#archivesgamenight

Gas mask baseball anyone? These World War I doughboys are ready for #ArchivesGameNight in any situation.

Excerpted from “Chemical Warfare Training, 1918-1919”  Series: Historical Films, ca. 1914 - ca. 1936. Record Group 111: Records of the Office of the Chief Signal Officer, 1860 - 1985

For #ArchivesGameNight, we’re featuring Welcome to Gameland . This circa 1964 trade catalog for Milton Bradley features games that are both familiar (Candy Land, Life) and new to us. Had you heard of Alfred Hitchcock’s Why? It’s a “suspense-filled ‘whodunnit’ game” with a surprise ending. 

The thrill of victory and the agony of defeat...this is #ArchivesGameNight!

The first Friday of each month the @usnatarchives hosts an Archives Hashtag Party exploring highlights from archival collections around a different theme. Come hang out on social media with all of the archives, libraries, galleries, and museums participating so far! October’s theme is #ArchivesGameNight.

White House photographer David Kennerly captured the highs and lows of playing board games during the Fords’ Christmas vacation to Vail, Colorado. Mike Ford celebrated his triumph and White House Press Secretary Ron Nessen slumped in despair while facing off in a football themed game on December 25, 1975.

NOW ON VIEW IN SPECIAL COLLECTIONS Football in Minneapolis Before the Vikings

Minnesota's getting ready for a pretty big football game (ahem, Super Bowl 2018) and the library is no exception. Visit Special Collections at the Minneapolis Central Library to learn more about football in Minneapolis before the Vikings,  a mini-exhibit featuring high school, college, amateur, and professional teams, on view now through February 2018. 

The Marines and the Red Jackets

The Minneapolis Marines was the city’s first professional football team, formed by local businessmen and consisting mainly of working class high school-age players. It was an independent team, which is to say it barnstormed around the city playing other city squads, with names such as the Beavers, the Powderhorns, the Deans, the Quicksteps, the Rosedales and Preins. The Marines did some traveling to play other teams, but after WWI, the Marines official joined the recently formed American Professional Football Association (APFA) in 1921. The following year, the APFA changed its name to the National Football League. The Marines did not last long with the NFL, folding after the 1924 season. A second attempt was made with the NFL in 1929 with the formation of the Minneapolis Red Jackets, but again to no avail. The team drew poorly and the Great Depression was settling in.

Professional football was a comparatively minor affair in those days, vastly out stripped in popularity by the college game, which drew enormous crowds, filling the huge new football fields being constructed in the 1920s, like the University of Minnesota’s Memorial Stadium.

More on Minneapolis football history from the Star Tribune.

It’s #ArchivesGameNight!

“Soldiers in France engaged in a game of checkers in front of a Young Men's Christian Association hut at one of the camps on the Aisne front.”

Series: American Unofficial Collection of World War I Photographs, 1917 - 1918. Record Group 165: Records of the War Department General and Special Staffs, 1860 - 1952

Today is the #ArchivesGameNight Hashtag Party hosted by the National Archives. What sort of games can be found in a business archive, you ask? Pretty much exactly what you’d expect. 

Here we share a few photos of our 1904 first edition of the card game Pit. Inspired by the Chicago Board of Trade’s trading floor (an octagonal structure known as “the pit”), the game is designed to make players yell out their bids as they try to corner the market on commodities, simulating the trading floor bidding experience.