Library of Congress's Blog, page 106

New Acquisition: 1783 Petition of a Revolutionary War Loyalist

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

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Portrait of Revolutionary War loyalist Isaac Low by David McNeely Stauffer. From New York Public Library: https://tinyurl.com/yax3pmap.

During the American Revolution, as many as one-third of American colonists remained loyal to Britain. These are the Tories we learned about in grade school, also known as loyalists.

Why did these Americans choose to remain British, and what did their decision cost them? The story told by a petition the Library recently acquired—addressed by New York loyalist Isaac Low on November 21, 1783, to the Loyalist Claims Commission in London—shows how one divided family struggled with these questions.

Born in New Jersey in 1735, Isaac Low was a prosperous New York City merchant. In the 1760s, as Americans became restive under British taxation and restrictions on trade, Low became active in the opposition. In 1774, he was a New York delegate to the first Continental Congress. As a merchant, Low was affected by the restrictions on trade, but he warned: “We ought not to deny the just Rights of our Mother Country. We have too much Reason in this Congress, to suspect that Independency is aimed at.”

When the Second Continental Congress met, the one that drafted the Declaration of Independence, Low did not attend. But he did participate ambivalently in several other patriotic bodies. The Manuscript Division has minutes of one of these, the New York City Committee of Sixty, which communicated with similar committees in other colonies and enforced boycotts of British goods. Low chaired this committee, but one of its members was suspicious of his loyalties. At a meeting held in April 1775, this unnamed member commented bitterly: “Mr. Lows non-attendance I ascribe to advices from England.” John Adams similarly believed that Low “will profess Attachment to the Cause of Liberty but his Sincerity is doubted.”

By the time the British occupied New York City in fall 1776, Low had made his allegiances clear and declared his loyalty to Britain. He remained in the occupied city, but when the British evacuated New York in 1783 and sailed for England, Low and his wife, Margaret, sailed too, joining their son Isaac Jr., who was already in London.

Low’s sisters, Gertrude and Sarah, had married two Irish-born brothers, Alexander and Hugh Wallace. Gertrude Low Wallace and Alexander Wallace, together with Hugh Wallace, left for Britain after the Revolution, but Sarah Low Wallace, Hugh’s wife, stayed behind, as did Nicholas Low, the brother of Isaac, Gertrude and Sarah. The Low and Wallace families preserved their bonds despite their political differences and wrote to each other for decades thereafter. Their letters are in the Nicholas Low Papers in the Manuscript Division.

Like other loyalists, Isaac Low’s property was confiscated by the Americans when he declared his loyalty to Britain during the revolution. The British parliament established the Loyalist Claims Commission to compensate loyalists for their American losses. Just before he left for England, Isaac Low drafted a petition to the commission—the one the Library recently acquired.

In it, he explains his history of shifting loyalties. He had always, he told the commissioners, “been warmly attached to the British Constitution.” For that reason, and to “continue a Member of the British Empire in America,” he had agreed to attend the Continental Congress as a delegate. He had believed that the “most worthy and respectable” of his fellow delegates wanted to “accommodate the unhappy Difference that then subsisted” between Britain and the colonies. But, to his “great Mortification and Grief,” his “Hopes and Expectations were all frustrated.”

Low details his service to the crown in occupied New York and gives a list of prominent men who can vouch for him. He describes his losses in a 1778 fire that caused great destruction in the occupied city. He was forced to throw goods “into the open Streets to preserve them from the Flames” and the fire consumed “several Thousand Pounds Sterling value in Anatta” (a red dye) that had been stored near the customs house dock waiting to be shipped to London. No longer bound by the boycotts he had once helped to enforce, Low was now trading with Britain from within the sanctuary of occupied New York.

After the war, Nicholas Low, in New York, provided material and moral support to his refugee relatives. He sent Isaac a pamphlet titled A Letter from Phocion. Phocion was Alexander Hamilton, as both brothers knew, since Hamilton was Nicholas’s lawyer.

Hamilton-as-Phocion argued that New York’s confiscation of loyalists’ property violated the terms of the 1783 Treaty of Paris. Isaac replied in an April 7, 1784, letter that the pamphlet did “honor to his [Hamilton’s] head and heart” but put him in danger of being “suspected of having changed his sentiments for what they will call Tory money.”

