History
Henry E. Huntington was a nephew and heir of Collis P. Huntington, one of the Big Four railroad tycoons of 19th-century California. After also working with his uncle's railroad, the younger Huntington began collecting art and rare books in 1910 at the age of 60. He divorced his first wife, Mary Alice Prentice in 1906, married his uncle's widow Arabella in 1913, and relocated from San Francisco to Los Angeles. He purchased more than 500 acres from the Farmers and Merchants Bank and developed San Marino. He did not visit Europe until he was 63 and usually purchased only one or two paintings a year. By using experts to guide him and benefiting from a post-World War I European market that was "ready to sell almost anything", however, Huntington amassed "far and away the greatest group of 18th-century British portraits ever assembled by any one man" before his death in 1927. In accordance with Huntington's will, the collection, worth $50 million, opened to the public in 1928.
Read more about this topic: Huntington Library
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the truth of the new is never on the news
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...
the lesbian archaeologist watches herself
sifting her own life out from the shards she’s piecing,
asking the clay all questions but her own.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Classes struggle, some classes triumph, others are eliminated. Such is history; such is the history of civilization for thousands of years.”
—Mao Zedong (1893–1976)