Juneteenth

Today is Juneteenth, a symbolic day celebrating freedom for the descendants of formerly enslaved people. Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. Yet, many enslaved people, including 250,000 in Texas, were forced to continue their labor until 1865. On June 19th of that year, Major General Gordon Granger arrived in Galveston and announced the official…
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Nobody is Perfect or Neutral — Or, Why Libraries Have so Many Mysteries Where a Librarian Solves the Case

Have you ever walked through the library’s mystery section and noticed that there seem to be a lot of books with detectives who are cats, librarians, owners of cute used bookshops, or retired librarians who now own cute bookshops and solve mysteries with their cat? What gives? Are the librarians pushing their biased pro-cat, anti-murder…
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The Origins and Practices of Holidays: Father’s Day & Shaheedi Guru Arjan Devji

June 16, 2019 - Father's Day Sunday, June 16, 2019 is Father's Day in the United States. The annual holiday falls on the third Sunday of June. Father's Day is meant to honor fathers, fatherhood, and paternal bonds. The origins of Father's Day is unclear. Some believe it was created in response to Mother's Day…
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Can You Do the Cancan?

“All the girls in Paris France Love to do the Can Can Dance.”¹ The dance and music is strongly associated with the artist Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec. He portrayed the dancers and their dance halls in many of his posters. As a result, people today may associate the cancan with Paris of the 1890s. The cancan…
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Illustrated Songbooks, Part II

This post is part of the Illustrated Songbooks series. Songbooks Illustrated by Henriette Willebeek le Mair Little Songs of Long Ago, music by Alfred Moffat Our Old Nursery Rhymes, music by Alfred Moffat Old Dutch Nursery Rhymes, music by Julius Rontgen Henriette Willebeek le Mair was a Dutch illustrator born in 1889. As a teenager, she…
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Mapping Summer Hotspots!

The school year is drawing to a close and at the Map Center we are dreaming about summer excursions! Traveling through our historic map collection, we have found all sorts of fun places to visit. Our itinerary starts in our hometown of Boston. In this historic tourist map from 1935 we can see all sorts of…
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