The progress of Isaac’s application to the commission can be traced in his letters to his brother in the Nicholas Low Papers. It took two years for the commissioners to decide on his application. When they did, he felt that the £1,700 they awarded him was “very scanty”—even though it was more than many others received, as historian Maya Jasanoff points out.

Isaac complained to Nicholas in an August 15, 1786, letter, “I must for the first time set myself down for a ruined man.” He blamed the commission’s decision on “malice whispered” by his enemies in a September 7, 1786, letter but also believed that “my having been in Committee and Congress, was a great stumbling block.”

When Isaac died in 1791, Isaac Jr. wrote to Nicholas on September 5 of that year that the “cruell treatment he experienced on both sides the Atlantic brought on an anxious mind, which hurried him to the grave.”

Gertrude Wallace appears to have been more resilient. On June 7, 1787, three years after arriving in Britain, she told Nicholas she was becoming accustomed to life there. “I could wish for a few of my old acquaintances,” she wrote, “but if it can’t be I must be content.”

Sports Broadcasting Legend Bob Wolff (1920–2017) Remembered

This is a guest post by Matthew Barton, the recorded sound curator in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. Bob Wolff, the subject of the post, died on July 15 at age 96.

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Bob Wolff at the Library of Congress in 2013.

In spring 2013, the Packard Campus for Audiovisual Conservation of the Library of Congress, was honored to add the personal collection of the late sportscaster Bob Wolff to its holdings. Included were complete recordings of the two games that feature Wolff’s best-known work: Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series and the legendary sudden-death overtime 1958 NFL championship game between the Baltimore Colts and the New York Giants.

Bob was feted in the Member’s Room of the Library of Congress when we acquired his collection and honored with a special video tribute on the Jumbotron at that evening’s Washington National’s game. We also hosted a screening of the baseball musical fantasy “Damn Yankees” at the Packard Theater in Culpeper, Va.

The Bob Wolff Collection reflects the longevity and versatility of one of the greatest practitioners of the announcer’s art that sports broadcasting has known. From 1946 on, Wolff worked in both radio and television, covering collegiate and professional sports, including baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, boxing, tennis and track and field. Somehow, he also found time to announce the annual Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show at Madison Square Garden for 33 years.

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Bob Wolff (right) with the Singing Senators, a group he formed with players from Washington’s major-league team. The players in uniform are (from left) Truman Clevenger, Jim Lemon, Albie Pearson, Russ Kemmerer and Roy Sievers.

In the 1940s, few believed that such broadcasts amounted to anything lasting; at that time, it was neither easy nor cheap for an individual broadcaster to make personal professional-quality recordings of his work. Wolff used recordings mainly as a production aid that enabled him to capture an interview during the day for use during his evening sports news programs. He soon started a “mystery guest” feature in which he would replay a clip from an old interview along with a few hints as to the guest’s identity, and invite listeners to send their guesses to him on postcards. Perhaps this practice convinced him to record and save his work when he could, for he continued to do it for decades to come.

For some interviewees, such as Babe Ruth, one can imagine Wolff keeping a recording in any case. But preserving an interview with the young coach of the Tri-Cities Blackhawks franchise of the fledgling National Basketball Association seems much less likely, no matter how good a talker future Boston Celtics coaching legend Red Auerbach may have been in that 1949–50 season.

Wolff’s broadcasting career began while he was still a student at Duke University in 1939. He was a fixture of the airways in his native New York from the 1960s on, but it was in Washington, D.C., that Wolff really learned his trade. Although the Washington Senators had been a contending ball club in the war years, they went from bad to worse while Wolff covered them from 1946 to 1960. They finished last five times, next to last four times and over .500 only once. Nevertheless, Wolff called their games enthusiastically, strummed his ukulele with the “Singing Senators” group he formed and gave airtime to everyone from upper management to stadium peanut vendors.

Wolff’s announcing performance for the 1956 All Star Game in D.C. earned him a spot in the booth for Mutual Network’s broadcasts of that year’s World Series, when Don Larsen pitched his perfect game. After that, his career highlights become too numerous to list here, but include three more World Series, national broadcasts for NBC and ABC and a stint as the New York Knicks’ announcer that included its two championship seasons in the early 1970s. He joined News 12 Long Island in 1986, where his commentary was a regular feature until early this year.

