Library of Congress's Blog, page 110

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.

Story of the Century: My Afternoon with a Jewish American World War II Veteran

The following is a guest post by Owen Rogers, liaison specialist for the Veterans History Project. An extended version of the post appeared on the Library’s “Folklife Today” blog.

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Schuman in Germany, 1945.

When Burton “Burt” Schuman greeted me at the door with a handshake and an offer of a home tour, he shared his framed Bronze Star Medal and a photograph of himself as a young GI whose smile belied the worn leather of his boots and rifle sling. I had questions about those. But it was the mezuzah on his doorframe that prompted my first and most personal question. Schuman was one of the half million Jewish Americans who served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II and a veteran of the European Theater of Operations.

I interviewed him when I was a graduate student at Central Connecticut State University’s Veterans History Project. Like the stories of other World War II veterans I interviewed then, Schuman’s oral history is archived both at the Library of Congress and Central Connecticut State’s Elihu Burritt Library.

Schuman ushered me to his basement art studio, where countless images of ducks and marsh life wreathed the walls. He explained that he started developing his artistic talents in college and continued during World War II.

With only one year of coursework under his belt, Schuman became the head cartographer in the G-3 section of the 100th Infantry of the U.S. Army’s “Century” Division. His responsibilities were vast, as he plotted the movement and positions of 100th Infantry forces, developing maps drawn from frontline reports and his own scouting of friendly positions. In our modern era of mobile GPS maps and pin drops, it’s hard to imagine an entire division relying on “maps mounted on four-by-eight plywood . . . on stands . . . [and] on a two-and-a-half ton truck,” as Schuman recounted. For two years, Schuman made that “deuce-and-a-half” [truck] his home.

Although his wartime experiences included encounters with personalities such as General George Patton and Marlene Dietrich, as well as a harrowing 13-hour flight toward friendly lines after his jeep was shot from under him, it was mention of the mezuzah that sparked his most emotional response. Jewish American GIs faced firsthand the horrors of Nazi edicts and extermination. Schuman recalled:

I had full contempt for them, without doubt. I saw many of the German prisoners. . . . [T]hey would march through our command post. I saw a lot of dead Germans on the side of the road, too. It didn’t make me too unhappy, really. I mean that’s going down to the basic thought that I had.

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Campaign map for the Battle of Heilbronn developed by Schuman in 1945.

I often think of what life must have been like for Schuman in the decades after World War II. Alone in his canoe, painting from life in marshy surroundings. What thoughts weighed on his mind?

Through the insights afforded by Veterans History Project, we’re made more aware of the history held behind his eyes. We owe it to the veterans among our friends, families and communities to ask them questions like the ones I posed to Schuman. Have you taken the time to ask such questions yet? If so, thank you. If not, go here to find out how.

 

From High Style to Humble: Surveying America’s Built Environment

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St. Alexander of Nevsky Russian Orthodox Church has a simple wood frame and a gable roof that covers its nave and sanctuary. It is located in Aleutians East Borough, Alaska.

Settlers’ cabins, high-style mansions, jails, barns and churches. These are just a few of the properties the Historic American Buildings Survey has painstakingly documented over the past 80 plus years. The Library started digitizing the survey’s records—many of them stunning and unique—20 years ago, providing public access on its website.

Known as HABS for short, the survey began in 1933 as part of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal. Architect Charles Peterson of the National Park Service proposed that the government employ 1,000 out-of-work architects, partly to support recovery from the Great Depression, but also to record America’s architectural heritage, increasingly threatened by the forces of modernization. Peterson wrote:

Our architectural heritage of buildings from the last four centuries diminishes at an alarming rate. The ravages of fire and the natural elements, together with the demolition and alterations caused by real estate “improvements” form an inexorable tide of destruction destined to wipe out the great majority of the buildings which knew the beginning and first flourish of the nation. . . . It is the responsibility of the American people that if the great number of our antique buildings must disappear through economic causes, they should not pass into unrecorded oblivion.

Within weeks of the government’s approving Peterson’s proposal, hundreds of formerly unemployed architects, selected with help from the American Institute of Architects, were busy documenting historical properties through measured drawings, large-format photographs and short historical reports. Thus began America’s first nationwide publicly funded historic preservation program.

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Isaac Potts House in King of Prussia, Penn., served as the headquarters and residence of General George Washington during the encampment of the Continental Army in the winter and spring of 1777–78.

Measured drawing of a room on the first floor of the Potts House, where administrative business of the Continental Army was conducted.

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View from the salon of Tudor Place in Washington, D.C. The house is an example of the federal-style architecture built in the U.S. between about 1780 and 1815.

Many of the properties first documented reflected high-style architecture. But HABS administrators advised fieldworkers to include buildings not previously considered of interest to the “architectural connoisseur,” such as Native American structures, the “hewn log cabins of the early pioneers,” and buildings in old mining towns. Special priority was to be given to buildings “in imminent danger of destruction.”

The Library of Congress has been a HABS partner from the start with the American Institute of Architects and the National Park Service. The institute advises the survey from the perspective of private-sector architectural practice; the Park Service develops guidelines and produces standard-setting documentation; and the Library maintains the collection and provides public access.

