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News
Featured Books
    All Featured Books
    Book of the Month Series
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    Garden Stories
    Monsters Are Real
    Page Frights
    Her Natural History
    Earth Optimism 2020
Tech Blog
Visit BHL
  • Home
  • News
  • Featured Books
    • All Featured Books
    • Book of the Month Series
  • User Stories
  • Campaigns
    • Fossil Stories
    • Garden Stories
    • Monsters Are Real
    • Page Frights
    • Her Natural History
    • Earth Optimism 2020
  • Tech Blog
  • Visit BHL
Biodiversity Heritage Library - Program news and collection highlights from BHL

All posts by Gretchen Rings

Blog Reel, Campaigns, Earth Optimism 2020

Landscape Democracy: The Life and Career of Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903)

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Considered the father of American landscape architecture, Frederick Law Olmsted co-designed many of the most well-known urban parks and landscapes in the United States in partnership with Calvert Vaux (Wikipedia). As Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker, “Was there a patch of grass in nineteenth-century America that he didn’t design? Stanford, Prospect Park, and the Biltmore Estate, in North Carolina; the space around the United States Capitol and preservation plans for Niagara Falls and Yosemite.” In addition to his impressive accomplishments in landscape architecture, including seventeen large urban parks across the United States — most notably Central Park — he was also a journalist, abolitionist, gentleman farmer, and conservationist

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July 16, 2020byGretchen Rings
Blog Reel, Campaigns, Her Natural History

The Popular and Prolific Ms. Pratt

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During the Victorian era, many gifted women participated in what has been called the “Golden Age of botanical art,” reflecting both a surge in gardening interests across English society, as well advances in book-making technology (Burns, Kramer). Though virtually unknown today, Anne Pratt (1806-1893) was one of the most prolific and popular artists and writers of this time, ultimately producing twenty published works that were loved for their handsome and accurate illustrations, and helping to create interest in flower study in the general public.

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March 29, 2019byGretchen Rings
Blog Reel, Featured Books

A “Botanist’s Botanist” : The Field Books of Timothy Plowman

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The Field Museum Library has recently digitized and added to the Biodiversity Heritage Library Timothy Plowman’s entire field book collection, which spans his career from 1969, when he worked for the botanical museum at Harvard, through his years as a curator of botany at the Field Museum from 1976-1987. Timothy Plowman was an ethnobotanist and the world authority on the taxon Erythroxylum (coca).
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September 7, 2017byGretchen Rings and Diana Duncan
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Spring Migration Notes…By a Murderer

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On November 5, 1950, The Field Museum [the Chicago Museum of Natural History at the time] Curator of Mammalogy Colin Sanborn received an extraordinary letter, which began as follows: It wasn’t the request itself that was so unusual: individuals (or their descendants) frequently inquired about a specimen donated to the museum. It was the letter’s author, in this case, that made it stand out: Nathan Leopold, Jr. Prior to becoming part of the infamous duo Leopold and Loeb, convicted for kidnapping and murdering Bobby Franks, a 14-year-old neighbor, Leopold had been a birder and ornithologist.
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April 27, 2017byGretchen Rings
Blog Reel, Featured Books

Celebrating the Birds of South America

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In honor of the first Olympics to take place in Brazil, we are highlighting a book contributed by The Field Museum featuring birds of South America, Le Vaillant’s Histoire naturelle d’une partie d’oiseaux nouveaux et rares de l’Amerique et des Indes (1801). Among several titles chosen for digitization from the Field Museum Library’s impressive Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library, housed in the collections of the Mary W. Runnells Rare Book Room, the entry for the volume in Catalogue of the Edward E. Ayer Ornithological Library characterizes it as “a work intended to supplement his Hist. Nat. des Oiseaux d’Afrique (q.v.) by describing and figuring birds not properly included in that work.”

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July 28, 2016byGretchen Rings

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The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) is the world’s largest open access digital library for biodiversity literature and archives. Headquartered at the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives in Washington, D.C., BHL operates as a worldwide consortium of natural history, botanical, research, and national libraries working together to digitize the natural history literature held in their collections and make it freely available for open access as part of a global “biodiversity community.”

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