Library of Congress's Blog, page 104

World War I: Workers Greet Labor Day 1918 with Optimism

This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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In a 1918 U.S. Department of Labor poster, a worker shakes hands with a soldier in symbolic support of the U.S. war effort.

Amid war, Labor Day in 1918 took on increased importance. Mobilization had presented unprecedented opportunities, and workers achieved remarkable advances during America’s months at war. Many reached out to President Woodrow Wilson before the 1918 holiday, hoping that he might make an appearance at their celebration: “Consider this Mr. President, and think of the moral effect upon our tens of thousands of shipyard workers who look to you for light and guidance,” wrote Oakland, Calif., labor representative William A. Spooner. Soon, however, in the afterglow of armistice and peace, labor would witness retrenchment.

The Library of Congress exhibition “Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I,” along with holdings from our Prints and Photographs Division, illuminates both the opportunities and the challenges that faced wartime laborers.

For labor, Wilson seemed an unlikely ally. As a younger politician, he had assailed the labor movement, describing it simultaneously as “economically disastrous” and “politically divisive.” When presidential ambitions and political necessity collided, however, Wilson courted labor.

In his first term, Wilson elevated the Department of Labor to a cabinet body and appointed “labor partisan” William B. Wilson as its head. Later, the president supported the passage of several labor reforms, including the Keating-Owens and Adamson Acts. In November 1917, Wilson became the first president to address the American Federation of Labor (AFL) at its annual convention.

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A December 14, 1917, letter from Samuel Gompers to Woodrow Wilson pledging the AFL’s support for the war.

Behind its president, Samuel Gompers, the AFL leant its support to Wilson and mobilization, even declaring labor’s “undivided support . . . so that it shall be a war of the people” in defense of the “fundamental institutions for human liberty transmitted to us by the forefathers of our country.”

The AFL expanded its membership from 2 to 3 million between 1917 and 1919. By the war’s conclusion, nearly a fifth of the workforce, excluding agriculture, belonged to a union. That is to say nothing of the benefits that nonunion labor in wartime industries enjoyed due to the achievements of their unionist counterparts. Yet the AFL did not represent all workers and could not fully guarantee the actions of all organized labor.

War rarely creates new conditions or movements in American society, but it does accelerate processes already in motion. This proved true of the nation’s labor movement, which had been battling big business since the late 1800s. From 1916 to 1922, between 1.5 and 4 million workers struck annually. The war failed to end such conflicts—instead, it raised the stakes.

More radical unions like the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) struggled as the U.S. government sought to place its foot on the IWW’s proverbial neck. In September 1917, the government raided IWW offices and placed over 100 of the union’s officers on trial in Chicago in 1918. Ironically, Gompers and other conservative unionists welcomed government intervention; it allowed Gompers to purge the AFL’s more radical members, marginalize rival unions and secure his own power.

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A July 12, 1917, photograph of hundreds of Wobblies being deported into the desert from Lowell, Ariz., now part of Bisbee.

Unions faced nongovernmental opposition as well: vigilantes targeted Wobblies, as IWW members were known, with violence. In 1917 in Bisbee, Ariz., local business leaders and police forced hundreds of Wobblies onto trains and deported them into the middle of the desert without food or water.

With nearly 440 strikes in the first month after the U.S. entered the war, Wilson agreed to the creation of numerous wartime labor agencies. The President’s Mediation Commission was created in September 1917 and dominated by future Supreme Court Justice and labor sympathizer Felix Frankfurter. The National War Labor Board, headed by former President William Taft and labor militant Frank P. Walsh, was established in April 1918 to intervene in labor disputes.

Through these two agencies and others, labor made great advances—though they were not shared equally across industries. Achievements included de facto recognition of unions, eight-hour work days, better wages, improved work conditions and collective bargaining. Critically, however, Wilson and Congress never institutionalized these gains. Or as historian Melvyn Dubofsky argued, “Wilsonians stocked the barest of legislative cupboards.” Moreover, the government’s wartime agencies lacked the power to actually enforce decisions; outcomes hinged on their ability to manipulate nationalism and wartime patriotism to cajole industry and labor to cooperate.

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A 1917 lithograph by Joseph Pennell depicts wartime work. He created it on behalf of a federal committee charged with pictorial publicity about the war effort.

Consequently, when armistice arrived on November 11, 1918, many of the gains afforded labor quickly evaporated. With the pressure of war removed, business leaders, who had always chaffed at government intervention, rolled back reforms. Under duress from an economy afflicted by inflation, workers soon went on strike; 1919 witnessed 3,000 strikes involving 4 million laborers.

