Articles

It's the day lots of adults look forward to, and lots of kids dread. After a summer of fun, it's time to start setting that alarm again, shop for supplies, and go back to school!Looking through our…

Ruthanna Emrys lives in a mysterious manor house in the outskirts of Washington DC with her wife and their large, strange family. She makes home-made vanilla, obsesses about game design, gives…

While attending the 1907 Iowa State Fair in Des Moines, ten-year-old Amelia Mary Earhart saw her first airplane. She was not impressed. She described it as “a thing of rusty wire and wood and not at…

July 17 is the 63 anniversary of Disneyland's opening day. This Disney loving librarian is planning on celebrating and won't be the only one either; it will probably be super crowded, and there will…

It's summertime in Los Angeles and the mercury is rising. Are you beach ready? Have you packed your sunscreen, hats, coolers, snacks, umbrellas, folding chairs, kites, frisbees, bikes, trikes, boogie…

In January 1947, KTLA Channel 5, Los Angeles's first commercial television station, aired its first broadcast, and the Herald Express newspaper was there to report the milestone event. Since then…

Dr. Kathryn Harkup is a chemist and author. Kathryn completed a Ph.D. then a postdoc at the University of York before realizing that talking, writing and demonstrating science appealed far more than…

The world of comics has long been filled with stories written by young men, for young men, featuring men throwing punches in a never-ending fight for justice, revenge, etc. But times have changed. The…

Ian McDonald was born in 1960 in Manchester, England, to an Irish mother and a Scottish father. He moved with his family to Northern Ireland in 1965. He has won the Locus Award, the British Science…

Long before Divine, Charles Pierce, Craig Russell, Jim Bailey, or any contestant on ‘Drag Race’ brought the art of drag performance to mainstream audiences, there was Julian Eltinge. Although…

After Ann Forst, the Black Widow, was sentenced to serve time for pandering, one of her protégés, Brenda Allen (born Marie Mitchell and going under a number of aliases including Brenda Allen Burns…

When we mention yoga in Western society, many of us envision young leggings-clad men and women in a yoga studio getting into impossible postures. While this may be the reality in some yoga classes, it…

June is LGBTQIA Pride Month, a time to remember the challenges that the LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual) community has faced and to commemorate the contributions…

And now, a bit of real life noir compliments of the photo collection of the Los Angeles Public Library and the real lives of two L.A. femme fatales – the Black Widow and the Vice Queen.No matter what…

C. L. Polk wrote her first story in grade school and still hasn't learned any better. After spending years in strange occupations and wandering western Canada, she settled in southern Alberta with her…

The library has recently added its first scores by the Korean composer Yun Isang (윤이상 / 尹伊桑) to our collection. There are currently seven scores and three books on Yun in our system, and several more…

Memorial Day is officially observed on the last Monday of May, honoring the men and women who lost their lives while serving in the U.S. military. It was originally known as Decoration Day because…

At some point in 1889 the president and (later) chairman of the board of the Farmers and Merchants National Bank of Los Angeles, Jackson A. Graves, decided that his Alhambra residence simply wasn’t as…

Born in Louisiana in 1922, Rolland J. Curtis came to Los Angeles with his wife in 1946 after serving in the Marines during WWII. He worked as an LAPD officer for four years before attending USC where…

In the United States, Mother's Day is always celebrated on the second Sunday of May. In some countries, it was changed to dates that were significant to the majority religion, or to historical dates…

The prom in all its drama has been around a lot longer than I thought. Originating somewhere in the1870s as a college tradition called the Promenade, it was a debutante coming out kind of thing. The…

John Kessel holds a B.A. in Physics and English and a Ph.D. in American Literature. He helped found and served as the first director of the MFA program in creative writing at North Carolina State…

Claire L. Evans is a writer and musician. She is the singer of the pop group YACHT, founding editor of VICE’s science-fiction vertical Terraform, and the co-founder of the Los Angeles-based events…

Cinco de Mayo is a holiday commemorating just one event: The Battle of Puebla, which was a day of victory for the Mexican army against the French in 1862. Over 150 years later, people still mistake…