Library of Congress's Blog, page 105

World War I: Over There

This is a guest post by Rachel Telford, archivist for the Veterans History Project. It was first published on “Folklife Today,” the blog of the American Folklife Center.

Recently, the Veterans History Project launched “Over There,” part two of our companion site to the Library of Congress exhibit “Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I.” While part one explores the United States’ entry into the war, part two delves into the experiences of American servicemen overseas during the world’s first large-scale, industrialized war.

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Francis Edward Mahoney, circa 1918

Francis Edward Mahoney wrote to his mother regularly while he served in France. His wartime letters are full of details about his incoming mail and assurances that he is in good health but provide little insight into his experiences. However, shortly after the armistice, he writes:

I never told you about the front Ma, because I was afraid you would worry but now it is all over and safe I guess it is alright.

He goes on to describe frigid conditions during his first winter in France, service on the front lines as a truck driver and close calls with enemy artillery.

Louis W. Rosen also spared his parents the details of his service during the war, but in two lengthy letters written after the armistice, he details his experiences repairing telephone lines with the 77th Infantry Division and notes:

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Norvel Preston Clotfelter, 1918

Very often would I witness a shell land in a spot where I had been only a short while before.

While Mahoney and Rosen managed to avoid injury, others were not so lucky. Leo Joseph Bailey was wounded at Belleau Wood while diving

for his dugout during an artillery attack and would spend two months recuperating in various hospitals. Interestingly, in his memoir he recalls not the pain of the injury but the joy of sleeping in a bed for the first

time in nearly a year and waking to clean linens and a hearty breakfast.

Norvel Preston Clotfelter also found himself in the hospital, though not due to injury. Like thousands of other soldiers during this period, he fell ill with the Spanish flu and, in a move that likely saved his life, was removed from the front lines and hospitalized in the final days of the war.

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Lucius Byron Nash, 1918

The major battles involving the United States all occurred on land, but the Navy also played a vital role. Sailors like Lucius Byron Nash, who served aboard USS Roanoke, distributed mines across the North Sea to deter German U-boats (submarines). In letters home, he describes a dirty, grueling job, which demanded 12-hour shifts spent on deck in the pouring rain.

Whether they were on land or at sea, on the front lines or in support positions at the rear, American service personnel faced dangerous conditions and made considerable sacrifices as they fought for Allied victory. View all of the collections featured in the “Over There” exhibit here.

And don’t miss the third and final installment in our World War I series, “A World Overturned,” coming in September.

World War I Centennial, 2017–18 . With the most comprehensive collection of multiformat World War I holdings in the nation, the Library of Congress 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.

Inquiring Minds: Bringing the Navy’s History to Life Through Photographs

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Robert Hanshew works in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division in July. Photos by Shawn Miller.

Robert Hanshew visits the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division almost every Friday. Over the past two or so years, he has sorted through literally hundreds of archival boxes containing photographs related to U.S. naval history. On other days of the week, he can often be found at the National Archives. His goal: to find rare and interesting historical photographs for the new National Museum of the U.S. Navy.

Now located within the high-security Washington Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., the museum is complicated to visit for those who don’t have military credentials. Still in the planning stages, the new and much larger museum—it will be the size of about four football fields—will sit outside the security perimeter, offering more opportunities for public education through photographic exhibits.

Hanshew has curated photographs for the Navy for about 18 years. Most recently, he helped produce a major outdoor public history exhibit, “Behind These Walls,” consisting of nine-by-seven foot photographs highlighting the history of the Washington Navy Yard. The display sits along the yard’s historical perimeter and includes photographs Hanshew identified in the Library’s collections.

Here Hanshew answers questions about his research at the Library.

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A 1935 photograph from the Library’s collection is the backdrop for a “Behind These Walls” exhibit panel titled “Community.” It sits along the exterior wall of the Washington Navy Yard. 

Tell us a little about your research for the “Behind These Walls” exhibit.

The exhibit was done in conjunction with D.C.’s Capitol Riverfront Development to draw people to the Washington Navy Yard. The 11 panels were designed as quick, easy lessons on the various uses of the Navy Yard since its establishment in 1799. While performing research for this project, I found that the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division had some of the best-quality photographs—simple yet educational.

For the new naval museum, what kind of images are you looking for?

I am looking for images that might differ from the photographs that have been used for many years or be of better quality (richer tones and unscratched). I am also looking to identify images that have not been previously identified that could be used for exhibit purposes beyond the new museum. For example, we are currently doing an exhibit about the Battle of the Atlantic. I am going through photos of engagements of the Allies against German U-boats and identifying the submarines with help from National Archives records and other sources to tell a fuller and richer story.

What are some of your interesting finds at the Library?

