Surprisingly, the first Arbor Day was not held in a heavily forested part of the United States, but in Nebraska, known for its treeless prairies. In 1872, J. Sterling Morton, more »
Category: Holidays and Special Occasions
Our Resource Description department is busy throughout the year cataloging books and other materials for our 21 branch libraries. This holiday season our catalogers shared a few delightful items that were recently cataloged, using the hashtag #12DaysofCataloging. Below is a round-up of all the titles we featured on social media. Get ready for lots of pop-up books, castles and winter themes! These fabulous books were compiled by staff members Heidy Berthoud, Lesley Parilla and Julia Blakely.
We wish you warm tidings from all of us at Smithsonian Libraries this holiday season! Within the snow globe is an image of the Smithsonian Institution Building (the Castle) from more »
The Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Library has nearly 2,000 movable and pop-up books, that are made with a variety of paper construction types and mechanisms that control the movement of more »
February 14th, 2018 marks the 200th birthday (observed) of Frederick Douglass. Interested in contributing to his legacy? Join the Transcribe-a-thon organized by Colored Conventions and the Smithsonian Transcription Center. Autobiographies more »
We wish you warmth and joy this holiday season! The book featured in this video is Tokaido gojusantsugi by Hiroshige Ando published in 1868. The translated title is 53 Stations more »
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.