Description: Sure, you’ve heard of famed composer John Philip Sousa. But did you know that Sousa composed a march just for the Smithsonian?On November 6, 1854, the “March King” John Philip Sousa was born in Washington, D.C. With roots in Southeast Washington near the Marine Barracks, where his father played trombone in the United States Marine Band, it should have been of no surprise to
Description: This blog post was edited in October 2021 for clarification. While surveying and collecting specimens in the Aleutian Islands in 1871-1872 for the United States Coast Survey, later renamed the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, naturalist William Healey Dall befriended George Tsaroff (1858-1880), an Unangan (Aleut) teen from Unalaska Island who had been hired as local
Description: As we digitize the Archives’ collections to make them available online, I am constantly being exposed to handwriting from the past two centuries. As a result, I have a deeper appreciatiation of how many different things influence the way a person’s writing appears on the page, things beyond the quality of their penmanship. Writing on the deck of a ship, on horseback or on
Description: The Conference on the Future of the Smithsonian took place on February 11, 1927, raising awareness of the activities of the Smithsonian and at the same time served as a venue to raise money.
Description: Explore what happened in 1969 when a man brought a hatchet and butcher knife to Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to attack a display of snakes.
Description: An international community of researchers and practitioners are driving the professional practice of digital preservation towards greater maturity and opening doors to new levels of access.
Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives has captured two years of Smithsonian websites using the web tool Archive-It. See how we predict future research.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="350" caption="Photo shoebox upset, by Stephen Cummings, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] I recently took a position as photograph archivist at the Smithsonian Institution Archives and hope to be able to share through this blog some of the processes we are undertaking to make our photographic collections more useful and