“Years ago, I had a conversation with an actor who maintained, ‘Once you can fake sincerity, you can achieve anything.’  Even when I had no respect for the people I was dealing with, it was important to behave as if I did.” 
Val McDermid, How The Dead Speak  https://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5672.Val_McDermid?page=7   

The Philadelphia Museum was an early museum in Philadelphia started by the painter Charles Willson Peale and continued by his family.  It was opened in 1784 as an art museum and added a natural history collection in 1786.  The exhibits included the first nearly complete skeleton of the mastodon, a relative of the mammoth.  Peale died in 1827 and the collection was sold in 1849 and 1854.  Peale opened the Museum in his home at Third and Lombard Streets in 1784.  The first exhibition was a collection of forty-four portraits of "worthy personages" from the American Revolutionary War.  Two years later, in 1786, he advertised his museum as a repository for natural curiosities.  In addition to portraits the museum's collection eventually included natural history specimens, fossils, archaeological finds, native American and Asian objects and curiosities.  Peale preserved his animal specimens using the methods of Edme-Louis Daubenton, however the results were not satisfactory.  He therefore tried other methods and found that arsenic or mercuric chloride were more effective.  In 1794 Peale accepted the post of librarian at the American Philosophical Society and moved his home and museum to their building at Fifth and Chestnut Streets.  In 1801 Peale visited a farm in New York State to view some recently discovered bones of a mastodon, an extinct relative of the European mammoth which was then known as the Great Incognitum.  He agreed to pay the farmer $200 for the bones already discovered and $100 for permission to find the remaining bones.  The excavation involved draining a 12 foot pit and took six weeks, but eventually the first nearly complete skeleton of the species was recovered.  As the skeleton was incomplete Peale's son Rembrandt carved wooden replicas with the help of the sculptor William Rush and Moses Williams, a formerly enslaved person. This was only the second time that a fossil skeleton had been mounted, the previous example being a megatherium assembled in Madrid.  The skeleton was unveiled in December as a separate exhibit costing 50¢, in addition to 25¢ to visit the museum.  Peale commemorated the excavation with his painting of 1806–1808 The Exhumation of the Mastodon.  The skeleton was purchased by the naturalist Johann Jakob Kaup in 1854 and is now in the Hessisches Landesmuseum Darmstadt in Germany.  Peale also reconstructed a second skeleton, which was later displayed in the Peale Museum in Baltimore, and eventually acquired by the American Museum of Natural History in New York.  In 1802 the museum moved again to Independence Hall, the former Pennsylvania statehouse.  Peale retired in 1810 and left the running of the museum to his son Rubens.  The museum was incorporated as the Philadelphia Museum Company in 1821.  In 1822 Peale painted The Artist in His Museum, a self portrait with his museum in the Long Room of the Independence Hall in the background.  In 1814 Peale's son Rembrandt opened a second Peale Museum in Baltimore, which was the first purpose built museum building in the United States.  Rubens opened a third museum in New York in 1825.  In the 1840s the Peale museums suffered from declining revenue and competition from the showman P. T. Barnum, who opened his American Museum in New York in 1842.  The New York Peale museum was closed in 1842 and the Baltimore museum in 1845, their contents being sold to Barnum.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peale%27s_Philadelphia_Museum#cite_note-Philadelphia_Encyclopedia-1   

Willie Howard Mays Jr. (1931–June 18, 2024), nicknamed "the Say Hey Kid", was an American professional baseball center fielder who played 23 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB).  Regarded as one of the greatest players ever, Mays ranks second behind only Babe Ruth on most all-time lists, including those of The Sporting News and ESPN. Mays played in the National League (NL) between 1951 and 1973 for the New York / San Francisco Giants and New York Mets.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willie_Mays   

Juneteenth, officially Juneteenth National Independence Day, is a federal holiday in the United States.  It is celebrated annually on June 19 to commemorate the ending of slavery in the United States.  The holiday's name is a portmanteau of the words "June" and "nineteenth", as it was on June 19, 1865, when Major General Gordon Granger ordered the final enforcement of the Emancipation Proclamation in Texas at the end of the American Civil War.  Although this date commemorates enslaved people learning of their freedom under the Emancipation Proclamation, this only applied to former Confederate states.  There remained legally enslaved people in states that never seceded from the Union.  These people did not gain their freedom until the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution on December 6, 1865.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juneteenth   

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2828  June 19, 2024