On the Cover

We launched the Everything Has a History feature in September to showcase short essays, each about a specific physical item. Since then, historians have written about pieces of the past ranging from bullfrogs to porcelain pigments, espresso machines, and a ship. Dina Kalman Spoerl’s entry in the series, about a clothing scrapbook in the collections of the Naperville Heritage Society, is a fitting conclusion to the first year. She describes a scrapbook that blends fabric scraps and annotations, observing that the creator had a “historian’s desire to get everything recorded that she could recall.” This series has highlighted how, truly, everything has a history..”

Courtesy of Naperville Heritage Society