Dressed in her inaugural gown of red, blue, and silver, Barbie made her political debut with a presidential run in 1992. In 2000, Barbie’s bid for president was part of the White House Project, a non-profit organization seeking to increase female representation in American institutions. In the 2004 presidential race, she donned a red power suit. In 2008, she added another run as presidential candidate to her storied resume. In 2012, Barbie sought to inspire girls. In 2016, […]
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Chaos Orb—Magic: The Gathering’s Wild Card
“Charming,” “whimsical,” “masterpiece,” “pretty funny” are just a few of the words used to describe the Magic: The Gathering card, the Chaos Orb. These accolades are for the card’s art, a bulbous, floating spherical monster endlessly drooling lava from its looming maw, as well as for the card’s powerful effect. But to understand the wild, disruptive effect of the card, it is good to know the basics of Magic.
Magic: The Gathering was the first “collectible card game” and […]
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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 […]
The Play of Fortune
Is our destiny in our hands, in God’s hands, or are we merely tossed on the winds of chance?
Those deep questions of causality and chance have long preoccupied philosophers and thinkers, and I was reminded of them a while ago when reading a book about 17th-century Puritan belief. This followed a conversation I had with a researcher at The Strong who was interested in the links between popular understandings of quantum mechanics and thinking about play. “God doesn’t play dice,” […]
Charles Harrison: The Black Industrial Designer Who Revamped View-Master
Born in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1931, Charles Harrison spent his childhood playing with model airplanes and Erector sets. His father taught industrial arts and his mother decorated the home with a keen eye for design. Inspired by his parents, Harrison built different structures and mechanisms to make his toys move and lift. In an interview with Smithsonian Magazine, Harrison recalled, “I built a boat once—took it out to the pond, put it in there and it sank with […]
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Let’s Put on a Show!
When I was growing up and my sister and I got together with our favorite cousins, there was hardly anything we liked better than putting on a show for the grown-ups. As I recall, the five of us kids would descend to our basement rec room where we’d cook up a script, cast the parts, devise costumes from the dress-up box, and practice our dramatic extravaganza. Meanwhile, I suspect our parents were upstairs rolling their eyes and bracing […]
Chalking Up a Win
Congratulations to sidewalk chalk for earning a place of honor among the three toys inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame on November 5, 2020. For a plaything that’s been around ever since our early ancestors were drawing on the walls of the caves they called home, that’s proof persistence earning well-deserved acclaim.
But 2020 wasn’t the first year that chalk received recognition as one of the 12 finalists for the Hall of Fame. Back in 2016, chalk’s inclusion on […]
Baby Nancy Inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame
It all began following the 1965 Watts Riots in Los Angeles, California. Louis S. Smith, II and Robert Hall worked with civil rights activists and community members to form Operation Bootstrap, a cooperative that sought to rebuild the community and provide jobs for its residents. Operation Bootstrap’s neighbor, Mattel, was impressed by its success. In 1968, Smith and Hall met with Mattel leadership. The makers of Barbie wanted to support Bootstrap’s initiative and offered to back a toy […]
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Star Wars Day: The Action Figures that Almost Weren’t
Not long ago—1977, to be exact—in our very own galaxy, moviegoers witnessed the birth of a legend. Since its inception, the Star Wars franchise has generated billions of dollars in film, television, and merchandise, and is one of the most iconic titles in entertainment history. But while its popularity is undisputed today, that was not always the case. In fact, it was quite the opposite, which led to what could have easily become one of the biggest faux pas in […]
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