Library of Congress's Blog, page 100

Pic of the Week: Noted Filmmaker Highlights the Value of America’s Film Heritage

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Celebrated filmmaker Christopher Nolan, left, joined Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in the Coolidge Auditorium on November 2 in a conversation about his personal experiences directing, writing and producing some of the most popular and acclaimed movies in cinematic history, including his latest, the World War II epic “Dunkirk.” He also spoke about the importance of film preservation and commented on topics including the value of continuing to shoot film in a post-digital age and the theatrical experience of it.

The event was one of several the Library is hosting this week to further its mission to celebrate and preserve America’s audiovisual heritage. Nolan is a member of the National Film Preservation Board and has been outspoken about the importance of film to our cultural history.

“As a member of our National Film Preservation Board, Christopher Nolan is a strong advocate for the preservation of this important part of our cultural history,” said Hayden upon announcing the event. “We’re proud to work with him and the entire film community—including writers, directors, actors, studio executives, theater owners and archivists—to make a lasting contribution to film preservation.”

Native American Heritage Month: Celebrating Sarah Winnemucca

November is National Native American Heritage Month. This annual recognition of the contributions of Native Americans to our national culture began in 1986, when President Ronald Reagan proclaimed November 23–30 of that year “American Indian Week.” In 1990, President George H. W. Bush extended the observance to an entire month. Every year since then, U.S. presidents have called for celebrating Native-Americans during the month of November, urging all the peoples of the United States to learn more about Native-American culture.

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Sarah Winnemucca’s statue in the Capitol Visitor Center. Photo by Judith Nierman.

In that spirit, we thought it would be a good time to highlight the remarkable story of Sarah Winnemucca. A powerful advocate for her people, she is also considered to be the first Native-American woman to secure a copyright and publish in the English language. In honor of her achievements, a six-foot-four bronze likeness of Winnemucca, sculpted by Benjamin Victor, was unveiled in 2005 in Emancipation Hall, the majestic gathering space in the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center.

Born in 1844 as Thocmetony, or “Shell Flower,” Winnemucca was a member of the Northern Piute tribe from an area that would later become the state of Nevada. The tribe had its first contact with white settlers shortly after her birth. Her grandfather, Chief Truckee, sought an amicable relationship with them, taking Winnemucca and other relatives to California to live and work among settlers when Winnemucca was a child. By age 10, she had learned English and Spanish. When she was 13, she lived in the household of William Ormsby of Genoa, Nevada, and later attended school briefly at the Convent of Notre Dame in San Jose.

In the meantime, the gold rush to California and the settlers it attracted to the West had undercut the Piute’s traditional way of life. In 1866, Winnemucca’s tribe asked her to use her English-speaking ability—a rare skill among her people—to ask the U.S. Army to stop the depredation of Piute bands by settlers. She agreed and went on to become an intermediary between her people and the U.S. government. She served variously as a translator, an interpreter and a teacher in interactions between her people and white settlers—sometimes incurring hostility for her approach to doing so.

Winnemucca published and copyrighted “Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims” in 1883 during a lecture tour of the East Coast in which she gave hundreds of speeches about her people’s lack of land, sustenance and rights. She had earlier traveled to Washington, D.C., to press President Rutherford B. Hayes to help.

In “Life Among the Piutes,” Winnemucca uses tales of hardship and human interest to persuade readers to pressure the U.S. government to change its Piute policy. The final chapter includes a petition to Congress for this purpose.

Winnemucca’s husband, Lewis H. Hopkins, helped Winnemucca by gathering material for the book at the Library of Congress. Educator Mary Peabody Mann edited the draft manuscript, and she and her sister, activist Elizabeth Peabody, hosted Winnemucca in their Boston home during Winnemucca’s lecture tour.

When Winnemucca returned to Nevada, she founded the Peabody Indian School, where she taught children in their native language and in English. Despite some success, the school suffered from financial shortfalls, including lack of support from the government, which demanded assimilation in Indian education. In 1887, the school was forced to close.

Four years later, Winnemucca died at her sister’s home in Henry’s Lake, Nevada, at age 47. The New York Times published news of her death on the front page of its October 27, 1891, issue, citing Winnemucca as the “most remarkable woman among the Piutes of Nevada.”

“It has been written that Sarah died believing she had not accomplished much—unconvinced that her life had an impact,” former senator Harry Reid of Nevada said at the dedication of Winnemucca’s statute in 2005. “I think if she could see us today, she might change her mind.”

For more information about National Native American Heritage Month, visit the newly updated web portal of the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration. The portal is a collaborative project to pay tribute to the rich ancestry and traditions of Native Americans and to recognize their important contributions to the United States.

