For decades, the Homewood Museum’s tours at Johns Hopkins University have fixated on the gilded lives of the Carroll family, one of Maryland’s most famous and historically rooted bloodlines, and the Federal-period arts and architecture of their opulent home.
But starting next month, those tours will dive equally into the lives of the Conner and Ross families, who served the Carrolls as slaves.
Julie Rose, the museum’s director and curator, told Baltimore Fishbowl it’s part of a national trend for museums—some of which have worked decades to preserve the furniture, architecture, art and other cultural relics of their original dwellers—to re-frame what that history means in the 21st century, in which inequality remains widespread. (Baltimore, of course, remains starkly segregated).
“We’re now taking another look at the historical significance in the context of social history,” she said. “We’re looking at humanness and the human stories.”
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