Despite these admitted setbacks, World War I enabled labor to weaken what Frankfurter and others called “industrial autocracy.” It might not have enacted the “industrial democracy” that had been on the lips of workers during the war, but business now had to acknowledge labor, even if with half-hearted company unions.

Later, Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was assistant secretary of the Navy during World War I, drew upon his wartime experience to sign labor reforms into law through New Deal legislation. World War II then normalized and undergirded the labor movement, putting postwar retrenchment out of reach.

World War I Centennial, 2017–18 . With the most comprehensive collection of multiformat World War I holdings in the nation, the Library is a unique resource for primary source materials, education plans, public programs and on-site visitor experiences about the Great War including exhibits, symposia and book talks.

 

New Online: Alexander Hamilton Papers

This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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Alexander Hamilton from an original painting by Alonzo Chappel (1828–87).

In spring 1848, Congress appropriated $20,000 to buy the papers of Alexander Hamilton from his family, including his widow, Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton. Mrs. Hamilton, 91 years old and widowed since 1804, had moved to Washington that year to live with her daughter and, in the words of a friend, to press her “honorable claims” on the federal government. For years, she had been gathering and preserving her husband’s papers so that his memory would continue to shine even after she was no longer alive to burnish it. Now her work was done.

Congress kept Alexander Hamilton’s papers at the State Department, where the first to use them was John Church Hamilton, the Hamiltons’ son, who fulfilled his mother’s long-held wish when he published his seven-volume Works of Alexander Hamilton between 1850 and 1851. In 1903, President Theodore Roosevelt directed State to turn over its historical papers, including the Hamilton papers, to the Library of Congress. They arrived in the Library’s Manuscript Division in 1904, and they have been here ever since.

In the Manuscript Division, the Hamilton papers grew with additional gifts and purchases. The Library preserved, cataloged and microfilmed them. Scholars based books on them. A modern edition of Hamilton’s papers, edited by Harold C. Syrett, was published between 1961 and 1987. This edition was recently digitized by Founders Online. A separate edition of the papers Hamilton accumulated as a lawyer was edited by Julius Goebel and published between 1964 and 1981 (it has not been digitized). And then, in 2015, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical “Hamilton” made the Revolutionary War officer, treasury secretary, inconstant husband and duelist into a singing, dancing, 21st-century celebrity.

In January 2017, Sotheby’s sold a fresh trove of Alexander Hamilton papers at auction. These, mostly family papers, had surfaced after the musical’s success. The Library of Congress snagged 55 items at Sotheby’s, mostly letters from Philip Schuyler, Elizabeth Hamilton’s father, to her and her husband from 1790 until 1804, the year she lost them both. Now the Alexander Hamilton Papers at the Library of Congress, including the Sotheby’s purchase, have been digitized and are available online.

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A November 11, 1769, letter from Hamilton to his friend Edward Stevens.

The Hamilton Papers consist of letters, drafts of speeches and writings, legal papers and more, a total of approximately 12,000 items. They cover almost every aspect of Hamilton’s career and private life: as a boy in St. Croix; as George Washington’s aide-de-camp during the Revolutionary War; as a New York delegate to the Constitutional Convention of 1787; as first treasury secretary of the United States; as a New York lawyer; as inspector-general of the Army in the late 1790s, when war with France threatened; and as an unlucky duelist. Included are letters to and from George Washington, the Marquis de Lafayette and Charles Pierre L’Enfant. The papers also include correspondence with and among members of his family, including his wife; his sister-in-law, Angelica Schuyler Church; and his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler.

Among the highlights of the collection is a November 11, 1769, letter the 12- or 13-year old Hamilton, working as a clerk for a trading company in St. Croix, wrote his friend Edward Stevens: “Ned,” he wrote “my Ambition is prevalent that I contemn the grov’ling and condition of a Clerk or the like, to which my Fortune &c. condemns me and would willingly risk my life tho’ not my Character to exalt my Station.” He concluded: “I wish there was a War.”

Soon there was a war, and it offered Hamilton the chance to escape his impoverished boyhood just as his younger self had imagined it would. His correspondence as aide-de-camp to George Washington in the Revolutionary War is in the Hamilton Papers (and there is more in the George Washington Papers, which are also online).

As treasury secretary in George Washington’s presidential administration, Hamilton wrote a series of reports that shaped the economic program of the United States. Drafts of these, including four drafts of his “Report on Manufactures,” are another highlight.

