Emily C. Hughes (she/her) wants to scare you. Formerly the editor of Unbound Worlds and TorNightfire.com, she writes about horror and curates a list of the year's new scary books. You can find her writing elsewhere in the...
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Wonderful Things: King Tut's Tomb
The archeaologist Howard Carter toiled in Egypt for three decades with little success. Under the sponsorship of Lord Carnarvon, he spent seven years searching the Valley of the Kings for the tomb of the young pharaoh Tutankhamen. Yet by November of 1922, Carter's luck was running out.
All Rise! Hollywood & the Herald Go to Court
There were two types of stories the Los Angeles Herald loved to cover – celebrity and scandal. If the two subjects happened to be merged under the same headline, that was even better.
There's More to Local History Research Than the "Los Angeles Times"
When I first started researching the life of 1930s/40s film star Ann Dvorak back in 1998, the Internet was around but there wasn’t much to be found on her.
Reasons to Visit the History Department in Person
While new technology points toward every reference resource being digitized and on your hand-held something there are library beauties that can only be savored in person, in your actual hand kind of experiences.
Historical True Crime Books
Did you know that within certain aisles of the Social Science Department lurks the largest collection of con men, burglars, criminals, mobsters, murderers, rogues, and scoundrels that you will ever have the misfortune to find? Of course, I’m talking about the true crime stories in our department.
The Coolest Books in the Library
As the heat of Summer slowly cools down to a simmer, those yearning for cooler climates might want to take a dip in one of the coolest sections of Central Library. Down in the History Department is where you will find the very end of the Dewey Decimal range of call numbers. The 998s and 999s.
Henrietta Lacks' Family Finally Gets to Have a Say
Henrietta Lacks was a 31-year old woman from the Baltimore area who died from ovarian cancer back in 1951. Some cells from her body were taken, without her family's consent, by medical researchers shortly before she died. These cells were grown over time and were used in many aspects of medical research.
Puppet Shows to the Rescue
Here’s something you may not know about the World Famous (or at least Los Angeles Famous) Children’s Literature Department at Central Library. If it weren’t for a puppet show, it might not ever have existed. Okay, make that a lot of puppet shows.
If These Walls Could Talk: How to Research Murder, Crime and Scandal at the Los Angeles Central Library
I first learned of the Doheny Greystone tragedy while curating an exhibition of manipulated photographs taken from the library’s Herald Examiner photographs.
King, the Kennedys, & Los Angeles
In the early 1960s, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy symbolized hope, change, and the dawn of a new era for a country that was caught in the clutches of Cold War fear, and in many cases, clinging to certain outdated social attitudes.