New Online: Rhode Island Folklife Project Collection

This is a guest post by folklife specialist Ann Hoog.

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A Rhode Island woman puts the finishing touch on a Ukrainian Easter egg, or “psyanky,” demonstrating one of the traditions documented in the Rhode Island Folklife Project Collection.

The American Folklife Center is pleased to announce the online release of the Rhode Island Folklife Project Collection.

Between 1977 and 1997, the AFC conducted 25 ethnographic field projects and cultural surveys in various parts of the United States, resulting in a rich body of visual and aural documentation of our nation’s cultural heritage. In celebration of its 40th anniversary in 2016, the AFC set the goal of making all the survey collections available online.

So far, in addition to the Rhode Island project, the AFC has released the Chicago Ethnic Arts Project Collection, the Montana Folklife Survey Collection and the South-Central Georgia Folklife Project Collection. By the time all the collections are online, over a quarter-million new items will have been added to the Library’s digital collections.

The Rhode Island Folklife Project Collection resulted from an ethnographic field project conducted from July 15 to December 31, 1979, by the American Folklife Center in cooperation with the Rhode Island Heritage Commission, the Rhode Island Council on the Arts and the Rhode Island Historical Society.

The collection consists of approximately six linear feet of manuscripts and ephemera, 200 sound recordings and 17,000 photographs documenting the ethnic, regional and occupational traditions of Rhode Island, especially the ethnic arts of the African-American, French-Canadian, Greek, Irish, Italian, Jamaican, Lithuanian, Narragansett, Polish, Portuguese and Ukrainian communities.

Fieldworkers for the American Folklife Center created the documentation. Longtime AFC staffer (and native Rhode Islander!) Peter Bartis took initial photos before the survey started. The other fieldworkers were Michael E. Bell, Thomas A. Burns, Carl Fleischhauer, Henry Horenstein, Geraldine Niva Johnson and Kenneth S. Goldstein, the project’s director.

The collection’s photographs cover subjects such as houses, barns, beaches, yards, gardens, orchards, churches, cemeteries, street scenes, landscapes, seascapes and religious processions. Many photos document occupational culture, including photos of textile mills, sawmills, markets, restaurants, Jamaican migrant workers, woodworking, boat building, fishing, clamming, gunsmithing and taxidermy. Others feature recreational subjects, including baseball, horseshoes, sailing, picnics, arts and crafts, sand sculptures, music and dance.

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Two boys at a French-Canadian family picnic in Cumberland, Rhode Island. Photo by Henry Horenstein.

Among the photographs are more than 9,000 by photographer Henry Horenstein, one of the fieldworkers. From occupational settings to picnics to Pawtucket Red Sox games, Horenstein’s wonderfully framed photos are a highlight of the collection.

Sound recordings include interviews, plays, music, dance and church services, such as a September 16, 1979, service at Mother Key’s Memorial Church of God in Christ in Newport, Rhode Island. Listen to it here:

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In addition to this church service recording, the collection includes an interview with Mother Key (Reverend Margie Key), a radio broadcast of one of her sermons and more than 300 related photographs.

Additional Rhode Island Folklife Project Collection manuscripts, small publications, ephemera, planning documents and more are available in the American Folklife Center’s reading room at the Library of Congress.

Celebrating and Advocating #Preservation of America’s Audiovisual Heritage

This is a guest post by Gayle Osterberg, director of the Office of Communications.

The advent of recorded sound and moving images has enriched our lives beyond measure. We have heard the voices of presidents and shared the beauty of piano concertos. We have watched tragedies unfold worldwide, and in our own backyards. We’ve been transported by movies that captivate, beguile, frighten and inspire. We have absorbed voices of affirmation, division, satire and song. In short, we have come to understand our world a little bit better.

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A technician at the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center inspects a historical film reel. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The Library is home to more than 5 million audiovisual works, including more than 3.6 million sound recordings and more than 1.7 million film, television and video recordings, representing more than a century of audiovisual production. They include newsreels, popular song, independent film, early field recordings, blockbuster movies—every type of recorded sound and moving image you can think of.

Collecting and preserving these works—each one a mini time capsule—is an enormous mission. As technology continues to evolve, so must collecting and preservation practices. And as the volume of these creations intensifies, it really does take a community of individuals and institutions to make sure future generations will be able to access these windows into 20th-century—and now 21st-century—life.

The Library this week is hosting multiple events focused on celebrating and furthering these efforts, in collaboration with some of our preservation partners, and we invite you to follow along in a few different ways.