Hamilton’s marriage to Elizabeth Schuyler in December 1780 was as important to his advancement as was his association with George Washington. The Library’s newly acquired letters from Philip Schuyler—one of George Washington’s major generals and a great landowner and political power in New York—to his daughter and son-in-law show how the Schuylers wholly embraced the immigrant, orphaned Hamilton, providing him not only social connections but also love. In a June 11, 1799, letter to his daughter, Philip Schuyler described his son-in-law as “that best of men whom heaven has bestowed upon you.”

Hamilton threw it all away when he agreed to meet with Aaron Burr on the heights of Weehawken on June 11, 1804. The papers contain the letters Hamilton wrote before the fatal duel. To his wife he wrote: “I need not tell you of the pangs I feel, from the idea of quitting you and exposing you to the anguish which I know you would feel. . . . Adieu best of wives and best of Women. Embrace all my darling Children for me.” But expose her he did, and the children, which is how she came to be in Washington in 1848, petitioning Congress to buy the paper remains of his life.

Now you can read Alexander Hamilton’s Papers online at home. You can page through folders, enlarge and rotate single images and learn from the bibliography, timeline, information for teachers, and more. And you will please the ghostly Elizabeth Hamilton, who I imagine is flickering around the Library of Congress right now, scrolling through her husband’s papers and smiling.

Trending: Wonder Woman of Tennis . . . and More

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Tennis star Alice Marble on September 3, 1937, during the U.S. National Championships—now known as the U.S. Open—in Forest Hills, New York. The photo montage is meant to demonstrate Marble’s serve and backhand.

Tens of thousands of tennis lovers will happily brave big crowds and warm temperatures this week to cheer their favorite stars in the U.S. Open. Held in New York City, the international tournament concludes the annual Grand Slam circuit.

Many Grand Slam champions are household names for years, whether for their history-making achievements, athletic prowess or colorful personalities—Arthur Ashe, Martina Navratilova, John McEnroe and Serena Williams are a few who come to mind. As decades pass, however, many stars fade from memory.

Today, probably few people outside the tennis world know the story of Alice Marble. But she was the No. 1 women’s tennis player in the United States between 1936 and 1940; the No. 1 player in the world in 1939; and an 18-time Grand Slam major champion. She appeared on the cover of Life Magazine on August 28, 1939.

I came across Marble’s story while researching an article for the upcoming issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine, which will highlight the Library’s vast collection of comics. Why comics? The reason: after Marble retired from tennis, her career continued on a pretty remarkable trajectory, including a stint as an associate editor of Wonder Woman.

Psychologist William Moulton Marston—the inventor of the lie-detector test—created the character of Wonder Woman as a strong, courageous figure meant to inspire self-confidence and achievement in young girls. She became the first female superhero to have her own comic book: Wonder Woman No. 1 appeared in summer 1942.

Marble became involved when Wonder Woman’s publisher was seeking endorsements from notable athletes to promote the new comic. Marble pitched the idea of creating an insert about real-life women who’d made history.

“What better way to promote strong women than to show that there are also superwomen in everyday life?” asks Georgia Higley, head of the Library’s Newspaper Section, in reference to Marble’s proposal. Higley is a curator of the Library’s comics collection, which includes more than 140,000 issues of more than 7,700 different titles, making it the biggest in the United States and perhaps the world.

Wonder Woman’s publisher embraced Marble’s concept, appointed her associate editor and paid her handsomely. Marble’s photo appears in Wonder Woman No. 1, along with a four-page comic about Florence Nightingale, the first Wonder Woman of History. Nightingale was followed by Clara Barton, Abigail Adams, Susan B. Anthony, Carrie Chapman Catt, Madame Curie, Helen Keller, Sojourner Truth and dozens of others.

It isn’t clear how long Marble wrote or edited Wonder Women of History. But her story continued to take fascinating twists and turns.

In 1942, she married an Army captain who left to fight in World War II not long afterward. Marble miscarried their baby following an accident and then, after learning that her husband had been killed, she attempted suicide.

Next she was recruited to serve as a World War II U.S. spy in Switzerland. Believing she had nothing more to lose, she agreed, she writes in her memoir, “Courting Danger.” She traveled to Switzerland under the pretense of conducting tennis clinics and exhibitions and gathered intelligence about Nazi finances from an old flame, a banker suspected of helping Nazis smuggle riches out of Germany. Found out, she was shot in the back while fleeing.

She recovered and settled her attention once again on tennis as an advocate for racial integration. In a July 1950 editorial in the American Lawn Tennis Magazine, Marble contended that fellow player Althea Gibson should be welcomed to play in U.S. Lawn Tennis Association competitions. Marble’s letter is widely credited with influencing Gibson’s invitation to play in the U.S. National Championships. She was the first African-American to do so.