This short blog post can only begin to describe Bob Wolff’s career, art and achievement. Soon, examples of his preserved work will be available on the Library’s website. For now, I’ll leave you with a short recording from the Bob Wolff Collection. It is a 1947 interview by two reporters of Jackie Robinson (1919–1972), the first African American to play baseball on a major league team in the modern era.

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Inquiring Minds: The Unheralded Story of the Card Catalog

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Peter Devereaux, author of “The Card Catalog: Books, Cards and Literary Treasures.” Photo by Shawn Miller.

The library card catalog was one of the most versatile and durable technologies in history—a veritable road map for navigating a “wilderness of books”—says Peter Devereaux of the Library’s Publishing Office. His new book on the subject, “The Card Catalog: Books, Cards and Literary Treasures,” explores the history of this once-revolutionary system and celebrates literary gems and artifacts from Library of Congress collections.

This is a reprint of an interview with Devereaux that first appeared in the Library of Congress Gazette.

Why did you write this book?

This book was a great opportunity to tell the story about an unheralded, yet extremely important, part of libraries—the card catalog—one of the most versatile and durable technologies in history. I wanted people to see what a massive and unprecedented undertaking it was, so I hope the book sheds some light on its history and the continued importance of cataloging here at the Library of Congress.

What are the ancient roots of card catalogs?

When I started research for this book, I struggled a little with finding a starting point that made sense. After reading about Sumerian historian S. N. Kramer, I understood the story really started at the dawn of civilization. He clearly identified one cuneiform tablet, found near the ruins of Nippur and dated around 2000 B.C., as being used for cataloging purposes. At just 2½ by 1½ inches, the tablet foreshadowed the use of small index cards.

What system did libraries use just before the invention of the card catalog?

Most libraries used some form of a shelf list or bound catalog. The drawback was while the titles were listed in the order they appeared on the shelf, they were virtually useless if you wanted to search by author or subject. The title-author-subject access points that the card catalog affords was really a game changer.

Who were the key figures in the development of the card catalog?

Although there were some important contributions by librarians in Europe, on this side of the Atlantic, major developments were happening by the mid-1800s. They were led by Smithsonian librarian Charles Jewett, who advocated for centralized cataloging. At Harvard, Ezra Abbot created the first modern card catalog designed for readers. His associate, Charles Cutter, who became the librarian at the Boston Athenaeum in 1868, created a new scheme that later was the basis for the Library of Congress classification system. Though Cutter’s cataloging rules were adopted by many libraries, he is overshadowed by Melvil Dewey, whose approach to cataloging was based on a controlled vocabulary, represented by numerical values that could be subdivided by decimals.

How did the card catalog revolutionize libraries?

It really came down to providing quick, reliable access to a library’s collection. Before Dewey, Cutter and American Library Association libraries were essentially left to their own devices when it came to organizing their books. What you see emerge with the card catalog is not only an effective way to catalog a library but also a set a standards shared by most libraries.

What was role of Library of Congress in this?

It started to come together during Ainsworth Rand Spofford’s tenure as Librarian of Congress. With the copyright law of 1870, which required materials registered for copyright to be deposited with the Library, the collections started growing fast. The antiquated catalog and classification system dating back to Thomas Jefferson wasn’t able to keep up. After the opening of a new Library building, Herbert Putnam became Librarian in 1899, and J.C.M. Hanson and Charles Martel were appointed to lead the new cataloging division. They confronted a collection of more than 800,000 books, hardly any of which had been cataloged by subject. With a larger staff, catalogers created a new classification system, as well as integrating a new system of subject headings.

What was the impact of the Library’s decision to print and distribute cards to other libraries?

In 1901, when Putnam sent a memo to more than 400 libraries announcing the sale of its printed catalog cards, it was really a turning point for the greater library community. The card service was an immediate success, providing either complete sets or individual cards to thousands of public libraries at a reasonable cost. The mass distribution of catalog cards made the Library the standard bearer, allowing smaller libraries across the country to possess the same quality catalog as the greatest libraries in the world and really solidified the Library’s standing as the nation’s library.

