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Games and other forms of play are used in today's libraries to attract underserved patrons, to introduce patrons to other library resources and services, and to facilitate engagement between library patrons. While many perceive gaming as a new library service, gaming services have been part of librarianship since the nineteenth century through chess clubs. During the Great Depression, libraries supported patrons with puzzle contests and developed circulating toy and game collections. Academic libraries built game collections for research and classroom needs, while school libraries collected and facilitated educational games to aid teachers. Video games have been used in libraries to help patrons learn to use technology and to bring groups of patrons together to enjoy shared experiences. The goal of this article is to demonstrate the different ways in which libraries have used games, toys, and puzzles over the last 150 years through both collections and services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the impact of the Second Reform Act, and the doubling of the electorate it delivered, on the linguistic complexity of speeches made by members of parliament in Britain. Noting that the new voters were generally poorer and less educated than those who already enjoyed the suffrage, we hypothesize that cabinet ministers had strong incentives--relative to other members--to appeal to these new electors with simpler statements during parliamentary debates. We assess this claim with a data set of over half a million speeches for the period between the Great Reform Act and Great War, along with methods for measuring the comprehensibility of texts--which we validate in some detail. The theorized relationship holds: ministers become statistically significantly easier to understand (on average) relative to backbenchers, and this effect occurs almost immediately after the 1868 election. We show that this result is not an artifact of new personnel in the House of Commons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses research involving the docket books that are associated with then-U.S. Supreme Court (USSC) Chief Justice William Howard Taft's tenure as the leader of the nation's highest court during the twentieth century, and it mentions how each docket book contains the votes that each U.S. Supreme Court Justice cast when the American judges met to discuss legal cases in conference. USSC litigation involving issues such as American civil rights and criminal procedure is examined.

During the past four decades there has developed a burgeoning literature on the concept of serendipity, the name for sudden insights or conceptual breakthroughs that occur by chance or accident. Studies repeatedly note that it was Horace Walpole, the eighteenth-century man of letters, who coined the word. None of them, however, notice that Walpole' s term is itself indebted to a much older tradition, invoking a formula developed by Francis Bacon. Recovering the prehistory of the term suggests that "serendipity," rather than being a name for a special mode of discovery invented by Walpole, has all along accompanied empiricism as the name for an essential gap in its epistemology. Serendipity bears directly on the "induction problem," or what has more recently been called the "conceptual leap." Though Walpole gave it its current name, versions of the concept have all along isolated a critical gap in the method of the sciences inaugurated by Bacon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its opening in 2011, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art has generated a great deal of interest from the public and other cultural institutions. From the construction of a 185,000-square-foot facility in the bottom of a ravine to the much-discussed art acquisitions, this attention is hardly surprising. However, beyond the building and the art, Crystal Bridges also has an art research library with many rare books and the most important collection of American color printed books in North America. This article focuses on the genres and methods of color printing in the Americas in the nineteenth century, then follows with a discussion of the challenges for this collection, as well as some guidelines for cataloging its items. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

George Sarton's original vision in establishing Isis and Osiris carried beyond these two publications. His particular view of history of science is worth revisiting to reflect on the values he embraced and the context in which he worked. His idea of an Institute for the History of Science and Civilization is even more provocative. Although Sarton's ideas and, especially, his way of framing them would probably be rejected by most today, there is at least one major emphasis worth recovering and reasserting: his commitment to taking the science and its technical aspects seriously. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the role of grandmothers in the African-American community from Reconstruction through the New Deal. It suggests that grandmothers were central to the economic survival of their families and worked as long as they lived, in paid labor and household labor to help provide for their families. Grandmothers had many roles in their communities: they were midwives, purveyors of domestic medicine, and caretakers of children. Grandmothers were the source of oral histories and narratives that helped their grandchildren resist the oppression of the larger society. This early role is linked to the role of grandmothers since World War II. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]