Alice Marble was inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame in 1964. She died on December 13, 1990, at age 77.

Keep an eye out for the next issue of LCM to find out more about real people in comics and much more!

Pic of the Week: Picturing the Parks

This post is based on an article from the November–December 2016 issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine.

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Carleton Watkins captured this view of Yosemite’s Mirror Lake while most of the country was engaged in the Civil War.

National parks are among the nation’s most cherished natural resources. The National Park Service, a bureau of the U.S. Department of Interior, was created by an act of Congress. On August 25, 1916—101 years ago today—President Woodrow Wilson signed the act into law.

A century after its founding, the National Park Service overseas more than 400 sites, in every U.S. state and territory. These include parks, monuments, battlefields, scenic rivers and trails and historic sites—many of which are represented in the Library’s photograph collections.

One of these sites is California’s Yosemite National Park. Carleton Watkins captured the pristine scene at Yosemite’s Mirror Lake shown here during the 1860s. One of the best landscape photographers of the 19th century, Watkins used the cumbersome, demanding technology of his era—requiring large glass wet-plate negatives—to produce some of the most stunning images of this extraordinary wilderness. His images are credited with encouraging Congress to pass legislation in 1864 that required California to protect the area from development. President Abraham Lincoln, who signed the bill, was reported to have been very taken with the beauty of the images.

Subsequent efforts by landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted and naturalist John Muir resulted in Yosemite becoming a national park in 1890—decades before the establishment of the National Park Service.

The Library’s website contains thousands of images of the national parks, including more than 100 views of the Yosemite area by Watkins.

New Online: Pre-1958 Chinese Collection

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Copper-plate engraving showing military exploits in southwest China during the reign of the Qianlong emperor (1735–96).

The contents of the Asian Division’s Pre-1958 Chinese Collection, totaling more than 40,000 items, are now fully searchable through the Library’s online catalog in both Chinese characters and Romanized script. This rich and diverse collection has served researchers and general audiences for nearly 90 years; until now, however, bibliographic records for these materials were only available through a card catalog.

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Map of China hand-painted during the Ming dynasty (1368–1644).

Around 23,000 of the works in the collection—including 5,300 titles designated as rare books—were created before 1911, when the rule of China’s final imperial dynasty ended. Among these works are rare Song and Yuan dynasty editions (960–1368), including 11 Buddhist sutras and 6,000 volumes of Chinese and Tibetan works donated in 1915.

Another 18,000 works printed between 1912 and 1958 offer wide-ranging possibilities for historical research on the society, politics, economics and literature of that era. These materials include official documents and government archival sources pertaining to the Second Sino–Japanese War (1937–45) as well as the conflict between Nationalists and Communists that culminated in the establishment in 1949 of the People’s Republic of China.

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The first issue of the People’s Daily, May 15, 1946.

Not all pre-1958 records can be retrieved at once because of a limit on the number of items returned by a single search. But there are ways to get a glimpse of the records’ scope. For example, searching for “ChinesePre-1958” together with “history” in the online catalog’s quick search or keyword search will retrieve more than 3,000 results on this subject.

The Asian Division has prepared a research guide for the Pre-1958 Chinese Collection. It offers a detailed overview of the diverse types of materials found in the collection and helps readers to navigate the rich body of texts it contains.

Preserving History Page by Page: Q&A with an Aspiring Book Conservator

This is a guest post by Rebecca Naimon, an intern with the Library’s National and International Outreach Unit. She is a senior at the University of Chicago, majoring in English and minoring in statistics. Naimon supported the Library’s Junior Fellows Program this summer and is working on the 2017 National Book Festival .

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Rebecca Naimon (left), author of this post, and Riley Thomas, a 2017 Junior Fellows intern, beside the kind of device paper conservator William Barrow used in the 1950s and 1960s to test paper quality. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Riley Thomas spent ten weeks this summer in the Preservation Research and Testing Division as an intern with the Junior Fellows Program, performing molecular analysis on paper samples. When I found out about her project, I wanted to know more. So I met Riley for coffee one morning and interviewed her. She’s entering her senior year at the University of Delaware this fall as an art conservation and anthropology double major.

What was your Junior Fellows project?

I worked with the Barrow Book Collection, which was owned by William J. Barrow, a paper conservator and chemist in the 1950s and 1960s. He had around a thousand books from the 15th to the 19th centuries; after his death, they were donated to the Library.

