Allen Ginsberg’s Sneakers
Decades after his masterwork Howl made him an antiestablishment icon, Beat poet Allen Ginsberg spent several months trekking through Eastern Europe wearing canvas sneakers. He kept them, he said, to illustrate the shoddy workmanship of Soviet-style factories—an observation that aligned with his repudiation of communism. In all, Stanford Special Collections has 1,300 linear feet of Ginsberg memorabilia, including an original typescript of Howl with annotations in the author’s hand.
Gestapo Arrest Book
Examples abound of Nazi Germany’s bureaucratic efficiency in service of its evil objectives. Here is another—a booklet prepared in advance of what the Gestapo anticipated would be an invasion of England. It includes names and addresses of thousands of people targeted for arrest, from well-known private citizens such as author Virginia Woolf to more obvious inclusions such as Winston Churchill, who appears at number 49 on the alphabetical list. The book is part of the collection at the Hoover Archives.
X-ray of Adolf Hitler’s Skull
After an assassination attempt in 1944 perforated Hitler’s eardrum, doctors in September of that year took this X-ray, hoping to diagnose the cause of the Führer’s lingering headaches. The X-ray has become one of the most popular items in the Hoover Institution archives. “Students just love it,” says assistant archivist Carol Leadenham.
Treatment Data from San Francisco’s First Family Planning Clinic
Adelaide Brown graduated from Cooper Medical College (a forerunner of Stanford Medical School) in 1892 and spent decades working as a physician in the Bay Area. In 1929, she opened a family planning clinic in San Francisco, and began providing advice and care for poor women seeking birth-control options. Brown’s work was not only groundbreaking—it was one of the first clinics of its kind in the United States—it also was brave advocacy. At the time, dispensing information about contraception was considered illegal because of a federal obscenity law. Her papers are held at the Stanford Medical History Center.
Handwritten note describing an enterprising young man
In June of 1976, Mike Rose, owner of an advertising agency in Los Altos, got a phone call from a 21-year-old entrepreneur asking whether Rose’s firm could help produce a user’s manual for a computer that the young man’s fledgling company had developed. Rose thought the whole thing sounded sketchy. “This joker is going to be calling you,” he scribbled in a note to his business partner; “. . . they build kits—operate out of a garage. Sounds flakey.” The “joker” was Steve Jobs. The note, which Rose donated in 1998, is part of the Silicon Valley Archives housed at Stanford.
