Long before Divine, Charles Pierce, Craig Russell, Jim Bailey, or any contestant on ‘Drag Race’ brought the art of drag performance to mainstream audiences, there was Julian Eltinge. Although…
June is LGBTQIA Pride Month, a time to remember the challenges that the LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual) community has faced and to commemorate the contributions…
And now, a bit of real life noir compliments of the photo collection of the Los Angeles Public Library and the real lives of two L.A. femme fatales – the Black Widow and the Vice Queen.No matter what…
At some point in 1889 the president and (later) chairman of the board of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank of Los Angeles, Jackson A. Graves, decided that his Alhambra residence simply wasn’t as…
Born in Louisiana in 1922, Rolland J. Curtis came to Los Angeles with his wife in 1946 after serving in the Marines during WWII. He worked as an LAPD officer for four years before attending USC where…
Cinco de Mayo is a holiday commemorating just one event: The Battle of Puebla, which was a day of victory for the Mexican army against the French in 1862. Over 150 years later, people still mistake…
In the spring of 1942, the City of Los Angeles experienced a population exodus triggered by a presidential executive order. Images in the Los Angeles Public Library's Herald Examiner Collection and…
"It happened in New York, April 10th, nineteen years ago. Even my hand balks at the date. I had to push to write it down, just to keep the pen moving on the paper. It used to be a perfectly ordinary…
“Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree.”—Trees by Joyce Kilmer Hard as it might be to imagine now, a majestic tree once stood on this forlorn strip of concrete wedged between…
The best way to celebrate the National Park System in America is to stand on the hallowed ground of any one of them and just look around. They never fail to fill you with wonder and genuine pride in…
Today marks the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. He was 39 years old when he was shot to death at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, on April 4, 1968.King was a…
This blog post series looks at the history of the 1905 firing of Mary L. Jones as Los Angeles City Librarian. It reveals the sexism that influenced the library’s Board of Directors and shaped their…
On April 18, 1958, Major League Baseball finally arrived in what was then the country’s third-largest city. The brand new Los Angeles Dodgers were going to play their first official home game against…
This blog post series looks at the history of the 1905 firing of Mary L. Jones as Los Angeles City Librarian. It reveals the sexism that influenced the library’s Board of Directors and shaped their…
