This portrait of Babe Ruth (1895–1948) was one of a series of eight taken by the photographic firm Irwin, La Broad, & Pudlin on July 23, 1920. Courtesy Library of Congress/George Hobart. Capturing the images […]
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Behind the Scenes with the Library of Congress Chinese Manuscript Collection
Here is another interesting accidental find, this time from papers at the Library of Congress. In 1917, Professor S.C. Kiang, an academic at the University of California in Berkeley, traveled to China to procure for […]
A Lucky Accident
Many of the most interesting discoveries you make when doing archival research are the things you weren’t looking for, and this interesting Pepsi ad in the Egyptian sports magazine al Abtal is one of them. […]
Bedouin intelligence agent in Sinai, World War I
Just a few days ago, I found this image of an armed bedouin intelligence agent in Sinai during the World War I era. When I saw it in Yigal Sheffy’s book British Military Intelligence in […]
Sometimes, what you see is what you get…sometimes…
Most military history narratives confine themselves to the dry recitation of the facts of battle. With this style of historical story-telling, you get the blow-by-blow of moving lines on the map, the killing and being […]
American POW registration cards
On May 29, 1942, the S.S. Stanvac Calcutta, an American custom-built tanker owned by the Socony Vacuum Company, steamed out of Montevideo, Uruguay bound for Caripito, Venezuela. Eight days later on June 6, while the […]
Maury Whale Chart
When English colonists first began settling the eastern seaboard of North America, they quickly discovered in its coastal waters enough fish to feed the growing Euro-American population for generations. A variety of whales also swam […]