Library of Congress's Blog, page 116

Pic of the Week: Ladies of Liberty

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Cokie Roberts reads to students in the Young Readers Center. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Author and journalist Cokie Roberts visited the Library’s Young Readers Center on March 6 to read from her new children’s book, “Ladies of Liberty: The Women Who Shaped Our Nation,” adapted from her bestselling adult work of the same title. Illustrated by Caldecott Honor-winning artist Diane Goode, the book features biographies of 10 influential women from the 18th and 19th centuries.

Third-grade students from Seaton Elementary School in Washington, D.C., listened to Roberts read in the Young Readers Center while students from elementary schools in Arkansas and Pennsylvania listened to a video recording that was streamed live. Roberts took questions from students in all the locations.

A student from Pennsylvania asked her why she decided to write about women. “If you only know about half of the human race, and not the other half of the human race, you don’t know the whole story,” she responded.

Everybody Wins! DC, a nonprofit that promotes children’s literacy, cosponsored the reading, which took place as part of the Library’s observance of Women’s History Month. Everybody Wins! DC is a longtime partner of the Library’s Center for the Book, and Library staff members have served as reading mentors to students at a nearby elementary school for the past seven years.

Library Welcomes New Blog

“Copyright: Creativity at Work” is a new blog of the U.S. Copyright Office. Karyn Temple Claggett, the office’s acting Register of Copyrights, wrote the inaugural post, published today.

The blog will introduce readers to the important work of the Copyright Office and its multitalented staff—many of whom have a personal stake as musicians, artists, and book lovers in the office’s mission to support authors and users of creative works.

Upcoming posts will inform readers about the office’s studies and reports, developments in domestic and international copyright law and policy, registration practice and other exciting news related to the Office.

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Eric Smith is one of many Copyright Office staffers who pursue the arts. He is a published poet and spoken word performer who has performed on hundreds of college campuses nationwide. Photo by David Rice.

Read the inaugural post here and consider subscribing.

My Job at the Library: Connecting Teachers with Primary Sources

(The following is an article from the January/February 2017 issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine , in which Danna Bell of the Library’s Educational Outreach Office discusses her job. The issue can be read in its entirety here .)

 

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Danna Bell. Photo by Abby Brack Lewis.

How would you describe your work at the Library?

I am production coordinator for the Teaching with the Library of Congress blog. I write blog posts and contribute to our Twitter feed. The goal of the Educational Outreach Office is to make primary sources an integral part of classroom activities. Primary sources can engage students and encourage critical thinking, analysis and exploration. I assist in the creation of teacher resources, including Primary Source Sets and eBooks. My favorite task is serving as the team’s Ask a Librarian contact, answering questions from teachers throughout the world.

How did you prepare for your current position?

I have a bachelor’s degree in public administration and a master’s degree in college student personnel from Miami University. After serving as a dorm director and an academic counselor, I needed a change. When I considered other careers, I realized I enjoy providing information. That, along with a love of libraries bred by the Enoch Pratt library system in Baltimore, my hometown, led me to librarianship.

I started at the Library of Congress in 1998 as part of the National Digital Library, providing reference support for the Library’s American Memory project—a gateway to the Library’s rich primary-source materials relating to the history and culture of the United States. I subsequently worked with the Digital Reference Section and later joined Educational Outreach.

I have held leadership positions in several professional associations. I served as president of the Society of American Archivists in 2013–14.

How has technology changed the way the Library shares its resources with students and educators?

Digitizing and providing online access to the resources of the Library of Congress in the early 1990s coincided with school districts asking teachers to use primary sources in the classroom. That was truly perfect timing!

The explosion of educational technology has spurred our work. We have converted several Primary Source Sets into eBooks. We reach teachers through webinars and our Teaching with Primary Sources partners. Teachers can also access content when it’s convenient for them on the Library of Congress YouTube page.

How can the Library help educators teach students about the electoral process?

As the home of the papers of 23 American presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge, the Library has much to offer teachers and students in the way of election history. A special online presentation documents the presidential inaugurations. The Library’s Chronicling America website allows users to see how historical newspapers (1789–1922) covered the presidents.

