Library of Congress's Blog, page 107

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.

 

This Day in History: Celebrating Wyoming

This is a slightly abbreviated version of a post by Kristi Finefield, a reference librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division, first published on “ Picture This ,” the division’s blog. Check out Finefield’s original post for even more fantastic photographs of Wyoming by Carol M. Highsmith.

Today, we turn our eyes to the wide open spaces of Wyoming for two reasons. On July 10, 1890, Wyoming became the 44th state in the United States of America. The second reason is the addition of thousands of modern, color digital photos of Wyoming to the ever-expanding Carol M. Highsmith Archive.

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Remains of the Carissa Gold Mine in South Pass City, a mining boomtown in the 1860s.

Over the last couple of years, Highsmith’s effort to document America with her camera and her own detailed captions took her across the state that brought us our first national park (Yellowstone), first national monument (Devils Tower) and first national forest (Shoshone). While still a territory, Wyoming was also first in granting women the right to vote in 1869, gaining a nickname as the Equality State. Another state nickname is the Cowboy State, and you’ll see plenty of those in Highsmith’s photos!

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Wild and domesticated horses at Ladder Livestock Ranch, a cattle and sheep ranch on the Wyoming-Colorado border.

Let these vibrant photos take you on a trip through Wyoming, a state where the old West can still be found in small towns and flatlands, in cities and up in snowy mountains. Witness the celebrations and traditions of American Indians, and watch cowboys working land and livestock as well as showing their skills in the rodeo. Drive down straight-as-an-arrow two-lane roads through grasslands, farms and ranches, all under wide blue skies. Look to distant mountain peaks and the storms rolling in from miles away. Marvel at natural wonders, rock formations and, of course, the wonderland that is Yellowstone National Park. Welcome to Wyoming! Scroll down for more fantastic Highsmith images.

Learn More:

Take your own trip across Wyoming through Carol M. Highsmith’s photos, most of which were taken in 2015 and 2016.
The Gates Frontiers Fund Wyoming Collection and Colorado Collection are the two most recent additions to the Carol M. Highsmith Archive. Highsmith’s travels to Wyoming’s neighbor to the south over the last few years produced thousands of new photos of Colorado which are also now available.
Explore the entire Carol M. Highsmith Archive in the Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.
Wyoming and Yellowstone have been a popular subject for photographs for a long time. Explore Yellowstone National Park in photos dating from as far back as the 1870s in the collections of the Prints and Photographs Division, and enjoy flipping through the pages of an 1883 photographic album, Journey through the Yellowstone National Park and Northwestern Wyoming, 1883. View a description of the album here.

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Lincoln Highway in Sweetwater County.

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A parade during Cheyenne Frontier Days, celebrated annually in the state capital since 1897.

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Ayres Natural Bridge in Converse County.

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Rodeo during Cheyenne Frontier Days.

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The Wind River.

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Ominous clouds above Pine Bluff in Laramie County.

Pic of the Week: Celebrating the Music of Hawaii

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Photo by Stephen Winick.

Ledward “Led” Kaapana delighted an audience in the Coolidge Auditorium on July 6 with traditional music from Hawaii. A master of the Hawaiian ukulele and slack key guitar, Kaapana has performed in Hawaii and beyond for more than 40 years, perpetuating the musical style and repertoire of his home village, Kalapana, in the southernmost district of Hawaii. Kaapana received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts in 2011. The fellowship is considered our nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. He appeared at the Library as part of its Homegrown Concert Series.

New Online: Oral Histories Offer a Glimpse of America at Work

This is a guest post by Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library of Congress Gazette.

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Steersmen Randall Spann (left) and Sean McDonald on the deck of the merchant ship Orange.

The culture of working is a big part of what makes America America—men and women on the job, growing our food, teaching our children, burying our loved ones, building our homes, doing the things that make our society possible.

Over the past seven years, the American Folklife Center (AFC) has collected the stories of working men and women for its Occupational Folklife Project, through interviews about what they do, how they do it and what they think about what they do.

Collectively, the interviews document Americans at work, in all walks of life: Iowa meatpackers, North Carolina morticians, Wisconsin teachers, New York dairy farmers, Massachusetts fishermen, Midwest ironworkers and grooms, hot walkers and saddlers at horse tracks across the country.

“These are the voices of Americans that we don’t generally hear,” said Nancy Groce, the AFC specialist who directs the project. “Even though they’re not on the public stage, they’re hugely important in forming our society and maintaining our society. Unless we’re very careful, those stories get lost.”

