Library of Congress's Blog, page 110

Inquiring Minds: Setting the Record Straight on Pirates and Their Wives

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Daphne Geanacopoulos at the Library of Congress. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Pirate lore has long captivated us and, through the centuries, worked its way into our literature, movies and popular culture. But many depictions of pirates are wrong, distorting our understanding of them. So writes Daphne Palmer Geanacopoulos in her new book, “The Pirate Next Door: The Untold Story of Eighteenth Century Pirates’ Wives, Families and Communities.”

Geanacopoulos used newly discovered primary sources from the 17th and early 18th centuries, including documents at the Library of Congress, to correct long-held beliefs about pirate life and to bring to light the strong women behind men widely considered outlaws and outcasts.

Geanacopoulos is an author, historian and journalist. Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post and other publications. She has a doctorate in liberal studies from Georgetown University with an emphasis in maritime history.

Here Geanacopoulos answers a few questions about her new book and her research at the Library.

First, how did you become interested in pirates?

I became interested in pirates when I wrote an article in 2002 for the New York Times about the Whydah Pirate Museum in Provincetown, Massachusetts. The Whydah was a pirate ship that crashed off the coast of Wellfleet, Cape Cod, in 1717 during a fierce storm. One hundred and forty-four men were on board; two survived. In 1984, Barry Clifford, a native Cape Codder and salvage expert, found the fabled pirate ship. For over 30 years, he and his dive team have excavated the shipwreck and have recovered over 200,000 artifacts.

While researching the article for the New York Times, I came across a fascinating primary source document about the pirates. It was a deposition from a runaway pirate, Jeremiah Higgins, who was caught by the authorities and thrown in jail in New York. He told the admiralty court he had been on one of the ships in the pirate flotilla that sailed with the Whydah up the eastern seaboard toward Cape Cod. Days before the wreck of the Whydah, the captain of Higgins’s ship, Paulsgrave Williams, veered away from the group and steered his ship to Block Island in Rhode Island. He wanted to go home to visit his mother and three sisters. Higgins reported that he remained onboard the ship while Captain Williams went ashore to see his family.

I was taken aback by this court testimony—a pirate going home to see his mother and sisters? And in a pirate ship, no less? Especially one painted yellow and blue with worn patched sails! It seemed like a very un-pirate thing to do.

I have long had an interest in issues concerning women, children and the family, and Jeremiah Higgins’s testimony made me realize that the story about pirates was not only about their seafaring exploits and stolen treasure, but also about their everyday lives and their relationships on land with the people they cared about—their families and communities. In one short sentence, Jeremiah Higgins gave me a gold nugget of information in what would later be a treasure trove that I compiled for my doctoral thesis at Georgetown University. My book, “The Pirate Next Door,” is based on the 15 years of research I did for my doctoral thesis.

Tell us a little about your book.

In “The Pirate Next Door,” I write about the wives, families and communities of four pirate captains from the Golden Age who were active from 1695 to 1720. Though pirates were active up and down the eastern seaboard of the United States and the Caribbean, I focus specifically on four pirates who operated in New England. This area was a hub of pirate activity, and I chose these four pirates in particular because they were all married (except Captain Samuel Bellamy, who had an “intended”). All interacted with each other at some point or another, and all of them were involved—in some cases quite actively involved—in the larger land-based community. These men are Samuel Bellamy of Cape Cod, Paulsgrave Williams of Block Island, and William Kidd and Samuel Burgess of New York.

While I focus on these four men, my research included the lives of 80 married pirates. Their stories help craft a picture of the wider world of pirates and the surprising sense of community these men often shared, inspiring us to take another look at the conventional image of pirate life

What collections at the Library did you use, and what was your experience like?

I spent days in the Manuscript Reading Room in the Madison Building. I also spent time in the Prints and Photographs Division. My experience was wonderful. There was always someone who could answer my questions. Or there was a resource I could use, such as a webinar through Patron Services, to figure out what I needed and where to find it.

