D-Day, Omaha Beach. Photograph by Robert Capa. Courtesy George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.
On June 6, 1944, 160,000 Allied troops landed on the rugged French coastline near Normandy.
For more photographs from this military battle, click here.
Commemorate this pivotal event in world history with one of the many D-Day books the library has available. If you’d like to read about World War II from a more general approach, you can select “subject” from the pull down menu on our catalog page and type “World War, 1939-1945.” You’ll see everything that’s available on the topic. You can further limit your search by choosing “Chelsea” or “This Library” from the second pull down menu.
Even 67 years after D-Day, the sacrifice of those soldiers continues to be deeply moving.
Click on the cover image to view information about the book.
The National Institutes of Health has pulled together a handy online factsheet for health issues affecting men. The Mayo Clinic has a Symptom Checker that allows you to select a symptom from an alphabetical index and request more information about the symptom and its possible causes. MedLine Plus, a source of reliable health information, has individual information pages on topics like men’s health, women’s health, senior health, for instance. These pages include general health information, as well as resources and articles for more specific health conditions, such as colon or prostate cancer.
Databases for health research can be accessed with your library card. The Health and Wellness Resource Center is one database that can guide you to information about diseases or conditions, health assessment tools, and full-text articles should you want to learn more about various medical conditions. Another database tool that you can reach with your library card is Health Reference Center Academic, where you can find full-text articles on the latest research. Maybe you’re interested in alternative treatments for prostate cancer or macular degeneration. You can find those here, too.
To your health!
Photo by Lewis W. Hine, ca. 1918-1935. George Eastman House, Rochester, New York.
If comics don’t spring to mind when you think of fine art… think again! The fine folks at Chelsea’s River Gallery have partnered with comics artist Jerzy Drozd, the Artist-in-Residence to create a gallery show of comics art that is miles away from the BAM! POW! of everyday superhero comics.
The Comic Jam: Comics Are Great Exhibition of Original Comics Art begins Saturday, May 28th and runs through June 22 at the River Gallery, 120 Main St. in Chelsea. The exhibit includes samples of the process, so preliminary sketches are displayed alongside finished products to give viewers a sense of how the result was achieved.
Join us for a Live Drawing Exhibit for a rare chance to watch artists at work on Saturday, June 18th from 3-5 pm at River Gallery.
An Artist Reception will be held Saturday, June 18th from 6-8 pm at River Gallery. All are welcome.
Here are few new nonfiction titles that are getting positive attention from reviewers and the buzz is already spreading around bookstores and libraries.
Many people know Erik Larson from his huge bestseller Devil in the White City. His latest, In the Garden of Beasts, tells the true story of Adolph Hitler’s rise to power and life in Berlin in the early years of Hitler’s career.
Mitchell Zuckoff’s Lost in Shangri-La is a WWII story about a plane crash that stranded a handful of servicemen and women in the jungle of New Guinea, where they faced the dangers of the unknown and treacherous landscape as well as violent native tribes. It sounds to me like Unbroken meets The Lost City of Z.
Don’t forget to check the New shelves on the 2nd floor for easy browsing of the latest titles! If you don’t see what you’re looking for, don’t hesitate to ask the librarian – we love that kind of thing. – Sara
Come watch an old-time baseball game in Timber Town this coming Saturday, May 21st. The fun begins at 2pm! The Chelsea Monitors are a Civil War-era baseball team that play with the rules and equipment of your typical 1860s team. On Saturday, they’ll be playing the Royal Oak Wahoos, another Civil War-era baseball club. If you’d like to learn more about the team or even join, email monitorbbcofchelsea@yahoo.com.
In case you missed last week’s Chelsea Standard article on the Monitors, you might want to read it to learn the baseball lingo and rules of days gone by. Spectators are called ‘cranks’ and players are called ’strikers’ or ‘hitters’ when up to bat. Also, Civil War-era players didn’t use baseball gloves. They caught the ball with BARE HANDS. Whoa. -Rachael
According to a May 6 press release, NASA plans to launchthe space shuttle Endeavor on or sometime after May 16 for a 14-day mission to the International Space Station. This mission will be Endeavor’s final flight and ends the Space Shuttle Era, which began with space shuttle Columbia in 1981.
This NASA video celebrates the upcoming mission while marking the end of the space shuttle program:
If you find space travel intriguing in anyway whatsoever, I highly recommend science writer Mary Roach’s latest book: Packing for Mars. In it, Roach asks every question imaginable about life in space. Fair warning: no topic is too gross for Mary Roach. She gets a kick out of telling which famous astronaut suffered from severe motion sickness and about the grim realities of going to the bathroom in space.
Alongside the gross-out moments are fantastic behind-the-scenes anecdotes from the numerous astronauts she interviewed for the book. One of the highlights is Roach’s own zero-gravity experience, in which she tags along as a journalist on a research flight and gets in trouble for using one of the experiments to push off so she can fly around the cabin. Take a look, Mary Roach is a top-notch writer who turns science into stories and finds the humor in every situation. – Sara
The Library of Congress has just unveiled a new project called The National Jukebox. Over 10,000 audio recordings made by the Victor Talking maching Company between 1901 and 1925 have been made available to stream free via the National Jukebox site. Many libraries and archives contributed their recordings to this project and the license to freely stream the music was provided by the rights owner, Sony Music Entertainment.
The Jukebox will continue to grow as more music is added regularly, so be sure to check back. In the meantime, you can hear recordings of Al Jolson and John Philip Sousa the same way people used to when they got out the old Victrola. Click “play” below to hear Arthur Pryor’s Band play “The Temptation Rag.”
The University of Michigan is hosting a Preservation Clinic staffed with their experts to help you repair, store, display and care for your treasures. Bring along your books, papers, maps, photos, sound recordings, laptop full of un-backed up digital photos you aren’t sure what to do with!
This is a great opportunity to learn about how to prevent damage and improve storage of delicate and fragile items to help them last through the years.
The event is free and open to the public. Stop in on Sunday, May 15 from 2:30 pm – 6:00 pm at the Hatcher Graduate Library in Room 100.
The trailer for the new Anne Hathaway movie, an adaptation of One Day by David Nicholls is here! This movie is supposed to arrive in theaters on July 8th. I loved the book and can’t wait to see how they’ve transformed the story in the film version.
Did you know that Anna Jarvis, the woman who began the tradition of Mother’s Day, was not a mother? Anna’s mother, Ann Jarvis, was the founder of Mothers’ Day Work Clubs dedicated to improving health and sanitation in several cities. After Ann’s death in 1907, Anna began campaigning to make the anniversay of her mother’s death – the second Sunday in May – a day for honoring one’s mother.
Anna specifically wanted the name spelled “Mother’s” because the intention was for each person to honor their own mother for her individual dedication to her family, rather than “Mothers’” which could encompass motherhood as a whole.
By 1914, President Woodrow Wilson made Mother’s Day an official holiday. Unfortunately, people didn’t celebrate the day quite the way Anna Jarvis had intended. By the 1920s, she was railing against the commercialization of the holiday and spent the rest of her life arguing against those profiting from Mother’s Day and those contributing to it. She especially disliked greeting cards, accusing those who sent them of being too lazy to give their mother a handwritten letter with a personalized sentiment.
So this year as you celebrate Mother’s Day with the deserving mother in your life, think of poor Anna Jarvis, pull out the construction paper, and make the card yourself.