The captions on the reverse side of photographs in the Navy and Marine Corps donated collections have been a revelation. At the National Archives, the photographs are mounted on a stiff cardboard that covers the captions, and the mount-card fronts usually have only one or two sentences. The information on the backs of photos at the Library helps me build better captions and offer more history, as names and proper dates are given. Another fantastic find at the Library are the educational tools the Navy used for training during World War II, including colorful naval aviation recognition tools used to help pilots identify U.S. aircraft from hostile planes. The images will make the basis for a wonderful exhibit at the new museum.

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An 1864 Library of Congress photograph is the backdrop for a “Behind These Walls” panel titled “Defense.” 

How do you document the photographs you identify for potential use?

I bring one of my best friends, my Nikon D80, to “photograph the photographs” and any relevant text. I then break down the photographs into war and nonwar eras that the Navy and Marine Corps have been involved in since the American Revolution. In our digital databases, they are further categorized by the exhibit’s chronology and additional subjects such as aviation, places, people, ships and weapons. I have gathered close to 30,000 images from the National Archives and the Library, along with images from our own archives. Staff and graphic designers will be able to choose from these images when the final design and construction process starts. I have now accrued close to 2,000 pages of referenced, photograph material from the Library and other D.C. repositories.  

How did you come to be a Navy photo curator?

A Navy veteran, I was lucky enough to be stationed in London, where I went back to university and finished a history degree. Then I traveled to Dublin to study further. About 18 years ago, an artifact curator position opened at the Naval History Center. After some time, I began to deal with photographs and performed a wide range of outreach. When it came time to start work for a new museum, I was fortunate to be offered the chance to perform the mission of curating all the visual aspects of the exhibits.

Can you comment on your experience generally working at the Library?

Every trip to the Library has been a joy. I view my trips as a good chance to chat with others who do similar jobs and are also excited about my finds of the week. I am also appreciative that the staff goes above and beyond to help me find what I might be looking for. For example, there was one image I could not find for a “Behind These Walls” exhibit panel, and I left disappointed. The staff took it upon themselves to do more research and found the image. This project would not be as good as it is without the help I have received from the Prints and Photographs Division. For that, alone, my team and I are eternally grateful.

 

A Different Sense of Thomas Jefferson’s Library

This post is by Zein Al-Maha Oweis , a summer intern in the Library’s Communications Office.

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Zein Al-Maha Oweis. Photo by Shawn Miller.

You know that feeling when Belle from “Beauty and the Beast” walks into the beast’s library of books from around the world—the gleam in her eyes that shows you she is amazed to see so many books creatively filled with words from different languages?

That is how I felt when the tour guide at the Library of Congress said, “Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Library.” I walked around the exhibit hearing people chatting, cameras snapping and sounds of amazement. I moved closer toward the shelves. But before I could reach the books, I felt the glass case that preserves them.

You might wonder why all my descriptions are sounds. Well, the answer is simple: I am visually impaired with only touch and sound as my tools to navigate the world around me. Still, I love books, and I can never imagine myself living without them.

When British troops destroyed the Library of Congress in 1814, former president Thomas Jefferson saved the day by selling his personal library of 6,487 books to Congress. Although a second fire on Christmas Eve of 1851 destroyed nearly two-thirds of the volumes, the Jefferson books remain the core from which the present collections of the Library of Congress developed.

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

The Thomas Jefferson Library exhibit is organized the same way Jefferson’s enlightened mind was organized. “He followed the premise of enlightenment, which is that all developments of the faculties of the human mind can be divided into three categories: memory, reason, and imagination,” explains Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. “He called them history, philosophy and fine arts.”

Physically, the space is also fashioned to reflect the way Jefferson used the library. “Jefferson wanted his books to be in a big circle, and he was supposed to sit in the center of it with his big desk and his Lazy Susan for books,” says Dimunation.

As you look around the moon-shaped cases with books hand-initialed by Jefferson, you can’t help but notice the white preservation boxes sitting among the sea of colorful spines. “These are the ghosts—these are the books that we are still looking for,” Dimunation says.

For 18 years now, the Library has been searching the world to replace the books lost in the 1851 fire. The goal is to match exactly the books that Jefferson owned. Later editions or editions published in other countries or cities won’t do. Dimunation has written to book specialists and sent emissaries to England, France and the Netherlands, and he and his team have even searched book dealers’ basements.

The way Jefferson collected titles makes the search especially challenging. Unlike other 18th-century bibliophiles, he collected his books in all languages. “His collection represents a much bigger base than almost any other collection in the world,” says Dimunation. Finishing the project requires locating 240 more books.

If you have not yet been to the Thomas Jefferson Library, I highly recommend a visit—you just might just see me sitting among the books, basking in all the wonders of the enlightened world. If you can’t make the trip, you can get your own—online—sense of the library here!

