by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
Staff News Lilian Varner has joined the Development and Communications Department as the new Marketing Coordinator. She will oversee social media, update the website, design printed materials, and assist in public outreach and events. Isaac Burgdorf, an incoming...
by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
Lately, I’ve been participating in the Clements crowdsourcing program “Picturing Michigan’s Past,” helping to categorize real photo postcards from the David V. Tinder Collection of Michigan Photography. Through these images I see how humans were affecting the world...
by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
Artists have long striven to replicate visual perception and wrestled with the limits of various image production methods. One of the great historical challenges has been that paintings and photographs are static, while our actual perceptions unfold in time and space....
by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
I have always envied people who seem to have a secure sense of direction. Myself, I am easily turned around and once got so lost that I had to casually ask someone the way to “downtown” because I didn’t even know which city I was closest to anymore. In an era before...
by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
When we think of urbanization in North America, our thoughts generally turn to the cities founded by European colonists in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries. We often forget that European adventurers who preceded the colonial settlers encountered the cities of...
by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
While sources describing cities of the past can be found throughout the library collections, another way to view urban history is by looking at predictions of the future. In his self-published Poetical Drifts of Thought, or, Problems of Progress (Detroit, 1884), Lyman...
by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
Between 1830 and 1913, the comparatively small state of Massachusetts became the beating heart of American shoe production. Home to numerous engineers and machinists devoted to mechanizing the artisanal shoemaking process, antebellum Massachusetts fostered an...
by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
John Bachmann arrived in the United States from Germany in 1848, and almost immediately became the country’s finest artist of urban bird’s-eye views. This recently acquired 1849 view of New York, looking south from Union Square, was Bachmann’s first bird’s-eye view of...
by Kayla Robinson | Jun 26, 2023 | Publications
The Clements holds many resources that enable the study of American city life in all its variety, including the urban expansion in New York during the 1800s, work ethic and mass production of sole work in Massachusetts, urban panorama photography and even early Native...