Follow along on social media: We will be sharing fun facts and tidbits about our audiovisual collections and preservation efforts all week on Twitter @LibraryCongress and Facebook.
Watch live programs on Facebook and YouTube: We are streaming programs on radio preservation and in celebration of public broadcasting’s 50th anniversary.
Nominate your favorite sound recordings and films: Cast a vote for songs or films for the National Recording Registry and the National Film Registry. Remember—they must be at least 10 years old.

More about what is happening at the Library this week:

The American Film Institute this week celebrates its 50th anniversary, and we are so grateful for its partnership over the years. AFI was founded as a national organization to focus attention on film preservation, to actively seek motion picture materials in need of preservation and to work in partnership with existing archives—like the Library of Congress—to secure permanent homes for these national treasures.

The Library’s collection includes more than 37,000 titles acquired in collaboration with AFI. These collections include original nitrate negatives and masters from major studios such as Columbia, RKO and Universal. Classics from early days of American film are among these collections: “Citizen Kane,” “It’s a Wonderful Life,” “The Birth of a Nation,” “All Quiet on the Western Front”—to name a scant few.

The collection also features an important corner in film history: films with all-black casts, originally intended for black audiences. These collections span 1918–1955 and range from drama to musical variety shows. The Library has partnered with Kino Classics to provide restored versions of many of these films to modern-day audiences.

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Christopher Nolan

Also this week, the Library hosts celebrated filmmaker Christopher Nolan for a special conversation with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Nolan is a member of the National Film Preservation Board and has been outspoken on the importance of film in our cultural history.

On Friday, two events at the Library will be live-streamed and offer a window into radio preservation and the history and impact of public broadcasting.

The ephemeral nature of radio, the lack of technology to preserve early broadcasts, neglect, emerging audio formats and underrepresentation of diverse genres are contributing factors in the crisis facing the preservation of America’s radio heritage. More than 300 of the nation’s top scholars and archivists will gather in and around Washington, D.C., throughout the week to address the state of radio preservation and what steps can be taken.

On Friday, the Library joins our partner in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, WGBH, in presenting four hours of programming celebrating the pioneers of public television with “Preserving Public Broadcasting at 50 Years.” The event will feature Cokie Roberts, Judy Woodruff, Jim Lehrer, Dick Cavett and many of the founders of classic public programming, including David Fanning (creator, “Frontline), Hugo Morales (co-founder, Radio Bilingüe), Bill Siemering (co-founder, creator of “All Things Considered) and many more.

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A selection of radio microphones. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Follow along throughout the week on Twitter @LibraryCongress #preservation, and tune in live on Facebook and YouTube to these events.

Preserving America’s Radio Heritage

Friday, Nov. 3, 9 a.m.–12:30 p.m. ET

Facebook: facebook.com/libraryofcongress

YouTube (with captions): youtube.com/Libraryofcongress
Preserving Public Broadcasting at 50 Years

Friday, Nov. 3, 2–6 p.m. ET

Facebook: facebook.com/libraryofcongress

YouTube (with captions): youtube.com/Libraryofcongress

Pic of the Week: Caring for the Library’s Oldest Poster

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Library of Congress conservators use enzymes and small hand tools to gently remove the cloth backing from the verso of a giant poster created to advertise a 19th-century circus. The treatment is part of an effort to preserve the poster, the earliest surviving one in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.

Titled “Five Celebrated Clowns Attached to Sands, Nathans and Company’s Circus,” the poster came into the Library’s collections as a result of being deposited with a copyright registration in 1856. Measuring almost 12 by 7 feet, it showcases five nearly life-size clowns.

Its size suggests that it was meant to be visible at a distance when adhered to the side of a building or a barn. Joseph W. Morse, who devised a system for printing theatrical posters from large blocks of wood, designed the poster. It was originally printed on 10 paper panels in four colors using 40 hand-carved wood blocks.

The Sands, Nathans and Company’s Circus operated from about 1855 to 1863 and was noted for its two performing elephants, Victoria and Albert.

The conservators shown here are, from left, Emilie Duncan, Claire Valero and Bailey Kinsky.

New Online: Scary Stories and More

This is a guest post by Stephen Winick of the American Folklife Center. An earlier version was published on “ Folklife Today ,” the center’s blog.

[image error]With Halloween just around the corner, the Library of Congress has released a new web guide to Halloween resources at the Library. It features select materials on the folk customs, fine art, pop culture and literature of Halloween and Día de Muertos, or “Day of the Dead,” observed in Mexico and elsewhere in North America on November 1.

