I go through a lot of names while searching for ‘Are We Related’ connections for this blog series. Some of those names are not represented in our collections. Those are the easy ones to discard. Other surnames, those found in our holdings, cause me to fall down the rabbit hole trying to locate connections between […]
“I bashed his head in with a hammer … I pleaded guilty hoping to get life. I got what I deserve…” – Clarence Thomas. This chilling confession echoes through history, drawing us into a harrowing tale that unfolded in a small Indiana town. On July 3, 1936, the quiet steamy summer morning was shattered at […]
This month we celebrate our appreciation for photographers. Whether amateur or professional, photographers are important to the historical record. At the Indiana Historical Society, we have millions of photographs representing many photographers. It was a struggle to decide which photographer’s collections to highlight. Here are the ones that I decided to share: Cephas M. Huddleston […]
Americans began to call for women’s suffrage as early as 1850, 70 years before the 19th Amendment granted white women the right to vote, and 115 years before women of color won the right to vote with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Do you know when Hoosiers began their participation in the women’s suffragist […]
You can take the ‘Rat’ out of the ‘Region,’ but you can’t take the ‘Region’ out of the ‘Rat.’ I was in college before I really learned what it meant to be a ‘Region Rat,’ despite having lived there my entire life. As one of my colleagues pointed out, though, the ‘Rat’ moniker supposedly stems […]
Welcome back to our monthly installment of “Are We Related?.” This time we’re exploring the Cheek family. My colleague Tamara provided some links to this surname, specifically noting her grandfather, Gail Austin Cheek. While seeking out Cheeks in the IHS collection, I came across a couple of options, but one really stood out. In our […]
September is probably best known for a celebration like Labor Day. Continuing our National Days blog series, I’ve highlighted two other day celebrations in the month as illustrated by materials from the IHS digital collection. In 2022, the American Hotel and Lodging Association along with National Day Calendar began celebrating September 1st as National Hotel […]
In the Fall/Winter 2023 issue of Connections magazine, available through the IHS Member Login tab, Purdue University Extension specialist Frederick Whitford writes of the beginning of the Purdue Extension Agent program and the agents’ work through the Great Depression and World War II. The article is based on a book Whitford authored about the same […]
As a meat and potatoes kinda gal, there are very few preparations of the vegetable known as the humble potato that I won’t eat. Growing up, we wouldn’t classify it as a vegetable because of its high starch content, but the USDA does, so why can’t we? Potatoes also have a notorious Indiana tie thanks […]
The newest book from the Indiana Historical Society (IHS) Press, “An Unusual Urban History of Indianapolis” by Connie J. Zeigler, details the unsung, underappreciated or lost-to-memory people, places and culture of the Hoosier state’s capital city. Throughout the book, Zeigler takes columns that appeared monthly in the Indianapolis Urban Times newspaper between November 2007 and […]
