Library of Congress's Blog, page 111

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.

First Drafts of History: Presidential Papers at the Library of Congress

The following is a guest post by Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library of Congress Gazette, about digitization of presidential papers held by the Library of Congress.

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An engraving of Franklin Pierce from the mid-1840s. The Library recently placed Pierce’s presidential papers online.

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An 1853 letter from Pierce to his future war secretary, Jefferson Davis, following the death of Pierce’s son in a train derailment.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Library of Congress’s presidential papers tell the American story in the words of those who helped write it: through war and peace, prosperity and hard times, from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge.

The Library is currently conducting a years-long project to digitize the nearly two dozen presidential collections in its holdings and place them online—an effort that, when completed, will add more than 3 million images to its online archives and give wider public access to some of the most important papers in U.S. history. A list of the Library’s presidential papers that have already been digitized and placed online is at the bottom of this post.

“These are among our most prized collections. They cover the entire sweep of American history, from our founding to the eve of the Great Depression,” said Janice E. Ruth, assistant chief of the Manuscript Division. “They were preserved and microfilmed for use by the American people, to advance our understanding of our history.”

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A circa 1850 lithograph of Millard Fillmore based on a Mathew Brady photograph. The Library recently posted Fillmore’s papers online.

The Library recently released the Franklin Pierce papers and the Millard Fillmore papers; the Ulysses S. Grant and James K. Polk papers will be available later in the year.

Those follow the additions of the James Monroe and Andrew Jackson papers in 2015 and Martin Van Buren, William Henry Harrison, John Tyler and Zachary Taylor last year. The Library digitized and placed online the papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and Abraham Lincoln more than a decade ago.

In all, the Manuscript Division holds the papers of 23 presidents, from Washington through Coolidge—collections that include some of the nation’s most important and treasured documents: Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence, Madison’s notes on the proposed Bill of Rights, Lincoln’s drafts of the Gettysburg Address and the .

The papers also reveal great figures as ordinary men who, like their fellow citizens, faced personal hardships and heartaches, found and lost happiness and experienced the pains and pleasures of everyday life: Grant composes sweet letters to his wife, Julia; a 13-year-old Washington practices geometry in his school copybook; Jefferson discusses his burial wishes; Theodore Roosevelt confides his suffering in his diary.

“The light has gone out of my life,” Roosevelt wrote beneath a big black X on Feb. 14, 1884—the day both his mother and wife died.

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A page from George Washington’s school copy book from 1745.

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Theodore Roosevelt’s diary entry for Feb. 14, 1884.

Pierce experienced terrible tragedy, too. One of his three children died in infancy and another of typhus at age 4. Less than two months before Pierce’s inauguration, tragedy struck again. His last surviving child, Benjamin, was killed in a train derailment, dying in front of his parents’ eyes.

“I presume you may already have heard of the terrible catastrophe upon the rail road, which took from us our only child, a fine boy 11 years old,” Pierce wrote to his future secretary of war, Jefferson Davis. “I am recovering rapidly from my bodily injuries, and Mrs Pierce is more composed to day, tho’ very feeble and crushed to the earth by the fearful bereavement.”

The National Archives and Records Administration, founded in 1934, oversees the papers of presidents beginning with Herbert Hoover. The Library acquired many of its priceless collections before that time, through purchase or donation.

The federal government, for example, purchased Washington’s papers from his great-nephew. Grant’s family donated his in three separate gifts, decades after his death. William Howard Taft deposited his papers at the Library before his death.

In such ways, the Library acquired the papers of most, but not all, of the 29 presidents who served before Hoover.

The Manuscript Division does not hold, for example, the papers of John Adams or John Quincy Adams. And it holds only smaller collections of a few other presidents, such as Fillmore and James Buchanan; those are not counted among the Library’s 23 presidential collections.

In 1957, Congress passed legislation directing the Library to arrange, index and microfilm the presidential papers for distribution to libraries around the country—a massive project that was completed 19 years later.

With the dawn of the digital age, the presidential papers were among the first manuscripts proposed for digitization. The microfilm editions of the Washington, Jefferson, Madison and Lincoln papers were digitized and put online between 1998 and 2005 (an improved version of the Lincoln papers is expected to go online this year).

In 2010, the Library began digitizing the remaining collections of presidential papers—a project that’s ongoing. The final result will be a massive addition of material online: The Taft papers alone encompass more than 785,000 images, the Woodrow Wilson papers nearly 620,000. Even the smaller Polk papers will produce nearly 56,000.

Placing all that material online, Ruth said, is a boon for researchers who in the past might have had to travel to Washington to study the microfilm or arrange for an inter-library loan from a state institution. “Now, we are making them accessible everywhere at anytime.”

Papers of U.S. Presidents Online at the Library of Congress

Millard Fillmore
William Henry Harrison
Andrew Jackson
Thomas Jefferson
Abraham Lincoln (Updated website coming soon)
James Madison
James Monroe
Franklin Pierce
Zachary Taylor
John Tyler
Martin Van Buren
George Washington

Inquiring Minds: Researching Jewish Cuisine at the Library of Congress

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Award-winning cookbook author Joan Nathan. Photo by Gabriela Herman.

Joan Nathan is the author of 11 cookbooks, including “King Solomon’s Table: A Culinary Exploration of Jewish Cooking from Around the World,” published in April. Her previous cookbook, “Quiches, Kugels and Couscous: My Search for Jewish Cooking in France” was named one of the 10 best cookbooks of 2010 by National Public Radio and Food and Wine and Bon Appétit magazines. Earlier honors include two James Beard Awards, bestowed for the best cookbook of a given year, for “The New American Cooking” (2005) and “Jewish Cooking in America” (1994). Nathan is a regular contributor to the New York Times and Tablet Magazine.

Nathan will appear at the Library of Congress at noon on May 15 as part of the Library’s celebration of Jewish American Heritage Month. She will speak about “King Solomon’s Table,” sharing stories about her interviews with people from around the world and her research, including her extensive use of Library of Congress collections.

Here she answers a few questions about Jewish cooking and her research at the Library.

What makes food Jewish?

Jewish food is unlike other cuisines like Italian or French food that derives from the land. Jewish food is Jewish if the cook follows the dietary laws or has the dietary laws in the back of her mind. There are two other qualities that determine Jewish food. One is the obsession with food because of the dietary laws. Jews have always been searching for religiously acceptable food from around the world. The third characteristic of Jewish food is the expulsions and relocations of Jews throughout history that made them adapt new local foods to the dietary laws.

When and why did you start researching Jewish food?

When I lived in Jerusalem in the early 1970s, I started seeing the universality of Jewish food. Until then, I was sure that all Jews ate the matzo ball soup, roast chicken and sweet challah that my family had for Friday night. I learned about Moroccan Jewish salads, Kurdish Jewish kubbeh, Aramian soup and so many other exotic and delicious foods.

When did you start using the Library of Congress collections for your research?

I started using the collections for articles for the Washington Post in 1977 and for my second cookbook, the Jewish Holiday Kitchen, which came out in 1979. It was then that I met Myron Weinstein and later Peggy Pearlstein of the Hebraic Section, who steered me to the collection and both helped me greatly in my early research.

What collections have you used?

I have used so many! In the early days, I would spend days reading original documents from the Hebraic collection as well as the European collection of cookbooks, looking for old recipes and memoires that revealed the food eaten by Jews throughout history. As the years went by, I would often get photocopies copies sent to my home.

Which languages do you research in?

Of course, I use English, but I am pretty fluent in French and can read Italian, Hebrew and German.

What are the most interesting finds you have encountered in our collections?

The most interesting have been early recipes in the European collections. Recipes like macaroons repeated themselves, and you repeatedly see recipes for sauce Portugaise that was a tomato sauce, most usually with a Jewish provenance.

What has your experience been like generally researching at the Library?

I love this library, especially the grand reading room and the stacks. There were many years that, on my birthday, I would spend hours in the stacks. This year, on my birthday, I went to the Hebraic Section to listen to Ann Brener, a reference specialist in the section, give a marvelous talk about Rachel Blustein, Israeli poetess and pioneer. All the Library staff have been amazingly helpful to me with manuscripts that could answer my various questions throughout the years.

What dishes might American audiences be surprised to learn are Jewish?

Young Americans today would be surprised to learn that bagels are Jewish as are baked goods like rugelach and babka.

Defiant Loyalty: Japanese-American Internment Camp Newspapers

This is a guest post by Malea Walker, a reference specialist in the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room, about a collection of newspapers published by Japanese-Americans held in U.S. internment camps during World War II. The Library placed the newspapers online on May 5.

 

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Roy Takeno (center), editor of the Manzanar Free Press, with other newsroom staff members. Ansel Adams Collection/Prints and Photographs Division.

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Tulean Dispatch, May 27, 1943

O, what is loyalty

If it be something

That can bend

With every wind?

Steadfast I stand,

Staunchly I plant

The Stars and Stripes

Before my barracks door,

Crying defiance

To all wavering hearts.

—Sada Murayama, Tulean Dispatch, May 27, 1943

 

In the pages of newspapers published behind the barbed wire of Japanese-American internment camps, one theme stands out: loyalty to the country that placed its own citizens there.

Early issues of the internment camp newspapers are filled with notices of flag-raising ceremonies, ways to help the war effort, ads for buying war bonds and articles encouraging loyalty. “The national emergency demands great sacrifices from every American,” reads one article in the June 18, 1942, issue of the Manzanar Free Press. “By our active participation in defense projects, we must prove our unquestioned loyalty.”

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Manzanar Free Press, June 18, 1942

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Tulean Dispatch April 1, 1943

By February 1943, however, a questionnaire was disseminated to the residents of the camps regarding their loyalty to the United States. The question of loyalty was no longer a philosophical one, but one that existed on a government form. Question 28 of Selective Service System Form 304A asked “Will you swear unqualified allegiance to the United States of America and faithfully defend the United States from any or all attack by foreign or domestic forces, and forswear any form of allegiance or obedience to the Japanese emperor, or any other foreign government, power, or organization?”

 

The responses were not all positive. By then, most of the people had been in camps for almost a year, and they had suffered through harsh living conditions in temporary buildings, some of which were not meant for human occupation. Many people had lost businesses and homes. This was not an easy question to answer, and it was debated throughout communities, in families and in the pages of the newspapers. “Did the person who phrased that question ask himself and really try to understand what he was asking,” wrote Shuji Kimura in the April 1, 1943, issue of the Tulean Dispatch.

“Loyalty doesn’t mean saying ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ or extending one’s hand to the flag, or raising a hat or standing up when one hears the ‘Star Spangled Banner’; anyone can do these things. No, loyalty has to be in our hearts and in our memories; it has to be in our fibre and in our bones. Loyalty comes from having lived in America, and having lived deeply.”

American-born citizens of Japanese ancestry, or Nisei, were required to fill out the form as a part of selective service so that they could be drafted. If they answered “yes” to the so-called loyalty questions, Nisei men were also allowed to volunteer for the military. Segregated units were formed, and a great number of young men from the camps volunteered.

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Topaz Times, March 24, 1943

In a letter to congressmen published in the March 24, 1943, issue of the Topaz Times, one group of volunteers clarified, however, “We are volunteering, therefore, not only because that is the most direct and most irrefutable demonstration of our own loyalty to this country, but because by our action we feel we are contributing to the eventual fulfillment of American democratic tradition in its best and highest meaning.” Reasons for volunteering were varied and complex, not just an act to prove loyalty in the face of internment.

In December 1944, the Supreme Court ruled in Ex Parte Endo that the War Relocation Authority did not have the right to detain loyal citizens. By January 1945, many Japanese-Americans were allowed to return to their homes, but they still faced widespread racism and questions about their loyalty as they integrated back into their communities. They were barred from getting jobs and faced open hostility in the West.

Articles on loyalty changed tone as many Nisei veterans faced these difficulties. The outrage was clear that the loyalty of these veterans was still being questioned. “What more is there to essence of loyalty? What more can they do?” asked Roy Yoshida in the May 2, 1945, issue of the Granada Pioneer.

All of this took place, noted the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in 1982, despite the fact that not a single incident of sabotage or espionage by citizens or residents of Japanese ancestry was ever found.

 

Photographs Document Early Chinese Immigration

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. This annual recognition of Asian Pacific Americans’ contributions started with a 1977 congressional resolution calling for a weeklong observance. In 1992, President George H. W. Bush extended it to the entire month of May.

At the Library of Congress, Asian American Pacific Islander resources include books, oral histories, personal papers, community newspapers and many other materials housed throughout Library divisions—including photographs that document early Chinese American immigration.

Carol M. Highsmith has recorded the American scene for more than 35 years and donated tens of thousands of photographs, copyright free, to the Library of Congress, available through the Prints and Photographs Division. She has spoken of feeling a sense of urgency to capture aspects of American life that may soon disappear. I suspect she would place in this category her 2012 photographs of early Chinese American settlements that are almost ghost towns today.

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An abandoned building in Chinese Camp, Calif./Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project.

Chinese Camp in California was one of the largest and most important of these early settlements. Three dozen or so Chinese immigrants from Canton—now known as Guangzhou—arrived there in 1849 to mine gold during the California Gold Rush. The town became known officially as Chinese Camp in 1854, when it got its own post office.

At its peak, 5,000 Chinese immigrants lived in the town, attracted by dreams of riches but also by the safety and comfort of living with others from their home country. Chinese immigrants faced harsh discrimination in the United States, sometimes even physical brutality and worse, culminating in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, the first major U.S. law restricting immigration.

The residents of Chinese Camp did not entirely escape violence, however. The town is also known for an 1856 battle between two rival Chinese factions—or tongs—vying for control. Four men died, and several others were wounded.

After the Gold Rush, the population of Chinese Camp dwindled, and the final settlers left in the 1920s. As of the 2010 U.S. census, only 126 people lived in the town.

“Today one can walk the streets of the old town,” wrote Daniel Metraux in the Southeast Review of Asian Studies. “But most of the buildings standing in the blazing sun are empty save for the ghosts of the original miners who gave life to the town.”

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Busts of Chinese philosopher Confucius and Republic of China founder Sun Yat-sen sit outside a community building in Locke, Calif./Jon B. Lovelace Collection of California Photographs in Carol M. Highsmith’s America Project.

Chinese immigrants built the town of Locke, California, in 1915 after a fire destroyed a nearby Chinese community. California’s Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited noncitizens from owning land. So the immigrants secured a lease from George Locke under which they could own any buildings they constructed but not the land itself, which remained in Locke’s possession.

Located near the Sacramento River, Locke served the area’s agricultural workforce, mainly Chinese laborers in the asparagus fields. In addition to homes, it had a small Chinese school, restaurants, a post office, hotels and rooming houses, a theater, grocery stores, a hardware and herb store, a fish market, two dry goods stores, a dentist’s office, a shoe repair, a bakery and a community vegetable garden. Early on, it was also known for its bars, gambling houses and opium dens, which drew hundreds of visitors on weekends.

Locke was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1990, and many of the original buildings have been preserved. Today, however, the town has fewer than 100 residents.

More than a century before Carol Highsmith documented Chinese Camp and Locke, photographer Arnold Genthe shot some of the best-known photos of San Francisco’s Chinatown before the earthquake and fires of 1906.

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Men and children in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Photo by Arnold Genthe.

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Arnold Genthe with his camera in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

He reported waiting patiently on street corners for hours to capture just the right images to document daily life. Yet Genthe is known to have edited his photographs in the darkroom, sometimes removing signs in English and cropping out westerners like himself. It is not known exactly why he did this—perhaps to make his pictures seem more authentic. But according to modern scholars, he achieved the opposite result: his photographs are now seen by many to convey an exoticized perspective on Chinatown.

Genthe moved to New York City in 1911, where he focused mostly on portraiture, photographing famous figures such as President Woodrow Wilson, actress Greta Garbo, dancer Isadora Duncan and others. The Library acquired 20,000 of Genthe’s photographs after he died in 1942. About 16,000 are available online, including hundreds of San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Pic of the Week: Disco Fashion

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Fashion expert Tim Gunn (right) discusses disco styles with Deputy Librarian of Congress Robert Newlen. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Platform shoes, bell bottoms and halter dresses were the topic at hand at a May 2 event featuring Tim Gunn, one of America’s leading fashion experts. He spoke about disco styles and what they say about the disco era.

“It was a time of flamboyance. . . . Everyone wanted to stand out,” Gunn said in an interview with Deputy Librarian of Congress Robert Newlen in the Coolidge Auditorium. “It was really a giant runway of sorts,” Gunn explained of the disco dance floor.

The event took place as part of a series of disco-themed events titled “Bibliodiscotheque” that the Library is presenting to celebrate and memorialize the period between the mid-1970s and the early 1980s that changed American art, fashion, language and sound.

View a video recording of the Tim Gunn interview here.

Journalism, Behind Barbed Wire

The following is a guest post by Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library of Congress Gazette, about a collection of newspapers published by Japanese-Americans held in U.S. internment camps during World War II. The Library placed the newspapers online today.

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Roy Takeno, editor of the Manzanar Free Press, reads the newspaper at the internment camp in Manzanar, Calif. Ansel Adams Collection /Prints and Photographs Division.

For these journalists, the assignment was like no other: Create newspapers to tell the story of their own families being forced from their homes, to chronicle the hardships and heartaches of life behind barbed wire for Japanese-Americans held in World War II internment camps.

“These are not normal times nor is this an ordinary community,” the editors of the Heart Mountain Sentinel wrote in their first issue. “There is confusion, doubt and fear mingled together with hope and courage as this community goes about the task of rebuilding many dear things that were crumbled as if by a giant hand.”

Today, the Library of Congress places online a rare collection of newspapers that, like the Sentinel, were produced by Japanese-Americans interned at U.S. government camps during the war. The collection includes more than 4,600 English- and Japanese-language issues published in 13 camps and later microfilmed by the Library.

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Manzanar Free Press, Dec. 22, 1943

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Topaz Times, Feb. 6, 1943

“What we have the power to do is bring these more to the public,” said Malea Walker, a librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division who contributed to the project. “I think that’s important, to bring it into the public eye to see, especially on the 75th anniversary. … Seeing the people in the Japanese internment camps as people is an important story.”

Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that allowed the forcible removal of nearly 120,000 U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese descent from their homes to government-run assembly and relocation camps across the West—desolate places such as Manzanar in the shadow of the Sierras, Poston in the Arizona desert, Granada on the eastern Colorado plains.

There, housed in temporary barracks and surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, the residents built wartime communities, organizing governing bodies, farms, schools, libraries.

They founded newspapers, too—publications that relayed official announcements, editorialized about important issues, reported camp news, followed the exploits of Japanese-Americans in the U.S. military and recorded the daily activities of residents for whom, even in confinement, life still went on.

In the camps, residents lived and died, worked and played, got married and had children. One couple got married at the Tanforan assembly center in California, then shipped out to the Topaz camp in Utah the next day. Their first home as a married couple, the Topaz Times noted, was a barracks behind barbed wire in the western Utah desert.

Mimeographs and Printing Presses

The internees created their publications from scratch, right down to the names. The Tule Lake camp dubbed its paper the Tulean Dispatch—a compromise between The Tulean and The Dusty Dispatch, two entries in its name-the-newspaper contest. (The winners got a box of chocolates.)

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Minidoka Irrigator, Jan. 15, 1944

Most of the newspapers were simply mimeographed or sometimes handwritten, but a few were formatted and printed like big-city dailies. The Sentinel was printed by the town newspaper in nearby Cody, Wyoming, and eventually grew a circulation of 6,000.

Many of the internees who edited and wrote for the camp newspapers had worked as journalists before the war. They knew this job wouldn’t be easy, requiring a delicate balance of covering news, keeping spirits up and getting along with the administration.

The papers, though not explicitly censored, sometimes hesitated to cover controversial issues, such as strikes at Heart Mountain or Poston.

Instead, many adopted editorial policies that would serve as “a strong constructive force in the community,” as a Poston Chronicle journalist later noted in an oral history. They mostly cooperated with the administration, stopped rumors and played up stories that would strengthen morale.

Demonstrating loyalty to the U.S. was a frequent theme. The Sentinel mailed a copy of its first issue to Roosevelt in the hope, the editors wrote, that he would “find in its pages the loyalty and progress here at Heart Mountain.” A Topaz Times editorial objected to segregated Army units but nevertheless urged Japanese-American citizens to serve “to prove that the great majority of the group they represent are loyal.”

“Our paper was always coming out with editorials supporting loyalty toward this country,” the Poston journalist said. “This rubbed some … the wrong way and every once in a while a delegation would come around to protest.”

Like Small-Town Papers

The newspapers maintained a small-town feel, reading like a paper from anywhere in rural America. They announced new library additions, promoted job opportunities, covered baseball games between residents, posted church schedules and advertised shows (“‘Madame Butterfly’ will be presented by Nobuio Kitagaki and his puppeteers”).

They often reflected a grin-and-bear-it humor about their plight. The Tanforan center was built on the site of a horse track, and some residents were quartered in horse stalls that once housed champion thoroughbred Seabiscuit—the source of frequent jokes in the camp newspaper, the Tanforan Totalizer.

A column of whimsical items was named “Out of the Horse’s Mouth.” A story headlined “Home Sweet Stall” reported on progress in living conditions: “Though still far from an earthly paradise, Tanforan has come a long way since the first week when residents were whinnying to one another, ‘Is it my imagination, or is my face really getting longer?’”

As the war neared its end in 1945, the camps prepared for closure. Residents departed, populations shrank, schools shuttered, community organizations dissolved and newspapers signed off with “–30–,” used by journalists to mark a story’s end.

That Oct. 23, the Poston Chronicle published its final issue, reflecting on the history it had both recorded and made.

“For many weeks, the story of Poston has unfolded in the pages of the Chronicle,” the editors wrote. “It is the story of people who have made the best of a tragic situation; the story of their frustrations, their anxieties, their heartaches—and their pleasures, for the story has its lighter moments. Now Poston is finished; the story is ended.

“And we should be glad that this is so, for the story has a happy ending. The time of anxiety and of waiting is over. Life begins again.”

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Heart Mountain Sentinel, July 28, 1945

The collection is available here.

Our Founding Uncle, Thaddeus K.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Gavin, senior public affairs specialist in the Library’s Office of Communications.

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An engraving of Thaddeus Kosciuszko from the 1820s.

We hear a lot about our “Founding Fathers,” who started a fight with their overlords, then went on to win it. But in that war of rebellion, there were also many brothers (and sisters), cousins and uncles-in-arms—many of them from farther away than the ancestral home of most of our founding crew, England.

One thinks of the Marquis de Lafayette, from France. But there was another founding figure who brought his skills, fervor and bravery to the cause: Thaddeus Kosciuszko of Poland, whom Thomas Jefferson called “as pure a son of liberty as I have ever known.”

This year marks the 200th anniversary of Kosciuszko’s death. In April, the Library of Congress hosted a seminar and one-day exhibition about the life of Kosciuszko, sponsored by the Embassy of the Republic of Poland, the Library and the Congressional Poland Caucus, co-chaired by U.S. Reps. Marcy Kaptur of Ohio and Tim Murphy of Pennsylvania (his mother was of Polish descent).

Kosciuszko, who arrived in the U.S. at age 30 in 1776, was a not-so-well-heeled noble from a part of Poland that has also been part of Belarus and Lithuania, through history. He trained for military service and graduated from his nation’s military academy, but left for France after his brother supported an uprising against the Polish king. There, he studied art, architecture and military topics and was exposed to the French Enlightenment.

No Fair in Love? OK, Then: War!

Back home, he couldn’t afford a commission into the military and worked tutoring students; he tried to elope with his employer’s daughter, but was stopped.

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A September 9, 1779, letter from George Washington to Kosciuszko.

His heartbreak would be second only to England’s, within a few years. His appearance in the brand-new United States would add a decisive skillset to the revolutionary victory. Upon his arrival, he was assigned to the Continental Army, where he was a one-man Corps of Engineers.

Col. Kosciuszko is credited with preventing the destruction of Maj. Gen. Philip Schuyler’s army as it fled the Siege of Fort Ticonderoga, buying crucial time by deploying defenses on the fly (blocking roads, wrecking bridges, stone-damming rivers to bog up adjacent lands). He later placed fortifications near Saratoga that allowed the Americans to defeat the British there in 1777, and he also conceived the famous fortifications around West Point.

Kosciuszko in 1780 was sent south to join the armies there, where his floating troop vehicles saved the day in the “Race to the Dan” River; he was wounded by a bayonet in the Second Battle of Camden. And he helped stage some of the nation’s earliest fireworks celebrations, when the war was won. His brilliance and bravery ultimately won him the rank of brigadier general.

His later life saw a return to Russian-occupied Poland, where he helped lead an unsuccessful uprising and was imprisoned and later released; and his return to the U.S., where he lived in Philadelphia (his house is now a National Park Service site) and became close friends with Thomas Jefferson and a proto-abolitionist. But eventually—concerned about his family and the U.S. Alien and Sedition Acts—he returned to Europe, where he ultimately settled in Switzerland. He died there in 1817; his body was later moved home to Poland, to the castle cathedral gravesite of its national heroes.

A Will, But No Way

Kosciuszko, before leaving the U.S., in 1798 wrote a will that is famous among African-Americans but less well-known to most other Americans. In it, he asked Thomas Jefferson to be his executor and, upon Kosciuszko’s death, to use Kosciuszko’s U.S. assets to buy numerous slaves out of their servitude, provide for their education and purchase land for them to farm. Ultimately, these wishes were not carried out, although at least some of the assets eventually funded a school for African-Americans in New Jersey. Jefferson, citing his age (77) when Kosciuszko died, asked an abolitionist friend to be the executor, but the friend declined; three other wills later written by Kosciuszko also clouded the issue. The will ultimately was resolved in 1856 after three trips to the U.S. Supreme Court.

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An April 2, 1802, letter from Thomas Jefferson to Kosciuszko.

Civil War Diary: “This Hell-Upon-Earth of a Prison”

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division, about the experience of Samuel J. Gibson, a Union soldier who was incarcerated in the Confederate military prison in Andersonville, Georgia. He arrived on May 3, 1864—153 years ago today—and his diary is now available online .

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Entries Samuel J. Gibson wrote in his diary from August 7 through 12, 1864, while he was being held in Andersonville Prison.

“I don’t know for whom I am keeping this Diary,” Corporal Samuel J. Gibson (1833–78) wrote on August 12, 1864. “I still have hope that I will yet outlive this misfortune of being a prisoner but I am not made of iron.” A veteran of Company B, 103rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, Gibson penned these lines while a prisoner at Camp Sumter in Georgia, a Confederate-run prisoner-of-war camp better known by its geographic place name, Andersonville.

Until mid-April 1864, Gibson primarily recorded the weather, his daily routine and observations of camp life in Plymouth, North Carolina. He had decided on January 5 not to re-enlist when his term of service ended and was counting the months until he returned home. On April 18, however, his regiment encountered Confederate forces, and “after a night of terror” the enemy surrounded them. After “a most terrific street fight” on the morning of April 20, Gibson became a prisoner of war and arrived at the military prison in Andersonville, Georgia, on May 3.

On June 12, 1864, Gibson penned a letter to his wife, Rachel, in Pennsylvania. He assured her that while his condition at Andersonville was “by no means a desirable one,” it “might be a great deal worse.(?)” He and his comrades were “in tolerably good health” but suffered “a good deal from the hot weather.” “Give yourself no uneasiness concerning me,” he wrote to allay his wife’s fears. “I can live where any other man can.”

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Gibson’s letter to his wife, dated June 12, 1864.

The reality of Gibson’s life at Andersonville was quite different, however. Overcrowding and lack of adequate food, water, shelter, sanitation and medical care made conditions at Andersonville among the worst experienced by prisoners of war on either side and contributed to high mortality rates among the prisoners. On June 9, just three days prior to writing his wife, Gibson stated more pointedly in his diary, “Still in this Hell-upon-earth of a Prison, our condition is daily growing more disagreeable as the weather grows warmer, three out of four of my mess, are sick.” On June 28, Gibson concluded, “If this is not Hell itself, it must be pandemonium; which is only Hell Gate. Heaven forbid I should ever see a worse place.” Gibson recorded the passing of comrades in his diary, sometimes adding bitter recriminations against those responsible for the conditions that led to prisoner deaths.

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Gibson wrote about the death of a fellow soldier, John Foster, on August 27, 1864.

News still reached prisoners in Andersonville, and Gibson turned his attention to political issues in his diary. He noted on August 29 that the Democratic Party held its presidential nominating convention in Chicago and speculated on the contrast between “their pomp & condition and the condition of the unfortunate inmates of this miserable prison.” On election day on November 8, Gibson recorded that Abraham Lincoln carried a three-to-one margin of victory in an informal election in camp, although he did not specify the candidate for whom he voted.

He left no doubt of his feelings about emancipation, however, and the termination of prisoner exchanges after the Confederates refused to exchange African-American Union prisoners on equal terms. “I hardly know which to despise most, the cruelty & perfidity of the so called Rebel government; or the Miserable Abolition Policy of the gov. of the, U.S. which is causing 50000 freemen to languish & die in Southern jails & Prisons,” he exclaimed on October 16. He continued this thought the following day. “I always regarded Slavery as a great evil; but Abolitionism, as a far greater evil.” Significantly, the words “Abolition” and “Abolitionism” are both crossed out in these entries, and “war” substituted for “Abolitionism.” Whether Gibson altered the diary at the time or when passions had cooled later is not known.

Gibson’s diary also served the vital function of marking time. “Shut up in Prison I am often indebted to this little book, to know how time flies. How else could it be?” he remarked on August 7. Gibson observed that without his diary he would not have known when Sunday arrived each week and would have been unable to observe the Sabbath. “I used to hail the return of sunday & keep it as a day of rest,” he noted on October 30 after being transferred to a prison near Florence, South Carolina, but “in this miserable Prison I would scarcely know the days of the week, were it not for this little Book.”

Gibson’s prayers were answered on December 14 when he discovered he would be among the “Lucky ones” to be paroled. He boarded the federal steamer New York in Charleston, South Carolina, on December 16, grateful to once again be under the “Stars and Stripes.” He reached the parole camp at Annapolis, Maryland, on December 22. Although the cold weather caused more suffering for the “thin & shattered condition” of the recent prisoners, he wrote on December 23, Gibson thought they were all “the most fortunate set of men in the world” that Christmas Eve.

Gibson returned to his family and received his official discharge from the army on March 14, 1865. His heath never entirely recovered from the time he spent at Andersonville, however, and he died at age 45 on December 2, 1878.

Inquiring Minds: Copyright Records Hint at Early America’s Preoccupations

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Joseph Felcone researches 19th-century New Jersey copyright records in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Photo by David Rice.

Copyright records are a valuable primary source for scholars seeking to understand the development of almost any aspect of American life. So wrote John Y. Cole, Library of Congress historian, in introducing a volume the Library published 30 years ago documenting the nation’s earliest copyright records—those dating from 1790 to 1800. They include copyright registrations for works as diverse as spelling books, maps, almanacs, sermons, and even a comedy in five acts.

President George Washington signed the first federal copyright law on May 31, 1790. It required authors to file printed title pages of their works with the district courts where they lived; after publication, the works themselves had to be sent to the Secretary of State. When Congress centralized copyright administration in the Library of Congress in 1870, most but not all of these early federal records were forwarded to the Library, as the law dictated.

New Jersey book collector and bibliographer Joseph Felcone spent several days in March in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, which preserves the early copyright records held by the Library. Felcone’s goal: to transcribe the New Jersey records from 1846 to 1870.