World War I Film Series: Testament of Youth

This is a guest post by Naomi Coquillon, an education specialist in the Interpretive Programs Office. It is the second of two posts by Coquillon about films the Library is screening this summer to highlight European perspectives on World War I. The screenings are part of the Library’s commemoration of the centennial of U.S. involvement in the conflict.

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Vera Brittain in the uniform of a World War I nurse with the Voluntary Aid Detachment. Photo courtesy First World War Poetry Digital Archive: http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/co....

This time last year He was seeing me off . . . and I had just begun to realise I loved Him. To-day he is lying in the military cemetery at Louvencourt—because a week ago He was killed in action. . . . And I, who in impatience felt a fortnight ago that I could not wait another minute to see him, must wait till all Eternity. All has been given to me, and all taken away again—in one year.

—Vera Brittain, New Year’s Eve, 1915

From “Chronicle of Youth: Vera Brittain’s War Diary”

In 1915, Vera Brittain—the daughter of a wealthy British paper manufacturer—suffered the first of many losses: her fiancé, Roland Leighton, was killed in action in the First World War just days before they were to be reunited for the Christmas holiday. That loss was followed in 1917 by those of her close friends Geoffrey Thurlow and Victor Richardson. Also in 1917, Brittain’s brother Edward was wounded in the Battle of the Somme; Brittain would nurse him back to health only to learn in June 1918 that he, too, had been killed in action. Roland, Geoffrey, Victor and Edward were among more than 700,000 soldiers from the United Kingdom to perish in the Great War. Through it all, Brittain recorded her thoughts and experiences in diaries, letters and poetry.

In 1915, Brittain wrote that “I am longing to begin nursing; the only way to support suffering one’s self is by alleviating even if it is only a little & indirectly, the sufferings of this unhappy stricken world.” Shortly thereafter, she left her studies at Oxford University to join the Voluntary Aid Detachment as a nurse, a role she would play for the remainder of the war. By 1918, more than 12,000 detachment nurses were serving in military hospitals throughout Europe.

After the war, Brittain returned to complete her studies at Oxford. She published her first novel, “The Dark Tide,” in 1923. It was followed 10 years later by “Testament of Youth,” her most famous work, which was based on her wartime diary and letters. In 2014, Brittain’s daughter, Baroness Shirley Williams, recalled that her mother “felt a need to recreate the young men that she loved by writing about them so their lives would not be ended. They’d live forever.”

“Testament of Youth” and Brittain’s personal correspondence present an unparalleled account of the World War I home front, battle front and aftermath of war. The novel was made into a BBC miniseries in 1979, nine years after Brittain’s death. In 2014, BBC Films produced a full-length feature starring Oscar-winner Alicia Vikander as Brittain and Kit Harington (now best known for his role in “Game of Thrones”) as Roland Leighton. At the premier of the film, Baroness Williams noted, “The great thing about this film is that in it, those young men do come alive again.” And through her letters and writings, Brittain does, too.

So it seems fitting that, as our summer series of European films on the Great War comes to an end, we should help to bring Brittain and her beloved brother and friends to life once again through Brittain’s story of that moment in time.

The Library will screen “Testament of Youth” at 2:30 pm on Saturday, August 12, in the Mary Pickford Theater, 3rd Floor, James Madison Building.

World War I Centennial, 2017–18 . With the most comprehensive collection of multiformat World War I holdings in the nation, the Library of Congress 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.

Uncovering the Story of Cats in the Biodiversity Heritage Library

This post is by Madison Arnold-Scerbo, a 2017 summer intern with the Junior Fellows Program . She is a student of history and museum studies at Haverford College. Her Junior Fellows project in the Science, Technology and Business Division combined many of her interests—the history of science, exhibition curation, library science and cats!

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At the Washington, D.C., Cat Show, Wardman Park Hotel, 1920.

Rodent catchers, lab specimens or treasured companions? Cats have played all these roles and more, as I found out this summer as a Junior Fellows intern in the Science, Technology and Business Division. I was assigned to create a digital exhibition drawing on sources from the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL) about a species of my choice, and I selected my favorite animal—the domestic cat.

Titled “Wild Mouser to Household Pet: A History of Cats in Science and Society, 1858 to 1992,” my exhibition showcases—through the story of a popular pet with a complicated history—resources from the Library’s science collections contained in the BHL, an open-access digital library that includes holdings from the Library and other institutions. My project also included choosing additional books from the Library to add to the BHL.

I discovered that from the 1850s to the 1920s in the United States and Europe, the role of the cat changed. Early on, cats were viewed as drifters that caught rodents, biological specimens for physicians and literary muses. It wasn’t until the end of the 1800s and the early 1900s that cats became domestic pets. In fact, in 1866 they were excluded from the Book of Household Pets.