I am a former congressional staffer, and one of my jobs was to send constituent requests to the Library. Magically, the answer or the documents would appear at my desk in very short order. I had no idea where in the Library the information came from. I only knew the Library from outside of the beautiful buildings. It was such an eye-opening and humbling experience to actually go into the different departments and do my own research. I am overwhelmed by the amount of information that is available in the Library. I have not begun to scratch the surface of what I can uncover for my research.

What were your most interesting discoveries at the Library?

I found an image of Captain William Kidd’s house in Manhattan, located at the corner of Hanover and Pearl Streets near the city wall that would be later be renamed Wall Street. The pen-and-ink drawing is from 1699, and I used it for the cover of my book. The three-story mansion actually belonged to his wife, Sarah, who inherited it from her first husband, William Cox. It is fascinating to see where one of the most notorious pirates in history lived with his wife and two daughters.

In the Manuscripts Reading Room, I found a fascinating document about Captain Kidd. It is an itemized list of the cost of maintaining a young boy and a young girl who were with him while he was in Newgate Prison in London. Kidd was held there for over a year while he awaited trial for murder and piracy. I had no idea that they were with him. I wondered, why were they there? The document listed the price of the girl’s dresses and shoes as well as the cost of trousers and shirts for the boy.

What finding in your book surprised you most?

The most remarkable thing my research has revealed is the role women played in the lives of pirates—a much larger one than has been acknowledged in previous pirate literature. I discovered that behind many a pirate was a strong woman on land.

Who is your favorite pirate wife and why?

I would say Sarah Kidd is my favorite pirate wife. Information about pirates’ wives is scant, but there is enough information about Sarah that I was able to piece together her life from an early age to her death. I admire her strength and grit. She was married four times, and Captain Kidd was her third husband. She went from a young 20-something New York socialite to a pirate’s wife and an accomplice to a man on the run from the law. What many people don’t know is that behind Captain Kidd was a very strong woman who pleaded, cajoled and bribed colonial officials to try to save her husband’s life. Their relationship was a real love story, and she was a remarkable woman.

New Finding Aid: Asian-American and Pacific-Islander Resources

This is a guest post by Andrew Gaudio, reference librarian and classics, medieval studies and linguistics specialist in the Humanities and Social Sciences Division.

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A 1943 photograph by Ansel Adams of the Catholic church at the Manzanar Relocation Center in California. It was one of the camps where the U.S. government detained Japanese-Americans during World War II.

The Library of Congress collects materials on most subjects, excluding agriculture and medicine. In a collection of over 160 million items, finding what you are looking for can be challenging. To help you better navigate collections on Asian-American and Pacific-Islander resources—and to commemorate Asian Pacific American Heritage Month—the Humanities and Social Sciences Division has created a new research guide.

It functions as an entry point for researchers seeking materials in multiple formats on Asian-American and Pacific-Islander studies and related resources at the Library. The types of resources covered in the guide—including both print and online materials—range from special collections containing photographs, diary entries and recorded interviews to monographs, reference works and serials. They are housed within reading rooms throughout the Library, including the Main Reading Room, the Asian Reading Room, the Manuscript Reading Room, the Prints and Photographs Reading Room and the Microform Reading Room.

For me, two online collections, both referenced in the guide, are especially striking. They document life for Japanese-Americans in World War II internment camps. Photographer Ansel Adams shot hundreds of images at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in California, including the photo at the top of this post. He donated the collection to the Library in the 1960s, placing no copyright restrictions on their use. And just this month, the Library placed online a collection of newspapers published in internment camps from 1942 to 1946.

To learn about many other notable Asian-American and Pacific-Islander resources at the Library, consult the guide!