Library collections range from classic films like “The Bride of Frankenstein,” “Nosferatu” and “Carnival of Souls” to recordings of storytellers spinning yarns about ghosts and witches. There is documentation of spooky séances with the great Harry Houdini, iconic artwork of Edward Gorey, essays by well-known scholars such as Jack Santino, photographic documentation of Halloween traditions . . . and, of course, thousands of wonderful books. The new web page will act as your guide through the Library’s spookier side!

If you plan to be in Washington, D.C., between October 27 and November 1, consider also checking out our pop-up exhibition of some of the best of these scary treasures. The event is called LOC Halloween: Chambers of Mystery, and it’s sure to add both cheer and chills to your All Hallows season.

For now, let me share with you “Married to the Devil,” an outstanding tale of the supernatural from the collections of the American Folklife Center. You can listen to it in the audio player and read along with my own transcription, below that.

The story comes from Bessie Jones (1902–84), a singer and teller whose extensive repertoire was recorded by Alan Lomax. His organization, the Association for Cultural Equity, has a nice biography of Jones online if you want to know more. For the present, let’s just say that she was an extraordinary talent, a leader of her Georgia coastal community and a cultural ambassador for her traditions. In 1982, she became part of the first annual group of National Heritage Fellows from the National Endowment for the Arts, a particularly distinguished group. Of course, Lomax’s extensive documentation of Jones is part of our archive here at the American Folklife Center.

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Bessie Jones (front) performing with the Sea Island Singers at Colonial Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Virginia, in 1960. Alan Lomax Collection.

Transcribing stories from people whose dialect is different from your own can be a challenge. Even Lomax, who knew her quite well, had to ask for clarification at one point! In most cases, I’m pretty sure I captured what she’s saying, though a few phrases could go either way: is she saying “yard dog” or “guard dog?” These moments of uncertainty even affected the title of the story. While the folks at the Association for Cultural Equity called it “Story of a Girl Who Got Engaged to the Devil,” I’m reasonably sure they go through with the wedding, so I decided to call it “Married to the Devil” instead.

“Married to the Devil” is a version of one of the most widespread magical tales in African-American tradition. In most American versions, the person who needs to escape the Devil is a man, and the helper is the Devil’s daughter. In this unusual version, the person escaping is the Devil’s newly married wife, and the helper is—well, let’s just say “it’s complicated!” A nice aspect of the story is that Bessie Jones gives Alan Lomax a little lesson in interpretation at the end. It’s one that I suspect a lot of African-Americans of her era would agree with. The fact that the story carries wisdom with both religious and practical applications may help explain why it was so popular with that community.

My transcription style is one that tries to keep some of the texture of oral performance. Rather than just organizing into paragraphs, I’ve made the unit of transcription the spoken line, bounded by pauses or other segment markers. In this, I follow some of my teachers in folklore, anthropology and linguistics, though I’m sure any deficiencies are purely my own fault.

Representing reported speech, which Jones only sometimes indicated with phrases like “say” or “she said,” was a challenge. I settled on using quotation marks throughout. But when the rooster sings, I used the block-quote function to set the singing off more fully from the plain text: a breakthrough into performance within the performance!

In the end, my goal was to represent how Bessie Jones told the tale, mainly for the benefit of listeners who might not catch the words of her dialect without some effort. So please listen to Bessie Jones tell the story, and scroll through my transcription as a form of subtitles.

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This girl, she was…a girl, they say

She THOUGHT that she was so pretty.

Everybody always told her she was pretty.

And she just had all…she just was IT, you know.

And her parents was rich and everything, and had plenty.

And she was their only one, and she had plenty.

So she told her mother that she was going to marry the prettiest man in the world,

That she wouldn’t be made ashamed nowhere, you know.

So, her mother told her, says: “Uh-huh. All right.”

And she wanted the prettiest man in the world.

Everybody come along and tried to marry this gal, and she said “No, no. No, no.”

So the Devil, he knows, you know.

The Devil made himself pretty, which he ARE pretty.

He made himself most beautified and charming,

Magnificent, you know, to look at, see. Very easy on the eyes.

He come up to the door

And all dressed up, you know,

He knew how to charm her, you see.

He come up there to the house, and he had his big rubber-tired buggy, you know,

They had buggies in those days…a fine buggy, and his…a fine horse.

His harness, it looked as silver to her.

Everything was charming to her eye…you know, he KNOW what to do.

And the buggy, it looked like the spokes was gold.

Red, Lord, it was just beautiful.

Whoo! And he was just IT!

He stepped out of there with all his diamonds and everything,

And all his glittering pins, whoo!

And he had his, his charm from head to feet.

