Long before Laura Ingalls Wilder became a familiar name on bookshelves, she was a daughter, teacher, farmer, wife, and mother. Her life crossed a remarkable span of American history, from a Wisconsin log cabin in 1867 to the middle of the twentieth century. The photographs that survive bring us closer to the woman behind the…
Napoleon Bonaparte rose from a Corsican family to become Emperor of the French. His victories redrew the map of Europe, while his government reshaped French law and administration. His story also includes two marriages, a much-wanted heir, catastrophic wars, and a final exile thousands of miles from France. To understand him means looking at both…
Martin Luther King Jr. helped change the United States by making racial injustice impossible for the nation to ignore. A Baptist minister, organizer, and advocate of nonviolent resistance, he became the most widely recognized leader of the modern American civil rights movement. His work helped build pressure for major changes in segregation and voting law,…
It’s 1910. The world of psychiatry is being utterly remade by the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund Freud and the pioneering work of Carl Jung and Eugen Bleuler. Yet, amidst the flurry of new ideas focusing on dreams and word associations, a young Swiss psychiatrist is turning his attention to a most unexpected tool: the simple…
A Glimpse Into the Mid-19th Century This portrait of an unknown man, likely taken in the 1850s or 1860s, is a striking example of early photography. It’s housed in an ornate case with a decorative brass mat, a style commonly used with daguerreotypes and ambrotypes of that era. These photographs were treasured possessions, often displayed…
Frances Virginia (Lee) Harris I came across her portrait in the Florida State Archives and could not look away. The young woman in the photograph had a gaze that seemed to pierce straight through time. Her name was Frances Virginia “Fannie” Lee Harris. She was born on June 15 1886 in Darien, McIntosh County, Georgia, and passed…
