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Hold the Phone Fiche: New Telephone Directory Database at Sutro Library
Since 2019, Sutro staff and volunteers have been working on making the Sutro Library’s telephone directories on microfiche (aka phone fiche) more accessible remotely and have created a new database...
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Esperantujo
In 1887, Polish ophthalmologist L.L. Zamenhof published Dr. Esperanto’s International Language.1 The book described a language that the author claimed could be quickly learned and used by anyone,2 no...
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Critical Family History at Sutro Library
As 2021 comes to a close so too does our fifth year of family and local history talks. Over the course of six talks, we explored how power relationships—be they social, cultural and/or political—can...
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Finding the Aztecs: Primary sources from the Sutro Library
Aztec calendar with birds of the day, lords of the night and day signs – Códice Tudela facsimile. This month, we focus our attention on the rich primary resources we have on the Aztecs. Sutro Library...
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The Lincoln Assassination & Its Aftermath
In many parts of the United States, the public’s reaction to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865 by stage actor John Wilkes Booth, was a mixture of grief, vengefulness, fear, and...
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E.M North-Whitcomb’s Scrap Books
Around 1921, Elizabeth “Bessie” McDonald1 gifted to Sutro Library—which opened to the public only four years earlier—several books and papers that had been in the possession of her late mother, E.M....
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Party like it’s 1950: Celebrating the Release of the Latest Census!
The 1950s seem to be making a comeback, from biopics on Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz in Being the Ricardos to another film coming out this year on Elvis Presley. The latest comeback to join the party...
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The First Jubilee and the Immortalization of William Shakespeare
“It would be as if the greatest works of English literature had never happened.” – Paul Collins[1] Stratford-Upon-Avon: The Home of William Shakespeare, pictorially illustrated. Walbrook:Rock...
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Chinese Pith Paintings: Postcards of the 19th and 20th centuries
[The following entry is from guest blogger and SF State University History undergraduate, Thai Van Stanoff, who supplied all of the text and images that follow. Stanoff adapted this post from a class...
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San Francisco Board of Supervisors Vice Map of Chinatown, 1885
Sutro Library Facsimile of vice map, originally from Report of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors, 1885. This map of San Francisco’s Chinatown was in the San Francisco Board of Supervisor’s...
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