Blog | Page 2 | Presbyterian Historical Society

You are here

Blog

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.

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...

July 25, 2022

When United Presbyterian Women gathered at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana in the summer of 1985, Carol Weir thanked them for their support, and a delegation from the Soviet Union gifted them a painted icon. The crowd heard from speakers representing the Third World and from the nuclear disarmament movement. Of these women, the most remarkable women bearing witness at the event were those who had fled US-sponsored military and paramilitary violence in Nicaragua and El Salvador. The next-most remarkable were the women who helped shelter them here in the United States

We'...

Featured Tags