Should Anywhere Adventures Come to Your Town?
The following is a guest post by 2025 Innovator in Residence Vivian Li, an illustrator, comics artist and web developer from Macomb, Illinois who currently lives in Seattle.
As someone who has lived in both rural Illinois and bustling Seattle, I was shocked that I could find really cool items about both locations on the Library of Congress website. For Anywhere Adventures, I will create an interactive site for audiences in three US towns to learn about their local history through stories I’ll unearth on loc.gov. The first location will be in Seattle, Washington, and I am now looking for the other two. Could it be your town? From now until February 5th, I’m taking suggestions for where Anywhere Adventures should go!
How to Submit
Do some searching to see what interesting free to use items from your town can be found within the Library’s digital collections and nominate them for consideration. Submit an item by posting the web link to your item and the name of your town in the comments below, or post to Instagram and tag the Library at @librarycongress or me @vivianlikesfruit. We’ll share what towns we pick back here on The Signal in March!
Tips on doing research in the digital collections
- Navigate to the Library’s website at loc.gov.
- Use the search bar in the top right to look up your town. You could also try other nearby towns or the county name.
- Filter your results with the options offered on the left. You can narrow it down by the type of item (such as image, manuscript, or audio recording). Or you could use the date filter to find periods that you’re curious about!
- Explore more items similar to ones you already like. Scroll down to the “More items like this” section, or see what collection the item belongs to in the “Part of” column on the right.
- Make sure it’s free to use by checking the “Rights & Access” section at the bottom of the item page. This guide from the Prints & Photographs Division is a great resource.
Some inspiration! What I found out about Seattle
Seattle is an extremely hilly city – biking anywhere will cause you to show up to your destination drenched in sweat. However, Seattle used to be much hillier than it is now.
It is a classic piece of Seattle history: the big regrade that flattened the city. In order to make downtown more accessible, giant hills were leveled to ease pressure on the horses that were used to transit at the time. That’s why it’s dangerous to be in SoDo (south of downtown) during an earthquake: that land was dirt that was transplanted from the old Denny Hill. It’s not packed dense enough, and will basically turn into liquid during an earthquake.
I had heard all this, but never stopped to consider how giant hills were being cut down in 1904. If I had to guess: shovels, maybe even bulldozers (I don’t know when bulldozers were invented!). When I stumbled across this photo in the Library of Congress’s stereograph collection of a hill being BLASTED WITH WATER, I lost my mind! What a wild way to deal with that problem. If I had to bet if that would be an effective way to move land, I would tell you: no. But I drove through Belltown today, and my car was so fuel efficient from climbing zero hills.
What’s even cooler about this image is that it is a stereograph. An image that was taken with a special camera with side-by-side lenses. If you let your eyes unfocus so that the two images drift towards each other and eventually overlap, you can see the mound of dirt pop out at you.
I like history most when I can feel how it’s affecting the world I experience today- and that’s the core of Anywhere Adventures! Finding awesome items like this.
Can you try doing some research about your area for yourself? If you find some cool story, share the item and what larger piece of history you learned (or what you found so charming about it). Happy adventuring and I’ll see you in the comments!
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