Library of Congress's Blog, page 112

Pic of the Week: Poet Laureate Celebration

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Juan Felipe Herrera, center, dances on stage in the Coolidge Auditorium with Tylana Enomoto, left, and Martha González, right, members of the band Quetzal. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The Library hosted a day of festivities on April 26 to honor Juan Felipe Herrera as he concluded his second term as poet laureate consultant in poetry.

Titled “Speak the People/the Spark/el Poema,” the celebration began with a choral performance by the Fresno State Chamber Singers from Fresno, California, Herrera’s home town.

In the evening, a panel discussion took place about the emergence of Latino American culture and its influence on the nation. In addition to Herrera, the panelists were Martha González, lead vocalist for the Grammy Award-winning East L.A. rock bank Quetzal; Hugo Morales, the founder and executive director of Radio Bilingüe; and Louie Pérez, singer-songwriter with the band Los Lobos. Rafael Pérez-Torres, an English professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, moderated the discussion.

Immediately following the panel, a concert by Quetzal closed out the celebration.

A video recording of the celebration is available on the Library’s YouTube site.

 

 

New Online: Iconic Recordings, Presidential Papers and a Civil War Diary

The following is a guest post by William Kellum, manager in the Library’s Web Services Division. 

Since the last installment in this blog series, published in mid-March, quite a few new offerings have been added to the Library’s website.

Women’s History Month

March was Women’s History Month, and we updated the site we maintain in collaboration with the National Archives and Records Administration, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Gallery of Art, the National Park Service, the Smithsonian Institution and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum with new content and an all-new visual design.

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The Library’s Manuscript Division holds the papers of 23 of America’s presidents, from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge. Making its online debut is the Franklin Pierce Papers Collection. Pierce (1804–69), was an army officer, representative and senator from New Hampshire and the 14th president of the United States. His papers contain approximately 2,350 items dating from 1820 to 1869. They include correspondence, a photostatic copy of a diary Pierce kept while serving in the Mexican War, drafts of his messages to Congress and an engraved portrait. Pierce’s correspondence relates chiefly to his service in the Mexican War, public affairs and national politics.

Millard Fillmore (1800–74) isn’t included in the Library’s main Presidential Papers Collection because most of his papers are held by the Buffalo and Erie County Historical Society in Buffalo, New York. But the Fillmore papers the Library does hold are now available for the first time on loc.gov. Fillmore was an educator and served as U.S. representative from New York, vice president and the 13th president of the United States. The online papers contain approximately 35 items spanning the years 1839 through 1925, with the bulk dating from 1839 to 1870. The papers include correspondence relating primarily to political issues such as slavery, the Compromise of 1850, the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, John Brown’s 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, and congressional politics.

National Recording Registry

The Library’s National Recording Registry is one of our most popular initiatives, routinely attracting wide press coverage and setting off some lively debates. Additions for 2016, announced in March, include Sonny Rollins, Judy Garland, Vin Scully, Wes Montgomery, Wilson Pickett, David Bowie, N.W.A and more.

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For Teachers

In conjunction with the Library’s major program to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the U.S. entry into World War I, a new World War I primary source set and teacher’s guide for classroom use is now available. The materials are also accessible in our student discovery set format for iPad through Apple iBooks.

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The World War I primary source set is available as a student discovery set, optimized for iPad.

From the Music Division

Albert Schatz (1839–1910) was a German music dealer with a lifelong interest in opera and its history. He traveled throughout Europe to collect opera libretti, including many first and early Italian, German and French editions from the 17th and 18th centuries. In the end, the Albert Schatz Collection totaled 12,000 operatic and 238 oratorio and cantata libretti. The scope of this digital presentation comprises all 12,238 Schatz libretti.

Civil War

Adding to our extensive online Civil War materials, the papers of Union soldier Samuel J. Gibson (1833–78) consist of a diary he kept while serving with Company B, 103rd Pennsylvania Infantry Regiment, and a letter he wrote to his wife while being held at the Confederate prisoner-of-war camp in Georgia commonly known as Andersonville. The diary documents the capture of the federal garrison at Plymouth, North Carolina, in April 1864, and Gibson’s experiences as a prisoner of war at Andersonville and in Florence, South Carolina. Gibson records war news and rumors received by the prisoners, the state of his physical and emotional health, the deaths of fellow prisoners and the importance of his diary in maintaining a sense of time.