But with popularity came consequences. A combination of negligent cat owners and the inability to spay or neuter cats led to widespread overpopulation. Cats became seen as a menace to wildlife, especially songbirds. Books from this time suggest some unpleasant ways to deal with this issue—an example is The Domestic Cat; Bird Killer, Mouser and Destroyer of Wild Life by Edward Howe Forbush.

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A May 8, 1895, newspaper story about the opening day of the first U.S. national cat show, held in Madison Square Garden, New York City.

Toward the end of the 19th century, another role for cats emerged: they became objects of display. Cat shows were places of entertainment, education and philanthropy. The first national cat show in the world was held in 1871 at the Crystal Palace in London. In 1895, the first national cat show in the United States took place.

Books and newspaper articles from the time share information for “cat fanciers.” A major concern was developing pedigreed breeds with particular traits. They did so using emerging scientific theories about heredity and genetics.

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A black-and-white cat from the 1898 book “The Angora Cat.”

One of my favorite discoveries about cat shows is the story “The Homeliest Cat” in Robert James’ 1898 book, The Angora Cat; How to Breed, Train and Keep It. In this story, a girl named Maysie enters her kitten Rags into the 1895 Madison Square Garden Cat Show. We get a glimpse into how spectacular this event was:

Oh, wasn’t it beautiful? All lit up with “’lectric” light! Row after row of cages crossed the floor, in each of which blinked and stretched and softly purred, a lovely lovely kitty.”

Rags ends up winning a prize for the ugliest cat, a real prize in the 1895 cat show! Other prizes went to the best long-haired cat, the best litter of kittens and the heaviest cat.

Check out my exhibition—suitable for scientists and cat enthusiasts alike!—to find out more about the long and complicated history of cats and their relationships with humans.

Learn More

Explore the full online exhibition Wild Mouser to Household Pet: A History of Cats in Science and Society, 1858 to 1992.
View all the digitized books from the BHL Book Collection “A History of Cats from 1858 to 1922”
Read a Science, Technology and Business Division blog post titled “Can Cats Speak to Us?”
See the list of books the Library of Congress has contributed to the BHL.

This Day in History: James Baldwin

This post draws on an essay about Baldwin’s life and achievements by Alan Gevinson of the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center .

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Photograph of James Baldwin from the Carl Van Vechten Collection. LC-USZ62-42481.

James Baldwin was born 93 years ago today, on August 2, 1924, in New York City. His many novels include his first, “Go Tell It on the Mountain” (1953), considered an American classic. He was also a poet and a playwright, but he is most well known and remembered as an essayist and social critic.

The Library of Congress has several notable audio recordings of Baldwin in its collections, including a December 10, 1986, lecture Baldwin gave at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., a year before he died. In it, he reflects on the meaning and impact of race in American life, a subject he investigated from the start of his writing career in the 1940s.

The lecture is one of nearly 2,000 recordings in the series “Food for Thought: Presidents, Prime Ministers and Other National Press Club Luncheon Speakers, 1954–89,” available on the Library’s website. Other speakers include Leonard Bernstein, Fidel Castro, Bob Hope, Nikita Khrushchev, Richard M. Nixon and Jonas Salk. The Library’s recordings of Baldwin, including his National Press Club lecture, are embedded at the end of this post.

Baldwin grew up in Harlem, the eldest of nine children. “I began plotting novels at about the time I learned to read,” Baldwin reminisced in an autobiographical essay that served to introduce his first collection of essays, “Notes of a Native Son” (1955). In grade school, his principal and teachers fostered his interest in reading and writing, urging him to visit the local branch of the New York Public Library.

At Frederick Douglass Junior High School in Harlem, Baldwin received encouragement from two African American teachers, acclaimed Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen and Herman W. Porter, a Harvard-educated math teacher, who helped Baldwin run the school magazine.

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Photograph of Countee Cullen from the Carl Van Vechten Collection. LC-USZ62-42529

Cullen persuaded Baldwin to attend his own alma mater, DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, considered one of the top public schools in the city. Interested mainly in English and history, Baldwin became an editor of the school’s literary magazine, The Magpie, to which he contributed stories, plays and poems. During high school, Baldwin also preached at a Pentecostal storefront church in Harlem, where his stepfather was a preacher. His novel “Go Tell It on the Mountain” draws on his experiences there.

Baldwin was inspired in the 1940s by American modernist painter Beauford Delaney, whom he viewed as “living proof . . . that a black man could be an artist.” Baldwin spent time listening to jazz and blues recordings in Delaney’s Greenwich Village studio, an experience Baldwin described as spiritually meaningful. He later credited Delaney with teaching him to observe reality closely and to honestly confront disturbing phenomena.

