Link Love: 8/26/2011

• How photos from the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Gardens help preserve the memory of gardens (such as the Middlegate Japanese Gardens pictured above) that are now gone.

• The Museum of the Future has a great roundup of videos and blogs about museums, technology, and media.

• An update on earthquake damage at the Smithsonian, and hear Smithsonian Secretary (and earthquake expert) Wayne Clough speak about the earthquake.

• And an update on the Smithsonian’s Haiti Cultural Recovery Project—a project in which Smithsonian experts are are helping to restore Haitian artwork, artifacts, documents, media and architecture that were damaged in the earthquake there.

• A very interesting post from the American Social History Project Blog looking at how photographs were distorted in their translation to engravings used to illustrate 19th century newspapers, demonstrating “the discrepancies between photographs and their adaptations into mass-produced formats”. (In this case the translation of a Civil War photo to a newspaper illustration poignantly expresses racial biases of the time period.)

• How an important letter written by President Lincoln after the Battle of Antietam, and then stolen from the War Department records, was recently returned to the National Archives:

"Missing Lincoln Documents returned to National Archives," The letter and Lincoln's endorsement had apparently been removed from Edwards' Commission Branch file at some unknown time in the past, perhaps when the records were still in the custody of the War Department. Bill Panagopulos of Alexander Auctions, Inc., when informed the documents were part of a file at the National Archives, agreed to return them. Courtesy of the National Archives YouTube Channel.