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Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Call me old-fashioned, but I still mail out Christmas cards every year. The tradition certainly seems to have waned – and evolved – over time, with online services making it a faster, less hands-on operation for those wanting to share holiday wishes. And of course, there’s no need to send a card to keep in …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Imagine needing all of the equipment shown below to simply take a photograph within a dark place. Take note of the camera on the tripod – a stereoscopic camera, which has two lenses. See the chalky residue of hundreds of magnesium tapers burned within the metal reflector at left. This intrepid crew and all their …
Posted in: Photographs, Series: Anything to Get the Shot, Women's History
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
We asked “What’s this Gadget?” about a set of twenty-five uncaptioned photographs from the Harris & Ewing Collection, and you definitely put on your thinking caps – or maybe your psychographs – which we learned the smiling woman below is “wearing”! This previously uncaptioned photograph shows a psychograph, a phrenology machine meant to measure the …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Even if I weren’t a reference librarian, I would have a fondness for the card catalog. When I was introduced to the cabinets of small drawers filled with cards in my high school library, I enjoyed the ability to browse through the cards and discover new books to read or topics to explore. Until automated …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
If you are interested in learning more about visual literacy and historical thinking and about resources such as historical newspapers and photographs, you are in luck! Join us online for a free two-day event: “The Library of Congress and Teachers: Unlocking the Power of Primary Sources.” The virtual conference will take place October 27-28, 2015 …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs, Visual literacy
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Work horses are just that – horses that work. By pulling a cart or wagon, a plow or a carriage, horses worked for centuries in farming, transportation and other industries before being largely replaced by mechanized vehicles in much of the world. Many people today have no first-hand knowledge of horses pulling vehicles on the …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
If you enjoy a good mystery, get ready to start sleuthing! This Friday, we will be adding a new group of mystery photos to the Library of Congress Flickr account. A portion of the glass negatives in the Harris & Ewing Collection came to us with no captions, providing many challenging photo mysteries to solve. …
Posted in: Flickr, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
The following is a guest post by Martha H. Kennedy, Curator of Popular & Applied Graphic Arts, Prints and Photographs Division. Travel by train, or what some called the “Iron horse,” dominated other forms of transport in America for nearly fifty years. During this “golden age” of railroads that began in 1865, public fascination with …
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
The January 1848 chance discovery of gold in northern California rapidly altered the course of America. On this day, August 19, in 1848, word finally reached the East Coast, when the New York Herald published a report of the discovery. By 1849, the rush was on in earnest, leading to the well-known term for gold …
Posted in: Drawings, Photographs