After a bit of a break to finish planting fruit trees in the food forest and work on Ranch programming for the next year, we are back to blogging and look forward to posting much more regularly about all things Ranch related.

Kenneth Warren's latest book—What Was African American Literature?—is based on a set of lectures he delivered at Harvard a few years ago. This week he'll take the podium in The Huntington's Friends' Hall to share a bit from what he hopes will be part of his next book.

For a short month, February has a lot of big birthdays—George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Charles Darwin, to name just a few. Perhaps none is bigger (here, at least) than Henry Edwards Huntington's.

Sunday night, Colin Firth has a good chance of winning his first Oscar for his role as King George VI. While The King's Speech is not yet available on DVD, you can rent A Single Man and watch Firth's Oscar-nominated performance from last year.

Twenty-five volunteers gathered in the auditorium of the Botanical Center on a recent Wednesday afternoon for a lecture on plant anatomy. A slide of the apical meristem—the growing tip of the shoot

If you're not sure what alchemy is, don't look it up in the dictionary. Come to Bruce Moran's lecture in Friends' Hall, where he'll explain it with some concrete examples from the 16th and 17th centuries.

It's hard for many people to get past the familiar image of George Washington that appears on the dollar bill. Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) painted several iconic portraits of our first president, some of which were used in engravings

Abraham Lincoln never set foot in California, but the Huntington Library has become one of the premier repositories of Lincolnian—manuscripts, books, letters, and ephemera by and about our 16th president. In 1914, Henry Huntington purchased the collection of William H. Lambert, a Philadelphia lawyer who was known as one of the "Big Five" collectors of Lincoln memorabilia.

Next month, a new exhibition featuring the work of California sculptor John Frame opens at The Huntington. "Three Fragments of a Lost Tale: Sculpture and Story by John Frame" will include sculptural figures

Looking for the perfect place to woo your sweetheart? There's no need to look any further than The Huntington. Whether your idea of a perfect date is discussing the romance of Shakespeare's plays, sipping a cup of jasmine tea overlooking a Chinese lake