On a side note, did you ever wonder why May is designated as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month? The answer is rooted in 19th-century American history. On May 7, 1843, the first Japanese immigrants arrived in the United States. Then, on May 10, 1869, the transcontinental railroad was completed, largely by Chinese laborers. With these events in mind, New York representative Frank Horton and California representative Norman Mineta introduced a resolution in June 1977 to mark the first 10 days of the month as Asian-Pacific Heritage Week. Congress passed the resolution, and President Jimmy Carter approved it on October 5, 1978. In 1990, George H. W. Bush signed a bill to extend Asian-American Heritage Week to a month that year. Two years later, he signed Public Law 102-450, which officially designated May as Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

For more information, visit the Asian Pacific American Heritage Month portal.

 

Form Follows Function: Diverse Collections Require Diverse Modern Storage

(The following is an article by Jennifer Gavin from the May/June 2017 issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. Gavin is senior public affairs specialist in the Library’s Office of Communications. Read the entire May/June issue here .)

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Thirty-foot-tall shelving units in one of the Library’s storage modules in Fort Meade, Maryland. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The phrase “form follows function,” long associated with the design movement, isn’t a bad starting place when we look at how the Library of Congress keeps track of 164 million books and other collections items.

Back in the day of physical card catalogs, item storage simply meant building enough shelving to hold all that stuff, bound or in containers. As a result, the Library’s John Adams Building, an art deco delight, was built in the 1930s to hold the overflowing collections; and later, the Library’s James Madison Memorial Building opened, in 1980, with significant storage capacity tucked in among its reading rooms.

But by the new millennium, it was clear some new approach would be needed to handle the 12,000 items that are accepted into the collections daily. As a result, the Library now has five (soon to be six) specialized buildings in Fort Meade, Maryland, designed to hold Library materials safely and efficiently. With shelves that soar quite high (special forklifts move the items), everything in these climate-controlled structures is bar-coded. This allows every inch of shelving space to be fully used. Researchers requesting items from such storage are served within 24 hours, sometimes later the same day.

Another approach is the Library’s special storage for rare collections. Custom boxes are created to hold rare or fragile items, such as those in a set of climate-controlled locking cases in the Geography and Map Division containing items from the unparalleled Kislak Collection of Mesoamerican artifacts.

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Custom-designed boxes house priceless Mayan, Aztec and Olmec archaeological objects from the Kislak Collection. Photo by Shawn Miller.

With special storage that ensures preservation, the 3,800 items in the Kislak Collection—about 25 percent of them are on public display at any given time, in the “Exploring the Early Americas” exhibition—are available to researchers at all times, said John Hessler, curator of the collection.

He praised James Thurn of the Preservation Directorate and Thurn’s team of box-makers, as he displayed a ceramic figure (300–650 CE) cradled in a specially carved bed of foam designed in the 21st century that could be slid sideways out of its preservation box, “so the object doesn’t have to be touched too much.”

Researchers from around the world come to study the objects, which range from ceramic and stone figures to a rare notebook penned in a native language by a Spanish missionary, to beautiful, flag-like panels woven using brilliant Macaw feathers. “No one actually knows what they were used for—probably to create some sort of sacred space,” Hessler said.

When the Kislak Collection first arrived at the Library, “It was nothing like this,” placed securely in closets but without the special preservation and access now made possible. “Now . . . if it’s not on display, it’s still accessible to researchers.”

On the Library’s Capitol Hill campus, book storage has been made more efficient by the use of shelving that rolls on rail-like tracks. The aisle space ordinarily left between fixed shelves is eliminated by putting the shelves on rollers, so they can be packed tightly together but an access point can be created instantly by turning a wheel at the end of a shelf, “So you don’t need all the aisles simultaneously,” said Steven Herman, chief of the Collections Access, Loan and Management Division. “It’s much more efficient.”

Special cold storage at the Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia, ensures that precious old movies shot on nitrate-based film stock will have longer life and remain chemically stable. Nitrate stock, used for nearly all 35mm filmmaking until about the 1950s, is a fire hazard.