You can really see the changes over the 400 years they span in the paper the books used, like parchment versus wood pulp, and the structure of the bindings. Some books from the 1500s and 1600s have really beautiful marble-decorated papers on the inside or really pretty illuminated letters.

Barrow used the books for testing, relying on a machine to fold pages back and forth at a 270-degree angle until they broke, counting how many times it took. He found that high acidity (a lower pH) was one of the biggest indicators of risk for degradation. He and his laboratory released reports saying that many papers from the 1800s and the first half of the 1900s were at risk for becoming unusable in libraries and other institutions.

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Thomas was especially fascinated by this pocket-sized edition of “The Iliad” from the Barrow Collection. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Now, we’re revisiting what Barrow did to see if his conclusions hold up with our more modern technology. We’ve been doing something called size-exclusion chromatography to examine the average molecular weight of the paper’s cellulose. If a paper has a lower average molecular weight, then it’s more degraded, so not as strong. We’re trying to see if there’s correlation between physical and chemical properties—strength and acidity—and the molecular structure of the cellulose of the same paper.

The work I did this summer supports the hypothesis that size-exclusion chromatography can be used instead of more destructive means to measure paper degradation. Additionally, my research showed that the Barrow Collection has deteriorated since the 1960s but that the amount of deterioration is not uniform between samples. The preservation lab now has a future research project on why there is such variation in the levels of deterioration.

Describe your typical day.

I ran about six paper samples a day, which were each five micro-punches of paper, one millimeter in diameter. I had to dissolve the paper to extract the cellulose from it, which could take anywhere from one to seven days. I had it on rotation, so I had something ready every day.

Once a sample dissolved, I diluted it and filtered it into little vials. I programmed the autosampler and let it run. In the meantime, I either took more samples or remeasured the pH of the books that Barrow reported as having the highest and the lowest pH. That unfortunately required full sheets of paper instead of micro-punches. But the books have kind of donated their bodies to science, so they are here for the purposes of research and testing.

Did you find anything exciting?

There is one book that I absolutely love that I found. It’s really tiny, maybe three inches by four inches, like a pocket-sized book. But it’s over 900 pages long because it’s “The Iliad.” On one side of the page, it’s in Latin; on the other side, it’s in Greek.

How did you get interested in conservation?

I learned about the field in my junior year of high school when I was trying to figure out what I wanted to do with my life. I’ve always loved art. I’m interested in anthropology, and I like history and science, too. Art conservation is super interdisciplinary. In my classes, we say it’s the three-legged stool of fine arts, chemistry, and art history/anthropology. I absolutely love it, and the program at the University of Delaware is great. We have to take four semesters of chemistry as part of the art conservation major, so that’s how I got interested in the chemistry aspect.

How was your experience as a Junior Fellow?

What I loved was that I had a supervisor, and we worked together on the goals of the project. But if there was something that I was interested in, he let me take the lead. I had a lot of independence in my day-to-day work.

Then, at the end of the program, we displayed our work for Library staff and the public. But we also had a presentation for our entire division. All the interns presented, and we had to write reports. I think both of those things are really important in the conservation field: being able to talk about your work and reporting on what you’ve done. Those experiences were really valuable to me.

New Online: Mary Ann “Mother” Bickerdyke’s Papers

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Mary Ann Bickerdyke, pictured in the Union Record, 1902.

During the Civil War, thousands of Union soldiers in the Western Theater affectionately called Mary Ann Bickerdyke (1817–1901) “Mother” for the tender maternal care she provided as a nurse and relief worker with the United States Sanitary Commission. Bickerdyke’s papers at the Library of Congress are now available online. They include lists of provisions supplied for soldiers’ aid during Bickerdyke’s time in the field as well as grateful letters from soldiers who benefitted from her nursing skills, donors on the home front and relief workers who shepherded food and other material to the front.

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“How little you who are living so far away know about the horrors and sorrow of this terrible war!” Bickerdyke wrote to her son James on June 6, 1864.

Like other women who provided nursing services in hospitals or labored on behalf of relief agencies during the Civil War, Bickerdyke had to leave her own children behind to be “Mother” to the soldiers who needed her care. At the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, she put her nursing background to use in Cairo, Illinois, by distributing supplies to soldiers and by serving as matron of the military hospital. Her work as a nurse and agent with the Sanitary Commission from 1862 to 1865 required her to follow the armies of Generals Ulysses S. Grant and William T. Sherman, establish field hospitals, arrange shipments of supplies and do whatever other tasks needed to be done on behalf of the soldiers who knew her as “Mother Bickerdyke.” This environment was no place for her own children, however; having been a widow since 1859, she had to rely on family and friends to look after her brood.

