When the U.S. Army started moving into the Pentagon in 1942, author, artist, and U.S. Marine Corps officer Colonel John W. Thomason, Jr., penned a humorous, but not entirely complimentary, description of the new building.
Physical aspects of a document, such as stains on a World War II-era telegram in the K. C. Emerson Papers, can sometimes add details to the story it tells, or leave you wondering.
Wallets and their contents are sometimes contained in collections of personal papers, and can provide clues about their owners, based on what they carried with them and the times in which they lived.
Among all the administrative burdens that confronted President Abraham Lincoln in August 1862, helping a naval officer get married was one task he seemingly enjoyed.
While the Pinkerton’s National Detective Agency Records might not contain your grandfather’s Pinkerton’s employment history, the collection offers information about the Pinkertons who ran the family’s agency and some of the more interesting criminals they investigated.
Cornelia Bryce Pinchot visited Iran in 1949 and returned to the U.S. with a striking public health poster warning against the spread of the infectious eye disease, trachoma.
In 1933, psychoanalyst Frieda Fromm-Reichmann fled Nazi Germany. Before landing in the United States, she passed through France. An item from the Manuscript Division’s collections tells this story.