In the book, you state that the card catalog was “destined from the start to collapse under its own weight.” Why?

By the 1950s, as the main card catalog at the Library surged to more than 9 million cards in 10,500 trays, staff grew increasingly concerned. In the annual report, the administration worried about “the space-consuming growth of the public card catalogue.” Many university and major public libraries were also facing a severe shortage of space as card catalogs continued to grow year after year.

Many librarians weren’t sad to say goodbye.  Why, and how did they bid farewell?

For librarians, there was a lot of excitement about a new technology, the computer, mixed with a little sadness about dumping the reliable and sturdy card catalog. In the 1970s, libraries nationwide embraced MARC and the computer catalog. Card catalogs quickly began to disappear. A few libraries held mock funerals. But the most interesting example I read about was one library that tied its cards to balloons, then let them float away.

What interesting tidbits did you learn that you didn’t know before?

What many consider the first attempt at a national library card catalog happened during the chaos of the French Revolution, which I find fascinating. In 1791, instructions were issued to local officials to begin cataloging libraries that had been confiscated from exiled or executed aristocrats. The method relied on playing cards, which then were blank on one side. Playing cards were a perfect choice: They were sturdy and roughly the same size, no matter what brand, and could easily be interfiled. Within three years, over a million cards were sent to overwhelmed offices in Paris.

“The Card Catalog,” published by the Library in association with Chronicle Books, is available in the Library of Congress shop or online.

Featured: Summertime Is Here!

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On the beach at Coney Island, 1902.

Sunshine, long days, trips to the mountains or beaches—we’re now well into the season many people anticipate long in advance of its arrival. A quick online search of the Library’s prints and photographs reveals that enthusiasm for the lazy days of summer is nothing new: the term “summer” elicits thousands of images dating from as long ago as the 18th century.

We’re featuring one such image, a 1902 view of the beach on Coney Island, intermittently on our home page this month.  It shows a large crowd of children and adults—wearing significantly more attire than is the norm for beach-goers today—enjoying the sand and sun. Although the richly colored picture looks like a photograph, it is actually an ink-based photolithograph—or photochrom print.

The Library has more than 400 photochrom prints of sites in the United States—and thousands more of locations in Europe, the Middle East and elsewhere. Hans Jakob Schmid (1856–1924), working for the Swiss firm Orell Füssli, invented the technique for making photochrom prints in the 1880s. It involves the direct photographic transfer of an original negative onto litho- and chromographic printing plates.

Even though the prints look deceptively like color photographs, when viewed with a magnifying glass, the small dots that make up the ink-based photomechanical image are visible. The photomechanical process permitted mass production of the vivid color prints. At a time when color photography was still rare, demand for them was high. Monochromatic prints were also issued, including a view of Pikes Peak in Colorado.

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Pikes Peak, a monochromatic photochrom print.

Photochrom prints were sold at tourist sites and through mail order catalogs to globe trotters, armchair travelers, educators and others to preserve in albums or put on display. Produced between the late 1880s well into the 1900s, they reached the height of their popularity in the 1890s and early 1900s.

 

Learning the Backstory to “Rent”

This post is by Emily Hauck, a summer intern in the Library’s Communications Office. A version of this post was first published in the Library of Congress Gazette.

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Members of the national tour cast of “Rent” examine original items from the Jonathan Larson Collection. Photo by Shawn Miller.

No matter how much you think you know about a topic, there is always more to discover. I found that out during my internship with the Library’s Office of Communications this summer.

One of my first assignments was to write a story for the Library of Congress Gazette about a June 22 visit to the Library by the 20th anniversary national tour cast of “Rent.” Cast members came to view the papers of Jonathan Larson, creator of the hit Broadway musical. I have a deep love of musical theater that spans back to my early childhood, so I jumped at the chance to interview them.

I learned more than I anticipated about the show from covering the event, and I consider myself to be a musical theater enthusiast. I wasn’t alone—even the cast that performs the show night after night expressed surprise and delight at materials in the collection.

The Larson Collection consists of approximately 15,000 items donated to the Library by his family, after his untimely death in 1996. The materials include lyric sketches, handwritten scripts, 400 recordings, personal correspondence, handwritten notes and more.