Educational Outreach staff recently updated our online “Elections” feature. The Law Library of Congress and the Library’s Prints and Photographs and Music Divisions also have special online presentations about elections and inaugurations.

In the case of 21st-century elections, the Library has been archiving websites pertaining to presidential, congressional and gubernatorial elections since 2000.

Women’s History Month: The Legacy of Hannah Richards

(The following guest post was written by Beverly W. Brannan, curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division.)

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Tintype of Hannah Richards from the William Henry Richards Collection

The Library purchased the collection of William Henry Richards (1856–1941), a law professor at Howard University, in 2013. The collection includes manuscript and visual materials, including a tintype of Hannah Richards, William’s grandmother, who was born in captivity but later freed. Research into her life—a story of determination and resilience—suggests she may have motivated William’s successful career. Besides being a law professor, he was a civil rights activist and a supporter of temperance and women’s right to vote and own property in the District of Columbia.

The library edition of Ancestry.com shows that Hannah Richards was born in Virginia, probably near Danville, around 1800. She belonged to Gabriel Richards (1739–1826), who moved to Roane County, Tennessee, in about 1805. He later relocated to McMinn County, Tennessee, where he died in 1826, freeing Hannah in his will. But there is more to the story.

Freed slaves were always at risk of being re-enslaved after being kidnapped or jailed for trivial offenses. Hannah almost lost her freedom for keeping company with a man. She was arrested in 1828, according to databases, and charged with harboring “a certain Negro slave Sandy without either written or verbal authority from . . . the said boy’s master” for two years. Papers filed in McMinn County court stated that Sandy had been “with her at her place of living on Sunday nights.” Hannah was fined $2.20 for “harboring and entertaining” Sandy, $2.00 for her jail fee and $0.75 for the justice of the peace. She was warned that if she did not pay all the costs as well as an additional $2.00, she could be sold into slavery for nonpayment of debt.

Hannah’s appeal went to the Tennessee Supreme Court, which returned the case to the McMinn County court. Fires at the courthouse destroyed any documentation of what happened next, although Hannah’s troubles certainly did not end there. In about 1855, she was abducted and taken to a plantation in Alabama. She escaped and returned to McMinn County.

At some point, Hannah may have married, and she must have had at least one child who remained free: the 1860 census indicates that her grandson, William, whom she raised, was the son of free parents.

Some time in 1860, when William was four, he was abducted. Hannah appealed to friendly white neighbors who found her grandson and returned him to her. Then, with William in tow, she did housework in homes around Athens, Tennessee. Young William learned the alphabet from children in the houses where she worked. Like much of East Tennessee, McMinn County was deeply divided on the issue of slavery. It provided 12 regiments for the Union Army and 8 for the Confederates during the course of the war.

William attended Quaker school until he was 17 and then taught in Quaker schools for five years. In 1878, at age 22, he enrolled in Howard University’s Law School, helped by a loan from a mentor. In 1881, he graduated first in his class and worked at the U.S. Treasury Department for four years to repay the loan. Then he returned to Athens, presumably to be near his grandmother. He practiced law and served as alderman and mayor. Later, he moved to Washington, D.C., to teach law at Howard University.

Records suggest that Hannah died in 1889, having accomplished much. Not only did she maintain her own freedom, but she also shielded her grandson from slavery, educated him and helped him rise to the middle class. She may also have anticipated the social justice issues he would champion and his movement into the emerging black intelligentsia in the nation’s capital, sometimes known, in the parlance of W.E.B. Du Bois, as “the talented tenth.”

The William Henry Richards collection contains 109 visual materials held in the Prints and Photographs Division. A few of the photographs have been digitized. Unprocessed images can be seen by advance appointment through the Ask a Librarian link on the Library’s website. Richards’s personal papers are in the Library’s Manuscript Division.

Literacy: Libraries Without Borders

(The following is a guest post by Guy Lamolinara, communications officer in the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.)

The Ideas Box, Libraries Without Borders’ portable media center, provides young Congolese refugees with information and education resources in a camp in Burundi. Photo courtesy Libraries Without Borders

You have probably heard about the aid organization Doctors Without Borders. But do you know about Libraries Without Borders?