And those pants he had on,

Looked like you could shave yourself with that crease in it, you know.

Oh, he was set a…he was set aside!

So that time, she seed him.

And all those charms, that’s went all through her,

Cause he knew how to do it.

So she said, “momma, this is the prettiest man in the world!”

“Look at…he’s stopping at this house, look AT him!”

And so, they looked at him.

And so, said, “sure is a pretty man!”

So he come to the door, and he talk and he talk

And he wanted to see the girl, and so all that,

So then, she walked OUT, you know,

She wanted to see HIM,

Let him see HER.

She’s all dressed to kill.

She sit and talk with him, and talk and talk.

So, he was after due to ask her to marry him,

She was ready, cause she didn’t want nobody else to get him.

Said she would marry him.

All right, said, “you’re ready to marry.”

“What we have to do to get married right now?”

“You got the preacher?”

Brought him back there, and they MARRIED.

She had to go home with him.

He had such a fine home.

He told her all about his nice home,

How beautiful it was,

And all…he just told her everything,

And she could look at him and tell he was all right.

And so they started out.

She left mother and everything that day,

And started on out.

And went through beautiful towns.

And seen most pretty homes.

She said, “Ooh, I wish that…I hope…”

“I HOPE my home be pretty like that.”

He said, “Ye-e-e-s-s-s, be prettier than that!

Prettier than that!”

Every town they go through,

There were big places seen,

She’d wish about it,

He’d say “yours be prettier than that.

Prettier than that, don’t worry.

Prettier than that.”

So finally, she comes to get into the country,

And missing houses,

And she wasn’t looking at him then,

She was waiting to see another town

Or another pretty house, or something.

She could see a smoke from far away,

And quite naturally know there was a town, somewhere.

And that’s goin’ on, and goin’, and goin’, and goin’,

And she wasn’t even noticing.

After a while, she noticed that she began to, you know, jerk up and down,

That way, like some bumpin’, and she looked to see how bumpy, you know,

How the road wasn’t ridin’ smooth no more.

She looked round, and then he done turned.

Two great big old horns up on his head,

Two great big red eyes, a wide mouth,

And lookin’ at…she looked at his hands,

He looked like that…an old Devil complete.

His horse was a grasshopper,

The Devil’s buggy was a road cart.

[Alan Lomax: A what?]

It done turned into a road cart. You know, a road cart.

See, that’s why she was bouncing so.

Then she sat there.

She was scared to death, too far from home to look back.

Didn’t know what to do.

Just sat right there, she was that scared.

Rolled on to his home,

Got out…he didn’t even tell her to get out

She just got on out.

Well, she stepped out the thing with a cry,

She didn’t know what to do.

So the Devil’s wife, she seed ‘em,

She come to the door and she called her,

Said “girl,” said “I know my husband fooled you down here.”

Said “this is the Devil’s place.”

Said “he’s…my husband’s the Devil.”

Oh, she was so outdone.

She told her he’d fooled her

And told her, says, “I know,”

Says, “That’s what he do”

“He fools people.”

“So if you want to get away,”

“And,” says, “I know you do,”

Say, “I want to help you get away,”

“I’m going to tell you HOW to get away.”

“So you go out there to the lot,”

“And you’ll see two horses.”

Say, “now, two of them horses, both those horses,”

“Comin’ in to the…gate.”

“And one of those horses gonna say ‘catch me’”

“And the other horse gonna say ‘don’t catch me.’”

And say, “and I’m going to give you a piece of iron, a grain of wheat, and one drop of water.”

Say, “you go on out to the lot,”

“And when you get there, and meet these horses…”

Say, “you see the big lot?”

She go, “yeah”

Say, “you get the horse that say ‘DON’T catch me.’”

Say, “when you get…when you go up that road,”

“You get up the road,” say “you…about five miles,”

Say, “you’ll see big signs all the way,”

“Every five miles, it’s marked.”

Say, “and you get about five miles,”

Say, “you…drop this grain of wheat.”

“And you go, and you get five miles further”

“Then you drop this iron,”

Say, “and the next five miles, you drop this water.”

All right, so, she said, “and you’ll get back home.”

You know, being taught how not to follow the Devil.

All right, she went out back to the lot,

And the horses come up to the gate,

One said “catch me,” and one said “don’t catch me.”

(Other said “catch me,” said “don’t catch me.”)

So she got on the horse that said “don’t catch me.”

She got on him.

And boy!

Her and that horse, that horse went on by then

When the word was “don’t catch me.” He MEANT that,

“Don’t catch me” when [she] get on, so he GOES.

And he went to going.

