Peek in the Stacks

In preparation for the semester break, we've pulled items from the collections around a wintery theme. From the rare book collection are several stories, poems, plays, and biographies abour the season or featuring related themes. These include children's stories such as Hans Brinker or the Silver Skates, plays like Snow: A Play in Four Acts, poems . . .

Political cartoons are valuable sources that can distill the social and cultural norms of an age. This distillation occurs because political cartoons portray common issues and events in terms that are meant to be easily understood by the general readership of a given publication, or publications. Their use as primary sources requires the understanding of several concepts including symbolism, metaphor, irony, and caricature....

In the United States, there are nine cities or towns named "Burbank." Though the botanist Luther Burbank is well known in his adopted state of California, the City of Burbank in the San Fernando Valley is named after Dr. David Burbank. He was trained as a dentist on the east coast and migrated to San Francisco in the early 1850s. By the early to mid-1860s, he had established...

The Old China Hands Archives in the Special Collections and Archives Department holds materials from a variety of individuals that lived and worked in China during the early 20^th century, including two small collections of materials from Scandinavian ship captains who moved to China and worked with international shipping companies...