“What is this thing?” This is a question I often asked myself, even while elbows deep and traveling across the country from archive to archive.

It’s not an article, and it’s not a book. I knew that because putting what was compelling me in strictly written and linear form would detract from what I ultimately wanted to say and would be, to put it bluntly, boring for both me and the potential audience. A death nail…

Thesis = a book tells a story, or more precisely, this book tells one.

This book…material object opens a world…

Compulsion to collect

Huntington Library, Explorers Club, The Morgan Library & Museum, Wildlife Conservation Society Archives, Archdiocese of New York Archives, Library of Congress Manuscripts Reading Room and Folklife Center, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Presbyterian Historical Society, New York Public Library Schwarzman Building, and Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. Less conventional sources, such as hiking in the Canadian Rockies and visiting the grave of Dr. Harlow Brooks, to confirm an aspect of his biography.

Countless hours searching HathiTrust, Internet Archive, Library of Congress, Smithsonian, Canadiana, New York Library, Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, Wikimedia Commons, and various university and newspaper digital collections as sources for research and visuals for storytelling.

I almost hesitate to evoke Kipling’s poem to describe my own experience, but it is true—this project has been calling me/driving me…

This is not a history, and I am not a historian; it is a demonstration of research put into the form of a story.

She is a librarian who created this project to demonstrate… that shines light on how historical research is done. She does not seek to make new arguments about the events of the past and, instead,…

It uses secondary sources but mostly relies on primary sources to demonstrate and emphasize what they bring to our understanding of the past and the present. I seek to be transparent about what is speculation. I do, for example, use words like “appears,” “possibly,” and “seems” to indicate I do not have definitive proof.

Thank you to…

LMU