Features
1/10/18 – Boise’s “Geothermal Gem”
Since the late 19th century, Boise’s geothermal energy has been an economic and cultural driver of the city’s development. A variety of entrepreneurs capitalized on the region’s active geologic inheritance to provide Boiseans with cheap and sustainable energy and, in doing so, pioneered the first geothermal heating district in the United States. Forty years later,… Read the Rest »
12/27/17 – Modern Day Research Trips and the Famed Golden Age of Travel, Part 2
The hustle and bustle of holiday travel is upon us. The surge of families with small children and less-experienced travelers at airports across the country means busier terminals, shorter tempers, and heightened levels of excitement…for some. As a result, the holiday-induced shift in travel patterns has me once again thinking about aviation, so get ready… Read the Rest »
10/10/17 – Let Sleeping Volcanoes Lie
Iceland has always loomed large in my mind, its geographic extremes and stark beauty placing it high on the list of places I want to explore during my lifetime. The volcanic island’s larger-than-life reputation in my head belies its true size, which is about that of the state of Oregon. Iceland has, however, had a… Read the Rest »
7/26/17 – Modern Day Research Trips and The Famed Golden Age of Travel
My job description at SHRA clearly outlines that travel is required. In fact, all historians with SHRA can expect to travel and work away from the office roughly 25% of the time. This is to be expected of a job where we are in search of rare documents that likely exist in only one repository… Read the Rest »
6/21/17 – The New Mexican Automobile Runway
While sifting through documents at the New Mexico State Archives on a recent research trip, I encountered references to “automobile runways,” a phrase I had never heard before. At first I ignored the term; it was not relevant to our immediate research topic. However, by the fifth or sixth mention of the runway I was… Read the Rest »
5/31/17 – Sourdough Story
At SHRA we spend a lot of our time interacting with archives. We locate archives online, we correspond with archivists, we review archival finding aids, and we travel to archives to conduct research. All of this archival work has to do with locating and capturing primary source materials: maps, ledgers, petitions, meeting minutes, newspapers, etc…. Read the Rest »
4/5/17 – Sacramento Dreaming
A recent research trip took the SHRA team to Sacramento, California. The project we were working on had us examining events during the very early days of California statehood, when San Francisco was by far the biggest and most influential city in the new state. As we sat at the State Library, looking out at… Read the Rest »
3/29/17 – The History of the Olympics…or the Olympics as History, Part III
The memories of last summer’s Rio Olympic Games are still fresh in the minds of sports aficionados, however, much of the fanfare and excitement that existed leading up to and during the event have faded from the public arena. As time progresses, the victories, defeats, and organizational challenges and successes of the Rio Games will… Read the Rest »
2/22/17 – “Let’s Go for a Drive”
During recent public history project research, I stumbled across an article and photographs by Otto M. Jones published in the Idaho Daily Statesman in 1919. The article described the “arduous task” of travelling “steep winding grades that are not inducive [sic] of much speed or tempered with any degree of safety or security.”[1] The accompanying… Read the Rest »
1/4/17 -The Legacy of Minidoka and the Work of Dr. Robert Sims
Editor’s Note: Today’s post is courtesy of guest blogger Dr. Cheryl Oestreicher, Head, Special Collections, Boise State University. You can read Dr. Oestreicher’s previous guest blog for SHRA here. As an archivist, I have a social responsibility to collect records that document all aspects of history, particularly underrepresented people, events, and organizations. Archival records serve to… Read the Rest »