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 . . .
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...
Natural disasters, as most of us know, are inevitable and can sometimes cause a lot of damage. In Los Angeles, we often experience earthquakes, fires, and occasionally, floods. In recent years, we have had tsunami scares, tornados touching down, and major fires in the area. Special Collections and Archives holds several collections that document various disasters...
World War I, also called the Great War, took the lives of more than 9 million people, and devastated millions more. It also brought invention, destroyed long standing empires, redrew some political borders, and created new ones. Like all wars before and since, it separated families, and had a dramatic impact on the social welfare of all involved nations...
The nineteenth century often invokes flowery images of romanticism and heavily-embellished architecture. By today's standards, it can also be seen as an oppressive era for women especially with regards to society, marriage, and the household. The Vern and Bonnie Bullough Collection on Sex and Gender spans many topics including birth control, abortion, homosexuality, cross dressing, sex education, and prostitution, and includes numerous works demonstrating popular public opinion and more subversive, revolutionary ideas about appropriate roles for women during the 19th century...
Special Collections and Archives holds many books and collection materials that illustrate the unique history of Los Angeles in the years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. The Los Angeles "Booster Myth," an outgrowth of Manifest Destiny, was largely perpetuated by real estate investors, commercial industry, and civic leaders in an effort to bring more settlers to Los Angeles and prolong the real estate boom of the 1880s...
Few things are more universal to the human experience than the enjoyment of music. For those with a cause on their minds, protest music can be an effective way of furthering their goals. Protest music is nothing new. Beethoven’s "Ode to Joy" is said to be a protest song in support of universal brotherhood. For this blog post, the focus will be American protest music. This type of music is topical in nature with a takeaway message for the listener...
While it is undoubtedly so today, crime has been a part of everyday life in Los Angeles for more than a century. Scholars in numerous disciplines might use crime-related statistics when examining a variety of social, political, and economic trends, historical events, or notable individuals. Today, websites like the Los Angeles Police Department's Crime Mapping page let police officers and individual citizens find crime-related statistics, or search for reported crimes by type, date range, and address...
On January 24th, 1848, while a work crew labored to build a saw mill for John Sutter on the American River at Coloma, carpenter James Marshall spied a few glittering stones just below the surface of the water. Marshall’s discovery of gold at Sutter’s Mill ignited one of the most iconic periods in American history – the California Gold Rush. Special Collections and Archives holds several collections that bring the California Gold Rush to life...
The Temperance Movement, also called the Prohibition Movement, was a political and social movement in the United States popular during Progressive Era. Supporters of the Temperance Movement, mostly Protestant and known as "teetotalers," worked for many decades to end the sale of alcohol across the United States at the local, state and national level. Groups like the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and Anti-Saloon....
