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A Winter Vacation of the Past
This past summer, we featured travel and vacation related items, including ones about express steamers, a beach hotel, and a lake resort. Each month this winter, we will do the same. But this time we...
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A Winter Holiday in 1905
Each month this winter, we are featuring a winter vacation related item. In December, we featured a 1906 brochure about a winter resort in South Carolina called The Court Inn. This month, we are...
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A Winter Resort from the Past
Each month this winter, we have featured a winter vacation related item. Previous posts featured brochures about The Court Inn and Hampton Terrace. Continuing with this theme, we are featuring a...
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Artistic Illumination
Besides being functional, lighting can also be decorative. The Libraries’ Trade Literature Collection includes many catalogs by companies which manufactured and sold lighting and related products. One...
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National Bike to Work Day
Kenwood Bicycle, front cover. Today, May 18th is National Bike to Work Day! Did you hop on your velocipede or walking machine for your commute today? If you missed it, don’t worry. National Bike Month...
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A Look Back at Barber Shops
Kochs' Gold Medal Hydraulic Barbers' Chair, No. 25 Has a red, white, and blue pole near a store ever caught your eye? It’s happened to me. I see the red, white, and blue pole but I don’t need to look...
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Happy Independence Day!
Bolgiano’s 1918 Catalog In honor of the patriotic spirit of the Fourth of July, plus the gardening season that is upon us, we take a special look at victory gardens! Though more known for their place...
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Patio Furniture Time! Woodard Furniture
Woodard Furniture catalog 1934 Over the past several years I’ve noticed a growing interest in wrought iron furniture- for both indoor and outdoor use, with people requesting information and images of...
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Digitization Dispatch: Downloads and Usage
As you may already know, in addition to viewing pages from the online ”flippy book”, or BookReader, the Internet Archive (our digitization partner and the SHAC collection’s current point of access)...
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Taking a Trip Back in Time with the Camera
Today with digital cameras, it has become so easy to take lots of photos and instantly see the pictures. But let’s take a trip back in time to 1897 when cameras were a little different. Catalogue and...
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A Three Month Tour…in 1908
This post was written by Cathy Rae Smith, who had a 2011-2012 Graduate Research Assistantship at the National Museum of American History Library, and Alexia MacClain, a SIL staff member at the National...
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“Comfortable Corsets” Circa 1893
This post was written by Cathy Rae Smith who had a 2011-2012 Graduate Research Assistantship at the National Museum of American History Library. “Style, Comfort, Economy” touted the full color...
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The Weight of a Bell
Did you know the 1876 Centennial Bell and the 1893 Columbian Liberty Bell both weighed thirteen thousand pounds? Do you know why? The Trade Literature Collection at the National Museum of American...
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I Scream, You Scream…
We all scream for ice cream! Without question, ice cream is one of the most popular treats in America, but do you know much about its history? According to Laura B. Weiss, author of Ice Cream: A...
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A Homemade Christmas
Do you make your own holiday decorations? Have you ever wanted to make your own decorations? Or do you remember making decorations and gifts in school as a child? This 1923 booklet, Dennison’s...
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Twelfth Night Traditions: A Cake, a Bean, and a King
Have you heard of a cake with a bean baked into it and the man who finds the bean becomes King for the night? That is just one tradition associated with Twelfth Night, but there are many more customs...
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Peerless: Cars from the Past
Peerless Motor Car Co. trade catalog Cars are part of our everyday lives. For many of us, it would be hard to imagine life without cars. So it’s not surprising to browse the Trade Literature Collection...
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Riding a Streetcar
Combination Car of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company of New York Imagine commuting to work on a streetcar like this one! Its open design made it easy to quickly load and off-load passengers, but...
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The New Century at the Turn of the Century
New Century Caligraph No. 5 “Machinery soon grows old.” We can all relate to that especially since we know how quickly technology changes. But when do you think that sentence was written? It was...
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Floors and Walls
When I moved into my apartment many years ago, I got rid of the old fashioned, worn out linoleum that reminded me of the floors of my childhood, but I was intrigued by the walls in the living room. I...
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