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Samuel Gibson’s diary includes details such as these entries from April 1864 in which he describes an onslaught by Confederate troops that ended in his capture.

18th-Century Socialite

The seven volumes of diaries and notebooks of Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton (ca.1775–1865) document her position at the center of a Washington, D.C., social circle that included George and Martha Washington, James and Dolley Madison, Thomas Jefferson, Margaret Bayard Smith and the cabinet members, congressmen and diplomats who constituted the city’s entwined social and political worlds. These volumes document the operation of her household, including the management of slaves; travel, including visits to the Virginia homes of George and Martha Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James and Dolley Madison; the construction of Washington, D.C., and the United States Capitol; the city under attack during the War of 1812; visits of the Count de Volney, 1796, and Alexander von Humboldt, 1804; an attempt on her life by Arthur, a slave, in 1835; the 1844 shipboard explosion that killed Secretary of State Abel Upshur and Treasury Secretary Thomas Gilmer; the inauguration of president James K. Polk in 1845; and the start of the Civil War.

The Library’s online presence goes back to the early 1990s, so upgrading and enhancing content that uses old technologies or presentations is a regular part of our work. Newly upgraded presentations include content related to the National American Woman Suffrage Association; the Vietnam-Era POW/MIA Database; and American Leaders Speak: Recordings from World War I (Nation’s Forum).

Happy 100th Birthday, I. M. Pei

This is a guest post by Mari Nakahara, curator of architecture, design and engineering in the Prints and Photographs Division.

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Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy with I. M. Pei in 1964. He is speaking to the press about funding for the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, which he designed.

Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei celebrates his 100th birthday today, April 26. The Library of Congress is fortunate to have original design sketches by I. M. Pei as well as thousands of his manuscript papers.

With the beautiful spring weather in mind, I decided to revisit this master designer’s work by looking first at his drawings for the Louvre Museum in Paris—I did so while picturing myself humming “Aux Champs-Élysées” and enjoying the walk from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre. I then turned to Pei’s designs for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

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Whimsical rendering of Pei’s design for the Louvre pyramid by architect Walker Cain, 1984.

French President Francois Mitterrand commissioned Pei in 1983 to develop a solution to a long-term problem with the Louvre’s original entrance, which was no longer adequate to receive the increasing number of daily visitors to the museum. Pei’s innovative idea was to insert a 71-foot glass and metal pyramid in the center of a courtyard surrounded by centuries-old structures. As an architectural grad student when the pyramid was completed in 1989, I admired his imagination and technical skill tremendously. A shape from ancient times, made of modern materials, melded beautifully and astonishingly into a historical setting.

Pei’s careful study of axes in site-plan sketches includes one drawing in black and red that determines the center of the pyramid by connecting the site to the Arc de Triomphe. A site plan on the bottom of a sheet of yellow tracing paper highlights the large main pyramid with a small pyramid behind, water pools and pavement patterns. All of these elements repeat the diamond shape, reflecting the pattern in the metal structure of the pyramid.

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Site plan sketch for the Louvre, 1983.

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More sketches for the Louvre site plan.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pei also created multiple models such as those shown below to study the structure and opening of the pyramid.

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Before the Louvre project, Pei worked on a design for the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, D.C., between 1968 and 1978. I can easily walk down the hill from the Library of Congress to the National Gallery of Art to enjoy this Pei masterpiece.

The triangular rhythms in the design sketches are what reveal Pei’s genius for me. He turned the unusual trapezoidal shape of the site to great advantage by creating a smaller but identically shaped trapezoid area and dividing it into two triangular buildings. The axis of symmetry of the larger triangle aligns perfectly with the central axis of the West Building. The hand-drawn diagram with diamond-shaped grids served as the basic module of Pei’s design of the East Building.

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Diagram for Pei’s design for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, 1969.

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Sketches for the East Building.

Pei started one of his most significant commissioned projects in 1964—the John F. Kennedy Library. During the selection of the architect for the Library, Jacqueline Kennedy visited each nominated architect’s office. While others welcomed her with their definite ideas, Pei told her he did not yet know what the library would look like. He said he would like to propose his idea after he spent more time contemplating what John F. Kennedy would have liked. I think that was a gutsy response, and this answer caught her heart. As shown in the photo at the top of this post, Mrs. Kennedy and Pei are both smiling at the press conference called to announce that public contributions to the fund for the library had exceeded $10 million.

Pei’s serious studies of traffic and pedestrian flows also influenced his design for the Kennedy Library. The two sketches below, right, represent his concept of combining triangular, square and round shapes.

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Site plan study for the Kennedy Library.

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Sketches for the Kennedy Library.

“I think a great building reaches into the folklore, if that is the right word, of the people it serves,” Mrs. Kennedy wrote to Pei in 1981.

“I hope it touches you the way it has affected the lives of all who live near it or discover it as they come to Boston by land, sea or air. . . . You made that possible for Jack. I will always think of it as a monument to your spirit—to your humanity and perseverance. . . . With my deepest thanks that stretch back through the years, and with much love, Jackie.”

 

This letter must have been very rewarding, especially after all the challenges Pei had to overcome during this project.

Congratulations on your centennial birthday, Mr. Pei!

The original materials described in this blog post and related items will be on view in the Library’s Jefferson Building from mid-May to early June. Once the dates are set, they will be posted in the Library’s events calendar.

Learn More

The Prints and Photographs Division holds visual materials from the I. M. Pei Papers. Additional materials will be transferred from the Manuscript Division this year.

The I. M. Pei Papers are available for research in the Manuscript Division. A finding aid for the collection is being prepared and will be available by the end of this year.

The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division holds transcripts and photographs from the John Peter Collection (1951–95), including an interview with Pei.

Free to Use and Reuse: Travel Posters

Faraway states, natural wonders and beautiful beaches—these are the settings that often come to mind as we start to plan our summer vacations. They also form the backdrop of hundreds of travel posters in the Library’s collections, including an assortment featured this month on the Library’s home page. The featured posters 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.

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Frank Hazell’s poster of West Point as seen from the window of a train car.

Travel posters are now sometimes sold at auction for tens of thousands of dollars, but they began as ads for a burgeoning industry. Following advances in color lithography, railways began producing art-oriented posters in the late 1800s to sell seats. Steamship lines, resorts, hotels and later airlines adopted the medium as well, some employing well-known graphic artists to tempt travelers with scenes of glamour, beauty, adventure and leisure. Travel posters enjoyed the height of their popularity from the 1920s through the 1950s.

Frank Hazell (1883–1958) was a landscape artist who also worked in advertising in New York City. He painted travel posters and brochures and taught advertising art at the Grand Central School of Art. His commissions included a 1920s painting of the United States Military Academy at West Point as seen from the window of a New York Central Lines car traveling alongside the Hudson River in the autumn. The image is part of the Library’s online Artist Poster Collection. Hazell also did poster art for steamship companies and other institutions.

Katherine Milhous (1894–1977), an artist, illustrator and writer, supervised the Philadelphia Federal Art Project, a branch of the Works Progress Administration (WPA), from 1935 to 1940. Her duties included creating posters promoting Pennsylvania into which she incorporated familiar Pennsylvania Dutch designs. Several Milhous posters are included in the Library’s online collection of WPA posters. Milhous won a Caldecott Medal in 1951 for “The Egg Tree,” a children’s book she wrote and illustrated about the Pennsylvania Dutch Easter.

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One of Katherine Milhous’s Pennsylvania travel posters.

This month’s featured posters are just a small sample of the Library’s digital collections that are freely available for your use. The digital collections comprise millions of items, including books, newspapers, manuscripts, prints and photos, maps, musical scores, recordings and more. Whenever possible, each collection item has its own rights statement. Please remember that rights assessment is your responsibility. For more information, see the Library’s guidance about copyright and Library collections.

Join the Celebration: Library to Livestream Events Honoring Poet Laureate

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Juan Felipe Herrera at the Library of Congress in September 2015. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The Library of Congress will honor Juan Felipe Herrera, who is concluding his second term as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, with celebratory events on Wednesday, April 26. The events will be streamed live on the Library’s Facebook page and its YouTube site.

Titled “Speak the People/the Spark/el Poema,” the celebration will kick off at noon with a choral performance by the Fresno State Chamber Singers, who hail from Herrera’s hometown of Fresno, California. They will perform newly commissioned pieces developed in collaboration with Herrera.

At 7 p.m., a panel discussion will take place about the continuing emergence of Latino culture and its influence on the nation. Participants will be Herrera; Martha González, lead vocalist for the Grammy Award-winning East L.A. rock bank Quetzal; Hugo Morales, the founder and executive director of Radio Bilingüe; and Louie Pérez, a singer and songwriter with the band Los Lobos. Rafael Pérez-Torres, an English professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, will moderate the discussion.

Immediately following the panel, a concert by Quetzal will close out the celebration. Quetzal brings together a wide range of musical influences, including Mexican ranchera, cumbia, salsa, rock, R&B, folk and fusions of international music. It is recognized as a leader and innovator in Chicano music.

About the celebration, Herrera said, “Meshing poetry and music with the Fresno State Chamber Singers, a panel on Latino culture, music by Quetzal—this night is a culmination of two years of beautiful and thoughtful audiences; of trains, planes, cars, highways, children, teachers and artists; of poetry seekers driving for miles to listen and exchange and tell me about their lives. This event will have all the love I can bring to it, and all the appreciations that have been given to me during these last two years; I hope to give back.”

Herrera is the author of 30 books of poetry, novels for young adults and collections for children. He has been one of the most active poets laureate in the history of the position, with two first-term projects and three second-term projects.

This past September, Herrera launched an online initiative, “The Technicolor Adventures of Catalina Neon,” a bilingual illustrated poem created by Herrera and artist Juana Medina. Presented at Read.gov, the poem features contributions by second- and third-grade students and their teachers and librarians from across the country.

Continuing his work with students, Herrera and the Library of Congress collaborated throughout the 2016–17 school year with the Poetry Foundation in Chicago and the Chicago Public Schools on a program titled “Wordstreet Champions and Brave Builders of the Dream” in which Herrera worked with high school English teachers to develop new exercises and strategies for teaching poetry.

Herrera’s third initiative during his second term involved creating the “Laureate Lab—Visual Wordist Studio” to serve as a performance and classroom space in the library of California State University, Fresno, where Herrera once taught. He uses the space to develop small-scale, dynamic programs and classes for the local community, mixing poetry with visual arts, song and movement.

For his poetry, Herrera has received two Latino Hall of Fame Poetry Awards, the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Award and a PEN/Beyond Margins Award. He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and the Stanford University Chicano Fellows. In 2016, Herrera was awarded the Robert Kirsch Award for lifetime achievement at the 36th L.A. Times Book Prizes.

The festivities honoring Herrera and the work he has done as poet laureate are presented by the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center, its American Folklife Center, its Music Division and its Hispanic Division.

Pic of the Week: Two Poets Honored with Bobbitt Prize

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Nathaniel Mackey

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Claudia Rankine

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Poets Nathaniel Mackey and Claudia Rankine accepted 2016 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prizes for Poetry at an evening event at the Library of Congress on April 20. The Bobbitt Prize recognizes the lifetime achievement of an American poet or a distinguished book of poetry written by an American and published during the preceding two years. This year, prizes were awarded in both categories.

Mackey, the author of six poetry collections, most recently “Blue Fasa,” received a lifetime achievement award. Rankine received the 2016 prize for “Citizen: An American Lyric,” selected as the most distinguished book of poetry published in 2014 and 2015. Both poets read from their works.

View past winners of the Bobbitt Prize on the Library’s website.

Photos by Shawn Miller.

Russian Revolution: The Last Days of the Romanovs

A daughter of the Romanov family transports sod in one photo, aided by a soldier; in another, her father, the deposed Russian czar, paces in front of a house in Siberia where the imperial family was held after the revolution in 1917 that toppled its dynasty. The grainy black-and-white images underscore how far the Romanovs fell from their days atop an empire—and also offer a window on the last days of a family whose story has intrigued the world for a century now.

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Grand Duchess Tatiana, one of the four daughters of the deposed Russian czar, transports sod on a stretcher in May 1917 with assistance from a soldier. She is helping her family plant a kitchen garden.

Discovered a decade ago, the two images in this blog post are part of a group copyrighted in 1921 by Underwood and Underwood, a firm that sold news photos. A college student participating in the Library of Congress Junior Fellows Summer Intern Program discovered them while inventorying the contents of files containing uncataloged deposits submitted with historical copyright applications. The photos were scanned and posted online by the Prints and Photographs Division, joining seven others already available.

Some photos in the group are believed to have been taken by Pierre Gilliard, a tutor who stayed with the imperial family during much of its detention. He composed a narrative that is attached to several of the original photos. It explains that the Romanovs were detained from March 1917 until August 1917 at Tsarskoye Selo, an estate that had belonged to them. They occupied their time with religious activities and walks in the park under close watch by guards. Gilliard continued to teach lessons, assisted by the czar and czarina.

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The czar and his children in front of Governor’s House in Tobolsk, Siberia, where they were held captive from August 1917 to May 1918. The four figures to the left are the grand duchesses; the boyish figure in the center is the czarevitch, the imperial heir. The figure on the far right is the czar.

“On the 13th day of May,” Gilliard wrote, “the family decided to change the lawn, near the residence, into a kitchen garden. All were enthusiastic and everybody, family retinue, servants, and even several soldiers of the guard joined the work. . . . In June, the results of their labor were clearly shown, for all kinds of vegetables had grown, including 500 cabbages.”

In August 1917, the Romanovs and their retinue were moved to Tobolsk, Siberia, where they remained until May 1918, when they were transported to Ekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains. The entire family and four retainers were executed there in July 1918.

On August 1, 2007, framed facsimiles of the newly found photos were presented to former Librarian of Congress James Billington, a Russia scholar, during an exhibition of items inventoried by the 2007 Junior Fellows interns. “This is an example of the power of discovering unexpected things in the Library’s collections,” he observed.

World War I: The Library of Congress Memorial Tree

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Tree planting ceremony. Photo by Underwood & Underwood, Dec. 7, 1920. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building is bordered by a number of impressive trees. One of them, a Japanese elm at the southwest corner of the building, was planted on Dec. 17, 1921, in memory of four Library of Congress staff members killed while serving in World War I. According to an article published in the Jan. 1, 1921, issue of the Library Journal, the planting of the tree was supervised by Superintendent of Building and Grounds Bernard Green. The article includes this photograph of the ceremony, which can be found in the Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library’s service flag, bearing 95 stars for all Library staff members who served, is stretched out in the wind. The day looks bright, but it must also have been cold. The crowd members wear hats and thick coats, but Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam, addressing them in the photo, has taken off his hat. Behind him, the American flag flies at half-staff on the Jefferson Building.

Putnam paid tribute to the four men, Cpl. Charles Chambers (312th machine-gun battalion), 1st Lt. Edward Comegys (11th Aero squadron), Cpl. Frank Dunkin (54th U.S. Infantry) and Cpl. John Wheeler (U.S. Signal Corps). Out of the 250 men employed by the Library, 89 had enlisted and four never returned.

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A.L.A. Library War Services Headquarters in the Library of Congress. 1918 or 1919. Prints and Photographs Division.

Chambers worked in the Smithsonian Section, Comegys and Dunkin worked in the Copyright Office and Wheeler was a member of the building maintenance force. Putnam wished to say more about their service but lamented that the “details of it are meager and unequal.” The available information was that, like many military deaths of World War I, the four men died from disease, not combat. He offered some information on their service:

Of the service – and character – of Lieutenant Comegys, his first Commanding Office, Captain Powell [who attended the ceremony], is to say something. He alone, of the four was killed in action – in the St. Mihiel drive. Dunkin also was in fierce fighting in which he showed both dash and grit. But it was not in action but in hospitals that he and Chambers came to their end – and both from pneumonia due to exposure in the trenches.

  Chambers had reached the fighting zone – on the Meuse – and was within reach of the German “heavies.” But the satisfaction of a response with his own gun was denied him; for before his unit – “Washington’s Own” – took the offensive that ended in the capture of Montfaucon – on the very night before this – he was rated too ill to fight. With 25 others of his Company, he was hurried to a field hospital and later to Hospital 26 at Alleray. There, within a few days, he died.

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Plaque of the memorial tree commemorating Library employees fallen during WWI. Photo by Shwn Miller.

Wheeler did not have the fortune to be sent abroad. His value was found in photographic work for which, after preparation at Columbia, he was detailed to Camp Merritt. It was there he died, also of pneumonia.

Besides Putnam, speakers included Rep. Julius Kahn of California, chairman of the House Committee on Military Affairs, Col. Lester Jones, Superintendent of the Coast and Geodetic Survey and first commander of the American Legion, and Captain Garland Powell, commander of the 22nd Aero squadron, in which Lt. Comegys served. Planes from Bolling Field circled overhead during Capt. Powell’s remarks. The U.S. Marine Band performed.

Putnam finished his remarks with these lines from Rupert Brooke’s 1914 poem, “The Dead,” and from Marjorie L.C. Pickthal’s poem “When It Is Finished.”

“The Dead,” Rupert Brooke

These laid the world away; poured out the red

Sweet wine of youth; gave up the years to be

Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene,

That men call age; and those who would have been,

Their sons, they gave, their immortality.

“When It is Finished,” Marjorie L.C. Pickthal

Bid us remember in what days they gave

All that mankind may give

That we might live.

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American Library Association, United War Work Campaign, Nov. 11, 1918. Prints and Photographs Division.

During the war, not only did men go to war, so did books. According to Wayne Wiegand, distinguished visiting scholar at the John W. Kluge Center, the American Library Association established its Library War Service in 1917 to provide books and library services to US soldiers and sailors both in training at home and serving in Europe. In fact, 12-year-old Rachel Ashley, daughter of Frederick William Ashley, who was the superintendent of the Library of Congress main reading room at the time, dropped off ALA leaflets at homes in her Washington, D.C. neighborhood inviting neighbors to donate books for the effort, wrote Wiegand in an article for American Libraries Magazine.

World War I Centennial, 2017-2018: With the most comprehensive collection of multi-format World War I holdings in the nation, the Library of Congress is a unique resource for primary source materials, education plans, public programs and on-site visitor experiences about The Great War including exhibits, symposia and book talks.

Inquiring Minds: African-American Soldiers in World War I

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Adriane Lentz-Smith

The following is an article from the March/April 2017 issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine, in which Adriane Lentz-Smith discusses her research at the Library of Congress into the experiences of African-American soldiers in World War I. Lentz-Smith is an associate professor at Duke University, author of “Freedom Struggles: African-Americans and World War I” and an adviser to the Library’s World War I exhibition. She is also the featured expert about the role of African-Americans in the war for the PBS documentary “The Great War.”

African-American soldiers and civilians in the World War I years saw the war as both obligation and opportunity. Over 380,000 African-Americans served in the nation’s strictly segregated military during the war years, 200,000 traveling with the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF).

Whether they numbered among the 40,000 who served in the two African-American combat divisions or among the majority relegated to labor battalions, black soldiers fought two wars for democracy: President Wilson’s against the Central Powers and their own against white supremacy and Jim Crow. Army lieutenant and, later, Howard University professor Rayford Logan would speak for countless African-American veterans when he wrote in his memoirs that he had been marked by both wars, Woodrow Wilson’s and his own, and that he could not discern fully which war had a more lasting effect.

I found my way to World War I through Rayford Logan and other African-Americans, such as AEF lieutenant (and later civil rights lawyer) Charles Houston, whose experience veered between service and heartbreak. My interest started with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)’s investigation of the 1917 police attack on black soldiers and their subsequent mutiny in Houston, Texas.

I visited the Library of Congress Manuscript Division to see whether the records of the NAACP housed there contained more incidents of brutal treatment and black rebellion, and to explore what World War I had meant to African-Americans who funneled their activism through local NAACP branches.

The papers opened up a project: they were filled with accounts of everyday people making meaning of the war, defending soldiers—sometimes literally in the cases of troops who ran afoul of the law or of brutal ranking officers—weighing in on what citizenship rights should accrue to black soldiers and linking soldiers’ fates to their own.

The stories, figures and interpretations that I found in them helped me to determine which additional Library collections to seek out, including the papers of Rayford Logan and those of William L. Houston, Charles Houston’s father.

I was no expert when I walked into the Library; I learned how to ask productive questions by wading through the NAACP papers, but Rayford Logan’s papers helped me see the disjuncture between wartime rhetoric and practice. Historian that he was, Logan meticulously recorded in his diary memories of the humiliations heaped on him by white superior officers. Recalling a lieutenant colonel who insisted on assigning sleeping quarters by race over rank, Logan acerbically described the officer’s commitment to segregation as “a perfect example of the American democracy in war.”

I also learned from colleagues I met in the Manuscript Division reading room. Indeed, every time I see my book, “Freedom Struggles,” I think of Jennifer Keene, historian at Chapman College, who first showed me the war poster “True Sons of Freedom” that eventually became my book cover. The intellectual community fostered in the reading room was but one of the many Library of Congress resources that shaped my work.

