Description: A daily photo highlight from Smithsonian collections. [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="Launching of Malcolm Forbes hot-air balloon on March 31, 1983 on the National Mall. Forbes offered his balloon, a replica of the Forbes chateau in France, for ceremonies dedicating the Postal Service's stamp commemorating 200 years of hot-air ballooning, by Richard K.
Description: “Watching Oprah: The Oprah Winfrey Show and American Culture," a new exhibit highlighting celebrity activist, Oprah Winfrey, opened at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. [via WAPO]Archivists with The Obsidian Collection are digitizing and publishing newspapers that document the Great Migration, Civil Rights, and Jim Crow eras. [via Info
Description: Link Love: a weekly post with links to interesting videos and stories about archival issues, technology and culture, and Washington D.C. and American history.
Description: The Smithsonian Institution Archives manages the cold storage vault at the National Museum of American History where approximately 3 million negatives are stored.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="316" caption="The coffin containing the remains of James Smithson is being carried out of the Genoa, Italy cemetery where his body had been buried. Notified that the cemetery was to be destroyed, Smithsonian Regent Alexander Graham Bell and his wife Mabel went to Italy to oversee the exhumation of Smithson's remains and their transfer
Description: Amy Ballard is a senior historic preservation specialist emerita with the Smithsonian’s Architectural History and Historic Preservation Office, where she worked between 1985 until her retirement in 2016. She was promoted to senior historic preservation specialist in 2010. Ballard has contributed to plans for new buildings, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the
Description: It turns out that a series of mysterious tunnels discovered in the early 1900s underneath Washington, DC’s Dupont Circle, were the makings of former Smithsonian employee and entomologist, Harrison G. Dyar (whose papers happen to be in our collections). Read more about this fascinating story and character at "the location" blog [via The e-Torch]. The Internet Archive explains
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_arc_308449,size=250,left]Though Roxie Laybourne may be a well-known topic here in the Smithsonian Institution Archives, there is a good reason she is so popular. From good advice to her pioneering career to modern day inspiration, her work offers new insight each time we turn to it. Laybourne’s interest in natural history began long before she began her