By: Dr. Emily R. Aguiló-Pérez, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
For generations of children, brushing Barbie’s hair has been as central to play as dressing her in the latest fashions. Beyond the familiar brush tucked into countless doll boxes, Mattel has repeatedly returned to hair as a site of innovation—designing dolls and accessories that transform styling into a creative, tactile, and sometimes experimental practice. Barbie’s evolving hairstyles chart a history of play that is as much about identity and imagination as it […]
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The Phenomenon of Rise ‘N Fly: A Black History Board Game
When South African bishop Desmond Tutu received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 for his anti-apartheid activism, Linda West Olds of Delaware turned to her 10-year-old son Kevin and asked: “Do you know what segregation is?”
He did not.
Perplexed, Olds probed further. Did he know who Ralph Bunche was? What about Andrew Young? Kevin drew blanks. He barely knew much about Martin Luther King Jr. As Olds later recalled, her son responded, “Well, he must be a great man, or we […]
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Double Dare You: Iconic Show Celebrates 40 Years
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
“On your mark…get set…GOOOOO!”
On October 6, 1986, Marc Summers uttered those words to kick off Nickelodeon’s Double Dare… and changed the face of television. Nickelodeon had survived a mostly unremarkable seven years on the air, originally launching an educational channel for children. The surprise success of a Canadian show, You Can’t Do That on Television, led to a philosophical shift in the early 1980s and the channel began […]
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Game Show Prizes 101
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
Prizes on game shows seem fairly straightforward. Here’s a nice thing; win the prize. But there’s some slight nuance to it that’s led to muddled or mistaken information being commonly shared over the years. This month, we’re going to dive into one fairly common misunderstood tidbit about what contestants can do when they win a prize on a game show.
There’s (usually) no such thing as “requesting the value […]
Celebrating 50 Years: “Let’s Play the Feud”
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
Fifty years ago this month, in July 1976, one of the most successful game shows in America made its debut. Mark Goodson-Bill Todman Productions, the ABC television network, and host Richard Dawson all declared, “Let’s play the Feud!”
Family Feud came to life thanks to the success of another game show. Goodson-Todman’s Match Game on CBS was the most popular show on daytime TV in the mid-1970s. One round of […]
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The Small World of Miniature Books
Recently while working on reorganizing some of the Brian Sutton-Smith’s Library and Archives collection, I began looking through our collection of miniature books. It was while going through these boxes and checking our library catalog to record them that I couldn’t help but ask some questions. Why were these made? Why would anyone wish to have a 40-volume set of Shakespeare’s works in a miniature format that is nearly unreadable? How did they make these books so tiny in the […]
Exploring Japanese Games and their Paratexts
By: Zari Smith, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
During the summer of 2025, I had the opportunity to visit The Strong National Museum of Play for a research fellowship. For two weeks, I had access to the collections and the rich archives that the museum owns in addition to the museum exhibits available for the general public.
I decided to apply for a fellowship from The Strong in order to find source materials that could assist me in writing my master’s thesis. My […]
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Adventures in Collecting
As I prepare to leave The Strong after 37 years on the museum’s curatorial staff, I’ve been reflecting on highlights from my career. The museum has seen incredible changes over those decades and moved from a sleepy museum focused on how everyday Americans lived between 1820 and 1940 to a vibrant institution that draws more than 600,000 guests every year to explore the ways play has changed lives through American history and continues to transform all of us each day.
As […]
The Computer that Took on Jeopardy!
By Adam Nedeff, researcher for the National Archives of Game Show History
In a well-publicized 1997 showdown, world chess champion Gary Kasparov competed against Deep Blue, a chess-playing computer built by IBM. Deep Blue won. Kasparov vehemently complained that the computer hadn’t been programmed so much to play chess as it had to specifically compete against him, but it was a huge victory for IBM.
Still, IBM acknowledged that success in a game like chess wasn’t such an extraordinary achievement. Eric […]
