Guest Blogger Archive

The artist and photographer Taryn Simon once opened an exhibit with a now-widespread observation: “Archives exist because there’s something that can’t necessarily be articulated. Something is said in the gaps between all the information.” Simon gets at something important here, I think. We tend to think of the gaps in archives as, at best, markers of where we need to “fill in” the historical record in the pursuit of some absolute, final body of total knowledge. But gaps can also […]

Continue Reading about Looking for Labor, Listening to the Archive Published on:
June 2, 2022

The video game company Her Interactive adopted the slogan “For Girls Who Aren’t Afraid of a Mouse.” The firm’s fan letters and focus group collections informed my research on how video games are a technological construction of human expression. Her Interactive was a company focused on creating games based on the reception they received from their audience—girl gamers. They wanted to make video games based on the Nancy Drew series of novels more story driven so that girls would be […]

Continue Reading about Heroines Just as Interesting as Heroes Published on:
May 19, 2022

My current book project looks at Orientalism in American toy culture at the turn from the late 19th to the early 20th centuries. Its primary objects of analysis are Japanese dolls, imports from Japan that were often imagined as Japanese American immigrants by the children who played with them. However, in researching this topic, I soon came upon another, much stranger artifact of interest: a toy called the Billiken doll. At first, this doll struck me as profoundly bizarre. It […]

Continue Reading about The Billiken Doll’s Racist History Published on:
February 17, 2022

During and following World War II, children across the United States used their pocket money to collect trading cards that depicted the activities of the U.S. military in a variety of times and places, both current conflicts such as the Pacific Theater in World War II or the Korean War of 1950–1953, and historical ones, such as the Mexican-American War and the American Revolutionary War. Although many cards showed lurid and violent conflict, much of this kind of action was […]

Continue Reading about Exploring Military Cards and Comics Published on:
January 6, 2022

The once pejorative term “walking simulator” was often deployed to single out video games that bucked the trend of delivering a fast-paced, action-packed, adrenaline-pumping experience with clear-cut rules and goals and instead opted for making video games organized by a thin set of rules and optional tasks in favor of open-ended wandering and exploration. These days, walking simulators show promise as they rise in popularity, signaling an important shift in interest among developers and gamers alike toward nuance, discovery, and […]

Continue Reading about Simulation, Photography, and Flâneurie In Video Games Published on:
October 28, 2021

Often written off as charming novelties of childhood, paper dolls can serve as powerful indicators of the drastic sociopolitical changes occurring in the early 20th century. Like many toys, they reflect the cultural values of their creators and their consumers, providing insight into the lives of women and children during a tumultuous political era. During my time at The Strong National Museum of Play, I was able to examine a wide variety of paper dolls created between 1900 and 1940 […]

Continue Reading about Dolly Dingle Visits the Museum: Early 20th-Century Paper Dolls as Socially Active Objects Published on:
September 9, 2021

For three months during the summer of 2021, I had the privilege to work as an intern for the Collections team at The Strong museum. My primary project focused on researching and cataloging action and toy figures ranging from the 1970s to the 2000s. At the start of my internship, I also cataloged a collection consisting of 1940s cast iron lead figures from manufacturers such as Barclay, Auburn Rubber Company, and Manoil Mfg, Company. Highlights included The Happy Farm […]

Continue Reading about Intern Experience: Processing Dime Store and Action Figures Published on:
August 12, 2021

Krystal Starke
2021 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow 
PhD Student at The State University of New York at Buffalo
I came to The Strong with an open-ended mission: to soak up everything I could surrounding my research interests in early childhood autism and play as part of my dissertation research. Fortunately, The Strong’s Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play is filled with rich secondary materials that provided a lens to understand the primary sources within the museum’s collections in a new way.
I […]

Continue Reading about Little People, Big Hopes: Exploring a Potential Play Intervention for Early Childhood Autism Published on:
June 3, 2021

In my previous blog post, I outline how the museum acquires butterfly pupae for our Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden. But what happens when the weekly shipment of 200 or 300 new pupae arrives?
Once the shipment arrives, my team and I open it up and begin setting up the pupae to be placed in our emergence case for guests to view. Pupae are arranged by species and labeled so we can easily tell them apart. (Different species often look unique so […]

Continue Reading about It’s Butterfly Day! Published on:
May 6, 2021