If you’re a member or fan of the National Museum of Play at The Strong, you probably know that the museum will open another major exhibit on the second floor in April 2013. Game Time! will illuminate the exciting history of board games, card games, puzzles, electromechanical coin-operated games, pinball machines, and other forms of home entertainment such as foosball and air hockey. As part of a comprehensive exhibit called America at Play, Game Time! marks the next phase in […]

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December 26, 2012

Many of us grew up playing domino games. And once the game was over, we carefully lined the dominoes up on end, just to watch them topple in a chain reaction. With a history stretching back more than 700 years, dominoes today look the same as they did two centuries ago. Dominoes are devices, like cards and dice, which provide hundreds of different games. And like playing cards, a 2010 inductee to the National Toy Hall of Fame at The […]

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November 28, 2012

Few people today know that Rochester, New York, was once home to a football team that became part of the American Professional Football Association (APFA), eventually known as the National Football League. The story starts in the early years of the 20th century when the Rochester Jeffersons took their name from their practice field’s location on Jefferson Avenue. The Jeffersons enjoyed about 10 years of competition with other small-town teams and provided plenty of entertainment for Rochester’s avid sports fans. […]

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October 30, 2012

Buzzwords and hot topics permeate the media as the 2012 election approaches. Watch almost any news report and you’ll likely hear phrases such as “fiscal responsibility” and “balance the budget.” As gloomy as the current political circumstances or economic conditions may seem though, history tells us that it’s nothing new. People have long persisted through tough times—and even had their fair share of fun doing it.
 Take for example Balance the Budget, a card game in the National Museum of Play’s […]

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May 23, 2012

Do you marvel at the toys and dolls on display at The Strong? Ever wonder how they came to the National Museum of Play? As curator of games—board games, card games, and many more—I’m responsible for acquiring historic playthings and popular new examples. But how exactly do we do it?
One way is through donation. And some of my favorite donations include stories about who played the game and what that experience involved. For example, the museum received a Monopoly game […]

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March 20, 2012

I was eight years old in 1968 and, like many of my friends, I played with toy cars. That year, Mattel introduced toy autos called Hot Wheels. Unlike the toy cars before them, Hot Wheels rolled really fast either downhill or with a touch of a finger. Accessories such as track sets and collector cases included speedy images of the cars in motion. Naturally, kids found these appealing and the tiny 1/64 scale replicas fascinated adults as well.
What made the […]

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December 20, 2011

Recently, The Strong acquired a rare and important early printed book illustration. The image came to our attention when Gordon Burghardt used it to illustrate his article, “The Comparative Reach of Play and Brain: Perspective, Evidence, and Implications,” in the Winter 2010 issue of The Strong’s American Journal of Play. As professor of both psychology and ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Tennessee, and author of The Genesis of Animal Play, Burghardt specializes in the study of play […]

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November 8, 2011

Did you play card games as a child? If so, you probably played a version of Old Maid. The term “old maid” is English and means an unmarried childless woman or spinster. Used as early as 1761 for the title of a play by Irishman Arthur Murphy, it also means an unpopped kernel in a pot of popcorn. And most dictionaries carry one more meaning for it: “A child’s card game.”
If we ignore, for a moment, the stereotypical and sexist […]

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August 30, 2011

As I write this, Katy Perry’s “E.T.” featuring Kanye West ranks as the number one pop song. Country’s top pick is “Heart Like Mine” by Miranda Lambert, while R&B’s current number one is “Sure Thing” by Miguel. Although the star performers get all the attention, hit songs could never happen without the session musicians and backup singers who fill out the sound behind the star. With so many categories and types of music today, how do performers teach songs to […]

Continue Reading about With a Song in my Heart: A Brief History of American Sheet Music; or, How to Search The Strong’s Database Published on:
May 25, 2011