Watch, Read, Listen

One afternoon in the Library's archive, I found a battered and scuffed photograph at the bottom of a small pile. Twenty-four men gaze somberly at the camera; all wear jackets and ties. The mere fact that the 19th-century portrait showed Black and white men respectfully intermingled

The Huntington is launching the first major exhibition on the life and work of award-winning science-fiction writer Octavia E. Butler (1947–2006), whose literary archive resides here. She was the first science fiction writer to receive a prestigious MacArthur "genius" award and the first African American woman to win widespread recognition writing in that genre.

"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place him in the American pantheon of writers and thinkers.

Newly married couples in 15th- and 16th-century Italy—like newlyweds today—could expect to receive a pile of wedding gifts. One of the most common gifts was a cassone, or big box...

Survivors from the dinosaur age, cycads continue to captivate collectors and researchersCycads are squat, woody, and branchless. They have no flowers, just spiky leaves that shred clothes and tear skin. They grow slowly, poison livestock and sometimes people.

The famous poet paid an unheralded visit to the Library in 1932 to view his manuscriptsOn Oct. 8, 1923, P. K. Foley, a well-known Boston bookseller and bibliographer, wrote a letter to Robert O. Schad, Henry E. Huntington’s assistant curator of rare books.