Smithsonian Libraries has partnered with the National Museum of Natural History to create a mobile museum scavenger hunt. This in-person hunt allows you to explore Libraries online collections while hunting for objects in the Natural History museum.  

Written by Jessica Masinter. She is an intern in the Cooper Hewitt Library and a literary studies major at Middlebury College. This follow up blog to “The Textile Thief and the Great British Manufacturers,” focuses on Watson’s samples of turban pieces and their significance in India in the mid-1800s. When J. Forbes Watson was collecting samples for his collection Textile Manufactures of India, turbans were worn almost universally throughout India. In Watson’s more »

The Smithsonian Libraries was recently gifted the flipbook Eagles in Flight. A flipbook is a grouping of still images of movement that when quickly “flipped” give the illusion of actual movement. The books reached their height of popularity  at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. This book is from a series entitled Flicker (because they are known as flickerbooks  in the UK where this title was printed) more »

As the weather gets hot, let’s look at a catalog to encourage thoughts of something a bit cooler in temperature. Perhaps a trade catalog related to soda fountains?

Written by Jessica Masinter. She is a summer intern in the Cooper Hewitt Library and a literary studies major at Middlebury College. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Indian textiles were the height of quality. Their exotic patterns, brilliant colors and dye fastness drove customer appeal among the English bourgeoisie to the point where India was considered by some to be the industrial workshop of the world. British textile manufacturers desperately tried more »

This post was written by Michelle Farias, intern in the Dibner Library of the History of Science and Technology. For more in this series, see previous posts about Edward Jenner and Joseph Jerome Le Francais de Lalande by Morgan E. Aronson. The five portraits collected by Bern Dibner that feature Antoine-François, comte de Fourcroy, show the chemist in two distinct periods of his life. While the portraits are not dated, two of more »

This post was written by Carolina Murcia, Biodiversity Heritage Library Product Development and Marketing Intern.     I am a designer. I am an artist. I am an illustrator. I am an amateur photographer, a daughter, a traveler, an adventurist, a niece, a walker, a cyclist, a friend, an intern, a professional, a foreigner, a Latina, a Colombian, a woman, a strong woman, a bilingual. I am a person that has grown more »