“What’s extraordinary about it is how much he wrote down. He’s somebody who sort of took notes about everything,” said Mark Horowitz of the Music Division, curator of the Larson Collection. “When he was writing a show, he would pose questions to himself—should I do this, can I make that clearer—and then he would answer them . . . in writing.”

Members of the cast expressed their fascination with the handwritten aspect of the collection as well. “Just being able to see the handwriting, the human behind the goliath of the show that we know,” said Christian Thompson, who plays Benjamin Coffin III. “It’s breathtaking.”

The display, spread over four tables in the Whittall Pavilion, included Larson’s notes and ideas, character biographies and his own biography through items such as his resume. “It’s so personal,” Horowitz said. “Not only is some of his stuff about the shows, but he also writes very personal things like: what are my goals in life, what do I want to do, how am I going to accomplish it?”

One item in particular that stood out to cast members was Larson’s biographies for the characters in “Rent.”

“Right now, I’m going through the biographies of the characters, and it’s quite interesting, some of the backstory that isn’t necessarily in the show,” Thompson said. “I’m actually just about to turn to the ‘Benny’ page, so I’m about to read about myself. Hopefully, my director doesn’t hate it if I add a couple of things in the next few days.”

“Knowing who each character is and why they act a certain way and to see that he went through so much trying to develop them—that’s amazing,” added Alexis Young, who is a swing of the production, the understudy for all the female roles.

Of all the items in the collection, one that stood out most to the cast and the curator was the handwritten math worksheet for “Seasons of Love” from “Rent” where Larson calculated that “525,600 minutes . . . measure a year” in the song’s lyric.

“I think the coolest thing, the thing that everybody likes, is the math for ‘Seasons of Love,’ it’s so remarkable and people really get that,” Horowitz said.

Though “Rent” is now over 20 years old, it is still relevant today, and this collection is proof of that.

“The story is kind of timeless,” Young said, “because it deals with wanting to live in the present and wanting to love. You know, who can’t relate to that?”

A New Website and More: Expanding Our Services for the Blind and Physically Handicapped

This is a guest post by Karen Keninger, director of the National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (NLS).

The NLS has a couple years of adventures ahead of it—adventures that sound chiefly technological but are really about meeting our patrons’ needs as reliably, easily and responsibly as possible. Technology is exciting in itself—but much more exciting is how it advances the ability of NLS and its network of cooperating libraries to serve our patrons who cannot read in conventional formats.

Let’s start with the new public gateway into our adventures—the NLS website. Our previous website, a solid workhorse for years, was starting to look a bit, shall we say, 1993-ish to sighted visitors. In 2017, with smart information architecture and navigation that’s been tested and retested with screen readers, we can provide a website that serves our blind patrons wonderfully—but that also has visual meaning and appeal for the sighted family, support assistants and staff members who use it alongside them. We also added tools and features for sighted visitors who may need to adjust what is on a monitor for their varying levels of visual acuity. It’s high time.

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The newly redesigned NLS home page.

On to the heart of our adventures: four pilots that will help ease the burden on our network of cooperating libraries and get more NLS materials to more patrons faster than ever before.

Duplication-on-Demand. To reduce wait times for talking books, NLS is testing a system allowing network libraries to duplicate talking-book files onto digital cartridges at their own state-based locations. And patrons would get to say what favorites they want loaded on a given cartridge from the entire NLS collection! Our libraries would no longer need to forecast what will be most popular and order preduplicated cartridges from the central NLS-managed distribution centers.

Synthetic Speech. Annoying robot voices are a thing of the past. In-person voice recording is still our gold standard, and we won’t change that. But synthetic speech can help us make available material we couldn’t easily record—think bibliographies, endnotes and recipes! Synthetic speech can also help us make “breaking news” or time-sensitive materials available more quickly.

Wireless Download. We’re exploring wireless transmission of talking-book files directly to simple devices in patrons’ home, allowing them to load the files from their devices onto cartridges themselves. Think of the ease of obtaining an album from iTunes or Amazon. And think, too, of the logistical and financial burdens this would take off our frontline network libraries.

