The following is a guest post by 2025 Innovator in Residence Vivian Li, an illustrator, comics artist and web developer from Macomb, Illinois who currently lives in Seattle.
As someone who has lived in both rural Illinois and bustling Seattle, I was shocked that I could find really cool items about both locations on the Library of Congress website. For Anywhere Adventures, I will create an interactive site for audiences in three US towns to learn about their local history through stories I’ll unearth on loc.gov. The first location will be in Seattle, Washington, and I am now looking for the other two. Could it be your town? From now until February 5th, I’m taking suggestions for where Anywhere Adventures should go!
How to Submit
Do some searching to see what interesting free to use items from your town can be found within the Library’s digital collections and nominate them for consideration. Submit an item by posting the web link to your item and the name of your town in the comments below, or post to Instagram and tag the Library at @librarycongress or me @vivianlikesfruit. We’ll share what towns we pick back here on The Signal in March!
Tips on doing research in the digital collections
- Navigate to the Library’s website at loc.gov.
- Use the search bar in the top right to look up your town. You could also try other nearby towns or the county name.
- Filter your results with the options offered on the left. You can narrow it down by the type of item (such as image, manuscript, or audio recording). Or you could use the date filter to find periods that you’re curious about!
- Explore more items similar to ones you already like. Scroll down to the “More items like this” section, or see what collection the item belongs to in the “Part of” column on the right.
- Make sure it’s free to use by checking the “Rights & Access” section at the bottom of the item page. This guide from the Prints & Photographs Division is a great resource.
Some inspiration! What I found out about Seattle
Seattle is an extremely hilly city – biking anywhere will cause you to show up to your destination drenched in sweat. However, Seattle used to be much hillier than it is now.
It is a classic piece of Seattle history: the big regrade that flattened the city. In order to make downtown more accessible, giant hills were leveled to ease pressure on the horses that were used to transit at the time. That’s why it’s dangerous to be in SoDo (south of downtown) during an earthquake: that land was dirt that was transplanted from the old Denny Hill. It’s not packed dense enough, and will basically turn into liquid during an earthquake.
I had heard all this, but never stopped to consider how giant hills were being cut down in 1904. If I had to guess: shovels, maybe even bulldozers (I don’t know when bulldozers were invented!). When I stumbled across this photo in the Library of Congress’s stereograph collection of a hill being BLASTED WITH WATER, I lost my mind! What a wild way to deal with that problem. If I had to bet if that would be an effective way to move land, I would tell you: no. But I drove through Belltown today, and my car was so fuel efficient from climbing zero hills.
What’s even cooler about this image is that it is a stereograph. An image that was taken with a special camera with side-by-side lenses. If you let your eyes unfocus so that the two images drift towards each other and eventually overlap, you can see the mound of dirt pop out at you.
I like history most when I can feel how it’s affecting the world I experience today- and that’s the core of Anywhere Adventures! Finding awesome items like this.
Can you try doing some research about your area for yourself? If you find some cool story, share the item and what larger piece of history you learned (or what you found so charming about it). Happy adventuring and I’ll see you in the comments!
Comments (12)
I found photos from 1919-1920 of people swimming and canoeing in my adopted hometown of Chesapeake Beach, MD. Here’s one– https://www.loc.gov/resource/npcc.01944/
Thank you for sharing and for the nomination, Tracee. Seeing bits of home in the collections is a wonderful feeling, and the images you found are really fun.
I’m a life-long Chicagoan and a long-time lover of the blues and devotee of the Chicago Blues Fest, where I got to know the artist performing “Sweet Home Chicago” on this recording, David Honeyboy Edwards: https://www.loc.gov/item/ihas.200196398/.
I’ll also never forget hearing this song performed by Matt “Guitar” Murphy in a church converted to music venue in Texas while there on an internship and just aching to go back to my sweet home Chicago.
I love to travel and have lived other places but no matter where I am, Chicago will always feel like home to me.
It is such a diverse, welcoming place full of advantures and fun!
Thank you for your nomination and for sharing such a great story with us, Julie. Also, congrats on such an excellent find in the Library collections. We love hearing how people relate and connect with collection items. Happy researching!
Please correct my typo: advantures should be adventures.