Libraries Without Borders provides a different type of aid: Since 2007, the organization has been supporting community development in 20 countries around the world through literacy promotion. In 2016, LWB was recognized for its innovative work with a Library of Congress Literacy Awards International Prize.

Pam Jackson, chair of the awards program, acknowledged LWB: “Its civic-minded, community-based promotion of equality through library access has made a difference in many countries around the world.”

One of LWB’s signature programs is the Ideas Box, a portable classroom, media center and library that fits on two standard pallets and can be installed in 20 minutes.

According to Allister Chang, general director of Libraries Without Borders, “Anywhere resources are needed, we want to bring it.”

You can see a short film about LWB’s work and how the amazing Ideas Box is set up, ready to work in 20 minutes. Each unit contains a satellite internet connection and a server, a generator, 25 tablets and laptops, six HD cameras, a large HD screen, board games, arts and crafts, and a stage for music and theater.

Want to tell the world about the great work you, or an organization you know, are doing in literacy (and perhaps win a Literacy Award in the process)? Then visit our site today and fill out an application.

PTSD: A Lasting Impact of War

(The following guest post was written by archivist Rachel Telford of the Library of Congress Veterans History Project).

“I went to the VA and I said, with tears in my eyes, I hurt. I mean, I really, really hurt, and I think Vietnam had something to do with it.”

—William Barner, January 2006

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William Barner in uniform, late 1960s

William Barner survived a year in Vietnam serving in a Howitzer Battery, but he did not return unharmed. Following his service, Barner was unable to control his anger and had difficulty keeping a job. Almost 40 years after his discharge, he was finally diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD).

Exploring the experiences of veterans and the impact of military service inevitably means discussing PTSD. The most recent installment of the Veterans History Project’s Experiencing War web feature recounts the stories of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines in different career fields who have returned from war bearing the invisible scars of their experiences. The collections in this exhibit were chosen with an eye toward exploring the variety of experiences of servicemen and women who have suffered from PTSD as well as the striking similarities.

Each veteran describes symptoms such as nightmares, anxiety, anger and difficulty maintaining personal and professional relationships, and all but the youngest among them tell of living with these symptoms for decades. Though understanding of PTSD grew after World War II, it did not begin to expand significantly until the 1980s. Many veterans of Vietnam, Korea and World War II have been diagnosed only recently.

Navy photographer Raymond Eldred Metcalf spent the Korean War traveling between combat units to collect images of Navy planes in action, surviving bombings and sniper fire, all while armed with nothing but his camera. In his VHP interview, he said, “When I got out there wasn’t even anybody to talk to … because nobody understood, and it seemed like nobody cared except me.” He experienced nightmares and suffered from depression but had nowhere to turn for help. Returning from Vietnam more than 15 years later, Arthur T. Baltazar, who served with the Army as a perimeter guard, experienced the same types of nightmares and despondency. He thought, “Nobody cares. I can’t believe that nobody cares what we went through. Not just me, but all the vets.”

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Reynaldo Puente, fourth from right, in a group photo with a nuclear missile, 1974

Though PTSD may typically be associated with combat, those serving away from the front lines are not immune. Reynaldo Puente was a nuclear missile crewman in Germany during the Cold War. When his unit went on alert status, he feared not only for his own life, but also for the safety of his loved ones in the event of nuclear warfare. Fortunately, Puente and his crew never had to launch their nuclear weapons, and he returned to Texas to begin a career as a police officer. Unfortunately, nightmares and anxiety eventually forced him to leave the police force. After many years and several more careers, Puente shared his story with a friend who was a psychiatrist, and she suggested he seek treatment for PTSD.

Among veterans of Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom, the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs estimates that between 11 and 20 percent experience PTSD in a given year. Larry Rosenthal, a New Jersey National Guardsman, was activated after the September 11 terrorist attacks and went on to serve in Afghanistan. Upon his return from war, he experienced sleeplessness, heightened awareness and difficulty controlling his emotions. Unlike his predecessors, he didn’t have to wait years to find the help he needed. He shared, “One Sunday I blew up . . . in a fit of what they call blind rage. And I said, ‘Time for counseling,’ and the VA was there.”