Old Devil’s ROOSTER’s now, was the only guard dog they have, you know.

The rooster he was walking around there,

Great big steps is, “clomp, clomp.”

He sees she’s gone.

He sees the horse is gone.

He went on out to the Devil’s workshop out there,

The Devil out there was out workin’ in the workshop,

Bam-nm, Bam-nm, Bam-nm, Bam-nm, knocking on iron, tin,

He’s a workin’.

Old rooster he come out there

He says to the Devil, he says:

That young lady you brought here is gone awaaaaay!

Old Devil heard nothin’, he’s noisy, he ain’t heard it, didn’t hear.

Rooster flutters up:

That young lady you brought here is gone awaaaaay!

He THOUGHT he understood it. He stopped to listen.

Old rooster crowed again:

That young lady you brought here is gone awaaaaay!

Ha, he’s thrown everything down, he runs to the lot

And there was his Don’t Catch Me gone!

He got on Catch Me.

And HIM and Catch Me, HIM and Catch Me got behind her,

And when she got to about five miles,

This one wheat, done turned into a great wheat field

And he had to go back home to get his wheat-cutter and cut it down

To see how to get the horse through there,

So he cut he cut that wheat down, and HIM and old Catch Me,

They was gone, they was gone.

So they got way up the road, and there up sets a GREAT big thing,

Well, it was so high, well, he couldn’t hardly get no way to get over it,

Couldn’t get around it.

So he had to go back. That was the iron bridge.

He had to go back home and get his iron saw and saw that bridge in two

He sawed, he sawed, he got the bridge sawed in two.

And then he pulled out behind her again.

And HIM and that horse, they got way up there and see that ocean of water

That one drop, it made an ocean of water.

There.

He left his…he run back, and got his oxen.

He got some drink oxen in Hell

He got them oxen to come back.

When they come back he turned them and said “drink, ox, drink. Drink, ox, drink.”

And then he looks and sees Don’t Catch Me floatin’, comin’ on back across the water.

She done made it safe!

And [he’s] comin’ back.

So, that’s the only thing that mattered,

‘Cause Don’t Catch Me had done put her landed!

So that’s just a great text, you know, if you understand it.

You see, how the Devil can tempt you

And get you into tribulation

But you got to put something BETWEEN you and him!

Trending: Celebrating the World Series with Song

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“The Red Sox Speed Boys” commemorates the victory of the Red Sox over the New York Giants in the 1912 World Series.

Baseball and music have a basic affinity, as any fan knows. . . . [E]very pitch ends either with the satisfying pop of the catcher’s mitt or the tension-creating crack of the bat. . . . It should surprise no one that a game with such inherently strong elements of musicality should have attracted scores of people who wanted to set it to music.

—David Broder, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and loyal Cubs fan

The Library holds more than 400 published songs about baseball in its Music Division, many of them from the heyday of American sheet music, 1895 to 1920, when baseball’s popularity was also growing. The first modern World Series was played during these years, in 1903, matching the victorious Boston Americans against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

In honor of the 2017 World Series, we’d like to call your attention to a selection of baseball sheet music on display at the Library of Congress through December 30. If you can’t make it to Washington, D.C., by then, you can view the exhibition, Baseball’s Greatest Hits: The Music of Our National Game, online.

Here are a few baseball songs (and a movie!) to get you started.

“The White Sox March” commemorates one of the greatest upsets in World Series history. In 1906, the Chicago White Sox—known as the “hitless wonders” after finishing the season with the worst team batting average (.230) in the American League—defeated a powerful Chicago Cubs in six games.
“The Red Sox Speed Boys” celebrated in song the triumph of the Red Sox over the New York Giants in the 1912 World Series. That year, which marked the inaugural season of Boston’s Fenway Park, was an exceptional one for the Red Sox. The team won 105 regular season games, including the first major-league game played at the park, in which they beat the New York Highlanders 7–6 in 11 innings.
“That Baseball Rag,” by lyricist Dave Wolff and composer Clarence M. Jones, was published in 1913. That year, the New York Giants became the first National League team since the Chicago Cubs to win three consecutive pennants. The Giants then lost the World Series to the Philadelphia Athletics. A recording of “The Baseball Rag” is available on the Library’s National Jukebox. Listen to it here:


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“Our Old Home Team” was composed in 1924 to celebrate the World Series victory that year of the Washington, D.C., Senators over the New York Giants. The song is dedicated to Senators pitching ace Walter “Big Train” Johnson (1887–1946), whose sizzling fast ball may have topped 100 mph. Johnson was one of the first five players inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Coincidentally, rare film footage of Senators’ 1924 win, including shots of Walter Johnson pitching, was discovered a few years ago among items included in an estate. The footage was sent to the Library’s Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, where technicians digitized and preserved it. Watch it here:

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And from the same World Series, here is a photograph from our collections of Elsie Tydings, who in October 1924 had the honor of purchasing the first ticket for a World Series in the nation’s capital!