Letters between Bickerdyke and her children in the Bickerdyke Papers document the tension this separation occasionally caused between mother and children. “I suppose you are very busy and hardly have time to think of the loved ones at home,” wrote Bickerdyke’s daughter Mary on November 25, 1861. “There is not many minutes passes but I think of you wishing you was home or I could see you.” Son James frequently mentioned in his letters a wish to see his mother, noting on January 7, 1864, that “I would walk 5 miles to see you if you was so near.”

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An August 23, 1864, letter from Bickerdyke to son James.

Knowing that her children were safe with friends at home, Bickerdyke felt her duty lay with the boys in the field. She tried to explain in her letters to her own boys the necessity of her absence. On August 23, 1864, Bickerdyke wrote to James from a field hospital in Marietta, Georgia, during Sherman’s campaign for Atlanta. She regretted that she had not seen him all summer but noted if he “could see the multitudes of wounded and sick soldiers who are now fallen defending the northern homes you would feel that you were willing to give up your mother a little while longer to comfort them.” On the reverse side of the same page she explained her absence to son Hiram by asking him to sympathize with the wounded soldiers for whom she cared. “Just think if you had one leg amputated and shot through the arm or chest or head how much you would need your Mother to attend upon you and then think of one or two thousand in that condition and you will be patient . . . to give your Mother to these poor wounded dying men, for many die.”

 James Bickerdyke still wished to be reunited with his own mother, but on March 30, 1865, expressed a sentiment that could have applied to all those soldiers with whom he had shared Mary Ann Bickerdyke during the war, “Theirs no one like a mother.”

 

Looking to the Sky: Solar Eclipse 2017

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

“Thousands of residents stood with necks craned and peered wide-eyed through smudged glass as the moon sped between the sun and earth, gradually shutting off the bright morning light. From President Coolidge to the urchins with bundles of papers under their arms, the city marvelled at the awesome but magnificent sight.”

—Washington Post, Jan. 25, 1925

If you take away the obvious differences (Coolidge is president, paperboys on the streets), I imagine a similar scene taking place today during our solar eclipse. As in 1925, Washington, D.C., is outside the “path of totality” but will still be able to witness a partial eclipse, with the moon covering about 80 percent of the sun. (In 1925, it was 95 percent covered.) I expect many will step outside, myself included, and turn their eyes to the sky to witness the phenomenon firsthand. (I plan to wear specially made glasses, rather than relying on “smudged glass,” as mentioned in the article.)

President and Mrs. Coolidge both stood on the White House lawn on a freezing day in January 1925 to view the partial eclipse as it began, as seen below. They watched in the cold for a short while; after the president returned to work, he used his darkened glass plate (which was likely a developed photographic glass plate) to view the eclipse at its peak from inside the White House.

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President and Mrs. Coolidge view eclipse of the sun on January 24, 1925.

Other prominent Washington, D.C., officials took the time to view the 1925 eclipse as well, such as Postmaster General Harry New and Gen. John A. LeJeune, commandant of the U.S. Marine Corps. Most relied on a piece of darkened glass for viewing, as depicted in these photos.

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Postmaster General Harry New

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Gen. John A. LeJeune

Not satisfied with a casual look with the naked eye, astronomers at the U.S. Naval Observatory lined up with their telescopes to get a better view of the 1925 eclipse.

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Astronomers at the Naval Observatory

And of course, many were not content to simply watch a solar eclipse, but endeavored to capture and document the event. The eclipse in January 1925 was photographed and filmed from the dirigible USS Los Angeles by a team formed by the U.S. Naval Observatory and the U.S. Bureau of Standards. Some members of the team posed with one of the specially designed cameras destined for the airship in the photo below.

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A team planning to photograph the eclipse from the USS Los Angeles pose with a specially designed camera.

Flown into Washington, D.C., in order to be christened by President Coolidge in November 1924, the USS Los Angeles took a tour over the nation’s capital a few months before its eclipse expedition. In the photo below, the airship is above the National Mall, with the U.S. Capitol in the background.

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The USS Los Angeles flies above Washington, D.C., before its eclipse expedition.

Capturing natural phenomena through a camera lens was nothing new, however. Scientists recognized the usefulness of photography to their work almost immediately after its invention. By the 1850s, photographers began documenting eclipses for scientific study. A volume of photos in the Prints and Photographs Division’s collections systematically shows the incremental phases of the solar eclipse of May 26, 1854. An example of one of the photos is featured below on the top. For comparison, on the bottom is a photo taken in New York during the January 1925 eclipse.

