In an interview, scholar Alyssa Collins explains how her time spent plumbing the sci fi writer’s papers left her stunned by the breadth of her interests and the depth of her scientific knowledge.
Gwoja Tjungurrayi features on our $2 coin and was the first living Australian to feature on a postage stamp. It turns out he made his stamp debut much earlier.
Holy cards are highly collectible but also very, very numerous.
Ryan O'Grady, The Marian Library, University of Dayton
The mass production of religious items such as rosaries and holy cards poses a problem for the curators of religious artifacts at libraries and museums. How do you dispose of unwanted donations?
Jubilee singers at Fisk University, in Nashville, Tennessee, pose for
promotional photograph, circa 1871.
William L. Clements Library
From fungi and flies to spiders and fish, living collections need care and feeding even when their human keepers are dealing with a pandemic and its resultant social distancing.
The success of ‘Maus’ made the genre more visible.
Photo by Noam Galai/Getty Images for New York Comic Con
Some graphic novels can spur teens’ engagement with social justice issues.
George and Laura Elmore (left) voting after wining a landmark case ending white-only primaries in South Carolina.
University of South Carolina Civil Rights Center
In a sermon two weeks after MLK’s funeral, civil rights leader, Wyatt Tee Walker, urged young seminarians to be hopeful and take action for making change happen. His sermon has valuable lessons today.
Photographer Ansel Adams poses on a bluff with his camera.
Roger Ressmeyer/CORBIS/VCG via Getty Images
Largely self-taught, Adams learned to harness the communicative power of photography during his years as a marketing photographer.
Two Marines in the Marine Corps’ 5th Division cemetery on Iwo Jima pay their respects to a fallen comrade.
United States Marine Corps Film Repository, USMC 101863 (16mm film frame)
Films of the battle for Iwo Jima, being digitized 75 years after they were made, offer connections and lessons for Americans of today.
With over 100 issues, ‘Young Love’ was one of the longest running romance comics series.
Gary Lee Watson Comic Book Collection, Irvin Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, University of South Carolina Libraries
During the ‘love glut,’ roughly 1 in 5 of all comic books were romance comics, as publishers scrambled to appease readers’ appetites for scandalous storylines.
The USS Cairo pulls up to the banks of the Mississippi River in 1862.
U.S. Naval History and Heritage Command
Centuries’ worth of important information is stored on paper – which can decay, burn or get eaten by pests. Peek inside the process of making all that data digital.
A lithograph from Gaston Tissandier’s balloon travels depicts falling stars.
Archive.org
Not so long ago, people had no idea what would happen to them – and what they would see – once they ascended into the clouds.
A looted Jewish shop in Aachen, Germany on the day after Kristallnacht, Nov. 10, 1938.
Wolf Gruner and Armin Nolzen (eds.). 'Bürokratien: Initiative und Effizienz,' Berlin, 2001.
Wolf Gruner, USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences
Most histories highlight the shattered storefronts and synagogues set aflame. But it was the systematic ransacking of Jewish homes that extracted the greatest toll.
Davide Tanasi scans an artifact from the Farid Karam collection.
Davide Tanasi
Davide Tanasi, a digital archaeologist, thinks it’s a pity when historical artifacts are locked away in storage. He’s working to fix this by sharing them as 3D models.
Idi Amin at a press conference in Jjaja Marina, Uganda in July 1975.
Courtesy of the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation
Hidden for decades in a vault at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation, the photographs depict a regime fixated on establishing order, meting out punishment and stoking nationalism.
Pfc Elias Friedensohn in June 1945 at the Special Services Distributing Point, Seine Section, Paris, France.
National Archives
An unprecedented survey of US GIs that began in 1941, preserved on microfilm, provides a raw and uncensored story of average Americans grappling with both national ideals and practical necessities.