Tag: historical research

  • 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 the Library of Congress valuable Chinese manuscripts relating to geography, and on his return, reported on his doings in China…

  • 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. Al Abtal (Arabic for “Heroes”) was published in Cairo in the early- and mid-20th century, and over time, its readership…

  • 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 the Palestine Campaign, 1914-1918, it piqued my curiosity, because you don’t commonly see images of the bedouin spies British and…

  • 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 ship was 500 miles off the Brazilian coast east of Recife, a German commerce raider, the Stier, attacked the tanker…

  • 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 the coastal waters of America’s astonishingly rich fisheries too. While fish supplied food, whales yielded precious sperm oil and whale…