The veterans featured in this exhibit share difficult stories that illuminate one of the most lasting impacts of war. For some, PTSD became more than simply an individual struggle. Army veteran David Polhemus became a counselor to soldiers like himself who live with PTSD; former medic Wendy Taines returned to school to learn more about PTSD so she could advocate for veterans; and William Barner spends his free time helping fellow veterans navigate the VA healthcare system.

Visit the exhibit to hear their stories and view all of the featured collections.

Pic of the Week: Women in Science

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Dr. Svetlana Kotliarova guides students in forming and testing a hypothesis about whether a peeled or an unpeeled orange will float. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Eighteen fifth-graders from Hendley Elementary School in Washington, D.C., visited the Library’s Young Readers Center this week to test the scientific method under the direction of Dr. Svetlana Kotliarova, a cancer researcher who is now a scientific review officer at the National Institutes of Health. She talked about her difficult childhood in Ufa, Russia, her education, and the scientific process. Who can become a scientist? she asked the children. Anyone with passion, curiosity and persistence, she told them.

The students left with a copy of “Women in Science: 50 Fearless Pioneers Who Changed the World” by Rachel Ignotofsky. The book was provided by the event’s cosponsor, Everybody Wins! DC, a nonprofit that promotes children’s literacy.

Everybody Wins! is a longtime partner of the Library’s Center for the Book, and Library staff members have served as reading mentors to students at a nearby elementary school for the past seven years.

Women’s History Month: A New Look for a Rich Resource

(The following guest post was written by Stephen Wesson, an educational resources specialist in the Education Outreach Division.)

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Screen shot of the Women’s History Month Portal

The signatures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone appear on “A Petition for Universal Suffrage.” A photograph captures Eleanor Roosevelt as she takes her seat as chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. The first woman to serve as Librarian of Congress delivers her first address from the Library’s Great Hall by video.

Each of these historical artifacts illuminates aspects of women’s experiences in a different era of U.S. history, and each is held in the collections of a different cultural institution. These items, and dozens more like them, can be easily explored in one place: the Women’s History Month Portal, redesigned and relaunched just in time for the March celebration of Women’s History Month.

The portal is the result of a collaborative effort undertaken several years ago by a group of museums and other institutions to commemorate and encourage the study, observance and celebration of the vital role of women in American history. The Library of Congress, 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 brought together links to exhibits and collections that shed light on landmark moments of women’s history, along with educational resources that provide context and teaching suggestions.

The Women’s History Month Portal now has a new look and new functionality to make it even easier to use. In recognition of the rising number of mobile users, it has a mobile-friendly adaptive visual design. A new and improved video player brings multimedia collection items to the forefront, and new content ensures that users have access to the most compelling objects each institution has to offer.

In the Library’s Educational Outreach Division, we’re especially aware of the power of primary sources to engage learners, build critical thinking skills and support the creation of new knowledge, so we’re delighted to share this engaging site with our K–12 audience. It provides rich opportunities to make connections between materials that not only represent a wide range of historical eras and media types, but also reflect the different strengths and varied approaches of the participating institutions.

We can see ourselves directing learners to the Library’s Primary Source Set on Women’s Suffrage to gather photographs and maps documenting the suffrage struggle, then to the National Park Service for accounts of important suffrage-related places, and on to DocsTeach from the National Archives to support students as they place suffrage artifacts into context.

The Women’s History Month Portal is one of a series of sites created by this collaborative group, all of which have been overhauled and relaunched over the past year. The full suite of heritage portals also includes sites for , Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, Jewish American Heritage Month, National Hispanic Heritage Month, and Native American Heritage Month.

As the year progresses, we hope you’ll turn to these portals to investigate the dramatic events and compelling personalities that have shaped the communities they commemorate. And we hope the intriguing objects that they make available will encourage you to further explore the organizations that brought these sites into being.

Join the (Twitter) Party!

[image error](The following is a guest post by Guy Lamolinara, communications officer in the Center for the Book at the Library of Congress.)

The Library of Congress Literacy Awards program is having a party. The party is on Twitter and it will recognize the importance of promoting literacy and all those individuals and organizations dedicated to increasing the population of readers worldwide.

You are invited to participate in a Twitter Chat about the Library of Congress Literacy Awards on Wednesday, March 1, from 2 to 3 p.m. ET. Follow @LibraryCongress and use the hashtag #PromoteLiteracy to join the conversation.