Braille eReader. Picture the Times Square news ticker with its flow of words. Now picture those words in braille—that’s easy to do, since braille was (in a certain sense) the first widespread digitization format for words. Braille eReaders can turn a digital file instantaneously into braille for tactile reading, and a new generation of braille eReaders has brought the price point of such readers down to where NLS—working with the renowned Perkins Library in Watertown, Mass.—can now study the viability of providing eReaders to our patrons, just as we loan digital talking-book players.

These are the adventures that lie before NLS over the next two years. We’re already measuring our offerings to our patrons in terabytes of data rather than solely in linear shelf feet of braille volumes and hours of audio. Petabytes are on the horizon. And that horizon—whether of materials to offer, of technologies to use, of services to offer patrons, and, above all, of patrons to serve—is widening every day. We’re happy to be rolling up our sleeves for all this and more.

World War I: Quentin Roosevelt’s Story

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

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Soldiers gather around the gravesite of Quentin Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt believed in the efficacy of war. For Roosevelt, the call to arms expressed national greatness and bold masculinity. Unsurprisingly, the former president loudly championed America’s entrance into World War I, often assailing President Wilson in the years and months running up to April 1917 for his reluctance to commit America to the conflict. Roosevelt’s four sons—Archibald, Theodore Jr., Kermit and Quentin—all served. It did not end without loss. Quentin, a pilot in World War I, was shot down and perished in mid-July 1918.

Quentin’s story is told in the exhibit, Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences, currently on display in the Library. However, by traversing three different Manuscript Division collections—the Peyton Conway March, Kermit and Belle Roosevelt and Theodore Roosevelt papers—and the L’Aerophile  Collection in the Library’s Science, Technology and Business Division, the heartbreaking story of Quentin Roosevelt’s death comes into greater relief and casts further light on the devastation of World War I, not only for the Roosevelts, but for all those who lost loved ones to the conflict.

In May 1918, former president Theodore Roosevelt wrote U.S. Army chief of staff Peyton C. March to thank him for appointing his son Kermit to captain of a Madrid-based artillery unit in Spain during World War I.  At the end of his letter, Roosevelt empathized with March, who had lost his own son during military training earlier that spring.

“I thank you sir. You have already drunk of the waters of bitterness; I suppose I shall soon have to drink of them; but, whatever befalls, you and I hold our heads high when we think of our sons,” wrote Roosevelt.

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Letter from author Rudyard Kipling to Theodore Roosevelt.

Roughly two months after T.R.’s letter to March on July 18, 1918, Rudyard Kipling, who had lost his own son in the war in 1915, wrote the aging Rough Rider to offer his own condolences. At the time, no official notice confirmed Quentin’s death, a point reflected in Kipling’s letter.

“I can’t yet make out from the papers whether Quentin is dead or down [and] in German hands. If the latter his chances are better than they would have been in the old days before the Hun saw the end coming,” noted the famous author. Whatever the case, he confided in Roosevelt, “the boy has done his work honorably and cleanly and you have your right to pride and thankfulness. I won’t take of your time with any more.” Nonetheless, deep down, Kipling knew the likely outcome: “No words are any use but we all send you our love and deep sympathy.”

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The Seattle Star was among many newspapers from around the country that covered Quentin’s death.

As a father, Roosevelt casts a complex shadow. A warmongering imperialist, he encouraged his sons to enter the war as a means to demonstrate their honor and prove their manhood. Yet, Roosevelt’s conception of war rested on dated ideals of 19th-century warfare: all horseback and chivalry rather than the mechanized grinder of WWI’s “total war.” However, he also doted on his children and loved them deeply. He would illustrate letters to them and thought of them often.

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For Roosevelt, Quentin’s loss hurt deeply. Still, he also clung to core beliefs about war and death. “There is not much to say,” he wrote Kermit soon after official word of Quentin’s death came. “No man could have died in finer or more gallant fashion; and our pride equals our sorrow—each is limited only by the other.”

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Page from family album showing photograph of Quentin, a poem about his death, a French plaque in his memory and his grave in Germany.