Users of the HABS collection include students, historians and even Hollywood producers aiming to convey the look and feel of an era. Architects often seek out HABS plans and drawings, including for restoration projects for which design details are available only in historical measured drawings.

Building on the success of HABS, the Historic American Engineering Record was founded in 1969 using the same model to document engineering works and industrial sites. The Historic American Landscape Survey was established in 2000 to document historic landscapes. Together, the three collections are among the largest and most popular in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.

Still growing, the collections include more than 555,000 measured drawings, large-format photographs and written histories for more than 38,500 historic structures and sites dating from pre-Columbian times to the 21st century. The online presentation features more than 43,000 digitized images of measured drawings, black-and-white photographs, color transparencies, photo captions, written history pages and supplemental materials.

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The Temple Among the Trees Beneath the Clouds in Weaverville, Calif., is a house of worship used by Chinese immigrants since 1874.

For some time now, students pursuing advanced degrees have produced much of the survey documentation, making the surveys an important training ground for aspiring architects, engineers and historians.

It’s safe to say that Charles Peterson would be more than pleased with the results of what he saw as a temporary make-work program to document threatened properties at a key moment in history. Thanks to his vision and the efforts of thousands of fieldworkers since, we now have a valuable repository of knowledge about the built environment to help tell America’s story.

The Historic American Buildings Survey is highlighted on the website this month under the Library’s “free to use and reuse” feature. As works created for the U.S. government, records from the survey are in the public domain, meaning you are free to use them as you wish. However, material from private sources occasionally appears with the survey records. These materials are noted by the presence of a line crediting the original source. So make sure to check each image before publishing or distributing it.

 

My Job at the Library: Building the Architecture, Design and Engineering Collection

(The following is an article from the November/December 2016 issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine, in which Mari Nakahara, curator of architecture, design and engineering in the Prints and Photographs Division, discusses her job. The issue can be read in its entirety here .)

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Mari Nakahara. Photo by Shawn Miller.

How would you describe your work at the Library?

Like other Library curators, I am responsible for building the collection. Acquiring new items for the Prints and Photographs Division is very satisfying, but it is also more complicated than one might expect. It requires an in-depth knowledge of the existing collection holdings, Library-wide collection development policies, research trends and rights-agreement issues, among other concerns.

How did you prepare for your current position?

I received a Ph.D. in architectural design and history in my native Japan. My dissertation on McKim, Mead & White, a New York-based architectural firm from the late-19th to early-20th century, required me to access their original documents held in the U.S. The beauty and rich information in those original, historical documents was a powerful magnet that led me to change my career, leaving academia to become an architectural archivist. I received a Fulbright Fellowship that made it possible for me to intern at Columbia University’s Avery Architectural Archives and the Museum of Modern Art. In 2000, I decided to immigrate to the U.S. to pursue my goal of working at an architectural repository, because this profession was not yet available in Japan.

My first full-time job at the American Architectural Foundation brought me to Washington, D.C., in 2003. Four years later, I was hired as a librarian in the Asian Division of the Library of Congress, and I acquired a library science degree at nearby Catholic University of America. I was honored to be hired as the curator of the Library’s architecture, design and engineering collections last year when Ford Peatross, my predecessor, retired after 40 years of service.

What is the size and scope of the Library’s architecture, design and engineering collections?

More than 4 million items pertaining to the subjects of architecture, design and engineering are housed in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. These include the drawings of many of the most distinguished figures in the field, such as Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect who studied at the École des Beaux-Arts, as well as the innovative furniture and house designs by Charles and Ray Eames from the mid-1900s. Hunt designed significant structures such as the pedestal of the Statue of Liberty and the Biltmore Estate and is considered a leading figure in American architectural history. The Historic American Buildings Survey, the Historic American Engineering Record and the Historic American Landscapes Survey are the most popular design collections. They document sites throughout the U.S. and its territories—ranging from one-room schoolhouses to structures designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

What are some of the most memorable items in the Library’s design collection?

The collection holds many memorable treasures. It is hard to pick a few because each has its own fascinating story. Among the highlights are the competition drawings for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which includes Maya Lin’s winning design. She created her entry at age 21 as an undergraduate student at Yale University. The world of design drawings and photographs constantly surprises people because it covers so many more subjects than one might expect.

Pic of the Week: Disco Dance Party!

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Gloria Gaynor. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Legendary singer Gloria Gaynor performed the night away in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building on May 6 to an audience of dancers in glittering halter dresses, platform shoes, and bell bottoms.

The dance party ended a daylong celebration of disco culture. It started with a symposium that explored disco’s influence on popular music and dance since the 1970s. Gaynor, whose song “I Will Survive” was added to the Library’s National Recording Registry in 2015, talked to Good Morning America host Robin Roberts about her career and what the disco anthem means for her.  Other panelists were photographer Bill Bernstein, scholars Martin Scherzinger and Alice Echols, and disco ball maker Yolanda Baker.

A video recording of the symposium is available on the Library’s website.

The dance party concluded “Bibliodiscoteque,” an events series that explored disco culture, music, dance and fashion as told by the national collections.