May 2012

On January 6, 1912, New Mexico became a state, followed 39 days later by Arizona. A 62-year-long quest for statehood—the longest in U.S. history—had finally ended.

What may seem today like a foregone conclusion about statehood was nothing of the kind at the turn of the 20th century. Fearing higher taxes, powerful railroad and mining interests lobbied hard against admission, while cattle barons fought to keep their free access to public lands. Citizens of both territories also didn’t appear particularly interested in statehood.

New Mexico legislators dissolved one constitutional convention for lack of delegates. In other years, inhabitants voted down statehood.

The Fledglings, a painting of a 1908 air meet in Morris Park in the Bronx, New York, has the feel of a single frame of a comic strip, with a lively crowd surging across the scene, milling around the aircraft, and even climbing into trees. That would make sense: the artist was 31-year-old Rudolph Dirks, a German immigrant already famous for creating the pioneering comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids.

“This painting is the first serious work of art to capture the excitement surrounding the birth of aviation in America,” says Tom D. Crouch, senior curator of the Division of Aeronautics at the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Crouch recently brought this valuable historical document into the museum’s collection thanks the generosity of the artist’s son, John Dirks.

The director of the Census Bureau doesn’t often pay house calls for census enumeration, but in the spring of 1940 William Austin stopped by the White House to find out who was home. Franklin Roosevelt himself helped fill out the form claiming nine in a household that included personal secretary Marguerite “Missy” LeHand, one cousin, a governess, and four “Negro servants.”

The page that FDR helped complete is one of 3.9 million images of the 1940 Census now available online at the National Archives website and Archives.com. When Allen Weinstein became Archivist of the United States in 2004, one of his primary goals was to increase the digitization and public availability of holdings.  But the government agency lacked the resources to tackle the massive job, so he put in place innovative public/private partnerships to get the work done.