Peek in the Stacks

November 5th, 2013 marks the one hundred-year anniversary of the completion of the Los Angeles Aqueduct. Special Collections and Archives celebrates this achievement with the release of the digital collection, Water Works: Documenting Water History in Los Angeles, and the opening of the Catherine Mulholland Collection, donated by author and historian Catherine Mulholland, granddaughter of the Aqueduct’s chief engineer, William Mulholland...

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 19^th 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...

Bess Lomax Hawes (1921-2009) was a folk musician, folklorist, and professor of anthropology at San Fernando State College (now California State University Northridge). During her time as a musician she wrote many songs, including the Kingston Trio hit “M.T.A.” She also performed and collaborated with such American folk luminaries as Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie. Her father, John Avery Lomax, and brother, Alan Lomax, were famous folklorists and musicologists who traveled across the United States collecting thousands of folk songs and interviews for the Archive of American Folk Songs in the Library of Congress...