Most of the interviews are the product of the AFC’s Archie Green Fellowships, established in 2010 in the wake of the Great Recession to stimulate research projects about contemporary work culture. Fieldworkers conduct interviews within a particular segment of working America—say, New York cabbies—and upload them to the AFC archive. To date, they have recorded more than 700 audio and video interviews.

The Library placed the first installment of the Occupational Folklife Project—focused on the Port of Houston—online this week and expects to add a new collection every other month.

The Port of Houston is one of the world’s biggest and busiest ports, a 25-mile-long complex of public and private facilities off the Gulf of Mexico.

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Interviewee Captain Doug Mims in the wheelhouse of the Sam Houston.

Over more than 50 interviews, longshoremen, boatmen, linemen, pilots, engineers, chaplains and labor officials talk about what they do there—the skills their jobs require, the camaraderie, pleasures, drudgeries, dangers and physical demands.

Benny Holland first went to the waterfront as a longshoreman in 1960, at age 18. A football and baseball player, Holland was fit, athletic, confident—and completely unprepared for the tough work of unloading cargo in a ship’s hold in 130-degree temperatures.

“My first day was throwing 140-pound sacks of flour. It was very difficult,” Holland said. “In fact, I was in what I thought was great shape. . . . I realized right away throwing 140-pound sacks of flour all day I was not really in that good a shape.”

Tough work, and sometimes dangerous. Giant shipping containers fall, cables snap and whip through the air, heavy vehicles move across a crowded dock. Longshoreman William Hausinger recalled men crushed by falling containers and seeing a big forklift carrying tons of steel back over a man. “We’ve all seen people hurt,” he said.

But there was much to like, too: good wages and benefits, pensions, variety in the work, community and camaraderie.

“We had the biggest bunch of misfits that ever gathered under one roof,” longshoreman Harold Shaffer said. “Everybody had a different personality, everybody had different beliefs, everybody had different religions, so on and so forth. We had drunks, and we had those that was preaching. Yet when we went down there and got on that ship, we come together and gave them as good a workforce as they could have possibly ever trained.”

As times and technology change, the jobs and workforce do, too.

Before goods were shipped in large containers, a vessel might stay in port 10 to 12 days, with crews working day and night unloading, said Clyde Fitzgerald, president of the International Longshoreman’s Association. Today, a big container ship may be emptied in 12 to 24 hours.

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Interviewee George Larrimer in the wheelhouse of the Farnsworth.

“We lost many jobs,” Fitzgerald said. “But the good thing—if there’s a good side to it—is now all the jobs we do have are all skilled: crane operators, machine operators. We’re able to, obviously, enjoy better wages and benefits because of containorization.”

Increased automation is bringing similar changes today. Some ports, Fitzgerald said, now are fully automated and might require only a handful of people in a tower controlling machines to do work once done by 60 to 70.

That kind of change creates a lot of uncertainty about the future.

“I just hope the employers can be protected,” retired longshoreman Eugene Harris said. “I hope there can be more employing for the future, for these people coming up. I hope there is something they can do to make this industry secure. I don’t want this industry to die. I don’t want automation to eat it all up.”

A key part of who we are as Americans is being able to talk, like the Port of Houston longshoremen, about our work. A mandate of the American Folklife Center, Groce said, is to record and preserve it.

“There are a lot of bright, dedicated, thoughtful people out there trying very hard to do a good job,” Groce said. “The idea that people don’t care, that they just phone it in, does a disservice to an awful lot of people. It’s not that people don’t have issues or concerns but they’re by and large very proud of what they do.”

She added, “It’s just a great testimonial to Americans reflecting on their work. Not only now, but 100 years from now it will be a wonderful archival resource that enables researchers, writers, and members of the public to hear the voices of working Americans at the dawn of the 21st century.”

Visit the project’s web page here to hear directly from the Port Houston workers.

Free to Use and Reuse: John Margolies Photographs of Roadside America

An earlier version of this post, written by Micah Messenheimer, assistant curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division, was published on “ Picture This ,” the division’s blog.

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Gas pumps in Yoder, Kans.

A giant coffee pot that doubles as a restaurant, drive-in movie theaters, old gas pumps and vintage hotels: these are but a few of the examples included in the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive.

We’re featuring the archive this month under the “free to use and reuse” feature on the Library’s home page. Each month, the website showcases content from the Library’s collections that has no known copyright restrictions—meaning you can use the content as you wish. Just this summer, the Library made its Margolies holdings—one of the most comprehensive documentary studies of 20th-century U.S. vernacular architecture—available digitally on the website.

