Publications
The list of selected staff publications may be searched by keyword or author and can be sorted by year.
Article for the world’s most-used encyclopedia.
Article for the world’s most-used encyclopedia.
Historical changes in transportation energy sources, fuels, and engines.
A comprehensive social history of railroads’ impact on American history, popular culture, and daily life.
Long-term impacts of railroads on U.S. demographics: immigration patterns, employment patterns, Native American displacement, cultural mobility.
The interpretive philosophy and approach of the major exhibition, America on the Move.
Historic black & white photographs, 1910-1950, with interpretive essays.
An overview for Soviet academicians of the historiography of science and technology studies in the U.S. and Europe.
Discusses several donations of French and American lithographs to the Smithsonian and their use in the development of the Graphic Arts exhibition before 1900.
This essay discusses the Smithsonian’s participation in a national exhibition, and describes the 1000 prints on view in the graphic arts section. It provides an appendix listing all artists and publishers included in the exhibition.
This article discusses Americans’ growing interest in prints in the last quarter of the 19th century, including exhibitions, sales, and the formation of collections.
This article presents some of the magazine covers produced in 1942 to celebrate the first Fourth of July after Pearl Harbor and the related exhibition at the National Museum of American History.
In a volume that presents a number of conference papers, this essay discusses the importance of prints to artists and collectors in Philadelphia in relation to the Sartain family of artists and art educators.
Catalog of an exhibition celebrating 150 years of print collecting by the Smithsonian Institution. Essay examines the history of public attitudes and cultural changes that affected artists, collectors, curators, and audiences.
Two essays in Volume 4 of the Artefacts series, studies in the history of science and technology, a collaboration of the Deutsches Museum (Munich), the Science Museum (London), and the Smithsonian. One discusses the role of photomechanical processes in reproducing and distributing pictures in the 19th century. The other describes selected museums that collect and exhibit visual collections and their apparatus.
This essay describes the Smithsonian’s ambitious program of loan exhibitions that included many works by living artists. These exhibits introduced many new prints and printmakers to a broad national public between 1923 and 1948. Two appendices identify traveling group shows and the printmakers featured in solo exhibitions during this period.
A special issue of the journal History of Photography featured the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History. Essays on several aspects of collection including daguerreotypes, W. H. F. Talbot, J. W. Draper, Pictorialism, color photography, and photomechanical processes.
Learn how a portion of the Woolworth lunch counter from Greensboro, North Carolina, became part of the American civil rights movement collection at the National Museum of American History.
The article uses the acquisition and exhibition of the Greensboro Woolworth lunch counter as a lens for examining, collecting, and interpreting the recent past. Explores the role of memory; meaning and representation; curatorial roles and obligations; politics; and race in doing public history at the Smithsonian Institution.
A discussion of some of the issues faced in exhibiting an icon of the American civil rights movement.
An essay on the history and importance of the Smithsonian Jazz Oral History Program and other components of the collections and work of the Smithsonian and the National Museum of American History to preserve and promote America's jazz legacy.
