Imagine that it’s January 1896. To your dismay, you find yourself stuck at your aunt’s house one particularly dreary winter day with absolutely nothing to do. Your aunt’s parlor is cold, with the wind whistling in through the single-pane windows and the wood fire barely taking an edge off the chill. Even worse, there’s nothing…
Here at The Strong, we take dolls seriously. Archeological evidence places dolls among the very oldest playthings and proves that children have enjoyed them since ancient times. More recently, dolls played an important part in the life of the museum’s founder, Margaret Woodbury Strong. Margaret started collecting dolls as a girl and amassed more than…
Some 135 years ago, four squirrels romping merrily through the woods met an unfortunate end. But, fortunately for us, those squirrels found a place in a playful diorama in the museum’s collections. Situated in a well-decorated parlor, the four squirrels are now posed in an eternal game of cards. That made them a perfect illustration…
In my May 12 blog, I noted that the museum will soon be embarking on an important project—collecting play histories from all of you. These firsthand recollections and stories will help us bring new life to the objects in the Strong’s collection and will add a new dimension to the meaning of play for us…
These familiar words have been used, in some form, through centuries of storytelling. The Oxford English Dictionary notes that the phrase dates to at least 1380, while Wikipedia states that “it seems to have become a widely accepted convention for opening oral narratives by around 1600.” For a long, long time then, these four words…
In my last blog, I reminisced about spending summers with my mom’s parents, which led me to my career preserving cultural artifacts. And while my other grandparents didn’t shape my profession, my summers with them helped lead me to my love for baseball. The relative isolation of another summer in the country wore on me…
I was a kid once, too. I spent every summer, between the ages of seven and ten or so, with my Mom’s parents at their big house in the country. There were four of us kids, and I think it was a favor to Mom to have us out from under her feet for a…