When Roosevelt discovered that the U.S. hoped to bring the fallen home for stateside burials, the former president once again reached out to March. “Mrs. Roosevelt and I wish to enter a most respectful, but a most emphatic protest against the proposed course so far as our son Quentin is concerned,” he informed March in a letter. “We have always believed, that ‘where the tree falls, there let it lie.’ We know that many good persons feel entirely differently, but to us it is merely painful and harrowing long after death to move the poor body from which the soul has gone. We greatly prefer that Quentin shall continue to lie on the spot where he fell in battle, and where the foemen buried him.”

This sort of circle of war, death and memorialization proved far more common for Europeans, depending on how one tabulates the numbers, roughly 126,000 Americans perished in the war.  For Europeans, the numbers were in the tens of millions. Tragedy played out across nations and classes. Roosevelt’s letter to March in May 1918 opened the narrative circle that closed with Quentin’s death roughly two months later.

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.

Pic of the Week: “Princess Bride” Kicks Off Outdoor Film Series

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Crowds gathered on the lawn of the Library’s Jefferson Building on July 13 to view “The Princess Bride,” undeterred by weather that was a little warm and humid, even for a Washington, D.C., summer evening.

The outdoor screening kicked off a six-film series, “LOC Summer Movies on the Lawn,” showcasing modern classics that have been added to the Library’s National Film Registry.

“There’s something special about sitting under the stars watching a good movie with family and friends, so we’re excited to invite everyone to the lawn of America’s Library this summer to enjoy some great modern classics,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

Films will be presented on Thursday evenings at 8 p.m. from July 13 through August 17. If you plan to be in Washington, D.C, during this time, think about joining us!

My Job: Helping the Library Share Its Riches Far and Wide

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Margaret Wagner. Photo by Lee Ewing.

This post by Margaret Wagner of the Library’s Publishing Office first appeared on “Teaching with the Library of Congress,” a blog that highlights the Library’s resources for K–12 teachers.

Describe what you do at the Library and the materials you work with.

I am a senior writer-editor in the Library of Congress Publishing Office, the headquarters of the Library’s general publishing program. We produce books, facsimiles, calendars, coloring books, puzzles and other material based on the Library’s collections and activities—which, given the depth and breadth of the Library’s holdings, is a very broad mandate. Our publications are aimed at a broad, rather than a specialized audience

As my job title indicates, I both edit the work of authors who publish works under the Library’s aegis and write books and other materials. My most recent writing project is “America and the Great War: A Library of Congress Illustrated History,” published on May 30, 2017, by Bloomsbury Press, in cooperation with the Library. One facet of the Library’s commemoration of the 100th anniversary of World War I, it is a sweeping history of the American experience during that era.  Books such as this are one more way the Library brings its riches to people across the United States and around the world.

In working on this and other publications, it has been my good fortune—and a wonderful, long-term educational experience—to engage in research not only in the Library’s General Collections (principally secondary sources), but also in many of the Library’s 21 custodial divisions (e.g., Manuscript, Prints and Photographs, Rare Book and Special Collections, Veterans History Project), where I am guided and informed by curators and specialists as I examine primary documents (e.g., original letters, maps and scrapbooks). These materials truly bring history alive!

Do you have a favorite item from the Library’s online collections?

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Detail from Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence.

That’s a very difficult question to answer, since so much intriguing material is added to the digitized collections every year. But among all those millions of items, one that has had special significance to me since I first had the thrill of viewing the original document when it was undergoing treatment in the Library’s Conservation Division is the rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, which online visitors to the Library can access via the webpage for the exhibition, “American Treasures of the Library of Congress” as well as the digitized Thomas Jefferson Papers. Written in Jefferson’s hand, with edits by John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, this document is a moving revelation of the philosophical struggles that impelled and attended the birth of the United States. It is also a testament to the continuing and profound importance, in our democratic nation, of ideas and ideals—and their careful expression through well-chosen words.

Share a time when an item from the collections sparked your curiosity.

What comes to mind almost immediately is not a single item but a small group of letters written by a very young and very well-educated Confederate officer during the U.S. Civil War; he became a lieutenant when only 17 years old. The letters are housed in the Manuscript Division’s Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection, and as I read through them I was very impressed with this young soldier’s courage, his powers of observation, his stoicism when he was a prisoner of war and his candor in letters he wrote to his parents. But the Manuscript Division only holds his Civil War letters, and I wondered how he fared after the war. As it happens, a little digging turned up a genealogy of his family in the Library’s General Collections, and from it I learned that he got safely home, trained as an attorney, married, and he and his wife had several children. Two of his sons went into the military and served in the U.S. Army during the Spanish-American War and in World War I. One of those sons, an engineer, wrote several books, and the Library has copies of five of them. So my curiosity led me to discover the saga of a family represented in different parts of the Library.

