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Peek in the Stacks: photographs

The First Wrigley Field: More Than Baseball

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...

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A Pardon for Bill Burwell, CSUN Student Activist and Faculty Member

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....

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Civil Rights in Los Angeles, California

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...

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Two Photographers and a Poet in Point Lobos

Point Lobos is just north of Big Sur and just south of Carmel-By-The-Sea, situated on the central coast of California in Monterey County. Filled with Monterey Cypress trees, vast kelp forests, and a diverse range of birds and animals, the area is awe inspiring for many artists. Special Collections & Archives holds two extraordinary books....

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The Homer Halverson Collection – Documenting Los Angeles in Photographs

Recently the Homer Halverson Collection expanded with the addition of some materials donated by his children. The collection holds a treasure trove of local history including documentation of the development of Los Angeles's water infrastructure, the Halversons' donation of land to the City of Los Angeles that would eventually become the CSUN campus, construction of multiple freeways around Los Angeles, and the Halverson Family's move from Oklahoma to California in 1924.https://library.csun.edu/SCA

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Historic Strikes Across Los Angeles

The Urban Archives, part of Special Collections & Archives, collects materials that document the history of Los Angeles, and includes the records of many labor unions, guilds, and affiliated labor organizations that have operated within Los Angeles since the early 20th century. Many of these collections include records documenting labor strikes, or work stoppages ....

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Bobtown: Robert Celestin and a Louisiana Township

In 1887, after Reconstruction, a black man named Robert Creecy purchased a parcel of Canebrake Plantation land in Louisiana from Florestan Waggenspauch. Creecy sold half the parcel to another buyer, while retaining ownership of the remaining land. In 1898, Creecy's son-in-law, a 25-year-old black man with indigenous ancestry named Robert Celestin, purchased the half parcel of land back...

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The Hassina and Deeptha Leelarathna Photographic Collection

The Hassina and Deeptha Leelarathna Photographic Collection is an invaluable historical archive that offers a glimpse into the lives of two Sri Lankan immigrants who made significant contributions to the Sri Lankan community in the United States.

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A Servicemember’s Best Friend

A number of collections in the Old China Hands Archives document the lives of American military personnel serving abroad in the 20th century, primarily in China but also in other countries in Asia and the Pacific Islands. Alongside photographs of local sites and fellow servicemembers, dogs make fairly frequent cameos. 

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