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Author Jack London found a kindred spirit in famed magician Harry Houdini, whose escape artistry London and his wife, Charmian, witnessed firsthand at the Oakland Orpheum on a November afternoon in 1915.

By the spring of 1865, when surrenders at Appomattox, Durham Station, and elsewhere had finally delivered an end to four years of bloody battle, the American Civil War had killed a staggering 750,000 soldiers and 50,000 civilians—about two and a half percent of the U.S. population—and wounded hundreds of thousands more.

The irony doesn't escape Ted Matson. Raised on the prairie of North Dakota, without a tree in sight, the one-time farm boy followed a path in life that led to a full-time career in bonsai. That path also led him to The Huntington, where Matson joined the staff in February (after several years as a consultant) to oversee the more than 400 miniature trees that make up the bonsai collections.

A piece of women's history lies deep in the underground stacks of the Huntington Library, among the papers of American astronomer Frederick Hanley Seares (1873–1964). Seares was the head of the computing division at the Pasadena office of the Mount Wilson Observatory

After they married in 1913, Henry and Arabella Huntington would spend several months each year in Europe, staying at the Château de Beauregard, a lavish castle located north of Paris, near Versailles. Reaching the Continent in those days meant traveling by ocean liner

With LOOK>>, we venture into our wide-ranging collections and bring out a single object to explore in a short video. Up first is Samuel Leigh and John Heaviside Clark's Myriorama from 1824.

We love to hate villains. Harry Potter's Lord Voldemort horrifies us with his flagrant use of the Unforgivable Curses. Before him, Darth Vader of Star Wars fame was the true embodiment of evil as he built the Death Star and battled his children.

Heroic tales of 19th-century frontiersmen pushing westward across the American continent have a tenacious hold on the popular imagination. Think, for instance, of Lewis and Clark exploring the waterways of the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase