Library of Congress's Blog, page 117

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.

Pic of the Week: Dance Battle!

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An Urban Artistry performer balances on his hand and fingers while dancing to the beats of disc jockey Baronhawk Poitier. Photo by Shawn Miller.

A performer competes in a “dance battle” in the Coolidge Auditorium on February 22 during a Homegrown Concert Series event of the American Folklife Center. Dance battles are an urban dance tradition that celebrate individual talent while helping to keep diverse forms of urban musical and dance expressions alive. In the Coolidge, pairs of dancers organized by the nonprofit Urban Artistry competed with one another for audience applause. Based in Silver Spring, Maryland, Urban Artistry documents and teaches urban musical and dance traditions of the Washington, D.C., region and beyond. It was founded in 2005 by performing artist and historian Junious Brickhouse, who served as the event’s emcee.

Freud Collection: The Opening of the Eissler Interviews

Menu with signatures of friends and admirers of Sigmund Freud. Sigmund Freud Archives, Library of Congress

(The following post is by Louis Rose, Executive Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives since 2015. It is the last of three weekly guest blogs by current and former executive directors of the Sigmund Freud Archives (SFA), an independent organization founded in 1951 to collect and preserve for scholarly use Sigmund Freud’s personal papers. The collection, assembled by SFA and others, has resided at the Library of Congress since 1952 and is now available online.)

The Sigmund Freud Archives has now opened all materials in the Sigmund Freud Papers allowable under the current copyright law and consistent with medical confidentiality and donor restrictions. Thus, the Library of Congress’s digital collection of the Freud Papers contains nearly all of the more than 270 interviews that Kurt R. Eissler recorded with Sigmund Freud’s colleagues, friends, family, and patients are open to the public. Of those, 150 were already available; now all but five of the transcripts are open to listeners and readers. Researchers now have access, for example, to all of Eissler’s extensive interviews with Freud’s patient Sergius Pankejeff, the “Wolf Man.” The availability of the Eissler Interviews is a noteworthy event for which the Sigmund Freud Archives expresses its gratitude to Emanuel E. Garcia, literary executor of the Eissler estate.  As scholars explore these materials, new educational sources and new lines of research will emerge, yielding more finely grained interpretations and insights regarding Freud’s work, the psychoanalytic movement, and the historical times that confronted them.

Kurt R. Eissler was a committed and painstaking psychoanalytic practitioner and biographer. He sought to interview as many individuals who knew Freud as was possible. The energies he poured into this task were remarkable, as was the scholarly preparation behind it.

His questions expressed his own research interest: first and foremost, to add detail to our knowledge of Freud’s biography and clinical practice. His interviews, however, depended also upon interviewees’ separate concerns and upon the nature and boundaries of their memories. Thus one finds interviews in which Eissler gives explicit direction to the course of discussion, pressing with varying degrees of success for information about those elements of Freud’s thinking, methods, and cases for which he wanted to collect more details. Other interviews utilize a far more open process in which the interviewee introduces subjects for discussion more freely. Here those interviewed might focus not only on Freud’s biography and career but also on their own lives and activities, and on the circumstances, reasons, and motivations that brought Freud and the interviewees into contact or collaboration with each other.

These discussions and recollections of the interactions between Freud and the interviewees, as recounted in the Eissler Interviews, shed new light on how psychoanalysis developed as both a scientific and cultural movement. For example, Ernst Kris recalled that when Freud asked him in 1932 to become editor of Imago, he—Kris—laid down certain “conditions.”  A key condition was that the journal would relinquish its early focus on so-called applied psychoanalysis, which at that time was still associated chiefly with psychobiography.  Kris maintained that there existed no such field as applied psychoanalysis, but only clinical psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic psychology. Freud agreed to Kris’s condition without question. Later, Kris’s commitment to building psychoanalysis into a general psychology remained crucial to his career in both Vienna and New York, in particular to his studies of ego development and child psychology and to his researches into image making, language, and memory.

Insight into the intellectual interaction between Freud and Kris, its role within the movement, and its historical background, gives but one example of the knowledge that can be gained from the Eissler Interviews. By providing a new comprehension of Freud’s professional and intellectual development and by highlighting those who worked with him and after him, the interviews significantly expand the story of how Freud’s theory, method, and practice grew and transformed under the conditions of twentieth-century history into a broadly based, multidisciplinary psychoanalytic psychology, a psychology that revolutionized our understanding of the mind.

World War I: Wartime Sheet Music

The following post was written by Cait Miller of the Music Division and originally appeared on the In the Muse: Performing Arts Blog.

