Dr. Ruth Wright Hayre (1910-1998) was a distinguished educator and administrator in Philadelphia's public school system, as well as a philanthropist. Among her many firsts, Dr. Hayre was the first African American high school teacher in the School District of Philadelphia (William Penn High School, 1946) and the first female president of Philadelphia's Board of Education (1990). The Ruth Wright Hayre papers, 1926-1990, document the education and professional career of Dr. Hayre thoroughly, and also contain material about her family and the associations and organizations to which she belonged.
Held at: African American Museum in Philadelphia [Contact Us]
British-born photographer Eadweard Muybridge (1830-1904) gained recognition for his landscape photographs of the American West before he developed a procedure in 1877 involving mechanically tripped shutters that allowed him to capture photographs in rapid succession to depict movement. In 1883, the University of Pennsylvania funded Muybridge to undertake a massive series of photographs of animal and human movement resulting in the landmark 1887 work
Animal Locomotion, that would prove invaluable to artists, anatomists, physiologists, and athletes. The Eadweard Muybridge glass positives and prints, circa 1887, consist of approximately 400 collotype plates and 500 glass positives from
Animal Locomotion.