Newly installed public phones ready for local and long distance calls

The newly digitized Midwest Commercial Architecture Photograph Collection consists of 32 photographs depicting commercial buildings in rural northwestern Ohio with Central Union Telephone Co. signs indicating recently installed telephones. There are a variety of commercial buildings present in the photographs, as well as telephone poles, merchants’ signs, displays of goods, customers, horse drawn wagons, and […]

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American Public Transportation Association Records Now Available!

After several years of reprocessing, the American Public Transportation (APTA) records are once again open to research with a new and improved finding aid.  The records document a pivotal time in the history of mass transportation in the 20th century.  Private companies operated nearly all of the mass transportation systems in the United States prior […]

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Federal Theatre Project personal papers

A number of personal collections related to the Federal Theatre Project are now processed and finding aids are available online.  The J. Howard Miller papers include custom-made  scrapbooks bound by the Milwaukee Handicraft Project, part of the Works Progress Administration of Wisconsin. Inside the scrapbooks are programs, photographs, posters, flyers, and newspaper clippings. Miller was […]

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Happy Halloween!

Happy Halloween! There is something inherently creepy about marionettes to me and after looking through photographs of marionettes used by the Federal Theatre Project, I thought a Halloween blog post might be the perfect way to highlight some of the photographs from the newly processed Ralph Chessé papers. All of these photographs are from productions […]

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Collection of “Frankly Speaking” Radio Shows Looks Back to the 1980s

What issues were on the minds of Northern Virginians during the beginning of the 1980s?  A collection of public service broadcasts recorded by George Mason University’s GMU Radio offers some clues.  “Frankly Speaking” was a series of weekly radio shows which featured discussions about current topics of interest.  A recently-processed collection, the “Frankly Speaking” Radio […]

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