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Category: Guest Blog Posts

Silver stylized owl with radiant circles around its head, surrounded by a gold frame

Rajah Raboid and the Business of Mystery

Posted by: Ellen Terrell

This post was written by Brendan Bachmann, a visiting library science student from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. Horoscopes have long been popular with those hoping for a glimpse of their future. Indeed, some individuals have made a business of the mystical, profiting from people’s curiosity of the unknown. A horoscope pamphlet that has recently …

Silver stylized owl with radiant circles around its head, surrounded by a gold frame

An Australian Librarian Visits the Library of Congress

Posted by: Ellen Terrell

Brendan Bachmann is a library science student from RMIT University in Melbourne, Australia. He spent two weeks with Business Reference staff at the Library of Congress in January 2020. Coming from a very different background, having worked for six years in various public libraries in Australia, it has been a fascinating experience spending two weeks …

Photograph of the Narrow-gauge steam locomotive

Walt Whitman’s View of Railroads: To a Locomotive in Winter

Posted by: Jennifer Harbster

Whitman's poem "To a Locomotive in Winter;" first appeared in print February 19, 1876 in the New York Daily Tribune as part of a preview of the volume Two Rivulets (1876). Published just seven years after the union of the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah Territory, Whitman's poem "To a Locomotive in Winter" considers the dynamic relationship between the railroad and nature.