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Perspectives Spotlight

Baseball Card Collecting’s “Holy Grail”

Why is the Honus Wagner card so valuable, and what can it tell us about the history of commerce, marketing, and consumerism?

Detail of a Honus Wagner baseball card, showing his face against an orange background, with a bright yellow ovular spotlight shape behind the figure in the background
Honus Wagner, Pittsburgh, National League, from the White Border series (T206) for the American Tobacco Company

Tracing Economics through Ephemera

An angle on commerce and consumerism through the “holy grail” of baseball card collecting
By Allison Rudnick and Dave Jamieson Mar 2, 2022

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A small bronze sculpture of a seated boy pulling a thorn from the bottom of his foot appears set against a bright yellow ovular spotlight shape in the background.

Spinario’s Thorn

What can Antico’s small, bronze sculpture teach us about pain, mindfulness, and the creative process?
Brown and beige fragment of a floor mosaic with a brown-skinned woman with curly brown hair, a headpiece, and earrings set against a bright yellow ovular spotlight shape in the background.

The Personification of Ktisis

What does this mosaic reveal about representation in the Byzantine world?
A detail from Thomas Cole's landscape painting "The Oxbow" set against a bright yellow ovular spotlight shape in the background.

Questioning Cole’s Romantic Wilderness

“The perception of America as an uninhabited wilderness is, in its own way, a historical fiction.” – Alan C. Braddock, professor and ecocritic
An ancient Egyptian seated statue of Hatshepsut in limestone, with a bright yellow ovular spotlight shape behind the figure in the background

The King Herself

A conversation on gender, power, and erasure

Related

Honus Wagner, Pittsburgh, National League, from the White Border series (T206) for the American Tobacco Company
Exhibition

Baseball Cards from the Collection of Jefferson R. Burdick

Cover of MetPublications
MetPublications

A Centennial Album: Drawings, Prints, and Photographs Bulletin

A woman sits at a table, writing
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