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 […]
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Sap, Smoke, and the Sticky Business of Play
Hello, and welcome. I’m new to blogging and only a few seasons into making maple syrup myself—but I’ve been around the process my entire life. What I didn’t realize until recently is that what keeps pulling me back to sugaring isn’t just the syrup. It’s the play.
I’ve always been a hands-on, take-it-apart, fix-it kind of person. Give me something mechanical, inefficient, or slightly broken, and my brain lights up. Sugaring fits right into that wheelhouse. The constant tinkering, the problem solving, the incremental improvements—it’s all part of the draw. But when I zoom out, I […]
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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 […]
Problems with Plastic Toys
By: Alexander Parry, 2025 Strong Research Fellow
In December 2021, TIME journalist Emily Barone published an editorial about the conflict between her and her children over plastic toys. Barone explained her misgivings about the sea of “eco-terrible plastic junk” available to kids and wondered how to reconcile her environmentalism with the shelf appeal of colorful, heavily-advertised, and often battery-powered toys. These cheap and flimsy items, Barone observed, were nearly impossible to recycle, contributing to air and water pollution and to the […]
Committed To Memory: The Glynn Family Scrapbook, Part 2
When we last left off, I was twenty pages deep into the expansive Glynn family scrapbook. During my brief pause, my curiosity about the family and their memories grew. I turned to The Strong’s online archive—formally known as the Brian Sutton-Smith Library & Archives of Play—to bolster my previous “investigation.”
Through my research, I learned that, despite my initial assumptions, Maxine and Alfred were a childless couple. According to the National Library of Medicine, a third of couples during the 1930s […]
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Nintendo’s Forgotten Accessibility Pioneer: The 1989 Handsfree Controller
By: Hana Hanifah, 2025 Valentine-Cosman Research Fellow
In recent years, the momentum for accessibility in games has gained significant traction. Many custom configurations, such as captions, remappable controls, and adaptable hardware, are becoming the norm as more people, especially those with disabilities, play and engage in games. The Xbox Adaptive Controller and the PS5’s Access Controller have been rightly praised and documented in the mainstream media. However, several decades before they emerged, there was an innovation that quietly went to the […]
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Cats, Cards, and Calamity!
Cats have been beloved members of our families for centuries. Their curious and often silly nature makes them the subject of many works of art, sources of humor, and entertainment. The Strong was recently gifted a delightful collection of 74 “Mainzer Dressed Cat” postcards, which feature brightly colored scenes of anthropomorphic cats dressed in human clothing and engaging in a variety of humorous activities, in situations that often threaten an impending calamity.
This collection of cards was designed by Swiss painter […]
Stacks & Steps: Growing with Interns, One Box at a Time
Being an Archivist is literally my dream job but one thing I did not expect was how satisfying it is to work with interns. You get to watch as they build confidence day by day in the decisions they make, hear them laugh as they find something unexpected or funny, listen to the yawns while they’re slogging through the “boring” tasks (removing staples from hundreds of pages can get repetitive), and best of all, see that spark ignite into “YES! […]
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Children’s Literature in The Strong’s Collections
Where can one find a good children’s book in The Strong Museum? The answer is almost everywhere in the museum’s two separate libraries—the Grada Hopeman Gelser mini-branch that is part of the Monroe County Library System (MCLS) and the Brian Sutton-Smith Library and Archives of Play. Both libraries are full of old and new children’s books. Why might that be? Well, children’s literature is a way of learning through the playfulness of storytelling, a major avenue of artistic expression, interacting […]
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