Tell us about a memorable interaction with a K–12 teacher or student.

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Union drummer boy Johnny Clem at Point Lookout, Tenn.

When Cheryl Regan, Michelle Krowl and I curated the Library’s Civil War sesquicentennial exhibition, “The Civil War in America,” I was intrigued by how deeply involved visitors became as they looked at the many different primary materials. Young people, usually going through the exhibition with their parents, seemed particularly intrigued by the medical aspects of the war and by Walt Whitman’s knapsack, which he took with him when he visited hospitals in and around Washington, D.C.  They were also intrigued by the story of young Johnny Clem, the famed drummer boy of Shiloh and Chickamauga (who tagged along with a Union regiment at the age of nine), and by the story of an extremely bright and observant youngster from Georgia, Leroy Gresham, whose diaries provide people of today with a unique personal view of the events and emotions he and those close to him experienced during that terrible fratricidal war. These materials helped young visitors realize, I hope, that people of all ages create, bear witness to and reveal history to later generations.

What’s one thing you’d like to tell teachers about the materials that you work with or the collections?

It’s difficult to convey in a short answer the richness and variety of the Library’s collections, spread throughout 21 custodial divisions, and how much they can reveal about almost any topic or era and about cultures around the world. I’ve worked here for many years, and I am constantly amazed.  The online resources are wonderful and constantly growing. But there is much to be discovered in the vast majority of the Library’s 165 million-plus items that have not yet been digitized. Teachers who are able to visit the Library will undoubtedly find treasures, unavailable online, that will excite them and enrich their teaching experience.

Prize for American Fiction to Be Awarded Posthumously to Denis Johnson

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Denis Johnson, winner of the 2017 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. Photo by Cindy Johnson.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today that Denis Johnson, author of the critically acclaimed collection of short stories “Jesus’ Son” and the novel “Tree of Smoke,” will posthumously receive the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction during the 2017 Library of Congress National Book Festival, Sept. 2.

The National Book Festival and the prize ceremony will take place at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C. The author’s widow, Cindy Johnson, will accept the prize.

Hayden chose Johnson based on the recommendation of a jury of distinguished authors and prominent literary critics from around the world.

“Denis Johnson was a writer for our times,” Hayden said. “In prose that fused grace with grit, he spun tale after tale about our walking wounded, the demons that haunt, the salvation we seek. We emerge from his imagined world with profound empathy, a different perspective—a little changed.”

In March the Librarian offered the prize to Johnson, and he enthusiastically accepted. He wrote, “The list of past awardees is daunting, and I’m honored to be in such company. My head’s spinning from such great news!” After a long struggle with cancer, Denis Johnson died on May 24.

The annual Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction honors an American literary writer whose body of work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination. The award seeks to commend strong, unique, enduring voices that—throughout long, consistently accomplished careers—have told us something revealing about the American experience.

Previous winners of the prize are Marilynne Robinson (2016), Louise Erdrich (2015), E. L. Doctorow (2014) and Don DeLillo (2013). Under its previous name, the Library of Congress Creative Achievement Award for fiction, the awardees were Philip Roth (2012), Toni Morrison (2011), Isabel Allende (2010), and John Grisham (2009). In 2008, the Library presented Pulitzer-Prize winner Herman Wouk with a lifetime achievement award for fiction writing.

Johnson was born in Munich, West Germany, the son of an American diplomat, and spent his childhood in the Philippines and Japan before returning to spend the rest of his youth in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. He is the author of nine novels, as well as numerous plays, poetry collections, a short-story collection and a novella. Johnson won the National Book Award for his resonant Vietnam novel “Tree of Smoke” (2007), which was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

His short novel “Train Dreams” (2012) was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. His most recent work, “The Laughing Monsters,” was published in 2014. Johnson’s many other honors include fellowships from the Guggenheim and Lannan Foundations and a Whiting Award.