Baldwin moved to Greenwich Village himself after a dispiriting year as a laborer at a defense-related construction site in New Jersey, where he endured racial prejudice. In Greenwich Village, he began to explore his sexual identity and commenced his professional career as a writer. He initiated a meeting in 1944 with Richard Wright, author of the acclaimed 1940 novel “Native Son.” After reading Baldwin’s work, Wright recommended him to his editors at Harper and Brothers publishers.

Beginning in 1947, Baldwin published essays and book reviews in The Nation, The New Leader, Commentary and Partisan Review. His first short story to appear in a major publication, “Previous Condition,” was published in Commentary in October 1948.

The next month, Baldwin moved to Paris, feeling that he had reached the limit of his tolerance for racial prejudice and eager to develop his literary career in a broader context. In the years following, he produced some of his most famous work, including “Go Tell It on a Mountain” and “Notes of a Native Son.” His work addressed complex pressures arising from integration not only of African Americans, but also of gays and bisexual men. Other titles include the novel “Giovanni’s Room” (1956), in which he explores the issues of race, sexuality and identity; the bestseller “Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son” (1961); the novel ”Another Country” (1962); and “The Fire Next Time” (1963), a book of two essays.

Although he lived outside the U.S. for much of his life, Baldwin’s writing remained focused intently on the American experience. He became a leader of the U.S. civil rights movement and on May 17, 1963, Time magazine featured Baldwin on its cover, stating, “There is not another writer who expresses with such poignancy and abrasiveness the dark realities of the racial ferment in North and South.”

In a December 1986 interview, shortly before he appeared at the National Press Club, Baldwin described writing as an act of faith. “The time of any artist—the time of any person—is brief. But that does not mean that he or she doesn’t have an inheritance which one way or another he is compelled to pass down the line. So you work in the dark; you work in your time. The only real sin is despair . . . and you try to tell the truth.”

James Baldwin died on December 1, 1987, at his home in France.

Scroll down for recordings of Baldwin: an April 1986 reading by Baldwin at the Library of Congress, introduced by poet Gwendolyn Brooks; the December 1986 National Press Club recording cited in this post; and an audiovisual interview Baldwin conducted in San Francisco in 1963 for a television documentary on the racial situation in the U.S.

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Inquiring Minds: Chinese Opera in North America

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Nancy Rao

In her new book, “Chinatown Opera Theater in North America,” music scholar Nancy Yunhwa Rao tells the story of how Chinatown opera, performed initially to entertain Chinese immigrants, developed into an important part of America’s musical culture.

Drawing on new Chinese- and English-language research—including sources at the Library of Congress—she unmasks the backstage world of Chinese opera while also looking at the role of Chinatown theaters in shaping Chinese-American identities and the birth of modern American music.

Rao is professor of music at the Mason Gross School of the Arts at Rutgers University. She has studied connections between China and the West and published on the ways in which modern composers of Chinese origin draw on the gestures, vocal styles and percussion patterns of Chinese opera. She has also explored other aspects of American music, including the life and contributions of American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger.

In 2012, Rao spent time in residency at the Library of Congress as a recipient of the Gerald E. and Corinne L. Parsons Fund Award, established to make the collections of primary ethnographic materials housed at the Library available to researchers. She will discuss her research and her new book at the Library at noon on August 9 in a Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture.

  Tell us a little about your book.

The book is about the world of Chinatown theaters, focusing on iconic theaters in San Francisco and New York but also tracing the transnational networks and migration routes connecting theaters and performers in China, Canada and even Cuba.

It brings together the threads of an enormously complex story: on one hand, the elements outside the theaters—including U.S. government policies on Chinese immigration, dissemination through recordings and print materials of the music performed in the theaters, impresarios competing for performers and audiences and business organizations facilitating the functioning of the theaters—and on the other hand, the world inside the theaters, encompassing individual performers, audiences, repertoire and the adaptation of Chinese performance practices to the American immigrant context.

The book also documents the influence of the theaters on the Chinatown community’s sense of its cultural self. Through the study of Chinese-American music as American music, it seeks to revise understandings of the latter by placing the musical activities of an important immigrant group firmly within the bounds of music identified as “American,” liberating it from the ghetto of exoticism.

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Stage photo of a production of the Chinese opera “Mu Guiying Takes Command” in the collection of Library of Congress. Shown here is the genre of Peking opera.

What inspired you to write about Chinese opera?