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Photo of the May 26, 1854, eclipse

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Diamond ring of the 1925 eclipse. Photo by Frederick W. Goetz.

Celestial events such as solar eclipses are studied and documented by scientists and armchair astronomers. Witnessing the totality is an event that drives people to travel thousands of miles. Photographers study methods for capturing images of the moon blocking the sun. But even if you aren’t going to such lengths, all you really have to do today to see something remarkable is take a few minutes and look to the sky—with proper eye protection, of course!

Learn More:

Enjoy additional photos related to eclipses from the Harris and Ewing Collection.
The Washington, D.C.-based National Photo Company captured photos of people viewing eclipses in the early 20th century.
Watch the webcast of a recent lecture at the Library about eclipses. C. Alex Young, solar physicist and associate director for science at the Heliophysics Science Division at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, spoke about the celestial mechanics of eclipses as well as how NASA will study the August 21, 2017, eclipse.
Keep an eye on our social media channels today, including our blogs, for more content about eclipses!

Free to Use and Reuse: Classic Children’s Page Turners

This is a guest post by Sasha Dowdy, program specialist in the Library’s Young Readers Center.

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“The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,” by L. Frank Baum with illustrations by W.W. Denslow.

Ever since I was in elementary school, books have been bridge-builders for me. I am not a native English-speaker—my first language is Russian, and my second is Japanese—so as a child, it was a challenge sometimes to connect with the language in my classroom.

Enter “The Wizard of Oz” in the hands of my Canadian tutor. I knew the general story, but it came alive when I started slowly piecing the language puzzle together into portraits of Dorothy and her friends. Not only did I want to keep reading after our weekly two hours were up—I wanted to write my own stories about Oz. My English was still imperfect, but I was excited about it for the first time and anxious to put it to use. How could I resist, knowing that I was acquiring tools to tap into a completely new realm of stories? That’s how I started finding creative inspiration and building small bridges to bring the world of English-language stories closer to my own.

“The Wizard of Oz” is one of the public domain books available on Read.gov that we’re highlighting this month on the “free to use and reuse” feature on the Library’s home page. Each month, the website showcases digitized content from the Library’s collections that has no known copyright restrictions—meaning you can use it as you wish. Imagine the connections you can make with the books we’re featuring this month: all you need is Internet access! Scroll down for more selections.

The 1928 edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” is full of the whimsical illustrations we have grown to love. This copy even has a title page signed by Lewis Carroll. The book inspired movies, video games, theater productions and numerous literary works. What role did Alice play in your life?

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An illustration by John Tenniel for “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” by Lewis Carroll.

This 1913 edition of “The Jungle Book” contains vivid illustrations. Bonus content: you can find a New York Public Library stamp on pages 4, 5, and 6—imagine the journey it took to arrive at the Library of Congress! How far have you traveled with your favorite book?

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“The Jungle Book,” by Rudyard Kipling with illustrations by M. and E. Detmold.

This 1915 edition of “Mother Goose Finger Plays” has photographs demonstrating how adults can put on finger-puppet shows with youngsters while following along with the story. You will find familiar rhymes that have lasted in our memories for over a century!

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“Mother Goose Finger Plays” by Irene Margaret Cullison.

 

Print your own pages from the 1907 edition of “The Twelve Magic Changelings” and reenact the stories or make up your own based on the brilliantly colorful images in cutouts of the Town Mouse and the Country Mouse, Robinson Crusoe or Humpty Dumpty.

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“The Twelve Magic Changelings,” by M.A. Glen.

Relive the haunting of “The Raven,” accompanied by deliciously creepy illustrations from the 1884 edition. The introduction sets exactly the right tone: “The secret of a poem, no less than a jest’s prosperity, lies in the ear of him that hears it.” What better way to start the chills running down your spine?

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“The Raven,” by Edgar Allan Poe with illustrations by Gustave Doré.

Visit Read.gov to explore more classics from decades and centuries past. No matter whether you share them out loud, use them as learning materials, draw creative inspiration from them or enjoy them as bridges to other people, times or worlds—they are waiting to be read and loved again and again.

We would love to hear how you connect with these books, so please comment below!

National Book Festival Posters: Download Your Favorites!

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This year’s National Book Festival poster, designed by Roz Chast.