Please let us know if you are planning to participate and which Twitter handle you will use. Please also feel free to share this information with your networks and anyone interested in literacy.

The chat is an opportunity to find out how others are working to increase literacy. You can make some new contacts and join in the overall celebratory atmosphere.

The Library of Congress Literacy Awards program is currently accepting applications for prizes of $150,000 (Rubenstein Prize) and $50,000 each (International and American prizes). The deadline is March 31, so there is still time to apply. For more information, go to read.gov/literacyawards/.

Bring your success stories, as well as questions, to the party! We look forward to hearing from you.

“Roots” – Celebrating the 40th Anniversary of an African-American Saga

(The following post is written by Ahmed Johnson, African American genealogy specialist in the Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Division.)

Cover image of Rosa Parks’s Personal Copy of Roots (1976), inscribed by Alex Haley. Manuscript Division.

I’d like to begin with a story – a personal story. I remember being in a sociology class at Hampton University and discussing the government’s unfulfilled promise, in the aftermath of the Civil War, to give ”40 acres and a mule” to newly freed black slaves. When my classmates began denying that any families had gotten their due, I raised my hand and informed everyone that, according to my grandmother, our family had in fact received our 40 acres.

The entire class burst into laughter.

Never one to be deterred, when I later joined the Local History and Genealogy section of the Library of Congress, I began conducting research on my family based on the stories told to me by my grandmother. I searched one of the Library’s subscription databases and located a land grant given to my second great-grandfather for 40 acres of land in Clarke County, Mississippi. Grandma was right! Well, almost. We did receive our 40 acres of land, but it was through a land grant and not through a government promise of “forty acres and a mule.”

I tell this story because writer Alex Haley followed the same path to discovery as I did but on a much larger scale. He remembered stories told by his grandmother about an ancestor, an African named Kunta Kinte who landed in a place called Annapolis and was given the name Toby. The African, he learned, called a guitar a “ko” and a river the “Kamby Bolongo.” This oral tradition passed down to Haley by his grandmother formed the basis of his motivation to pursue his family history, culminating with the publication, in 1976, of his seminal novel “Roots.”

In 2012, the Library of Congress brought together a group of curators and subject specialists to develop an exhibit, “Books that Shaped America,” featuring 88 books by American authors that had a profound effect on American life. A few years later, the Library of Congress asked the public to name “other books that shaped America” and which of the 88 books on the original list were most important to them. That survey formed the basis of the Library’s 2016 exhibit, “America Reads.” Of the top 40 books displayed in the exhibit, which is now available online, “Roots” ranked sixth.

After its publication, “Roots” spent months on the New York Times Best Sellers list, including 22 weeks at No. 1. It received a special citation from the judges of the 1977 National Book Awards and a special Pulitzer Prize. Then, in January 1977, the ABC miniseries “Roots” aired on television: some 85% of American households tuned in to watch some part of it. The book and miniseries stimulated nationwide interest in genealogy and an appreciation for African American history.

Despite the success of “Roots” and its impact on millions of readers and watchers, it has met with its fair share of controversy. Alex Haley was sued by two authors claiming plagiarism – one he settled for more than $600,000 dollars – and many historians and genealogists have questioned the validity of his story. There is no doubt that the book should be read with a critical eye, but as noted Yale Historian Edmund Morgan stated in a 1977 New York Times article, “Roots” is “a statement of someone’s search for an identity…. It would seem to me to retain a good deal of impact no matter how many mistakes the man made. In any genealogy there are bound to be a number of mistakes.”

Ultimately, Haley’s book proved more novel than fact (Haley himself described the novel as “faction” – part fact, part fiction). More importantly, though, “Roots” captured the imagination of millions, inspiring many to pursue their own family history, including me. I watched the movie and read the book – now my career is dedicated to helping others find their roots.

Interested in tracing your own roots? You can start by visiting our Local History and Genealogy website, which includes genealogy search tips, resources and an overview of the services we can provide as you begin your search. If you have specific questions about conducting research into your family’s past, I encourage you to contact me and the Library’s other local history and genealogy staff through our Ask a Librarian service.