Hi Vivian, I wonder if you’d consider doing a slightly larger area than a single town? I’m from Pennsylvania, which has a long history of roads, highways and turnpikes (oh and railroads! even canals! bridges!) that were moving people west to the interior of the country (with lots of local stops along the way) and I’m guessing that people who use these roads may not be aware of the history of the places, the technology, or even the places themselves. A couple of specific examples that come to mind are the Horseshoe Curve (Pennsylvania Railroad) in Altoona, the Incline Planes in Johnstown, and the Delaware Aqueduct going into Pittsburgh (the oldest surviving suspension bridge in America, designed by John Roebling who went on to create the Brooklyn Bridge). The Pennsylvania Turnpike itself is considered the first modern superhighway. But older roads include the Lincoln Highway and before that the Great Wagon Road from Philadelphia into the upcountry via Martinsburg, now West Virginia and Winchester, Virginia, which followed an older trail used by Native Americans. Conestoga wagons come from Pennsylvania, named for the Conestoga River valley near Lancaster. There are all variety of sites from three-plus centuries including some great roadside architecture and Ft. Necessity. Or you could pick a smaller city such as Lancaster, Reading, Altoona, Johnstown, etc. and catch some of the throughways. A small city like Winchester would be cool too—it has all the wars including prisoners plus the Valley Road, Quakers, an apple festival and Patsy Kline. And George Washington slept there. Or the Valley Road itself, or… overall I’m suggesting the idea that travel routes create networks of access that tie our “local” places together in ways we may not realize. A different road in a different part of the country would also be cool.
Thank you for your nomination, Susan, and the suggestion to consider an area larger than a single town. Drawing connections between multiple towns, structures, and roadways can reveal parallels in different communities and create a network of ties between an area and the Library.
I would like to nominate the city of Little Rock, Arkansas for its rich southern history of agriculture and industry (especially because of its position along the Arkansas River), southern politics (including duels between candidates) and Governor/President Bill Clinton, and its involvement in civil rights.
One of the most well-known events in Little Rock is the desegregation crisis of Central High School in1957 which gained national and international coverage and is synonymous with the Civil Rights Movement in the United States.
This item from the LoC collection features army national guard troops in front of the iconic Central High School in the heart of Little Rock. https://www.loc.gov/item/2022887124/
Another perspective of this same event is shown in this photograph, of “three pajama-clad white girls being educated via television during the period that the Little Rock schools were closed to avoid integration.” https://www.loc.gov/item/2003654390/
As a participant in the National Digital Newspaper Program, there is a significant amount of newspaper coverage including the Arkansas State Press, the newspaper owned and operated by Daisy and Lucious Bates. Daisy was instrumental in the desegregation crisis of Central High and her newspaper was a mouthpiece for the Civil Rights Movement, ultimately leading to its demise. To read the paper, visit the Chronicling America collection of historic newspapers at https://www.loc.gov/item/sn84025840/.
Thank you for your nomination, Katie, and for taking the time to include a variety of items that connect Little Rock to the Library’s collections! It’s fascinating to see the different ways people and places turn up in the Library collections.
Birmingham, Alabama, would be a great city to feature. It was founded in 1871, during Reconstruction, and developed into an industrial and railroad center that served as a model for other growing towns in the state and region.
In addition to its rich Civil Rights history, Birmingham is known for its ties to the iron and steel industry. A symbol of that is one of the local landmarks, The Vulcan, a 56-foot statue that depicts the Roman god of “fire and forge” who appears with his ironworking equipment. A detailed drawing of the statue and the park that contains it can be found at https://www.loc.gov/item/al0964/; there are also several pictures of it in the Library of Congress’s holdings, including https://www.loc.gov/item/2010636958/).
Chronicling America is also a good place to find information about The Vulcan’s history. Lots of articles in The Birmingham Age-Herald feature pictures (since it is the largest cast iron figure in the world) and describe how the Commercial Club sponsored its creation in 1904 so it could represent the city in the World’s Fair in St. Louis: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038485/1904-03-13/ed-1/seq-25/.
Other articles trace the Vulcan’s history, which note debates over whether or not to bring it home from the fair and where to put it in Birmingham: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038485/1920-05-18/ed-1/seq-6/.
Finally, advertisements in the 1920s demonstrate the statue’s link to “progress”: https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85038485/1922-10-01/ed-1/seq-32/, which reminds me of all the businesses that are STILL named after it.
Like it or hate it, The Vulcan has become a cultural icon that is well known in Birmingham, so the city and the statue seem to go hand in hand.
Thanks for such a rich history and a great nomination, Melissa! It’s wonderful to see the variety of items that are linked to the Vulcan in Birmingham. Thanks for highlighting the Chronicling America collection and detailing your research process. Hoping your story inspires other nominators to dive into the online collections!
I would like to nominate Evanston, Illinois as one of your feature towns. I’ve searched for Evanston on the LOC website and found a trove of historical material that most Evanstonians would be surprised to learn about. I love the image of President Roosevelt’s visit during a speaking tour https://www.loc.gov/item/2010647463/. And I was startled to see the photo of Al Capone at Dyche Stadium (only fully viewable at the LOC). Evanstonians are forward-looking folks–and that’s fine; one must always plan for the future and work toward it–but I’d love for them to gain a deeper sense of the history that’s right under their feet.