Archive of technology, entertainment and everyday life
Museums and collections show that a toy is not merely a cherished object: it can document industry, education, consumption, gender and everyday life. A critical reading of how this material memory is preserved, displayed and contextualised.
Open storyThe Museo Universitario del Chopo opened in 1975, and its Information Centre and Media Library holds materials useful for researching musical cultures and practices. Available documentation places it as a landmark for Mexican underground cultures in the 1980s and as host to the first Tianguis de la Música.
Open storyStickers did not begin as isolated toys. In Spain, the evidence gathered places their antecedents in commercial wrappers from the late nineteenth century, their spread through consumer products in the 1920s, and the sale of packets in the post-war period. This history explains why the album, the duplicate, and swapping form a cultural system of their own.
Open storyBetween the second half of the 1970s and 1990, magazines were a decisive route for adult comics in Spain. This piece examines their expansion on newsstands, their editorial diversity, and the reasons attributed to their later decline, distinguishing available evidence from interpretation.
Open storyA guide to working with catalogues, photo archives, periodicals, and academic studies when reconstructing everyday practices. It starts from available evidence on Mexico, Spain, and Ibero-American archives, distinguishing what a source documents from what it only permits as a hypothesis.
Open storyThe Historical Archive of the Puerto Cristal Museum in Chile holds records from the 1960s to the 1990s concerning a mining camp and the lives of its residents. It offers a way to explain why an archive is not a collection of isolated memories: it preserves provenance, activities, and links among the school, radio, port warehouses, laboratory, and mine, although the available evidence does not describe every record or its physical condition.
Open storyThe Museo da Conserva’s #ComidaViejuna campaign invites us to read household recipe books as objects that preserve recipes, visual habits and cultural memory. Drawing on that initiative and sources on food heritage, this piece examines what can—and cannot—be documented when collecting, describing and interpreting everyday papers.
Open storyA chronological reading, based on the available sources, of the changes in context, access and preservation surrounding Spanish television from the 1970s to 2009. It separates documented material from interpretation and avoids treating nostalgia as historical proof.
Open storyA reading of fashion in Spain from the post-war years to the 1970s as material culture: garments, accessories, photographs, fashion plates, and magazines make it possible to study both dress and the channels that made it visible.
Open storyThe 1990s are often identified as a turning point for the board-game industry and its study. Rather than offering a closed history of successes and labels, this article examines what the available evidence supports: a broader supply, the popularisation of Eurogames, new meeting spaces, and historical research that remains fragmented.
Open storyToy collections, exhibitions and museums make it possible to understand these objects beyond nostalgia. Drawing on sources about Spanish toy heritage, this article examines what objects can document, how museums put them in context, and the limits required by a rigorous reading.
Open storyThe Tolosa museum traces chocolate through tools, chocolate pots and a historic workshop. Its collection shows how a food can also become technical, domestic and cultural heritage.
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