Our online collections support many a research project, but contact with physical photographs and graphic items can be eye-opening and reveal new avenues for investigation. Kya Mangrum, a doctoral candidate in English Language and Literature at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, recently spent several days in the Prints and Photographs Reading Room exploring images of …
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” This decision was pivotal to the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States. A year later, in May 1955, Thomas O’Halloran, on assignment for U.S. News & …
We are still savoring the comments visitors to the National Book Festival offered last fall while viewing sample photographs from our collections. This visitor’s comments seem particularly apt as we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month. The commenter recognized the well-known subject of the photograph, educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune served …
On February 1, 1960, four young men sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and ordered coffee and doughnuts. More than fifty years later, this may not seem like a daring act, but it was. First the waitress and then the store manager explained that the lunch counter was reserved for …
