Museum Collections are a Library of Life  Much of what we know about biodiversity and its origins comes from the collection, preservation, and ongoing study of natural specimens and cultural remains.  Museum collections are libraries of the world's biological, cultural and environmental history and are vital to our ability to interpret the past and understand our place in its future.  As such, museums are stewards of this history, preserving it for posterity while fostering an informed appreciation of our complex and ever-changing world.  The Florida Museum's Division of Collections and Research is dedicated to understanding and preserving biological diversity and cultural heritage.  As of 2011, the Florida Museum houses more than 34 million specimens and objects, making it the Southeast's largest natural history museum and one of the top five nationally in terms of collections size.  Many of its individual department collections rank among the top 10 in the U.S., and some rank among the top 10 globally.  These holdings are available locally and internationally to scholars, scientists, students and the public through on-site study, public exhibitions, loans, publications, television and the Internet.

https://www.flmnh.ufl.edu/discover/the-value-of-museums/collections-are-a-library-of-life/

See also The Library Photo Archives collection from the Field Museum in Chicago dating back to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893.  It comprises over 300,000 images in the areas of Anthropology, Botany, Geology, and Zoology.  http://www.fieldmuseum.org/science/research/area/photo-archives See also a description of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH), comprising 27 interconnected buildings housing 45 permanent exhibition halls, in addition to a planetarium and a library.  The museum collections contain over 32 million specimens of plants, humans, animals, fossils, minerals, rocks, meteorites, and human cultural artifacts, of which only a small fraction can be displayed at any given time, and occupies 1,600,000 square feet (150,000 m²).  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Museum_of_Natural_History

Raggedy Ann’s creator was Johnny Gruelle, a free-lance cartoonist and editorial illustrator for The Indianapolis Star, The Cleveland Press, and The New York Herald, in the first few decades of the twentieth century.  Born in Arcola, Illinois in 1880, Gruelle moved at age two to Indianapolis, where his father Richard Gruelle came to associate and exhibit with the Hoosier Group of painters.  Richard Gruelle’s circle of friends included bestselling Hoosier poet James Whitcomb Riley.  Decades later, Richard’s son Johnny turned to the family friend’s verse in naming a forlorn rag doll found in the Indianapolis attic of his parents’ home, combining “The Raggedy Man” and “Little Orphant Annie” to produce the name “Raggedy Ann”.  After rehabilitating the doll’s features with a few strokes of his pen and a pair of buttons, the illustrator set about creating a story line for Raggedy Ann, initially to entertain his daughter Marcella.  After Marcella’s tragically premature death, Gruelle threw himself into writing and illustrating the Raggedy Ann Stories, the first volume of which was published by P.F. Volland in 1918.  Gruelle had simultaneously been designing a Raggedy Ann doll.  After his prototype received final approval from the US Patent Office, the dolls went into production and were used in Volland’s promotion of Gruelle’s book.  Publishing Ragged Andy Stories in 1920, Gruelle continued the saga of the red-headed ragamuffins through books and serialized newspaper stories until his death in 1938.  http://indianapublicmedia.org/momentofindianahistory/raggedy-anns-hoosier-ped 

POEM:  LITTLE ORPHANT ANNIE  You’ve probably seen the 1982 movie Annie; maybe you’ve caught one of the musical’s many revivals.  And most everybody knows that the musical itself was adapted from a popular and long-running comic strip.  But did you know that all those were based, in turn, on the 1885 poem “Little Orphant Annie?”  Or that James Whitcomb Riley wrote the poem about a real-life orphan, Allie?   Find the poem at http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2014/10/07/gobble-uns/

POEM:  THE RAGGEDY MAN  http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174221

Hill & Hollow Baked Beans adapted from Alfred Brumley's All-Day Singin' and Dinner on the Ground

4 c. dry beans, cooked & salt added

3 slices cooked salt pork or bacon, chopped

1/4 c. chopped onion

1/2 c. brown sugar

1/2 c. catsup

diced fruit (optional)  Mix ingredients together, put in casserole, and bake 25-30 minutes.

A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

per se  (puhr SAY)  adverb   In or by itself; intrinsically.  From Latin per se, translation of Greek kath auto.  Earliest documented use:  1505.   NOTES:  Today’s term makes an appearance in the word ampersand which is a corruption of “and per se and”.   Earlier the & symbol was considered the 27th letter of the alphabet.  Yes, they used to say “A to ampersand” instead of “A to Z”.   Schoolchildren reciting the alphabet would end it with “& per se and”, meaning the symbol &, by itself, is the word “and”.  Where did the symbol & come from?  It’s a corruption of “et”, the Latin word for “and”.  That explains why sometimes “etc.” is written as “&c”

bona fide  (BOH-nuh fyd, FY-dee)  adjective:  Genuine.  adverb:  In good faith; sincerely.  From Latin bonus (good) + fides (faith).  Earliest documented use:  1542.

Feedback to A.Word.A.Day

From:  Michael R. Sitton  Subject:  per se   Thank you for including information about the origins of the word ampersand, which for anyone in the Adirondack region of northern New York brings to mind the a popular hiking destination, Ampersand Mountain, near Saranac Lake, with spectacular views of the Saranac Lake region, Whiteface Mountain, and other peaks in the area.  The name is attributed to the winding course of a creek resembling the ampersand symbol; from Ampersand Creek came the name of the mountain.

From:  Bert Katz   Subject:  bona fide   I would say that “bona fide” has also become a noun.  As in, “The prospective employee presented his bona fides to the interviewer.”  In this case, “bona fides” means verifiable qualifications or skills.

                                     

Follow-up on stories about Sylvanus Pierson Jermain 

SP Jermain was also an urban planner in the fact that by establishing the parks his vision was to ultimately make a green ring around Toledo that never materialized, and the expressway really inhibited that notion.  A bronze sculpture of him is located at the Ottawa Park Golf course and was stolen some years ago.  The arts commission and the golf community raised funds to remake it and the new statue of him sits near the first tee at Ottawa Park.  The local amateur match play championship  is still held at Ottawa park and bears his name.  The SP Jermain Memorial Match Play Championship to be June 21-29, 2015.   Thank you, Muse reader!

References to Roman Law in U.S. Courts, a guest post by Dante Figueroa, a senior legal information analyst at the Law Library of Congress.  March 20, 2015   I have previously written about the amazing collection of Roman law resources at the Law Library of Congress.  In fact, the use of and reference to Roman law by U.S. courts has been widely documented.  A U.S. law professor has stated that the use of Roman law by U.S. courts was “an integral part of the larger jurisprudential process by which American jurists reached back to find a line of argument to be employed in understanding the case.”  (Samuel J. Astorino, Roman Law in American Law: Twentieth Century Cases of the Supreme Court, 40 Duq. L. Rev. 627 (2002).)  Find more information and a list of cases in which the U.S. Supreme Court referenced Roman law at http://blogs.loc.gov/law/2015/03/references-to-roman-law-in-us-courts/

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1274  March 23, 2015  On this date in 1699, John Bartram, British-American botanist and explorer, was born.  On this date in 1857, Elisha Otis's first elevator was installed at 488 Broadway, New York City.