National Poetry Month: New Recordings Uploaded to Recorded Poetry and Literature Archive

The following is a guest post by Anastasia Nikolis, a graduate student intern in the Poetry and Literature Center and a doctoral candidate in the English department at the University of Rochester.

Happy National Poetry Month! I hope you are all as excited to celebrate as we are here at the Poetry and Literature Center.

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2011–12 poet laureate Philip Levine at the Library of Congress. Photo by Abby Brack Lewis.

In honor of National Poetry Month, the center has digitized and uploaded 50 new recordings to its online Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. Among the additions are recordings by poets laureate Daniel Hoffman, Philip Levine, Rita Dove, Maxine Kumin, Josephine Jacobsen, William Stafford, Anthony Hecht, Robert Pinsky and Gwendolyn Brooks.

Conceived of in 1940 and kicked off in 1941 with a lecture by Robinson Jeffers titled “The Poet in a Democracy,” the archive began as a national culture-building project in response to the pressures of World War II—in particular, to the rise of European fascist rhetoric. The hope was to capture the voices of an elite class of poets and then make that elite content democratic by increasing access to it through dissemination of the recordings. The underlying message was that American literature could spread as far as fascist propaganda, but even more effectively.

Furthermore, to close the divide between practicing poets and the cloistered academics who studied poetry, Librarian of Congress (and poet!) Archibald MacLeish intended to promote young poets “who should have some attention and are usually ignored” in favor of more established poets, and “make albums from time to time which [the Library] could sell to the many schools, colleges and interested individuals”

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Portrait of Robert Frost, the 1958–59 poet laureate consultant in poetry.

The advancement of recording technology meant that you didn’t have to be in Washington, D.C., or New York to hear great poets like Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Conrad Aiken—you could buy the record and listen to them anywhere. Today, the technology is even better, since you can just stream the recording right from your home computer at no cost at all.

Over the course of its more than 75-year history, the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature has expanded its mission, amplifying voices of women and writers of color to make the poetry community even more inclusive, which you will see in the selection of recordings chosen for this month’s release.

Fifty recordings is a lot to get through, so I have chosen three to spotlight in this post to guide you if this is your first encounter with the treasure trove that is the archive.

So, without further ado, turn up your speakers, plug in your ear buds, and enjoy the audio archive!

Kamau Brathwaite, 1982

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Kamau Brathwaite is a Caribbean poet born in Barbados. He explains in this reading that his connection to his Caribbean heritage was estranged at first, encouraging him to flee his home country to attend school in England and then work in Ghana in order to find a place where he felt he could write. He says, “[H]ome was philistine. Home was a kind of desert. Home was not the place where one wrote poetry. So I had to find another kind of home. Another kind of rootlessness.” Brathwaite eventually realizes that his home in the Caribbean is precisely where his poetry comes alive, and in poems like “South” (which starts at 35:50), he details his journey through rootedness and rootlessness to find his voice.

Josephine Jacobsen, 1972

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Poets laureate begin their terms in the fall with a reading of their work and conclude their terms in the spring with a lecture like this one. Josephine Jacobsen was the 21st consultant in poetry (the position that is now known as poet laureate consultant in poetry) and only the fourth woman consultant; Elizabeth Bishop was the third 20 years earlier. The lack of respect given to women poets was acute to Jacobsen. This lecture examines “the atmosphere in which [women poets] worked, in order to understand its pressures and permissions.” Jacobsen explains how women poets were pressured not to behave in certain ways and only permitted to speak of certain subjects, and she goes on to explain how poets like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath changed American women’s poetry by explicitly rendering emotional and bodily experiences.

Muna Lee, 1960

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Muna Lee was a poet, translator novelist, and activist, who worked most of her life facilitating relations between the United States and Latin America through her work at the State Department. She lived in Puerto Rico for a number of years and describes that tropical landscape and culture in her poems. One of the fun things about these recordings is that they not only capture the poems being read aloud, but also capture a bit of the poet’s personality. Notice how differently Lee reads her poems: she reads her second poem, “Legend,” much more dramatically than the others, letting herself get caught up in the rolling, emphatic quality of the lines so that the last line arrives loudly. A few poems later, she reads the short poem, “Hacienda” (8:40), more hypnotically, and the last line arrives much more quietly, fading into the hush of the organic items of the poem—cinnamon and cassava root.