One of the coolest things about working at The Mariners’ Museum and Park is seeing how science has been, well, a thing, since the very beginning. The fact that we were doing soil pH measurement as early as the 1930’s is something that deserves a little more discussion.

What do Vogue Magazine and military recruiting have in common? We take a look at the fashion industry's impact on WAVE recruits during World War II.

In the International Small Craft Center at the Mariners’, there’s a Portuguese Moliceiro, or Kelp Boat. This boat was one of the first 5 in our collection, accessioned in 1934. This moliceiro had a life on the water, felt the sun’s rays and was used and loved by the kelp gatherers.

The Mariners’ Museum and Park has thousands of prints in our collection, and one of my recent projects has been to catalog the prints and engravings from a German book titled Meyer’s Universe, or Illustration and Description of the Most Remarkable and Strangest Things in Nature and Art all over the World.

Hampton Roads is a pretty amazing place. Besides being one of the most important ports on the East Coast, it’s also been a cradle for innovation.

This past year we undertook a project to photograph all 275 instruments in the Peter Ifland Collection. Here’s how it went!

The Women’s Army Corps or WAC (originally the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps) was the only one of these groups to integrate women into its corresponding military branch fully. However, in the 1940s, there were much stricter ideas of gender norms, gender expression, and heteronormativity. This meant there was significant pushback against the idea of women joining the military, as this was viewed as the epitome of masculine spaces.