“The Beast of Berlin,” by John Clayton Calhoun, 1918. Music Division.

Piano transcriptions of large-scale works, marches, sentimental ballads, and other examples of parlor music are well documented in the Music Division’s sheet music holdings; and from the late 19th century through the early 20th century, sheet music not only served to disseminate music for home recreation but contributed to documenting what events, issues, and cultural themes were significant to the American public as well as how those topics were perceived. Our published sheet music collections cover just about every historic event in American history, including World War I.

Frederick G. Vogel wrote in the preface to his reference book, “World War I Songs: A History and Dictionary of Popular American Patriotic Tunes, with Over 300 Complete Lyrics,” that “With the exception of World War II, no episode in American history has stimulated the nation’s songwriters into action more than World War I…” Vogel asserts that more than 35,000 marches, ballads, and anthems related to the “war to end all wars” were copyrighted between 1914 and 1919 by established composers and no-name amateurs alike. The Library of Congress acquired over 14,000 pieces of published sheet music relating to the “Great War,” with the greatest number coming from the years of the United States’ active involvement (1917-1918) and the immediate postwar period.

African Americans were represented in the music of the time.

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.

Rare Book of the Month: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Brownies

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Cover of the first issue of “The Brownies’ Book.” Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress

(This is a guest post by Elizabeth Gettins of the Library’s Digital Conversion Team.)

This month’s rare book honors William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, born Feb. 23, 1868. It features one of his most beloved creations, The Brownies’ Book, a serial published in 1920 and 1921. It is —22 back-to-back chronological issues. It was the first magazine of its kind, written for African-American children and youths to instill in them a sense of racial pride and provide overall instruction on how to conduct oneself, Du Bois is credited with establishing the genre of African-American children’s literature. The Brownies’ Book is considered part of the movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, a time of great African-American artistic expression.

The Brownies’ Book was created by founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, (NAACP), among them, Du Bois. Hired as the group’s director of publicity and research with the primary duty of editing the NAACP’s monthly magazine The Crisis, Du Bois went on to launch and edit the serial aimed at youngsters. This publication was created in whole by black artists and authors and featured poetry, literature, biographies of successful black people, music, games, plays, and current events. Du Bois himself wrote the column “As the Crow Flies.” Many authors got their starts contributing to this magazine, including Langston Hughes.

Du Bois was a man of great conviction and valued education above all else. He particularly advocated for education in the arts, as he felt such schooling could lift one above his or her current station in life. He disagreed with another tireless African-American civil-rights advocate, Booker T. Washington, who believed in a more practical education in the trades. In the words of Du Bois, “Education must not simply teach work—it must teach life.”

Du Bois himself was a very accomplished man and likely arrived at his opinions due to his upbringing. He was born in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, into a socially progressive community which embraced a more racially integrated way of life. His experiences afforded him a good start in life and he noted, “I had a happy childhood and acceptance in the community.” Because of his progressive beginnings, he had the opportunity to receive a good education and went on to become the first African American to graduate with a Ph.D. from Harvard. Throughout his life he was deeply involved in the fight for the rights of African-Americans and was also a prolific author of such important works as The Souls of Black Folk and Black Reconstruction in America. He also wrote many treatises and essays as well as three autobiographies.

Who knows how many young African-Americans read the Brownies’ book and took inspiration from it? It was, and still is, a charming publication, filled with enchanting stories, adorable photographs and illustrations and good writing. It was Du Bois’ keen hope that he was helping to educate “the talented Tenth of the Negro race [as they must] be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people.”

The Brownies’ Book is also the focus of the Library’s latest Pinterest board.

Highlights of the Sigmund Freud Papers

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Sigmund Freud

(The following post is by Harold P. Blum, M.D., Executive Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives 1986-2013. It is the second in a series of three weekly guest blogs by current and former executive directors of the Sigmund Freud Archives (SFA), an independent organization founded in 1951 to collect and preserve for scholarly use Sigmund Freud’s personal papers. The collection, assembled by SFA and others, has resided at the Library of Congress since 1952 and is now available online. In this blog, Dr. Blum provides an account of major events during his tenure as executive director of the SFA, including Anna Freud’s bequest of the papers of her father she still possessed at the time of her death in 1982 and the work leading up to the major Library of Congress exhibition, “Freud: Conflict and Culture,” which went on display in 1998.)

Sigmund Freud’s scientific papers, correspondence, books, memorabilia, films, and photos are critical for psychoanalytic, historical, and biographical scholarship. Freud was a prolific letter writer, perhaps one of the most prolific in history.  The amount of his correspondence in fact exceeds his 23 volumes of psychoanalytic publications.  Not only did Freud have prolonged correspondences with friends and colleagues, but he also responded to worldwide inquiries.  The Sigmund Freud Papers collection at the Library of Congress is the major repository of these documents.

