Description: What better time to capture family memories and stories than when you and your relatives gather to celebrate Thanksgiving? For the past several years, several organizations have encouraged families to listen to one another and record family history over the Thanksgiving weekend. StoryCorps, for example, has launched The National Day of Listening. So put down that pumpkin pie
Description: C. Malcolm Watkins (1911-2001), curator of cultural history at the National Museum of American History, was a pioneer of material culture studies and historic archeology.
Description: Each week, the Archives features a woman who has been a groundbreaker at the Smithsonian, past or present, in a series titled Wonderful Women Wednesday.
Description: In 1956, Helena M. Weiss received a letter asking for information about “how to capture them, also how to raise them… what to put them in, also what to feed them.” Interestingly, the letter-writer neglected to specify what he or she meant by “them,” leaving Weiss only to guess what exactly the inquiry was referring to. From 1948 to 1956, Weiss was Chief of the Office of
Description: Here at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, we take pride in preserving the Institution’s history, including its sizable web presence. While various offices at the Smithsonian create and back up the contents of their websites, the Archives also crawls each website using Heritrix, an open-source tool created by the Internet Archive, to capture content in an archival format.