I spent many years analyzing American ultramodern music of the 1930s, by composers such as Henry Cowell, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and others. The constant reference to the influence of Chinese opera on their music always intrigued me. When I traced the history further, I realized that not only had Chinese opera, Cantonese opera in particular, been performed in the United States since the 1850s (the first troupe came in 1852), but also that there was an important renaissance of its performance in the 1920s, with six theaters opening across the United States in a short span of three years. It is a much neglected chapter of American music history.

Also, I grew up in Taiwan with parents from mainland China. I knew several different Chinese opera genres from following my mother and nanny as a kid. So the issues of opera and diaspora, family, community and fandom are familiar and particularly meaningful to me.

What collections did you use at the Library?

As a Parsons Fellow, I had wonderful access to collections at the Library of Congress. At the American Folklife Center, the field tapes of Chinese immigrants from the Ethnographic Collections allowed me to learn their cultural expression and social activities in several states around the mid-20th century. These tapes might not be directly related to Cantonese opera, but the voices and utterance of the immigrants gave me an important feel for the social context.

At the Asian Division, I studied many boxes of materials from Chinese performing groups in America, as well as many books on Chinese opera. At the Prints and Photographs Division, I found in the Bain Collection many fascinating photos of New York’s Chinatown in the 1910s, including the design of a Chinese theater that never got built! The pictorial collections of early San Francisco souvenirs and books were amazing as well, showing many details about 19th-century Chinese theaters that I had not encountered elsewhere. Other drawings, photos and prints from different cities also contain voluminous images of early Chinese immigrant communities—street views, parades, architecture, pedestrians, interiors, families, crowds at community bulletins—through which I built an understanding of cities where the Chinatown theaters thrived and were embraced by both locals and visitors from afar.

What was the importance of Chinese opera to the Chinese-American immigrant community?

Whether for young children and their families, men and women doing menial work at laundries or merchants and store owners, Cantonese opera was an important form of musical utterance. Few other genres matched opera songs as apt expressions of mood, values and feelings for them. In particular, during the period of renaissance in the 1920s, live performance was still the most important form of entertainment and theaters the largest gathering place in the community.

With many stellar opera performers, Chinatown theaters attracted new audiences to Cantonese opera as well: those who attended because they were the talk of the town, those who were attracted by the Chinese identity they symbolized and, last but not least, those second generation Chinese-Americans for whom the theaters were everything from playground to education in all things Chinese.

In addition to theaters, Cantonese opera records began to be very popular in late 1920s with the advent of better technology, so opera could be heard everywhere—in stores, on streets and in homes, as well as places far away from any Chinese theaters. The arias were also common in print form as published anthologies of lyrics, pamphlets that came with recordings and playbills on which lyrics were printed. I wrote about a Chinese-American woman growing up in Mississippi listening to Cantonese opera recordings in the back of her family grocery store who felt “at home” when she eventually visited San Francisco’s Chinese theater for the first time! Sonic literacy underpinned her feeling of cultural belonging and triggered a sense of social identity.

When did people from outside the immigrant community start attending performances?

From 1852, when they first appeared in United States (at the American Theater in San Francisco), Chinese opera theaters were entertainment to all at the frontier. In 1868, the Daily Dramatic Chronicle reported that Chinese theater had the fourth highest revenue in San Francisco, out of nine theaters listed. As Chinatowns began to be established, Chinese theaters became an important tourist destination. Many of these audiences from outside the immigrant community were attracted by elaborate and spectacular costumes, tumbling and acrobatic movement. But some were attracted by the performing styles as well, such as members of California’s Bohemian Club, whose own drama drew inspiration and even materials from Chinese opera theaters.

In the Roaring Twenties, many forward-thinking performing artists and composers from outside of Chinese communities attended performances and drew from the aesthetics and expression to craft modern music, theater and dance. Composers such as John Cage and Lou Harrison were famous examples.

How has Chinese opera influenced the broader American musical culture?

In addition to their influence on American modern music, dance and theater of the 1920s and 1930s, Chinatown opera theaters were an important part of urban histories. Many amateur groups or clubs such as the Bohemian Club emulated their performing styles; jazz musicians of the early 20th century commonly adopted a drum used in Chinese opera accompaniment; and Chinese theaters became the basis of plays such as “The Yellow Jacket” and operas like “L’Oracle” and “Fay Yen Fah.” In addition, in the form of social memory, Chinese opera continues to be symbolically significant in the work of our contemporary Asian-American authors and artists, such as Maxine Hong Kingston, David Henry Hwang, Fred Ho, Frank Chin and Amy Tan, among others.

What was it like to work at the Library and with Library staff?

As a Parsons Fellow, I received a great deal of support and generous help from staff members at the Folklife Center. They not only gave me direction in using their collection and dug out obscure materials for my research, even if only tangentially related, but they also introduced me to librarians and staff in other divisions of the Library. I have remained in contact with some of them, and continued to draw on their help from afar when I was writing the book. I remain grateful for the experience.