Over the span of nearly 40 years, Margolies took more than 11,000 color-slide photographs of vernacular structures across America’s highways, byways and main streets. Traversing the country, he was drawn to the architecture that came to define travel by car—motels, diners and gas stations—but also to quintessentially American oddities: buildings in the shape of dinosaurs, the sculpted concrete and plaster obstacles of miniature golf courses and parks featuring attractions from parrots to petrified rocks.

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Giant dice on a miniature golf course in Roseville, Mich.

Vernacular roadside and commercial structures spread with the boom of suburbanization and the expansion of paved roads across the United States in the prosperous decades after World War II. Yet, in many instances, the only remaining record of these buildings is on Margolies’ film, as tourist architecture was endangered by the expansion of the interstate system and changing travel desires. Small town main streets were bypassed for the speedier travel of the freeway.

For Margolies, the shift to freeway travel took the joy out of the road trip and the architecture it dreamt up. Rather than stopping to enjoy sights passed along the drive, the point became to travel as far and as fast as possible. Yet even he came to recognize the amusement of architecture associated with chain and franchise businesses when designs evolved and iconic examples began to fade away.

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McDonald’s in Azusa, Calif.

The architecture that drew Margolies’ eye was often derided by critics as aesthetically unstudied, tacky or even ugly. Margolies, in turn, faulted architectural historians for idealizing canonical works that did little to reflect everyday, lived experience through their forms.

In his view, ephemeral and vernacular architecture better told the story of 20th-century America and, just as frequently, expressed the eccentricity and ingenuity of its makers. New building materials and techniques allowed for whimsical design elements that served no structural purpose. Decoration was prominent, but usually coarsely constructed as it was meant to be comprehensible from a distance.

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Flamingo Drive-In Theater in Hobbs, N. Mex.

Because roadside architecture was built to grab the attention of a motorist traveling down the road, it was rarely constructed with longevity in mind. These buildings acted as what New York Times architecture critic Paul Goldberger termed “exclamation points of the landscape.”

Although much of the architecture Margolies documented was well past its heyday by the time he photographed it, he rejected the word “nostalgia” in describing his work, stating, “I don’t want to be ahead of my time. I want to be in sync with it.” With his thousands of photographs now online, viewers can roam in his footsteps (or tire tracks) to enjoy roadside America.

Scroll down for more Margolies images. And if you find an interesting way to use the photos, we’d love to know—post a comment describing your use!

John Margolies made the photographs in the John Margolies Roadside America Photograph Archive. The Library of Congress purchased the intellectual property rights for the photographs with the archive and, therefore, there are no known copyright restrictions on the photographs. Privacy and publicity rights may apply. Photographs of sculpture or other works of art may be restricted by the copyright of the sculptor or artist.

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Holiday Inn in Gatlinburg, Tenn.

 

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DC-7 Steakhouse in Byron, Ga.

 

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Bob’s Java Jive in Tacoma, Wash.

New Online: Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton Papers

This is the second of two related guest posts by Cassandra Good, associate editor of the Papers of James Monroe and author of “Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic” (2015), and Susan Holbrook Perdue, director of digital strategies at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and adviser to a variety of historical editing projects.

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Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton, 1804, by Gilbert Stuart. National Gallery of Art.

As we mentioned in the first post in this two-part series, for anyone interested in the founding era in Washington, D.C., the writings of Margaret Bayard Smith (1778–1844) and Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (ca. 1775–1865) are essential sources. Both lived their entire adult lives in the capital city and, as members of the city’s elite, were friends with one another and important political figures of the era. Their proximity to power made them unusual, but their writings also illustrate what it was like to be a woman in the early republic.

The papers of Smith and Thornton are in the Library’s Manuscript Division, and now they are online for the first time. This post focuses on Thornton; our first covered Smith.

Thornton came from much more humble origins than Smith. She was born around 1775 to Ann Brodeau, who emigrated to Philadelphia from England that year to establish a school. The identity of her father is a mystery. He may have been English clergyman William Dodd, who was hanged for forgery two years later. At only 15, she married 31-year-old William Thornton, an architect from the British West Indian island of Tortola. He helped plan the capital city, designed the United States Capitol and served as head of the Patent Office.

The couple came to Washington in 1792, before the city was built, and, like the Smiths, became fixtures of the Washington elite. While William Thornton is better known, and a volume of his writings has been published—the Manuscript Division also has a large collection of his papers—Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton’s writings are an important source of information about daily life in Washington.

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Pages from Thornton’s diaries showing autographs, including those of John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay and James Madison.

