Description: Consider the courage it took for some of the earliest women in science at the Smithsonian to donate their personal papers to the Institution.
Description: [caption id="attachment_4184" align="aligncenter" width="300" caption="Obama Billboard in Times Square, New York, January 7, 2010, Courtesy of Marvin Heiferman."][/caption] Both the media and Times Square were aflutter recently over a photograph of President Obama used without permission on a huge two-sided billboard in midtown Manhattan to advertise men’s coats.
Description: Who doesn't love giant treasure-troves of historic photographs? Check out some amazing shots from the history of the Field Museum in Chicago. [via Wired]History detective: Researchers in Amsterdam used Google Maps to pinpoint the exact location of the house depicted in Johannes Vermeer's painting, “The Little Street.” [via Hyperallergic]Want to contribute to public history
Description: As I write this crossover Preservation Week/MayDay post so close to Earth Day 2020 (the fiftieth anniversary), stunning news continues to break across the globe due to the coronavirus. Shining through the fog of worry, there have been surprising gains in a period of forced inactivity due to reduced emissions, such as record-breaking solar energy capture in Germany, and cleaner
Description: Formal portrait photographs of scientists tend to preserve the stiffness of the moment, rather than capture the sitter’s personality. Perhaps that is the reason that candid photographs of celebrities like Albert Einstein stick in public memory.A 1931 photograph of three Nobel laureate physicists illustrates why we tend to remember the informal photos of scientists more than
Description: The George Lucas Museum of Narrative Art will have a prominent home on Chicago's gorgeous lakefront. The museum will house Lucas's private art and memorabilia collections, which includes Star Wars and Indiana Jones ephemera, Norman Rockwell paintings, and movie posters. [via Wired] Who knew? Actors who got their start in government films! A weekly feature of archive & museum
Description: As promised, we just uploaded a new batch of over twenty photographs from our Science Service collection to the Smithsonian Flickr Commons. This week is heavy on the anthropology, archeology, and psychology, with a dabble of astronomy and engineering thrown in. The photos include such gems as: Drs.