The Umpire Strikes Out: Baseball Music and Labor

This post is by Katherine Walden, a 2017 summer intern with the Junior Fellows Program . Walden is a Ph.D. candidate in American studies and sport studies at the University of Iowa, where she is also completing a master’s degree in library and information science with a focus on digital humanities and archives. She has a bachelor’s degree in music from Vanderbilt University.

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Katherine Walden at Vanderbilt University’s Hawkins Field. Photo by John Russell, Vanderbilt University.

This summer, I have been updating the Music Division’s 1991 baseball music bibliography, which identifies over 400 baseball-related titles in the division’s holdings. Much like a scavenger hunt, my internship involves thinking about where baseball songs might be in the collection, as well as what keywords or search terms might lead to copyright deposits for previously unknown baseball songs. My goal is to at least double the bibliography’s size to provide a robust resource for Library staff, academic researchers and anyone who wants to know more about baseball.

Among my many interesting finds, songs about umpires especially stand out for me. I research U.S. popular culture and baseball labor history, and umpire songs offer a fascinating glimpse into both.

Today, the umpire is frequently an object of fan ridicule. But long before instant replay destabilized umpires’ authority, early baseball fans—and Tin Pan Alley songwriters—looked for ways to ridicule “the man behind the plate.” I have yet to find a song written from an umpire’s perspective, which suggests songwriters thought depicting umpires as humorous or pitiful would have better popular culture traction than attempts to rehabilitate the umpire.

The chorus to the 1909 title “Let’s Get the Umpire’s Goat,” written by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth (a co-writer of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game”), shows how fans expressed their frustration with the umpire:

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“Let’s Get the Umpire’s Goat,” by Nora Bayes and Jack Norworth.

Let’s get the Umpire’s goat, goat, goat

Let’s make him go up in the air

We’ll yell, Oh you robber! Go somewhere and die

Back to the bush, You’ve got mud in your eye

Oh, what an awful decision!

Why don’t you put spectacles on?

Let’s holler like sin, and then our side will win,

When the umpire’s nanny is gone.

The 1905 title “The Umpire Is a Most Unhappy Man” suggests that driving a hearse was the only profession worse than being an umpire. The chorus asks

How’d you like to be an umpire

Work like his is merely play

He don’t even have to ask for

All the things that come his way

When the crowd yells, ‘knock his block off’

‘Soak him good,’ says ev’ry fan

Then who wants to be an umpire

The brickbats whiz when he gets his

For the umpire is a most unhappy man.

Listen at the Library’s National Jukebox:

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Even the famous “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” includes a passing reference to umpires. The song’s main character, Katie Casey, “saw all the games” and “told the umpire he was wrong, all along good and strong.”

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“Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” by Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer.

Though entertaining, early 20th-century songs about umpires also reflect changes in popular culture and a period in American labor history rife with worker strikes and labor activism.

Early baseball in the United States existed primarily in upscale gentlemen’s clubs, but after the Civil War and into the 20th century, entrepreneurs like Albert Spaulding and Henry Chadwick made strategic efforts to market the game to working class fans, from mass-produced baseball equipment to inexpensive annual baseball guides.

As baseball infiltrated popular culture, labor in professional baseball became a contentious issue, just as it was in other realms. The American Federation of Labor had formed in 1886, the Western Federation of Miners was established in 1893, and the Pullman railway strike took place in 1894. Also occurring were a variety of coal strikes and movements advocating living wages, child labor laws and safe working conditions.

In baseball, it was team owners and league officials who were most often in tension with players in labor debates. But the umpire was an easier target, and composers continued writing songs about umpires past World War II.

Want to see more songs about baseball umpires? Check out umpire-related titles in the Library’s digitized sheet music collections.

To learn more about baseball songs in the era of sheet music, visit the Library’s exhibition “Baseball’s Greatest Hits: The Music of Our National Game.”

Pic of the Week: Library Fellows Display Treasures

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Participants in the Library’s Junior Fellows Program displayed items from the collections on July 26 in the Jefferson Building. Photo by Shawn Miller.

This week, interns participating in the Library’s Junior Fellows Program presented more than 150 rare and unique items they researched and processed over the summer. For the first time since the program’s launch in 1991, “display day” was open to the public.

Items on view included blueprints for the Statue of Liberty’s pedestal, a letter handwritten by Abraham Lincoln about William Shakespeare, a postcard from Jacqueline Kennedy to architect I.M. Pei, a stage manager’s copy of Tennessee Williams’s “The Glass Menagerie” and more.

Working under the direction of Library curators and specialists, the interns—selected from among more than 900 applicants across the country—explored the institution’s unparalleled collections and resources.