A nitrate fire, if one gets going, is “a tough critter,” said Stephen Leggett, liaison specialist for the Library’s National Film Preservation Board. “It creates its own oxygen when it burns.” As a result, the nitrate film vaults at Culpeper isolate each film container in its own cubbyhole. Should a fire start, water would be released from overhead pipes at a rate of 200 gallons per minute, creating a curtain of water that would let the fire burn itself out within its compartment. To date, the campus has never had a fire and the nitrate film storage area, at 35 degrees F and about 30 percent relative humidity, has kept the film treasures intact.

Check out a video of Library of Congress staff constructing a custom storage box here.

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Pic of the Week: Celebrating Classical Cambodian Dance

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

The Cambodian-American Heritage Dancers and the Chum Ngek Ensemble performed classical Khmer dance and music in the Coolidge Auditorium on May 25. The program took place as part of the Library’s Homegrown Concert Series and in celebration of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month.

Inquiring Minds: Restoring the Legacy of a Barnstorming Movie Man

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In a clip from a soon-to-be-released documentary about early motion pictures, George Willeman (left) of the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation helps film researcher Mike Zahs. Courtesy of Andrew Sherburne.

Most are just a few minutes long, and some last only a few seconds. But the movies at the center of a new documentary film, “Saving Brinton,” are treasures even so.

The film follows the journey of Mike Zahs of Iowa, a retired middle-school history teacher, as he travels near and far—including to the Library of Congress—to restore and preserve a collection of film from the earliest days of motion pictures. Zahs bought 35,000 feet of footage, fast decaying as a result of having been made on flammable nitrate stock, along with thousands of trinkets, handwritten journals, receipts, posters and catalogs, at a 1981 estate sale. All was once owned by William Franklin Brinton, the “barnstorming movie man” whose story Zahs uncovers as part of his quest.

Brinton toured small towns in the Midwest and Texas from about 1895 to 1910 showing movies he bought from production companies like Lumiere, Pathé and Edison. In church halls, opera houses and even tents, audiences watched motion pictures for the first time thanks to Brinton, viewing images as diverse as animals in the London Zoo, street scenes in Cairo and re-created bank robberies.

Here Andrew Sherburne, producer of “Saving Brinton,” answers questions about the documentary and the role of the Library of Congress in saving Brinton’s films.

What inspired Brinton to bring movies to the heartland?

Frank Brinton was a dreamer, an adventurer, a futurist. He toured the world, he tinkered with airships, he filed patents. And he shared this thirst for knowledge with his community, first with illustrated lectures on the Chautauqua circuit and later in his own touring show. He’d been using magic lantern slides already for years, so the invention of moving pictures would have immediately intrigued him. He was buying and showing films in Iowa by 1897, if not earlier. I think he was awed by this expansion of the mind, this opening of doors to the world beyond. He wanted to bring the world to Iowa, and film allowed him to do that.

How did you become interested in Mike Zahs and his effort to restore Brinton’s movies and legacy?

Mike had been showing these films annually to his small community in Ainsworth, Iowa (population 600) for over a decade. This got the attention of some folks at Humanities Iowa. They called us and said you won’t believe this amazing collection of films discovered just down the road. Sure enough, we were instantly fascinated by the films. Then once we met Mike, we realized there was so much more depth to this story and the way it threads through the fabric of time.

I understand that the Library helped to restore the original nitrate film soon after Zahs purchased it. How did that come about?

The Library of Congress became involved in 1981, when Mike was purchasing the estate of Frank Brinton from the Masson family, who had inherited it. The American Film Institute had been scouring the country for old films and had become acquainted with this collection. The films were beginning to deteriorate, so they were sent to the Library of Congress for preservation. The Library returned dupes of the films to Mike and kept the original cellulose nitrate reels in its climate-controlled vault.

More recently, the Library has supported the effort to created high-definition copies of the surviving original nitrate film. Can you tell us a little about that?