In 1904, Thornton’s papers were donated to the Library of Congress by John Henley Smith, Margaret Bayard Smith’s grandson. He inherited the papers of his grandmother and both William and Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton around 1899. His father, Jonathan Bayard Harrison Smith, was Anna Maria’s lawyer and executor. The Smiths and Thorntons were close friends, and Anna Maria had hoped Harrison Smith could have her husband’s papers published. Thus both William and Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton’s papers were stored away with Margaret Bayard Smith’s papers.

In 1907, one volume of Thornton’s diary was published in the Columbia Historical Society’s journal. Over the past century, historians have frequently cited it, but Thornton’s papers at the Library of Congress have much more material than the published diary volume. It’s also worth noting that, unlike modern editors of historical documents, early editors often excised text, changed spellings and made other alterations without alerting the reader.

Thornton’s papers are divided into seven volumes, each accessible with individual links from the finding aid. These volumes are compilations of a variety of materials, ranging from pocket almanacs with handwritten notes to household expense accounts to diaries. Thornton’s papers span from 1793 until her death in 1861, covering both her dinner guests and national political events. She, like Bayard Smith, kept a commonplace book with essays, poems and quotes. The collection also includes silhouettes (including some by acclaimed American artist Charles Willson Peale) and autographs.

Thornton’s diary entries are generally quite succinct, but they contain valuable information, including what food she was purchasing, what tasks she assigned to her household slaves, who dined or took tea with whom, personal finances, the passage of legislation and the weather.

With only her journal from 1800 and the set of diary entries on the invasion of Washington in 1814 published, there is plenty new to discover.

World War I: Film Series Explores the European View of the Conflict

This is a guest post by Naomi Coquillon, an education specialist in the Interpretive Programs Office.

When the Library began its work on “Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I,” there was, as with all exhibitions, a question of scope. How could an institution with a collection as comprehensive as the Library’s determine a focus for a topic as vast as World War I? What would we display, and what stories could we tell in a limited space?

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A film based on “The Good Soldier Schweik,” the World War I–themed novel of Czech author Jaroslav Hašek, will be screened at the Library on July 8.

Our answer was to present American perspectives on the war—an aspect of it on which the Library’s collections are especially strong. Relevant holdings include Veterans History Project diaries and oral histories, 14,000 pieces of sheet music and 1,900 posters.

But for all the war wrought on the American social and political landscape, the United States was involved in the fighting for only about six months, and a mere 19 months passed from U.S. declaration of war in April 1917 to the armistice in November 1918. And, of course, the fierce fighting of the war happened elsewhere. The physical landscape of the nation remained intact, while Europe was ravaged by four years of industrialized warfare.

With this background in mind, as our team began planning programs related to the exhibition, we knew that sharing European perspectives on the conflict would be vital to our effort to explore the impact of the war over time.

A centerpiece of that effort will be the screening of two films from the Library’s collections, both based on literary works from the postwar period. “The Good Soldier Schweik” (Germany, 1960), based on a novel by Jaroslav Hašek, will be screened on July 8, and “Testament of Youth” (U.K., 2014), based on a memoir by Vera Brittain, will be shown on August 12. Both films will begin at 2:30 pm in the Mary Pickford Theater of the Library’s James Madison Building.

“The Good Soldier Schweik” (pronounced sh-vake) follows a Czech soldier drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army during World War I. He is an admitted buffoon whose comic adventures mock army bureaucracy and the absurdity of war.

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Jaroslav Hašek, 1920

Schweik bears more than a passing resemblance to his creator, Jaroslav Hašek, a Czech writer (and, like Schweik, a dog seller) with a love of practical jokes and a checkered career. Within a year of being drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army, Hašek was taken prisoner by the Russian army. He returned to his native Prague in 1920, where he continued his work on “Schweik” until his death of heart failure in 1923 at age 39. Published in serial form, the novel was never completed.

“Schweik” was later banned by Nazi Germany, but it has had a lasting influence in literature and popular culture. Some accounts suggest it was an inspiration for Joseph Heller’s “Catch-22,” and Czechs have adopted the term “svejkism” to describe extreme passivity. “Schweik” has been reinterpreted numerous times as plays, an opera and, in 1960, a film produced in West Germany. The version to be screened at the Library is the original 35-millimeter copyright deposit preserved in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.

In addition to housing this unique film resource, the Library of Congress is also considered the best repository of Czech and Slovak books, periodicals and related materials outside of the Czech Republic and Slovakia. In the Library’s European Reading Room, researchers can access 146 volumes of Hašek’s work, including almost 30 editions of “Schweik” in the original Czech and several of the 60 languages into which the book has been translated.

To find out more about this film series and other programs and resources related to the Library’s commemoration of the First World War, visit the online exhibition. And tune in next month for a post on “Testament of Youth,” in advance of the August 12 screening.

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.