By: Maureen Callahan

Please indulge the ebullient tone in this post — the sun is shining and I just can’t contain myself. Every once in a while, we should take a moment to look at a truly beautiful image. There’s a lot to like about this image. The composition is effective, the subject compelling, colors vibrant and details […]

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By: Alison Miner

Earlier this week I spent some time working on the collections of Linton Satterthwaite relating to the archaeological investigations in Caracol, Belize. The expeditions, in 1951 and 1953, were primarily focused on the salvage and documentation of stelae, the large carved monuments erected by the ancient Maya to commemorate rulers or historic events. They recovered […]

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By: Maureen Callahan

The Ferber method, free-range kids, Dr. Spock, attachment parenting — it seems that the world has always been full of people who think that they know how to raise your kids better than you do. In this vein, and in the context of early twentieth-century progressive party-crashers and a national campaign of widespread displacement and […]

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By: Alison Miner

Given this rhetoric, and the colonial relationship between the Japanese government and the Ainu peoples, it is not surprising that their culture was not well studied for many years. In 1900, however, a traveler from Philadelphia, Hiram Hiller, took a detour from his pan-Asian journeys to visit Hokkaido. He met Jenichiro Oyabe, a Japanese man who was educated as a missionary, but who became a self-trained ethnographer of the Ainu people.

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By: Maureen Callahan

What in the World? was the Penn Museum’s Peabody Award-winning popular weekly half-hour television program which was first seen in 1951 and broadcast for 14 years. By the early 1960s it was one of the oldest programs on television, bringing positive reviews and a steady stream of fanmail to the Museum. On each What in […]

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By: Maureen Callahan

This week’s FFIOW is an image by Jotham Johnson, a classical archaeologist and later the president of the Archaeological Institute of America, and was taken at the site of Minturnae, in Italy. The woman in this photograph is Agnes K. Lake, a scholar of Roman religion, and member of the faculty at Bryn Mawr College. […]

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By: Maureen Callahan

Cross-posted to the International Council on Archives’ “Young Professionals, New Archivists” blog. This image, produced at some point between 1876 and 1885, was the work of Maison Bonfils, a photography studio in Beirut. A studio image, obviously staged, this photograph shows a group of Bedouin women from Syria. Bonfils is credited with introducing the genre […]

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