When I became Executive Director of the Sigmund Freud Archives in 1986, access to most of the collection was restricted; much of it would be unavailable well into the following century.  One of my first tasks was to increase vastly the availability of the treasure trove of Freud materials at the Library of Congress.  With the approval of the Board of Directors of the Sigmund Freud Archives and the General Counsel of the Library of Congress I embarked on a gradual, systematic derestriction of the Freud collection.

By the year 2000 the vast majority of materials were derestricted, open to scholars with the permission of the Library of Congress. The new availability of the previously restricted material made possible the publication of important sets of correspondence, between Freud and his close colleagues, including, for example, Eduard Silberstein, Karl Abraham, and Ernest Jones.  Their relevance to the history of psychoanalysis is immeasurable, revealing–through letters he may never have envisioned becoming public–the private Freud.

During my tenure, Sigmund’s daughter Anna Freud bequeathed to the Library collection an extraordinary addition of papers, which she had kept in the Freud home at Maresfield Gardens, Hampstead, England.

Following the legal release required after Anna Freud’s passing in 1982, the Sigmund Freud Archives could claim the bequest. I went to London, and after (for security’s sake) making photocopies of the documents, I brought the papers to the American embassy.  By prearrangement with the Library of Congress, the documents were placed in a diplomatic pouch, flown to Washington by the United States Air Force, and delivered to the library under the protection of military police.

Anna Freud also designated that the Maresfield Gardens home become a museum.  Initially managed by a joint committee of the Sigmund Freud Archives and Muriel Gardner’s New Land Foundation, the London Freud Museum, containing Freud’s couch, library, and collection of artifacts, opened regally in 1986.  At present, Sigmund Freud Archives is represented on the museum’s board of directors and is ultimately responsible for the museum’s contents.

While I served as executive director, the virtually complete first editions of the works of Sigmund Freud became yet another significant addition to the Freud Papers.  Originally donated by Dr. Robert Stoller in my honor to another institution, I subsequently was able to ensure that this precious collection become a permanent gift to the Library of Congress.

In 1995 I proposed a Freud exhibition at the Library of Congress, “Freud: Conflict and Culture,” based mainly upon the priceless Freud collection.  Curated by Michael Roth, the carefully prepared exhibit had the collaboration of the Freud museums in London and Vienna.  It opened, not without controversy, in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress in October 1998, and it remains the largest and most in-depth display of Freudiana.  The exhibit enjoyed extensive press coverage and subsequently travelled nationally and internationally, attracting thousands of visitors.  In June 2010, with the splendid cooperation of the Library of Congress, I organized a more compact Freud exhibition at the library.  Arranged with the staff of the Manuscript Division, it appeared in conjunction with the meeting of the American Psychoanalytic Association in Washington, D.C.

The Library of Congress has provided benevolent, resourceful support for the Sigmund Freud Archives, for which I was particularly grateful to Dr. James Hutson, chief of the Library’s Manuscript Division, as well as to the Sigmund Freud Archives Board and its presidents, Drs. Alexander Grinstein, Eugene Halpert, and Deanna Holtzman, during my tenure as executive director.

World War I: Online Offerings

(The following was written for the March/April 2017 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. You can read editions of past issues here.)

[image error]With the most comprehensive World War I collections in the nation, we are uniquely equipped to tell the story of America’s involvement in the Great War through our website.

Today we launched a comprehensive portal to its extensive holdings on the subject of World War I (1914–1918) as part of our commemoration of the 100th anniversary of the U.S. involvement in the war. The portal is a one-stop destination page for digitized versions of many of these assets.

These remarkable collections include recruitment and wartime information posters, photos from the front, manuscripts and papers of prominent figures such as General John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, newspapers that provided the first draft of the war’s history, maps of campaigns and battle lines, sound recordings of prominent leaders of the era, war-related sheet music, even early film treasures.

Along with extensive access to these rare materials, the portal will include links to the online version of the Library’s major new exhibition, “Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I,” which opens April 4.

In addition, the portal will feature articles from our blogs, written by Library curators who will offer unique insight into the collections and highlight stories and materials that are most revealing about the war, and America’s involvement in it—before, during and after its military participation.

The page will include WWI-related content for teachers, a guide for visitors on-site to the Library in Washington and details on lectures, programs, concerts and symposia related to the conflict, and will be regularly updated with new information and collections material as they become available.