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Elsie Tydings

For more information, see the Library’s Bibliography of Published Baseball Music and Songs.

A Ghostly Image: Spirit Photographs

This is a guest post by Kristi Finefield, a reference librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division. An earlier version was published on “ Picture This ,” the division’s blog.

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“The Haunted Lane,” a stereograph showing a ghost frightening a boy and a man. Created in 1889 by Melander and Bro. 

Can you take a photograph of a ghost? Will a spirit pose for your camera? Looking at “spirit photographs” from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, you might be tempted to answer, “Yes”!

Claims of capturing a spirit with the camera lens were made as early as the 1850s, when photography was relatively new to the world.  At that time, the process of photography was mysterious enough to most people that the idea of a photograph capturing the latent image of a spirit seemed quite possible.

By the time spirit photographs were being publicized in the 1860s, professional photographers had developed several techniques to portray ghost-like apparitions through composite images, double exposures and the like.

In fact, Sir David Brewster, in his 1856 book on the stereoscope, “The Stereoscope: Its History, Theory, and Construction,” gave step-by-step instructions for creating a spirit photo, beginning with:

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“Spirit,” a 1901 photograph allegedly documenting a séance. F. W. Fallis, photographer.

For the purpose of amusement, the photographer might carry us even into the regions of the supernatural. His art, as I have elsewhere shewn, enables him to give a spiritual appearance to one or more of his figures, and to exhibit them as “thin air” amid the solid realities of the stereoscopic picture.

He went on to explain how this was easily done. Simply pose your main subjects. Then, when the exposure time is nearly up, have the “spirit” figure enter the scene, holding still for only seconds before moving out of the picture. The “spirit” then appeared as a semi-transparent figure, as seen in “The Haunted Lane.”

One of the more famous—and infamous—spirit photographers was William H. Mumler of Boston. He turned his ability to make photographs with visible spirits into a lucrative business venture, starting in the 1860s. Doubts grew about his work, but even when a spiritualist named Doctor Gardner recognized some of the so-called spirits as living Bostonians, people continued to pay as much as $10 a sitting. Mumler was charged with fraud in 1869, though not convicted, due to lack of evidence.  However, his career as a photographer of the spirit world was essentially over.

Celebrities took sides in the debate in the 1920s. Famed author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an outspoken spiritualist who believed that the supernatural could appear in photographs, while illusionist Harry Houdini denounced mediums as fakes and spirit photography as a hoax. Doyle and Houdini publicly feuded in the newspapers.

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Harry Houdini with a ghostly image of Abraham Lincoln.

To demonstrate how easy it was to fake a photograph, Houdini had an image made in the 1920s, showing himself talking with Abraham Lincoln. He even based entire shows around debunking the claims of mediums and the entire idea of spiritualism.

That said, since Halloween will soon be upon us, a day for the spooky and the unexplained, you might want to keep your digital camera handy, just in case!

Learn More

Try a search in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog for spirit photographs or Halloween.
Find out more about Halloween in the collections of the Library of Congress on our updated Halloween page!

New Online: Ulysses S. Grant Papers

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

Ulysses S. Grant

On May 17, 1877, former president Ulysses S. Grant and his wife Julia departed from Philadelphia on an extended trip. Other former presidents traveled after retiring from public office, but none journeyed as far as Grant did. He and Julia spent the next two years traveling around the world meeting members of high society and the general public, while Grant engaged in unofficial diplomacy for the United States and acquired more first-hand knowledge of foreign lands and people than any American of his time.

Materials documenting Grant’s post-presidential travels are represented in the Ulysses S. Grant Papers at the Library of Congress, which are now available online. Other highlights of the collection include the handwritten manuscript draft of Grant’s celebrated memoirs, Civil War headquarters record books, and personal letters he wrote to Julia throughout their life together. While many people know Grant as a Civil War general, 18th president of the United States, and memoirist, few are familiar with Grant’s global adventures.

Traveling with special passports, General and Mrs. Grant arrived in the United Kingdom on May 28, 1877. Grant’s prominence, and the novelty of a former American president traveling abroad, prompted a flood of invitations for his attendance at dinners, receptions and other events in all the countries he visited before returning to the United States in September 1879. The council in Sheffield, England, sent a special resolution inviting Grant to visit when he was touring the area near the start of his travels, and Chulalongkorn, the King of Siam, sought to make Grant’s acquaintance on the final leg of his journey. The Shanghai Bowling Club in Shanghai, China, invited Grant to use its facilities, promising that “the alleys are open at all times.” The Grants maintained an active social and touring schedule during their two years abroad.

