Description: Take a listen to clips from The World Is Yours episode “Early Air Mail” and its short reign under the United States Postal Service from 1916 to 1926.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="370" caption="Square House, Man, Child, and Dog on Lawn, ca. 1855, by Unknown photographer, Daguerreotype with applied color (1/2 plate), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Museum purchase from the Charles Isaacs Collection made possible in part by the Luisita L. and Franz H. Denghausen Endowment, 1994.91.234."][/caption] Often we are
Description: On June 11, 1927, 25-year-old Charles Lindbergh, and his plane Spirit of St. Louis, arrived back in the United States, and Washington, D.C. threw a party.
Description: This month, the Smithsonian Institution Archives, along with many other archives across the Smithsonian and around the nation, will be celebrating American Archives Month. The purpose of this celebration is "to raise awareness about the value of archives and archivists." We write a lot about what an archivist does on this blog, but, for those of you who don't know and are
Description: [caption id="" align="alignleft" width="150" caption="Ralph Waldo Emerson, between 1860 and 1870, by J. W. Black & Co., Photographic print on carte-de-visite mount, Abbott Handerson Thayer and Thayer family papers, 1851-1999 bulk 1881-1950, Archives of American Art, Digital ID: 5677. "][/caption] From the beginning, photography upset conventional ideas about the relationship
Description: Though photographs are accepted as subjective but ultimately faithful visual reproductions of reality, in many instances they don’t correspond to our experience. Pupils don’t regularly glint red, and people don’t transform into the streaked, evanescent smears we so often witness in photos. Yet we have no trouble accepting these inconsistencies, knowing that taking a picture of