If you mourn the destruction of the late, great Pennsylvania Station in NYC, you’ll find this glass heralding the coming of the new...

RL Fifield vacuuming samplers with a dental vacuum in the old Textile Conservation Lab, MFA Boston, 2001. Back in the early aughts, I was...

Oil painting on canvas, Thomas Bewick (1753-1828). Cherryburn, Northumberland, National Trust. NT 530359. In digging through the British...

I have spent my life caring for cultural heritage. As a museum collection manager, my work aims to preserve the physical and intellectual...

Quiz: What does a Marylander most often associate with a bushel basket? Sure, you can put fruit or vegetables in it (pick-ur-own or...

The Accident in Lombard Street. Charles Wilson Peale. Winterthur Museum. 1962.88. A pie lays broken in the street, a distraught servant...

I spent July at a Research Fellowship at Winterthur Museum, Library, and Garden. This mainly meant identifying manuscripts and object...

Do we say “museums are not for everyone” and leave it at that? Or should we have meetings this Monday morning to figure out how our...

Chester County Historical Society. In addition to Swarthmore College’s Friends Historical Library, Wednesday also took me to the Chester...

My time here at Winterthur is wrapping up. I took yesterday to visit two incredible local institutions, the Friends Historical Library at...

RL Fifield. I attended the American Institute for Conservation’s Annual Meeting in Indianapolis at the end of May. The opening reception...

Read this great book on 18th century commerce in the backwoods of Virginia. Ann Smart Martin’s Buying into the World of Goods: Early...

Just barely. RL Fifield 2013. Dr. V. indulged my whim to visit the assemblage of historic trains at New York’s Grand Central Terminal...

I was scooting through my apartment building’s basement (a wonder in systems and architecture) on my way to pick up a package at the...

A few samples of historically recreated printed textiles using modern materials. The folded squares at the front are handkerchiefs....

Collage of engraved portraits on exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in “A Will of their Own: Judith Sargent Murray and Women of...

Picture postcard of duck hunting in a sink box at Havre de Grace, Maryland. Duck is tasty. It was popular fare in New York’s...

I roll over this analogy in my mind as I work with my study of 1,000 runaway indentured and enslaved women and their 6,000 garments,...

Has anyone else been outraged by the clips on WNYC when they ask people on the street “Who is Beethoven?” followed by soundbites of...

The Leaky Faucet features two of the weirder Muppets, The Martians. Their octopus-like lower halves are topped with wide flexible mouths...