Description: In celebration of Archives Month, join us Monday, October 27th, 10am to 4pm ET, where four of our archivists specializing in audio/visual material, photos, and digital records (or electronic records) will be on the Smithsonian's Facebook page to answer questions about your own archival collections. Questions from our readers in the past have ranged from storing letter and
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="269" caption="First Lady of the Land, First Lady of the Air, by John Roosevelt, c. 1936, National Museum of American History, Kenneth E. Behring Center, Archives Center"][/caption] One of the things I love about working at the Smithsonian is spending my days typing keywords into our search engines and seeing what kind of images will
Description: [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="240" caption="I have no hours in the day to watch TV/games. Don't let life go by!!, by National Media Museum, Creative Commons: Attribution 2.0."][/caption] From 2002-2005, a unique archive of video tapes was compiled by the Center on Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) at UCLA, with the goal of studying a relatively new social
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="403" caption="Untitled, 2001, by Susan Watts, Digital photograph, National Museum of American History, Behring Center, Division of Information Technology and Communications, Courtesy of Susan Watts/New York Daily News, Image No. watts012."][/caption] Given how quickly photographs are spread by the news and social media, we’ve come to
Description: In the spring of 1846, after years of debate, the legislative logjam over what the Smithsonian would be was finally broken with compromise legislation by New York Congressman, William Jervis Hough.
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: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_12035,size=350,center]June is National Camping Month, and to celebrate we are recognizing one of the Smithsonian’s original outdoorsmen: Alexander Wetmore. The Smithsonian’s sixth Secretary thrived outside. Annually for 20 years Wetmore would make the trip south to Panama, to the same spot, Isla Iguana. There he would conduct his observations, record
Description: It can be so frustrating to put great effort into something, and then to have your work and achievements called into question. I can't begin to imagine how frustrated Samuel Pierpont Langley was in 1903. By that time, he had spent over forty years studying astrophysics and aerodynamics. His work on astronomically-derived time measurement in the late 1860's is the heart of the
Description: This post is the third in a series this month that honor the anniversary of the famous Scopes Trial held in Tennessee from July 10–21, 1925. We're highlighting a set of rare and newly digitized photographs from the Smithsonian Institution Archives collections, of witnesses at the trial, which have been added to the Smithsonian Flickr Commons. On Wednesday afternoon, July 15,