Browse Items (76 total)

"The people of Appalachia are a proud people. They were very open and honest with me, welcoming me into their homes and to their tables. They loved the beauty and solitude of the mountains. I understood their love of the land. ...Coal mining changed…

Edward Emerson Barnard was known for his photographs of galaxies, especially after joining the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory. Each image took many hours of exposure. While clear skies in California made observations easy, in Wisconsin,…

First introduced in 1900, the Kodak Brownie camera sold for only $1.00, and allowed users to make photographs easily and cheaply. Brownies were portable and recorded people as they were and as they wanted to be seen at the beach, at Coney Island, on…

University tradition describes this award as a contest for the most popular male student who represented “the ideal of young manhood.” Elected by his peers, the Bachelor of Ugliness was first chosen on Founder’s Day in 1895. In 1898, writers at Phi…

Barnard moved to California in 1887 to inaugurate the new observatory at Mount Hamilton near San Jose. He discovered the first non-Galilean moon of Jupiter, Amalthea, in September 1892 over 275 years after Galileo's discoveries. Observatory staff…

While at Lick Observatory, Barnard was the first astronomer to discover a comet using photgraphic plates. In 1889, he became the first astronomer to observe the eclipse of Saturn's satellite Iapetus.

Weiser’s four studios across downtown Knoxville catered to the residents of a booming industrial and violent city in the early 1900s. Railroad expansion after the Civil War connected eastern Tennessee with the rest of the South, bringing Welsh, Swiss…

Seen with her long hair down and wearing a loose wrapper, this woman, possibly Alva Vanderbilt, stares directly at the viewer/photographer. Is this room a boudoir? Her clothing and pose suggest that this is a private, relaxed moment, as does the…

The transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway and the great hotels the firm built changed how people saw the mountains. Once considered a barrier to progress, the mountains were now viewed by many as a major tourist attraction. Canadian Pacific…

Ernest Goodpasture studied medicine at Johns Hopkins University, earning his M.D. in 1912. He became interested in vaccines working at Chelsea Naval Hospital’s pathology lab during the 1918 influenza epidemic. In 1925, Dr. Goodpasture arrived at…