Tag Archives: 19th century

Food, Glorious Food!

Posted on June 19, 2015 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Diaries and Journals, Everyday Life, Newspapers, Scrapbooks | Tagged , , , , , , | Leave a comment

By guest blogger Alex Olkovsky, a graduate student in American Studies While many collections in our archives contain business and legal documents, there are also numerous focused on people’s daily and domestic lives. Unsurprisingly, these collections are where we can … Continue reading →

Cartes de visite: More than just photographs

Posted on July 24, 2014 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Cartes de Visite, Cool Collections, Everyday Life, Newly Online, Photographs | Tagged | 1 Comment

Recently, we digitized a large collection of cartes de visite, a mid 19th century photography phenomenon that featured albumen prints mounted on heavy paper or cardstock. Here are some examples — click on each image to see it up close, complete with the photography studio … Continue reading →

Thought for the Day: 19th century poetry and the daily newspaper

Posted on January 14, 2014 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Newspapers | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Newspaper clippings are a common type of content in larger collections of personal or family papers. Though a lot of them help record news about the family or about important current events, many are simply interesting pieces of writing someone … Continue reading →

Unintentional Spooks

Posted on October 30, 2013 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Photograph Albums, Photographs | Tagged , | 1 Comment

If you’ve ever spent much time looking at photos of “ghosts” on the Internet, you know our eyes are very good at seeing what we expect to see — a face in the window, a shadowy figure in the bushes … Continue reading →

Hidden Gem: 1892 Baptist hymnal

Posted on September 25, 2013 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Audio, Books | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

I recently stumbled upon an interesting item in the Manly Family papers manuscript collection: a hymn book from 120 years ago, with selections chosen by Basil Manly, Jr., a Baptist minister and educator. The book was published in the year … Continue reading →

The Siege of Vicksburg

Posted on May 21, 2013 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Civil War, Southern History | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

150 years ago today, Vicksburg, Mississippi. was in between two major assaults that began a more than month-long siege of the city. What began as a conflict between Gen. Grant’s Army of Tennessee and the Confederate forces of Lt. Gen. … Continue reading →

Family Pets, part one: Cats

Posted on May 16, 2013 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Everyday Life, Photographs, Southern History | Tagged , , , , , | 1 Comment

While our collections document some important local, national, and international history, they also chronicle the lives of individual families, giving us insight into the everyday lives of Americans over the last couple of centuries. It’s no surprise that a big … Continue reading →

Not your average christmas carols

Posted on December 17, 2012 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Sheet music | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

There’s so much music written and published just for the Christmas season, but I bet you haven’t seen any of these pieces before. Here’s some pretty normal fare, from 1887. Notice Santa using his glasses to check his list. (Click … Continue reading →

ETDs 2012: History, Culture, and Art

Posted on December 4, 2012 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Research, UA History | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

More scholarship from graduate students at UA. These questions all represent research published in dissertations and theses during 2012. * Anthropology: Can we learn anything about the 20th c. Great Migration of African Americans by looking at cemeteries? This image … Continue reading →

Native American Heritage Month

Posted on November 20, 2012 by kgmatheny | Posted in: Cool Collections, Foreign Language, Small Collections | Tagged , , , , , | Leave a comment

Did you know November is Native American Heritage Month? The W. S. Hoole Special Collections Library houses some really interesting collections pertaining to the Choctaw Indians living in Mississippi and Louisiana at the turn of the twentieth century. The Choctaw … Continue reading →