Peek in the Stacks

In 1921, William Mills Wrigley, Jr., the Wrigley Company founder of chewing gum and candy fame, became majority owner of Major League Baseball’s Chicago Cubs. That same year, a time when Major League Baseball had no teams west of St. Louis, Wrigley purchased the Pacific Coast League’s Los Angeles Angels, then a minor-league team. In 1925...

As the 2024 election campaigns heat up, media are already shaping the battle of public opinion. Aggregated news sites, email, and social media now form the “public square” through which power is negotiated and exercised. The efficacy of modern communication is undeniable, although not as original as it may seem. The archives are full of examples of documentation designed to target specific populations, and to disseminate with ease from person to person in order to apply pressure in pursuit of power and justice alike—from national governments to local communities.

Last week, California Governor Gavin Newsom issued a posthumous pardon for former CSUN student activist and faculty member Bill Burwell. Special Collections & Archives has several original and primary sources that document Burwell's work and contributions on campus in its University Archives & Campus History collecting area. While some have been shared....

If it were not for the photographic collection at the Tom & Ethel Bradley Center, evidence of Los Angeles’s support for the modern civil rights movement in the South may have quietly slipped into the past. The African American photographic collection in the Bradley Center documents this era in the works of three photographers: Charles Williams, Harry Adams, and Guy Crowder...