As part of this project, our film team worked closely with the University of Iowa and the Library of Congress to properly digitize the best surviving copy of all of the films within the Brinton collection (also known as the Masson collection at the Library). With the help of George Willeman and Zoran Sinobad at the Library, we identified the reels that were best suited for digitization. The Library then created high-definition scans of all of the black-and-white films. Collectively, we also made the thrilling discovery that some of the original films were hand-colored. These films were shipped to Colorlab in Rockville, Maryland, where they were scanned and restored. All told, there are now quality high-definition scans of over five hours of cinema from the 1890s and 1900s, including 14 films in color.

What has your experience been like working with Library staff?

We’ve worked with so many people on staff at the Library over the last three years. Initially with Mike Mashon and Sheryl Cannady to visit and film at the Library. With Rob Stone and Rachel Del Gaudio to show some of the Brinton films as part of the Library’s wonderful “Mostly Lost” film festival and to film there. With George Willeman to dig deep into the vaults and uncover the secrets of the collection. And with Ryan Chroninger, Rosemary Hanes, Zoran Sinobad, Jerry Hatfield and Laurel Howard on the task of matching up records with reels and thoroughly duplicating every frame of film we could find. Library staff members were instrumental in deciphering records, generous with their time and expertise, open to being a part of the story, crucial in helping us find our way and, more than anything, kindred spirits in their appreciation for these century-old films, giving their time and energy to the task of bringing these films back to life.

You note in your publicity materials that a rare Georges Méliés film was discovered in the collection in recent years. How did that come about?

There are over 120 films in the Brinton collection, and the vast majority were unidentified when we started. As we began the quest of identifying the films, some films immediately grabbed our attention. There are many magic or fantasy films in the collection. Some were immediately identified as well-known George Méliés films, and others we learned were by a Méliés contemporary named Segundo de Chomón who was working with Pathé films. But a few films eluded us.

Luckily, Brinton also left behind his film catalogs. We paged through the catalogs looking for descriptions that matched the unidentified films. When we found a synopsis for “The Triple-Headed Lady” that seemed to fit, we searched the known archives of Méliés films compiled by Lobster Films to see if it was an existing film. It wasn’t. Luckily, Serge Bromberg of Lobster Films was in attendance at “Mostly Lost” in 2014, and we also attended. There in the lobby at the Packard Campus, Mike showed the film to Serge. There was no doubt that this was exactly the missing Méliés we thought it was, as Serge excitedly proclaimed, “We have a new one!”

What are your favorite movies from Brinton’s collection ?

As much as I love the fantasy of Méliés and Chomón, or the comedies of Edison and Lubin, my favorite films are the actualities—films that documented life and events around the world. To me, these films represent the clearest window into the past: images from the other side of the world in India, Burma and the Ottoman Empire; exotic animals; the World’s Fair; president Theodore Roosevelt riding in a carriage down the streets of San Francisco before the earthquake; a mesmerizing trip by rail across the Brooklyn Bridge. In these films, I can feel a sense of pure wonder for the world we live in. It still resonates.

Here are two restored motion pictures from Brinton’s collection available on the Library’s website: “The Enchanted Glasses“ and “Chrysanthemums.” Both films were produced in 1907 by Pathé and directed by Segundo de Chomón.

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Celebrating Yiddish American Popular Song

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“Bist Mein Kroin Mein Welt” from the Library’s Yiddish American Popular Sheet Music Collection. Published in 1911 by Hebrew Publishing Company, New York.

The Library’s collection of Yiddish American sheet music is an unusual one for the Library of Congress, mostly because of the way it came together: It started not with acquisition of materials that were then cataloged, but with a catalog.

Lawrence Marwick retired as head of the Library’s Hebraic Section in 1980. Soon afterward, he set out to compile a list of Yiddish American plays and music the Library of Congress had acquired as deposits with copyright registrations. Because the deposits had not been cataloged, these works were virtually unknown to scholars at the time, and Marwick wanted to rectify that. He started by recording information on some 5,000 index cards.

