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 […]
Search by Category
Intern Experience: Processing Dime Store and Action Figures
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
Little People, Big Hopes: Exploring a Potential Play Intervention for Early Childhood Autism
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 […]
It’s Butterfly Day!
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 […]
Where Do The Strong’s Butterflies Come From?
The question I hear most as supervisor of live collections is, “Where do you get all these butterflies?”
Any guest who has marveled at the hundreds of tropical insects flying around our Dancing Wings Butterfly Garden has probably had the thought at some point. Many guests assume we breed butterflies and caterpillars on site, while others ask if we go out and capture adult butterflies in nature ourselves. While I love the idea of spending my days frolicking through a meadow […]
Continue Reading about Where Do The Strong’s Butterflies Come From?
Playing with Words and Images: Animals with Human Characteristics in Children’s Literature
Eva Nwokah, 2019 G. Rollie Adams Research Fellow
Professor, Our Lady of the Lake University, San Antonio, Texas
My current research is focused on how animals in children’s literature are portrayed with human characteristics through what they wear and what they say—in other words, animals that are anthropomorphized. Why do children find that animals speak and behave like humans appealing? This playful aspect of stories encourages children’s imagination, holds their attention with silly images, and has been used by authors […]
My Week with Brian: A Conversation with the Collected Works of Brian Sutton-Smith
Alec S. Hurley, 2018 Strong Research Fellow
PhD Student, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX
Despite growing up in Rochester and routinely passing The Strong museum en route to the family business on Oregon Street, I failed to take advantage of the museum’s wonderful exhibits and its abundant collections until late June of 2018. Then, over the course of five days leading up to the July 4th holiday, I was fortunate enough to take a break from my doctoral […]
Preserving the LGBTQ Game Archive at The Strong
Adrienne Shaw, Director, Cultural Analytics Certificate
Associate Professor, Department of Media Studies and Production
Lew Klein College of Media and Communication Graduate Faculty
Temple University
This fall I donated three digital collections to The Strong museum: the LGBTQ Video Game Archive Source Files, the Rainbow Arcade Collection, and the Joshua D. Savage Digital Game Documents Archive. These are part of my ongoing project documenting the history of LGBTQ content in (primarily) digital games. By donating these files, I hope to encourage future researchers to […]
Continue Reading about Preserving the LGBTQ Game Archive at The Strong
Rare Atari Cartridge is Another Clever Invention of a Video Game Pioneer
Chris Kohler, Editorial Director, Digital Eclipse
The first home video game machines were all, as we call them today, “dedicatedʺ systems—that is, the hardware and the software were all contained in one single unit. If you wanted more games, you had to buy an entire separate machine. You can imagine why this was not exactly a solid structure on which to build a new creative medium!
For most players who were around in the late 1970s, their first “programmableʺ game […]
Continue Reading about Rare Atari Cartridge is Another Clever Invention of a Video Game Pioneer