Joshua Ortiz Baco is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Texas at Austin. His work combines cultural studies and digital methodologies in the study of 19th-century abolitionist and racial discourses in U.S. newspapers of Cuban, Puerto Rican and Brazilian immigrants. His research is funded by the Andrew Mellon Foundation grant-in-aid program …
Maria Mitchell (1818-1889) is an astronomer, educator, librarian, activist, and the first nationally recognized woman scientist in the United States. She discovers a new comet, which bears her name, and calculates its orbit, and adds several new nebulae to sky maps. She also teaches at a prominent women’s college and fights to advance the cause of …
This post originally appeared on the Library of Congress Blog. This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. Over the past 20 years, one would be hard pressed to identify an industry that has undergone as many wrenching changes as newspaper publishing. Allen Neuharth, chairman of the Gannett Co. from …
Solving puzzles didn’t just pass the time in the early 1900s, solving puzzles could sometimes even win you a prize! Puzzle contests abounded, sometimes run by the newspapers and sometimes run by local companies hoping to get readers’ business. One of the favorites for contests of the era was the rebus. What is a rebus? …