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Category: Researcher Stories

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Researcher Stories: Walter Stahr

Posted by: Wendi Maloney

In this segment of a regular feature on authors who use the Library's collections, we interview Walter Stahr, a lawyer turned historian. His latest biography, published in 2022, is "Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival," a look at the influential treasury secretary and later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court during the mid 19th century.

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Researching Nannie Helen Burroughs: Danielle Phillips-Cunningham

Posted by: Neely Tucker

Danielle Phillips-Cunningham teaches multicultural women’s and gender studies at Texas Woman’s University and writes about race and women’s labor history. She is writing a book about Nannie Helen Burroughs -- who founded the National Association of Wage Earners, a little-known but important Black women’s labor organization -- in the Library’s collection of Burrough's papers.

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

Researcher Stories: Civil War Photographs, “Chlorophyll Prints” and Robert Schultz

Posted by: Wendi Maloney

For years, artist Robert Schultz has made creative reuse of historical Civil War-era images, developing photographs from the Library's Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Portraits in the flesh of tree and plant leaves found on former battlefields. It turned out so well that the Library has acquired some of his art.

Image of an ornate clock showing 2:05 with sculpted male figures sitting on each side of the clock face

The Great Buchanan Inheritance Hoax

Posted by: Neely Tucker

Ninety years ago, a Texas grocer named Lorenzo D. Buchanan stepped forward with one of the great hoaxes of 20th-century American pop-culture life, a genealogical fabrication that continues to resonate today. The Great Buchanan Inheritance Hoax rocked American life from 1931-1936 with his false tale of an $85 million inheritance that was available to anyone who could prove a family connection.