Butterfly or insect collecting became popular during the Victorian age as a respectable hobby among the growing middle class. Scientific collecting of butterflies and other natural specimens had been a popular venture as natural history museums and…

Jack Hurst interviewed country music star Eddy Arnold (1918-2008) in 1977. Arnold is known as the progenitor of what is called “The Nashville Sound” in country music. This tape is one of the hundreds of audio cassettes that comprise the Jack Hurst…

In 2012, Jack Hurst donated his interviews with celebrities and industry leaders from the 1970s and 1980s to Vanderbilt University's Special Collections. These are a rich treasure trove of insider information from the people who made country music.…

Corruption at the highest level of state office forced Governor-elect Lamar Alexander to make a difficult decision—to take office early and risk the appearance of a coup, leading to four years of struggle with a democratic house. If he did not act,…

In this 1948 letter, art critic and historian Wilhelm Reinhold Valentiner describes a painting depicted in one of the Contini photographs and attributes the work to Rembrandt van Rijn. This kind of correspondence was valuable to scholars as they grew…

James M. Lawson, Jr. (1928- ) is a Methodist minister, activist and academic. During the escalation of the Korean Conflict, he declared himself a conscientious objector and refused to report for the draft in 1951. He served fourteen months in prison…

Count Contini-Bonacossi’s nephew and namesake – Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi – was an art historian employed by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. He assisted his uncle in assembling and organizing the massive photograph collection – over 50,000 images…

John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1917-1963) was a congressman from Massachusetts and the thirty-fifth President of the United States. He was assassinated during a November 22, 1963, visit to Dallas, Texas. The 1954 letter from then Senator Kennedy, the 1967…

This index of paintings by Watteau represents one of the few handwritten documents in the Contini-Volterra Photographic Archive. It was likely written by one of the various scholars who worked on building the collection and would have served as…