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“A Boychik Up-to-Date,” published in 1904 by Theodore Lohr, New York.

While doing so, he read a story in the New York Times about music historian Irene Heskes and her project to organize a collection of sheet music owned by the Hebrew Publishing Company of New York City. The collection included many Yiddish popular songs performed by stars of the Jewish stage. Marwick wrote to Heskes, and she agreed to meet him in Washington, D.C. Unfortunately, in October 1981, before Heskes could come, Marwick fell ill and died.

But his vision for Yiddish American sheet music acquired through copyright endured thanks to Heskes. She began in 1984 to revise and expand Marwick’s unfinished work, adding composers, arrangers, publishers and other information. Her efforts culminated in Yiddish American Popular Songs, 1895 to 1950: A Catalog Based on the Lawrence Marwick Roster of Copyright Entries, published by the Library of Congress in 1992. Heskes donated sheet music from her Hebrew Publishing Company research to the Library after the book’s publication.

Much of the Library’s Yiddish American Popular Sheet Music Collection has roots in the Yiddish theater. It thrived in the Bowery area of New York City’s Lower East Side from the 1880s into the mid-20th century and expanded into a network of theaters in Jewish communities around the country. The collection also features popular arrangements of folk songs and sacred songs as well as instrumental numbers. Some compositions, most notably those of composer and violinist Abe Schwartz, became standards in the field of klezmer music.

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“Uptown and Downtown,” published in 1906 by Theodore Lohr, New York.

Most items in the online presentation of the collection—which includes more than 1,300 items—were scanned from printed copies of sheet music published by companies that specialized in Jewish music. But many are copyright deposits that were submitted to the Library as unpublished manuscripts. These unique items are in many ways the jewels of this collection. Some also exist in published form, but many were never published and appeared publicly for the first time in the online presentation.

The online presentation stops at 1922, because many works published after that year remain under copyright protection in the United States. Researchers can access post-1922 items from the Yiddish American Popular Sheet Music Collection in the Library’s Performing Arts Reading Room.

Lawrence Marwick’s bibliography of more than 1,000 copyrighted Yiddish plays was published separately. A finding aid to the plays is available in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Reading Room. In addition, 77 unpublished playscripts are available online.

 

Recognizing the Service of Asian-Pacific-American Veterans

The following is a republication of a post by Andrew Huber, liaison specialist for the Veterans History Project. It was first published on the Library’s “Folklife Today” blog.

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Warren Tsuneishi at the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in Wyoming, one of the internment camps where Japanese-Americans were detained during World War II.

Throughout the month of May, we celebrate Asian-American and Pacific-Islander heritage and remember the contributions made by people of Asian-Pacific descent. Those contributions are numerous, from Duke Kahanamoku, who brought the sport of surfing into the mainstream, to Steven Chu, who earned the Nobel Prize in physics for pioneering methods in supercooling atoms. However, the contributions to our nation that required the most courage, dedication and sacrifice were undoubtedly those of veterans.

Perhaps the most notable and selfless examples from this group are the Nisei veterans of World War II— American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry. Along with their parents, children, aunts and uncles, they were rounded up by their own U.S. government, forcibly removed from their homes and placed in internment camps. After these grave injustices, nobody could have blamed Japanese-Americans for turning their backs on the country that betrayed them. Instead, thousands of Nisei volunteered to go to war.

One such volunteer was Warren Tsuneishi. He was living in Monrovia, California, when Executive Order 9066 forced his family to relocate to the Heart Mountain War Relocation Center in Wyoming. He received a special dispensation to leave the camp and get his college degree from Syracuse University. After finishing his senior year early, he volunteered for the Army and enrolled in the Military Intelligence Service Language School—the only option offered to him as a Japanese-American except for the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed entirely of Americans of Japanese ancestry.

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Warren Tsuneishi (left) in the Philippines during World War II.

