Yesterday, we handed The Huntington’s Instagram account over to journalist and essayist Lynell George, who spent the day sharing photos of items in the archive of famed science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler. Lynell has been conducting research in the archive as part of “Radio Imagination,” a yearlong project organized … Continue reading
Category Archives: Beyond The H
A Deep Dive into Jack London’s Life
Since the age of 10, filmmaker Ben Goldstein has been riveted by the life and writings of Jack London (1876–1916). His fascination with the author of The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf has now spawned a feature-length documentary about the famed writer and adventurer. Entitled Jack London: American … Continue reading
Seeing to It
Chicago-based collage artist Candace Hunter first started reading Octavia Butler’s speculative fiction as an undergraduate. Themes from Butler’s writing permeated Hunter’s work through the years and reached a pinnacle with the opening this summer of her solo show in Milwaukee, “So Be It. See To It,” based on Butler’s stories. In … Continue reading
From Olympics of the Past
As the world celebrates the Games of the XXXI Olympiad in Rio de Janeiro—where more than 10,000 athletes from over 200 countries will compete in 41 sports—we want to share with you some of the Olympics-related items in our Library collections. We start with a fairly recent item and work our … Continue reading
Pokémon GOing Places
Summertime bustles at The Huntington. Researchers fill the Library, and throngs of visitors arrive to take in the latest exhibitions and meander in the gardens. But this year a different sort of traveler is on site: people using their smartphones to play the wildly popular augmented-reality game Pokémon GO. Groups … Continue reading
Artful Opportunism
One of the remarkable and exciting things about The Huntington—aside from its glorious collections—is its relative lack of bureaucracy and, as a result, its ability to move quickly. We are, in a word, nimble. And we love to jump on an opportunity whenever it presents itself. So . . . … Continue reading
Decoding the Civil War
Today The Huntington announces the launch of a crowdsourcing project to transcribe and decode U.S. Civil War telegrams from its collection. What follows is the text of the press release about the project’s launch. In a move to gain new insights into the U.S. Civil War, The Huntington Library, Art … Continue reading
Mentoring in the Afterlife
When it came to finding the confidence to publish her writing, science fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006) could count on herself for a pep talk. “I shall be a bestselling writer,” she wrote in one of the notebooks contained in her papers. “I will find the way to do … Continue reading
Maps that Scholars (and Goonies) Treasure
In the early 1980s, Mary Robertson, then chief curator of manuscripts, had an unusual meeting with a film production designer. Robertson was used to talking with people about the wonders and mysteries within The Huntington’s vast and renowned collections. But this man had an odd request—he wanted to see real … Continue reading
Advancing the Humanities
The Huntington and the University of California, Riverside, have selected the first two fellows for the highly competitive Huntington-UC Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, a partnership designed to boost the humanities at public universities. The program currently supports scholars whose research areas are focused on 18th-century studies and on the history … Continue reading