The National Book Festival began in 2001 as a joint project of former first lady Laura Bush and the Library of Congress. A career librarian and a native of Texas, Bush proposed a national literacy event building on the success of the Texas Book Festival. Her idea took off: the National Book Festival has taken place every year since 2001 in Washington, D.C., attracting more than a million visitors in total. This year’s festival will take place on September 2 at the Washington Convention Center.

One much-loved feature of the festival is the unique poster commissioned for each. Texas artist Lu Ann Barrow painted a folklore-style poster art for the first festival. Designed with children in mind, it aims to convey the wonder of reading through a scene in which family, friends and pets enjoy one another and good books on a day out. For years afterward, festival posters followed that model—artists from diverse personal and stylistic backgrounds communicated a love for reading to kids.

In 2014, nationally acclaimed illustrator Bob Staake was asked to do something a little different: to design a poster with appeal to adults and children alike, one that bridged age gaps while being colorful and uplifting. He depicted a green quarter-moon with a stocking cap happily “staying up late with a good book,” the festival’s theme that year, setting a new standard for festival posters.

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The inaugural National Book Festival poster, designed by Lu Ann Barrow.

Until 2013, artists submitted their designs to the Library as physical works—paintings in watercolor, acrylic or oil. That year, Suzy Lee submitted the first digital design, a large tree hosting ladybugs, frogs, rabbits, bears and other creatures interacting with patterned books.

This year’s poster, by New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast, offers a whimsical view of the festival from the perspective of the books themselves.

Below Library staff members comment on their favorite posters. Read their comments and then check out the posters on your own. Crowds of festival-goers have warmly welcomed each one of them, so you are sure to find something you like. Feel free to download and reproduce any of the posters!

Jamie Bresner, Art Director, Web Services

It’s tough to choose a favorite, but I really like Peter de Sève’s 2015 poster showing a young girl’s relationship with books and the story it tells of reading book after book.

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Rafael López designed the 2012 festival poster.

Jennifer Gavin, Festival Director, 2010–14

My favorite is the 2010 oil painting by illustrator Peter Ferguson, showing a young girl curled up in a cozy armchair, enraptured by the book she is reading, while famous characters from world-renowned books gather all around her, reading over her shoulder. It’s the looks on these characters’ faces—fascination, puzzlement, astonishment—that make me smile: Frodo and Treebeard, Cyrano de Bergerac and Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn and Jim, Hester Prynne, Captain Ahab, the Dodo and the Rabbit from “Alice in Wonderland” and several other lit-critters. But most of all, it’s me in that chair—me at about age 9. I could really relate to that poster!

Ashley Jones, Graphic Designer, Communications Office

It’s hard to pick a favorite poster. Each poster visually captures a celebration of the written word in a unique manner. But I really enjoy the whimsical imagery of the 2012 poster illustrated by Rafael López. The animals practically leap off the page.

Guy Lamolinara, Communications Officer, Center for the Book, Festival Co-Director, 2015–16

My favorite poster is from 2016, with the readers on a gondola. I especially like it because it has broad appeal for both adults as well as kids. It symbolizes how books can take you anywhere, and when I look at it I think of traveling to Venice—my favorite city in the world.

Faye Levin, Festival Volunteer Coordinator, 2005–07, 2010–17

My favorites include Gennady Spirin’s 2006 poster—the picture is perfect as books do take us to distant places, introduce us to new people and let us enter worlds we might never know. The fact that the poster also captures the magic of the National Mall (former home of the festival) is an added bonus. In terms of a sheer fun, Rafael López’s 2012 poster gets my vote. The children with their faces buried in books, the charming collection of animals and the hot-pink color make me smile every time I walk by the poster—the festival posters are all framed and line the walls of our pool-table room at home.

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Longtime festival volunteer coordinator Faye Levin displays framed festival posters in her home.

David Rice, Graphic Designer, Copyright Office

Rafael López’s 2012 poster is a harmonious blend of vibrant illustration and functional graphic design. The colorful and fanciful characters guide the viewer from the giraffe’s nose sniffing at the Library of Congress logo, down to the National Book Festival information, onward to the three kids immersed in their books. I’m sure every kid and adult has a creature on this poster that he or she is drawn to.

Natalie Buda Smith, User Experience Supervisor, Office of the Chief Information Officer

The 2016 poster, illustrated by Yuko Shimizu, is my absolute favorite. Her work is very graphic and contemporary and quite different from the styles chosen previously. Our team created some animations from her illustrations that were very fun to make. We also created many of the graphics used on the book festival app. It was a pleasure to use Shimizu’s engaging work. I have the poster hanging in my office to remind me of the wonderful and meaningful work we do at the Library.

For more about National Book Festival posters, check out our Pinterest board!