After six months of schooling, he deployed to the Pacific Theater to translate captured Japanese documents and interrogate prisoners. One of the documents his team captured and translated happened to be the Japanese military’s defense plan for the island of Okinawa. It revealed an unconventional strategy that involved allowing the Americans to advance to the heart of the island, where the Japanese had concentrated their forces in fortified positions. Once the Americans were engaged, kamikaze planes were to destroy the supply ships off the coast, cutting off the American infantry from resupply and reinforcement. The battles on Okinawa were still hard-fought and bloody, but the Allies were able to avoid this trap, and countless American lives were saved, because of Tsuneishi’s translation and interpretation of the captured documents.

To learn more about Asian Americans in the U.S. military, visit our “Experiencing War” web feature Asian Pacific Americans: Going for Broke.

Free to Use and Reuse: Gorgeous Gardens, Breakthrough Buildings and Notable Designs

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A Frances Benjamin Johnston lantern slide of the gardens of Beacon Hill House in Newport, Rhode Island, in 1917. Beacon Hill House was razed in 1967, and the garden acres were sold for a subdivision, making this photo an important historical record as well as a stunning image.

Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864–1952) loved beautiful gardens. From 1915 through the 1930s, she shared her enthusiasm in lectures to garden club members, museum groups and horticultural societies. No doubt her listeners valued her knowledge of gardens—but they may have enjoyed her visual examples even more.

Johnston—one of the first women to achieve international prominence as a photographer—illustrated her lectures with glass lantern slides created from her black-and-white photographs. Guided by notes from Johnston, colorists carefully hand-painted small glass transparencies that, once inserted into a projector, cast an enlarged image on a screen.

The Library of Congress purchased Johnston’s archive from her estate in 1953, including more than a thousand garden lantern slides. They had not been seen since the 1910s to 1930s until the Library digitized the images and put them online in 2012. The project was possible because of extensive research and new insights from house and garden historian Sam Watters, who spent five years working with the collection.

Some of Johnston’s slides are highlighted 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. The items are U.S. government works, in the public domain, or cleared for public use by copyright owners—meaning you can use them as you wish.

This month, we are highlighting architecture and design: Carol M. Highsmith photographs of architectural gems by John Eberson and Frank Lloyd Wright; beautiful images from the Historic American Buildings Survey; drawings and designs for landmarks and landmark structures—and more.

Scroll down to view some examples.

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A photograph by Carol M. Highsmith of the Carpenter Theatre in Richmond, Va., designed by John Eberson.

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A photograph from the Historic American Buildings Survey of Fallingwater in Fayette County, Pa., designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

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Design for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. Maya Lin created the design in 1981 when she was as a student at Yale University’s School of Architecture.

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An 1807 site plan by architect Benjamin Henry Latrobe of the White House’s principal story.

Pic of the Week: Inspiring a Sense of Service

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Ann Compton (left) moderates a discussion between Secretary of Transportation Elaine Chao (center) and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The Peace Corps and its ideals—service to country and the cause of peace—was the subject of discussion at the Third Annual Daniel K. Inouye Distinguished Lecture, held in the Coolidge Auditorium on May 18.

Elaine L. Chao, U.S. Secretary of Transportation, and Netflix CEO Reed Hastings reflected on their Peace Corps service, their leadership experiences, and why the ideals of the Peace Corps remain relevant five decades after its founding. Ann Compton, former White House correspondent for ABC News, moderated the exchange. Chao is a former director of the Peace Corps, and Reed is a former volunteer.

This year’s lecture was planned with the Kennedy Center and the Peace Corps to recognize the centennial of the birth of President John F. Kennedy and values he held in common with Daniel K. Inouye, Hawaii’s first U.S. representative and a U.S. senator for nearly half a century. The lecture is the third in a five-year series being hosted by the Library’s John W. Kluge Center with the Daniel K. Inouye Institute.

A web recording of the event is available here.

