Watch, Read, Listen

California's punishing drought has produced one positive effect: local gardens have gained some freedom from the expectation of the classic green lawn. More and more gardeners are removing lawn in favor of landscapes that look good while using less water.

With LOOK>>, we venture into our wide-ranging collections and bring out a single object to explore in a short video. This time around, we look at Milton Bradley & Company's Historiscope, ca. 1870.

We asked Amanda Herbert—the inaugural Molina Fellow in the History of Medicine and the Allied Sciences at The Huntington and assistant professor of history at Christopher Newport University—to share with us some of her current research in the Library's collection.

In recent months, the National Football League's seemingly imminent return to Los Angeles has been big news. This year, the press has widely reported that three NFL franchises—the Chargers, Raiders, and Rams—want to move their teams to the city.

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