The show, which runs from May 10 to June 15, includes Brown’s original 1916 Rose Bowl poster, Roger Williams’s copy of John Eliot’s Algonquian translation of the Bible, and an eighteenth-century telescope used to chart the transit of Venus.

Also among the items in the downtown display is the sheet music for “The Providence Girl,” which was written for a musical titled A Black Sheep, presented by the Providence Stock Company in 1905. It’s part of the John Hay Library’s sheet-music collection, which is reputed to be one of the largest such collections in the United States.