Happy Friday readers! I’d like to take a minute to encourage you to view a great item that has just been posted on our Library website. It is a full-text, PDF version of a spec book from 1862! This item is usually restricted from public view due to its fragility, but, since we like you [...]
Hello everyone, and welcome once more to the Library blog. Sadly, today is my last day writing for you fine readers, and I want you to know what an honor it has been. When I arrived at the Library in June, I knew nothing about the SS United States, but with some guidance and access [...]
Like many of you, I have been fascinated with the story of RMS Titanic for as long as I can remember. I’m not sure why, exactly. I wasn’t a particularly sympathetic child, grieving over the story of hundreds of lives lost. That was a characteristic I developed in adulthood. I also don’t think that I had [...]
Today, Archives staff has put up on the web finding aids for letters in our collections from two survivors of the Titanic disaster. Have a look at the finding aids for the Mary Lines Letter and the Helen R. Ostby Letter under Special Collections and choose the category “Shipwrecks, Collisions, Salvage and Underwater Archaeology.” Both these [...]
Last week, a very large collection of items relating to passenger liners from the late 1800s up to the 1980s landed at the Museum. Besides a large number of artifacts, over 14,000 archival items, ranging in description from menus to brochures to stationery to family snapshots, were donated by Mrs. Norma D. Beazley from her [...]
We recently unearthed another Civil War letter in our archives. The letter was written by Charles Pye to Colonel Thomas Millar on October 4, 1862. In the letter, Pye requests that his slave, oxen, and cart be returned to him after they were confiscated by Union cavalry. Pye lived near Port Tobacco, Maryland and his slave [...]
Join us tomorrow, Wednesday September 7, at noon for this this month’s Secrets in the Stacks. Tom Moore, Senior Curator of Photography and Photo Archivist, will share the Hampton Roads Port of Embarkation Collection. This extraordinary collection of photographs visually illustrates the role of Newport News as one of the major military Ports of Embarkation [...]
Join us at the Library next Wednesday May 4, 2011 at noon for our next Secrets in the Stacks. This month’s presentation will feature two journals kept by sailors who served on the ironclad monitor Nantucket during the Civil War. First we will look at the journal of Walter Jacobs, a Union sailor during the Civil [...]
One Saturday in March of 1864, a man aboard the whale ship John P. West wrote in his journal, “My Pidgeon layed 4 eggs.” He also documented the day that his dog fell overboard (Logbook #027). Nine years earlier Asenath Taber, daughter of a whaler, noted the “beautiful little chicken” her family had on board [...]
The newspaper clipping from the Boston Post accompanying this undated (pre-1956) photograph from the Museum’s Chris-Craft Archives reads: Hard Flight From North Santason dashed up to the pier on the river in a smart motor boat on which his name was painted in large letters. Hardly had he landed before he presented Carolyn G. [...]
