Spoiler alert: the contents of this blog post will answer one of the trivia questions in the May edition of D Magazine. It has to do with Liquid Paper and the Dallas secretary who invented it. Her name was Bette Nesmith — later Bette Nesmith Graham — a single mom who, in 1956, tried to find a simple way to make her life at work easier.

In her Richardson garage, Nesmith Graham mixed a concoction consisting largely of white tempura paint. The solution could blot over typewriter mistakes and dry quickly, allowing for fast changes. But it wasn’t the invention of the substance that was Nesmith Graham’s real genius. As this piece in The Hustle explains, it was her flair for marketing.

With the Academy Awards only weeks away, now is a great time to take a look at some notable female actors who have visited North Texas.

The following photographs are part the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Collection and many are available through the library’s online catalog.

Among the images are a visit to Bishop College by multi-talented singer songwriter Oscar nominated actress and activist Eartha Kitt. Decades later, I can still recall the awe I felt as a small child in the 1980s, watching Kitt’s portrayal of Catwoman in reruns of the 1960s Batman television series. Actress May Wynn was photographed on a jet at Dallas Naval Air Station (Hensley Field) to promote a film opening in 1954.

There are images of Casablanca star Ingrid Bergman. Tina Turner and Gladys Knight visited Dallas in 1962 and 1968. Vertigo star Kim Novak was once spotted at Union Station around 1956. Horror legends Vincent Price, Frank Lovejoy, and Morticia Adams were all here, too.

So take a look at the gallery and see a few times Hollywood came to Dallas.

Trigger warning: this story contains references to racial violence.

Adam W. McKinney remembers the first time he encountered the name Fred Rouse. It was in a book he had bought at the Underground Railroad Museum in Flushing, Ohio, while on tour with the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater troupe. He read the book later, in 2007, after he’d moved to Fort Worth to become an assistant dance professor at TCU, conducting research and choreographic work that delves into racism. That’s when he learned that on December 11, 1921, a badly beaten Rouse was seized from the Tarrant County hospital by a mob of White men, who then hanged him from a tree.

The Fort Worth Telegram report at the time contained gruesome details, but as McKinney tried to find out more about the story, he soon discovered that few knew the details of Rouse’s life, and even fewer remembered the manner of his death. So he enlisted theater artist and activist Daniel Banks to help rectify the situation. “It became clear to us as artists that we needed to share this history together as a community,” McKinney says.

By now, most tuned-in Dallasites are familiar with the story of The Accommodation, our friend Jim Schutze’s landmark study of Dallas’ racial history. Over the weekend, CBS This Morning brought the tale to national audiences. In the report, Schutze and civil rights activist Peter Johnson speak about Dallas history, segregation, and the resurgent popularity of the long out-of-print book that will be republished by Deep Vellum later this year. Schutze bashfully admits to being somewhat flabbergasted about the whole ordeal.

“I feel like this book is this weird stone tablet that somebody found,” Schutze tells CBS News producer Rodney Hawkins. “When this regeneration of interest started ten years ago, I just didn’t get it at all. All the people who wanted to talk to me about it were young, 20- and 30-year-olds.”

CBS does well to note that the network’s fabled newsman Walter Cronkite was hired by Dallas civic leaders in the 1960s to create a piece of propaganda intended to tamp down on civil rights protests in Dallas. They fail, however, to note that Schutze’s book will be brought back by Will Evans’ non-profit publishing house after a bootleg .pdf version of the book floated around youthful circles of Dallas history and politics wonks for years (thought its Twitter handle gets a shout out).

Instead, Hawkins reports that “John Wiley Price fought to republish it.” Schutze, you may remember, sold the rights to Price decades ago, before the two had a falling out. Price also features in the report, and he has a new forward in the Deep Vellum edition. The CBS clip is after the jump:

Art and artists have always been part of the Dallas landscape, and the Dallas Public Library photograph collections have examples of how cultural offerings helped shape the city. The following photographs are some of the images of the arts I have encountered in the Dallas Public Library’s Dallas History and Archives Collection and are available through the library’s online catalog.

The late Dmitri Vail shows his paintings and photographs in 1952. Expatriate German artist George Grosz visited Dallas to create a series called “Impressions of Dallas” on behalf of Leon Harris, Jr., vice president of the A. Harris and Company department store. Sculptor Horace Foxall and his works are depicted as part of the Marion Butts collection, as well. The Dallas Public Library’s historic connection to Dallas art is represented by photographs such as the Art Room of the original 1901 Carnegie Library, the contents of which later helped form the Dallas Museum of Art.

Classroom art instruction, art competitions, and influential artists like Everett Spruce and Ruth Uhler are among these historic photographs. Prominent public sculptures occupy other photographs. Take a look in the gallery below.

Charles DeMorse, a newspaper editor, checked into a room at the Crutchfield House, a modest two-story inn on Dallas’ courthouse square. The year was 1852. DeMorse was crisscrossing North Texas on horseback, covering court cases for his paper. In the morning, he would ride on to Denton, but that evening he wanted to unwind. From his hotel window, DeMorse spotted on the far side of the square something called The Arts Saloon. It was a curious name. “Looking again, I tried to read it ‘The Ark Saloon,’ ” DeMorse later wrote, “not understanding what a gallery of the fine arts should be doing at the city of the Three Forks, but rather supposing that a drinkery had been so termed.”

DeMorse headed over and discovered that The Arts Saloon was, indeed, more salon than saloon. Part art gallery, part dance hall, part photography studio, The Arts Saloon was run by a peculiar Frenchman named Adolphe Gouhenant. Close readers of Dallas history will recognize the name.

Gouhenant makes cameos in a dozen or so Dallas volumes, though his story is often muddled or misrepresented. Gouhenant has been lumped in with the French settlers of the La Réunion colony, even though Gouhenant arrived in Dallas years before the socialist utopians. Some Dallas historians, like DeMorse, mistake Gouhenant’s Arts Saloon for a frontier bar. In Dallas: The Deciding Years, A.C. Greene notes that Gouhenant’s establishment was “something more significant”; it was a daguerreotype studio responsible for most of the earliest photographs of Dallas. But even calling Gouhenant the city’s first photographer sells him short.