Brigadier General Franklin Pierce

This is a guest post by Peter A. Wallner, author of a two-volume biography of President Franklin Pierce consisting of “Franklin Pierce: New Hampshire’s Favorite Son” (2004) and “Franklin Pierce: Martyr for the Union” (2007).

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An engraving of Franklin Pierce from the mid-1840s.

It is often forgotten that Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States, was also a brigadier general in the Mexican War (1846–48) who commanded troops under General Winfield Scott in the campaign around Mexico City. Pierce was a political general, appointed by President James K. Polk, and served directly under Polk’s close friend General Gideon Pillow, while maintaining a relatively apolitical stance toward the Whig General Scott.

For the only time in his life, Pierce kept a diary, in which he recorded his experiences in Mexico. He expected at some future time to pass the diary along to his only surviving son, Benny, but the latter died in a train wreck prior to Pierce’s presidential inauguration in 1853.

Scott was already near Mexico City when Pierce and his 2,500-man brigade reached Vera Cruz. After acquiring nearly a thousand mules to pull the wagons full of supplies and funds that Scott so desperately needed to carry out his campaign, Pierce and his men set off for the 150-mile trek inland to meet up with Scott. Along the way, Pierce and his brigade were attacked six times by guerillas, who at one point blew up a stone bridge across the Plan del Rio. This required Pierce and his men to build quickly a new wooden bridge, prompting Pierce to write in his diary that it was absurd for the Mexicans to think that they could “play such a trick upon Yankees.” (See Pierce diary entry of July 22, 1847).

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Excerpt from Pierce’s diary from July 25, 1847.

On another occasion, Pierce’s suspicions were raised by the friendly greeting he received in the town of Jalapa. Sensing something was wrong, Pierce withdrew from the town, later learning that it was a hotbed of guerilla activity. This caused Pierce to reflect in his diary on the utility of a limited war strategy in Mexico. “Perhaps a peace can be conquered by our present system of operations and policy. If so, we have made a grand leap in civilization, we will astonish the world . . . we will make wars to cease . . . because if we can conquer a peace in this way we can conquer it better without arms than with them.” While Pierce accepted that the United States was on a “mission of civilization and humanity,” he believed that “human butchery” by Mexican combatants made this impossible. He concluded that the best answer was “war to the knife and the knife to the hilt.” (See Pierce diary entry of July 25, 1847)

The next day Pierce regretted what he had written, noting that the purpose of the diary was simply to state the facts so that he could remember them better at some future time. The diary entry also reminded him of his friend Samuel E. Coues of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, who wanted all nations to outlaw war. He concluded that as a general he was responsible for prosecuting the war since “such a course would more speedily lead to peace.” (See Pierce diary entry of July 26, 1847). The diary ends on July 30, 1847, when Pierce’s brigade joined up with Scott’s army.

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Pierce wrote to J. F. H. Claiborne of “the just & accomplished Beauregard,” who supported Pierce’s candidacy for the presidency.

The remainder of Pierce’s time in Mexico was more controversial. On August 19, during the Battle of Contreras, Pierce was thrown from his horse, which landed on his knee. Though visibly suffering from his injuries, Pierce insisted on participating in the Battle of Churubusco the next day. At one point, he had to dismount his horse to lead it across a stream, and the pain in his knee caused him to faint.

This became a campaign issue in the 1852 presidential election when the “fainting General” charge was leveled against Pierce as an indication that he was a coward.

The vast majority of Mexican War officers, however, supported the Democratic contender Pierce in 1852 against their former commanding general Winfield Scott, the Whig candidate. Among those who supported Pierce were volunteer officers including Jefferson Davis, Caleb Cushing and Gideon Pillow. In fact, Cushing and Pillow met with Pierce twice in the months leading up to the Democratic convention to urge him to run for president. Also supporting Pierce were professional officers such as Robert E. Lee, George B. McClellan, and P. G. T. Beauregard. It is unlikely that such men would have supported a candidate guilty of military cowardice.

In any case, the accusation did not prevent Pierce from winning the election.