To view the complete list of display items, visit this Library link.

Inquiring Minds: Finding Gems in the Jazz Collections

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John Szwed (left) and Larry Appelbaum of the Library’s Music Division. Photo by Larry Appelbaum.

John Szwed has many accomplishments to his name. To name a few, he directed the Center for Jazz Studies at Columbia University, taught anthropology and African American studies for 26 years at Yale University, played jazz professionally for more than a decade, and wrote or edited 18 books, including “So What: The Life of Miles Davis”; “Space Is the Place: The Lives and Times of Sun Ra”; and “Jazz 101.” His book “Doctor Jazz,” included with the CD set “Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax,” won a Grammy Award in 2005.

For much of 2016–17, Szwed was a visiting scholar at the Library of Congress, where he conducted research in the Music Division’s jazz collections. He did so under the auspices of the Jazz Scholar Program, a collaborative effort of the Library and the Reva and David Logan Foundation. It was not Szwed’s first experience at the Library: over many years, he has consulted the Library’s collections for his research. Here Szwed answers questions about his experiences at the Library.

Why did you want to be jazz scholar at Library this past year?

I was anxious to catch up with recent acquisitions in the Music Division and to see what might suggest to me a subject for a new book.

You wrote in a separate blog that you spent a lot of time exploring the papers of jazz drummer Max Roach. What drew you to his papers?

Max Roach was an exceptional musician in many ways. In addition to being a world-known percussionist and composer, he was an author, lecturer, professor, producer and advocate for human rights. Since many of his activities were not as well documented as his music, I wanted to see what was available in the Library. Fortunately, his archive is one of the largest ever kept by a musician.

Why was Roach such an important figure in jazz?

In the early 1940s, he was one of the creators of bebop, one of the most radical and serious forms of jazz. But unlike most other jazz musicians, he was an important figure in every new form of jazz developed after the 1940s. Given that the second half of the 20th century was the most innovative period of the music, with shifts in style and form occurring every 5 to 10 years, his ability to stay creative throughout the era was unprecedented.

Roach was a tireless advocate for social justice. What do his papers reveal about that aspect of his life?

He was a careful writer, one who edited, re-edited and reformulated his writings and lectures and thoughtfully kept copies of all of his work. For a person interested in the politics and history of an era, his writings are very important, especially as they cover everything from the day-to-day problems of surviving as a musician to the larger struggles for the dignity of jazz, for civil rights and for the decolonization of Africa. Throughout his writings, you see not only an advocate, but also a leading figure in the various causes he espoused, and an individual whose own life was directly affected by the results of those efforts.

What details about the economics of the music business did you find in the Roach papers?

His archive documents his efforts to control the publishing of his own music, something rare for a musician in those days and even now. He was the co-founder of a recording company, again, something almost unheard of at the time. What you see in his business letters, his applications for licenses and his negotiations is a musician’s view of the world of arts commerce. Almost everything in his business papers is a revelation.

What surprised you the most in the Library’s collections?

There are surprises everywhere, but I suppose it was the originals of manuscripts of music that were most fascinating. Just to see the writing in the hand of the original composer was something, but to also see the changes that took place between the writing and the recording of many works was especially surprising.

Did you learn anything about other prominent figures that you didn’t know before?

Almost every file of material was a learning experience: the care taken by composers to produce readable manuscripts; a composer’s works not known by the public, not even by scholars; and the passion of many musicians in their defense of their music.

You’ve used the Library’s collections in the past. What are some of your notable discoveries?

Among my biggest surprises were stumbling across an unknown recording by jazz saxophonist Lee Konitz made for a Haitian record company; learning that the Library has a copy of “The Experimenters,” a rare 1965 NET television program on which Ralph Ellison introduced the avant-jazz of Cecil Taylor and Charles Mingus, only to then express his misgivings about what he saw as the intrusion of European art music into jazz; discovering that novelist and folklorist Zora Neale Hurston had once written blues songs; seeing a microphone used by early jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton when he recorded in the Library of Congress in 1938; finding that playwright Arthur Miller had written scripts and collected folksongs for the Library’s radio programs in 1945; and seeing unknown artworks by the folklorist, filmmaker and painter Harry Smith.

What is it like to work at the Library?

It’s always a pleasure and a learning experience to come to the Library of Congress, whether it’s my own discoveries or what I learn from the staff. A large part of my education has been gained from the specialized knowledge and generosity of librarians.

What is value to scholars, and the public, of the Library acquiring collections like those you’ve consulted and making them accessible?

Personal collections and archives may at least sound interesting in the abstract, but once you delve into them you discover they often contain information and personal insights that are literally history changing, whether by finding an unknown manuscript, or something contained in just a single sentence that reverses what we think we knew.