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October 23, 1878, letter to Grant from Navy secretary Richard W. Thompson.

While General Grant technically traveled as a private citizen, as a former president he clearly was considered an unofficial representative of the American government. That impression was sustained by his periodic travel on ships of the United States Navy, and made explicit in an October 23, 1878, letter from Secretary of the Navy Richard W. Thompson encouraging Grant to return to the United States via Asia as the relationships he formed in the East “would lead to more extended and intimate commercial relations between them and the United States.” Grant thus had to exercise greater diplomacy than the average American tourist in accepting (or not) invitations from parties involved in international disputes or making statements that might cause offense to his hosts. In one instance, Grant engaged in actual diplomatic activity in trying to negotiate peace between China and Japan over the Loo Choo (Ryukyu) Islands.

Grant’s contemporaries could read about his experiences in the newspapers, and a scrapbook of newspaper clippings in the Grant Papers allows modern readers to do the same. The New York Herald offered the most thorough coverage of Grant’s odyssey because Herald journalist (and future Librarian of Congress) John Russell Young accompanied the Grants for much of their time abroad and submitted stories for publication in the Herald. In 1879, Young published a narrative of his time with Grant in his book, “Around the World with General Grant.”

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January 25, 1878, letter from Grant to his son Frederick from Egypt.

Grant shared more personal observations in letters written to family and friends. To son Buck, he confided that the reality of the Levant region in the Middle East did not match his imagination. “All the romance given to Oriental splendor in novels and guide books is disipated [sic] by witnessing the real thing,” he lamented. Egypt greatly interested Grant, who wrote to his son Fred in 1878 that “I have seen more in Egypt to interest me than in all my other travels.” Grant then poked a little fun at his wife, noting that “your Ma balances on a donkey very well when she has an Arab on each side to hold her, and one to lead the donkey.”

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The Grants at Karnak, Egypt, in 1878,

Intrepid traveler Julia Grant accompanied her husband to nearly every location on his itinerary. She devoted five of the twelve chapters of her memoirs (chapters 7–11) to the trip, recalling pleasant memories of the sights enjoyed and the social receptions attended. Like many tourists, she relished shopping opportunities, including those in Turkey, the Netherlands, Russia and India.

In addition to her own purchases, she and her husband received numerous gifts along the way, such as silks, flower vases, lacquered boxes and a bird cage made of tortoise shell in Japan. But after a disappointing purchase of ostrich feathers in Egypt, Julia offered the would-be traveler a bit of advice: “Only buy what you need. You can get everything in New York better and cheaper than you can import it yourself.”

The memories, international good will and friendships the Grants made during their two years abroad, however, were priceless.

New Online: A Digital Treasure Trove of Rare Books

This is a guest post by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins.

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An image from “Map and Views Illustrating Sir Francis Drake’s West Indian Voyage,” 1585–6.

There is a mystique surrounding libraries with old, rare books, and the Library of Congress is no exception. Just think of all the dark and vast vaults of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division that are closed to the public and imagine what undiscovered treasures they hold. Now, thanks to the digital age, the stacks are open and searchable—everyone can access these untold treasures through our newly released web portal.

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Pages from the Gutenberg Bible, ca. 1454–5.

The Rare Book and Special Collections Division traces its beginnings to Thomas Jefferson, who sold his book collection to Congress in 1815. Today, the division’s holdings amount to nearly 800,000 books, encompassing nearly all eras and subjects maintained in well over 100 separate collections. Read About this Collection and the Articles and Essays for a fuller description of these rich collections.

The new portal will continue to grow and improve as we add more content and supporting documentation. Currently, there are nearly 1,000 digital resources to discover. Featured content, highlighted in the banner at the top of the portal’s home page, includes “Maps and Views Illustrating Sir Francis Drake West Indian Voyage,” Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the “Federalist,” the Declaration of Independence, “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz” and no less than the Gutenberg Bible. Continue to scroll along the top banner to sample a few of our other top treasures.

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Cover for “The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum, 1900.

There are so many more to discover! Just click Collection Items and search on a term of your choice. You can filter your search by clicking on the various categories on the left.

We are excited to share our treasures with you and welcome all! Our collections hold fascinating, important and just plain awe-inspiring items waiting to be found, and we invite you to mine them to make new connections and new discoveries.