Historical Highlights #035

Happy Friday! This week’s historical highlights cover bookstores, libraries, archives, art, music, architecture, refugee camps, currency, and eugenics. I hope you find at least one link that piques your interest.

Let’s start with a picture of the oldest book store in the world. It opened in 1732 and moved to this location in 1755.

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The Bertrand Bookstore in Lisbon, Portugal.

Now, would you agree that this is the most beautiful bookstore in the world?

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The Lello Bookstore in Porto, Portugal.

On a sad note, the Newfoundland and Labrador Public Libraries announced that 54 libraries in the province will be closing.

The most interesting part of this blog post is the mention of a bogus historian who stole hundreds of documents from the U.S. National Archives in the 1960s. I’ll have to do some research on him…

If you want to know more about the behind-the-scenes work of an archivist, read this interview with Josh T. Franco, Latino Collections Specialist at the Archives of American Art.

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Justin McCarthy pastel drawing, n.d. Angel Suarez Rosado papers, 1978-2010. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

Or if music is more your cup of tea, listen to some Basque folk songs from the Ralph Rinzler Archives.

“For decades, a modest farmhouse in central Virginia was thought to be what remained of President James Monroe’s home in Charlottesville, Virginia. It turns out, historians were wrong.” Read on to find out how they discovered the truth.

Did you know that during World War II European refugees fled to Syria?

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A group of women and a young girl launder clothes at refugee camps in El Shatt, Egypt and Bab Al-Hawa, near the Syria-Turkey border, in 1945 and 2014. Credit: United Nations Archives and Records Management Section and Mouaz Al Omar/Reuters

The American nickel is 150 years old. Read its history here.

This article is rather chilling: “The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement.”

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Adam Cohen’s book “Imbeciles” details how Carrie Buck, shown here with her mother, Emma, in 1924, came to be at the center of a Supreme Court case that legalized forced sterilization for eugenic purposes. Photograph courtesy Arthur Estabrook Papers, Special Collections & Archives, University at Albany, SUNY

As always, comments are welcome. Enjoy the weekend!

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