Along with time, humankind invariably changes the landscape. The geography and a series of events and errors that occurred in Halifax, Nova Scotia, on December 6th, 1917, contributed to the most catastrophic and dramatic man-made violence to a surrounding area and its inhabitants before the Atomic Age. In the annals of disasters of the 20th century, including the Great War, the explosion that occurred at the Canadian harbor was particularly horrifying and cruel. It was if the battles of the Western Front had crossed the Atlantic in a flash and ruined the bustling, prosperous seaport.
Month: November 2017
Is a new kitchen gadget on your holiday wishlist? How about tools for making ice cream? Let’s look at a 1912 trade catalog illustrating some equipment for making and dispensing ice cream.
Due to the unusual amount of rain in March of this year, Peru experienced major flooding, particularly in the Northern providence of Lambayeque. Many cultural institutions were affected. As a result, Vanessa Wagner, the U.S. Embassy in Peru’s Senior Cultural Specialist, reached out to the Smithsonian to organize workshops and talks on the subjects of fire and flood safety & emergency response.
This post was written by Victoria Cunningham, summer intern in the Smithsonian Libraries’ Education office.
This summer I had the pleasure of working on a team of interns under the direction of Education Specialist Sara Cardello to further expand the I See Wonder collection for the Smithsonian Libraries. I See Wonder is an excellent tool for teachers of all grades to help further extend students’ natural curiosity of the world. Children and teens are able to look at photographs and either verbally or in written form express what they see and then take it a step further and discuss what they wonder about the photograph. Teachers are then able to guide the students’ thinking and have them dig deeper to justify their reasoning or expand upon their wonderings. This natural way of learning helps students to develop a deeper understanding of topics through guided inquiry, versus being told exactly what they are supposed to learn.
Is there a food in North America more intrinsically linked with the landscape of the past and nostalgically intertwined with a holiday feast than the cranberry? From Cranberry Lakes in Nova Scotia, Cranberry River of West Virginia, Cranberry Pond in Sunderland, Massachusetts, the Cranberry Isles of Maine, Cranberry Mountain in New York, Cranberry Meadow in New Jersey, and many a Cranberry Bog dotting coastal areas, the plant deserves the appellation of First or Founding Fruit. It is one of the indigenous foods in North America widely cultivated today. The narratives of the places where the berries once grew wild and of the loss of these habitats can be recovered from historical sources.
Earlier this year, two music manuscripts arrived in the book conservation lab from the Dibner Library for the History of Science and Technology. These two small items, James Bishop’s musical Gamut of 1766, and Uri Bishop’s Military Music from the War of 1812, were part of a donation earlier in the year by James L. Cerruti and his sister Vera V. Magruder. The generous gift was featured in a Smithsonian Libraries blog post by Liz O’Brien, “Donations Reveal a Family History”.
The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum Library owns books like Researches into the history of playing cards (1816) that support research into the objects in the museum’s curatorial departments. In studying this book, I was able to make a connection between the book illustrations and some playing cards in the Cooper Hewitt Museum’s Drawings & Prints collections. This book is an in-depth research into the history of playing cards, with black and white engravings, and eight hand-colored woodcuts. Smithsonian Libraries’ has an Adopt-a-Book Program that provides essential funding to support the conservation, acquisition, and digitization of books and manuscripts. In addition to adopting books online, the Cooper Hewitt Library will be having a special Adopt a Book event on Nov.7th, 2017 in the museum in New York City. This title is one of the books up for adoption to fund its preservation treatment.