Centuries before the pop song, love sonnets provided the thrill of peeking into another’s romantic experience. Petrarch’s poems about his adoration of a woman named Laura still impacts how we talk about love today and spawned an early kind of fan fiction that swept the Renaissance reading public.
In this lecture video, David Roediger, professor of history at the University of Kansas and 2024's R. Stanton Avery Distinguished Fellow, considers the circumstances and limits of Robinson Crusoe’s Friday character and what it says about the history of race.
The Huntington’s Edward Davis Townsend collection contained something rather curious: a spool of thread with a note hidden inside that shed new light on the dramatic events that unfolded shortly after the election of Abraham Lincoln in November 1860.
Lois Rosson, The Huntington’s 2023–24 Octavia E. Butler Fellow, discusses her experience at NASA, her study of astronomical illustrations as extensions of the frontier West, and Butler’s alternative vision of space.
American artist R.B. Kitaj, one of the major figures in the London art scene of the 1960s, loved books not only for their contents but as tangible objects. Kitaj created an imagined library in screen prints, which is on display in the Huntington Art Gallery through March 4, 2024.
While examining and treating Edward Hopper’s iconic painting “The Long Leg,” Christina M. O’Connell, the Mary Ann and John Sturgeon Senior Paintings Conservator at The Huntington, discovered something that others have overlooked.
The custom of using an eye-catching greeting card to convey good wishes is a time-honored tradition, one exceptional chapter of which can be found in The Huntington’s archives.
The Huntington is a place of wonder, beauty, and intellectual engagement. With the following selection of Verso posts, we invite you to revisit some of The Huntington’s 2023 highlights.
