It was Valentine’s Day 1917 in the Minnesota farming village of Lewiston, and Fred Roth — a fourth grader — seems to have come up with just the way to express his love for his sweetheart, Louise Wirt. He gave her a card.

Celebrating Valentine’s Day in the United States comes with multiple go-to practices. Offering a bouquet of red roses to your beloved. Purchasing a card with a heartfelt message. Sharing a candlelit meal with your partner. Giving a heart-shaped box of delicious chocolates.

Cowboys in the Old West worked up voracious appetites. It took a lot of calories to sustain their long days of grueling physical labor, especially on long cattle drives. So it's no wonder that cowboys not only relished their meals at the end of a day, but treated them as nearly sacred.

Valentine's Day is an annual holiday that sees people worldwide celebrate love in all forms. The day sees people exchange gifts, words and other expressions of love and affection for each other. But how did Valentine's Day begin and what does St. Valentine have to do with the holiday?

The cliche ideas of Valentine’s Day—the roses, chocolates, and construction paper cards—are not what this collection is about. The history of Valentine's cards is rich: they are the love letters of culture’s past.

Today, February 14 Valentine's Day, which is celebrated with gifts such as red roses, heart chocolates and teddy bears, dates back to a festival celebrated in Ancient Rome in the 6th century BC.The unchanging symbol of February 14, which has passed through various stages and loaded different meanings over time, is love and love.

On Valentine's Day, millions present flowers, chocolates and cards to their sweethearts. While the holiday's traditions really became cemented in the 1800s, historians link its roots to wild pagan revelries from before the birth of Saint Valentine himself.

The origins of Valentine’s Day are pretty obscure. While scholars generally agree that the holiday was popularized in the 1840s in the U.K. and U.S., the specific historical roots of the celebration remain ambiguous. Some say it began with the Roman pagan festival Lupercalia, a fertility festival from February 13-15 involving animal sacrifice, ritualized sex play, and general debauchery. Others point to Roman emperor Claudius II’s execution of several men named Valentine on February 14, one of whom later became a martyr in the Christian faith. Fast forward several centuries and the holiday shows up again in the Middle Ages, with Chaucer’s poem “Parliament of Fowls” (referring to the mating pattern of birds in early spring), and later in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, which alludes to lucky lovers meeting on St. Valentine’s Day. But how do a pagan fertility festival, a Christian martyr, and English poetry connect with this now ubiquitous, commercialized celebration of love?