In 1994, Felcone published a transcription of New Jersey copyright records from 1791 to 1845. He discovered those earlier records in a federal building in Trenton, the state capital. Researchers thought they had been lost or destroyed, but it simply turned out that no one had forwarded them to the Library in 1870. Researchers continue to locate other early copyright records, especially as more historical documents are being scanned and made available electronically.

Felcone took a break from his research in March to answer questions about his work and his findings.

What draws you to the early copyright records as a researcher?

I’m a book collector and a bibliographer, and I’ve written a lot about the early New Jersey book trade—printing and publishing—and copyright is part of it. Copyright records can provide considerable bibliographical information, some of which is available nowhere else.

What inspired you to transcribe the 1846–70 records?

When I was here several years ago working on another project, Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, showed me the 1846–70 New Jersey copyright records, and I saw all these wonderful tipped-in title pages, package labels, photographs and drawings, and I knew I had to publish those records. The earlier New Jersey volume I transcribed in 1994 contains no inserted material, only transcribed titles. The printed title pages that were submitted with those copyright applications long ago disappeared. However, by the early 1850s, as proprietors of patent medicines began seeking copyright protection for labels and trademarks, the clerks found it easier to simply paste in the supplied label rather than attempt to transcribe or describe it. Soon they were doing the same with title pages and graphics.

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A photograph of a steam-powered robot pulling a wagon. The photo was registered in 1869 in U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey. The court’s clerk pasted the photo into the copyright record book. Photo by Eric Frazier.

What do book registrations from this time tell you?

What’s most important to the historian is knowing about the books, pamphlets and other printed materials that were registered for copyright but do not exist today. This can often be tremendously valuable information. In some cases, these items don’t exist because they haven’t survived, or no copy has yet been found. However, most don’t exist because they were never published—even though the titles were registered. This tells us what an author or a publisher intended to do, and clearly worked on, but either did not finish, or finished but never printed. Copyright registrations provide the only record we have of these works.

What else do the records reveal?

Occasionally, though not often enough, you can learn the identity of the author of an anonymous or pseudonymous publication. When an author wished to remain anonymous, he or she normally would have the publisher apply for the copyright. However, once in a great while, a record will reveal that the author himself applied for the copyright, though the author’s name appears nowhere in the publication. I’ve had perhaps two instances of this in all the New Jersey records, but it can be of great importance, particularly in cases where an author later rose to prominence.

Valuable information is also found when a title is submitted for copyright and then, weeks or months later, the work is submitted a second time, with a different title. Since 19th-century titles could often be lengthy and very descriptive of a book’s contents, such title changes can reveal something about the creative process of an author.

What are the subjects of the book registrations you are transcribing now?

Quite a variety. Novels, plays, poetry, some how-to-do-it books. Several books on life insurance, which was an important industry in Newark beginning in the 1850s. There are a number of New Jersey histories, both local and statewide. Legal treatises were important, both professional works designed to assist members of the bench and bar as well as manuals of the everyman-his-own-lawyer variety.

Many of the works submitted for copyright were what we would call today “vanity” publications—the author was his own publisher as no commercial publisher would have taken on the work. Once I have completed my research, I think I’ll find that most of the works that haven’t survived, or that never saw the light of day, are of this genre.

What other types of registrations—besides books—are you finding?

Starting in the 1850s, almost half of the copyright registrations were for package labels—mostly for patent medicines. The advertised claims became more outrageous as time went on. After the Civil War, popular music became an important part of copyright registrations. I’m also finding maps, handbills, prints and photographs, political campaign badges, children’s games and artwork.

Who is the audience for your transcription?

Chiefly bibliographers and book historians—those who study the history of books, printing, the book trade, reading and so on. Also those interested in documenting the rise of popular or quack medicine as well as the advertising that drove that market. Also music historians and historians of photography—and of course New Jersey historians.

What are your most interesting finds so far?

As I mentioned, finding records of books that were contemplated, or even close to fruition, but probably never printed, are by far the most exciting finds. There are also two wonderful photographs in the records of steam-driven robots. The robots are fully dressed, top hat and all, but you can see the steam apparatus underneath, and the robot is pulling a wagon.

There are also two large pencil drawings by Lilly Martin Spencer—probably studies for paintings—that are almost certainly unknown to art historians. She was a very popular 19th-century artist who lived for years in Newark.

In the 1860s, Harold Brothers was a Plainfield, New Jersey, manufacturer of toys and games for children, and the records contain several delightful printed illustrations of its products, including directions for playing several of the games.

Can you comment on your research experience here at the Library of Congress?

Working in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division of the Library is a privilege and a pleasure. I have worked here many times, and it is always a perfect research experience.