Special Collections and Archives holds many rare, unique, limited, and first edition works of American literature, including books by famed author John Steinbeck whose books of fiction and non-fiction have often sparked controversy....
Thanksgiving is a holiday celebrated in the United States, in which family and friends gather together to have dinner and give thanks. Special Collections and Archives holds several items that relate to how people celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday. While some people have family traditions that include...
The Vahdah Olcott-Bickford Collection contains many gifts of information about classical music, the guitar, and the city of Los Angeles, including several hundred concert programs from across the world that Olcott-Bickford (1885-1980) collected over...
Everyone has a sense of humor and in Special Collections & Archives, there are many kinds of jokes and humor in our collections. Some humor is provocative and racy, or culturally humorous, or satirical. Depending on who the audience is, it can sometimes be understood ....
Special Collections and Archives holds a number of collections that document the history of the American Civil War through personal narratives, photographs, correspondence, and official records. While small collections are sometimes overlooked by researchers, their contents can often pique our curiosity and lead to fascinating discoveries about...
Edwin Thomas Booth may be best known as the brother of John Wilkes Booth, assassin of President Abraham Lincoln, but Edwin was one of the most famous American Shakespearean actors of the nineteenth century. The Booths were a family of actors beginning with...
In general, archival collections are primarily made up of manuscript collections and published materials which are used for scholarly research. However, many collections also yield unusual and unique items in the form of rare ephemera, one of a kind or single issue publications, and curious objects that cannot be categorized. These items, captured through human ingenuity and inventiveness, reflect...
In 1915, the second Ku Klux Klan was founded by William J. Simmons in Atlanta, Georgia. By the 1920s, social tensions brought on by rapid industrialization and increased immigration in urban areas had set the stage for the Klan’s expanding popularity. Unlike the first Klan, the second Klan was...
The legend of the American cowboy was not only shaped by the Vaquero tradition, but by a host of other pioneers who sought to make a new life in the west. In January 1837, former Midwesterners Philip Leggett Edwards and Ewing Young would set out from Yerba Buena (now San Francisco) on what came to be known as...
Sport, athletics, and the quest for fitness have been important parts of American life for over a century. What was originally called "Physical Culture" emerged in Europe and the US during the 19th century, and resulted in a fundamental reorientation of life and cultural ideals in the US by the turn of the twentieth century....
