both, but I was curious to see…
I was at a reading this week by author Isabel Wilkerson on her new book about the Great Migration – that mighty flood of black people who left the South in the early part of…
Posted in collectibles, and history
When I first saw the group of items on the table, I was drawn to the colored labels bearing numbers and id’s. They reminded me of deaccession tags that accompanied the stuff that museums consigned to auctions to raise…
Posted in history
Recently, I got an email from a man named Darrell English who had read my blog posts from some months ago about an auction of Nazi paraphernalia. I had written emphatically that I could never…
Over the weekend, I went with a friend to see Robert Redford’s new movie “The Conspirator,” about Mary Surratt, who was tried and convicted of conspiring to kill President Lincoln in 1865. I know the…
The little child’s piano just grabbed hold of me when I walked through the door of the auction house. Someone with a marketer’s eye knew what they were doing. It faced me like a yearning…
Posted in Black history, and history
Last year, I was in my basement tending clothes in the washer on the day after President Obama’s State of the Union Message. It was the one where South Carolina Republican Rep. Joe Wilson shouted out…
I immediately made my way to the glass counter to look for the letter. I wanted to see this document written in the hand of a black Union soldier to his wife in May 1864.…
