Library of Congress's Blog, page 121

World War I: On the Firing Line With the Germans (1915)

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On the Firing Line With the Germans advertisement, Moving Picture World, 26 February 1916

(The following post was written by Mike Mashon of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division and originally appeared on the Now See Hear! blog.)

During the centenary observance of World War I, we’ve been prioritizing the preservation of films in our collection pertaining to the conflict. Foremost among these is a film called “On the Firing Line With the Germans,” shot in 1915 by William H. Durborough and his cameraman Irving Ries. Library staff members George Willeman and Lynanne Schweighofer reviewed and selected the best surviving scenes from among 32 reels of nitrate film, nine reels of paper print fragments, and supplemental 35mm from the National Archives, then assembled the digital files created from them to present a complete version of the film as it premiered on 28 November 1915. This description hardly does justice to the hundreds of hours required to restore this film, a complex and exacting process we’ll describe more fully in a future post.

Our restoration could not have happened without the indefatigable research conducted by independent researchers James Castellan and Ron van Dopperen, plus former Library of Congress Moving Image Curator Cooper Graham. In 2014 the trio co-authored “American Cinematographers in the Great War,” which was published by John Libbey and sponsored by the Pordenone Silent Film Festival, where in October 2015 the film was publically shown for the first time since its last documented showing in March 1917. It will be screened again on November 16 here at the Packard Campus, with pianist Stephen Horne accompanying.

Ron was kind enough to synopsize the history of the film for Now See Hear!, but a fascinating and much more comprehensive report—which Castellan, van Dopperen, and Graham call “On the Firing Line With the Germans: A Film Annotation”—can be found here.

In April 1915, the persuasive and enterprising still photographer Wilbur Henry Durborough and cinematographer Irving Guy Ries crossed the border between Holland and Germany in a large, flamboyant Stutz Bearcat to photograph the Great War from the German side. They were to have a great and unique adventure.

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Durborough and his Stutz Bearcat, courtesy Prints & Photographs Division

 

Their task was to film Germany at war. The Germans knew they were losing the propaganda battle in the still-neutral United States, and were anxious to have American correspondents document and publicize their point of view. In addition, a group of businessmen in Chicago, a center of pro-German sentiment in the United States, saw an excellent business opportunity in making a war film for American theaters. While the Newspaper Enterprise Association financed Durborough’s wartime photographs, an ad hoc War Film Syndicate financed the duo’s motion pictures.

They filmed in wartime Berlin and East Prussia capturing some poignant footage of life in Berlin, including military hospitals, as well as the destruction in East Prussian cities. Durborough filmed Friedrich von Bernhardi, perhaps the most sword-rattling German militarist of them all, as well as extremely rare footage of the feminists Jane Addams, Alice Hamilton and Aletta Jacobs, who had come to Berlin for the opposite reason: peace.

Durborough and Ries were fortunate to be in Germany in the summer of 1915, during the great German drive across East Prussia and Poland which drove the Russians back to their own border. It was the high-water mark of German forces on the eastern front. For most of this time, Durborough and Ries were accompanying Hindenburg’s forces. They would be present at the fall of Novo Georgievsk, the major Russian fort in Poland, and at the Kaiser Review that followed, where Wilhelm reviewed and thanked his troops on their victory and Durborough caused a stir when he disobeyed orders and filmed Kaiser Wilhelm. He also photographed the fall of Warsaw to the Germans, and its Jewish quarter.

The film is unique in being the only American feature-length documentary made during World War I. It is doubly special because, unlike most other films of the period, it was not cut to pieces for stock shots. It also reflects indirectly the financial and ideological forces at work in the United States at the time. Although probably not the intent of the film makers, it shows horrors of war that were impacting not just the battlefields but also the German home front.

On the Firing Line With the Germans (William H. Durborough, 1915)

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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.

Technology at the Library: Getting the Whole Picture

(The following is from the November/December 2016 Library of Congress Magazine, LCM, and was written by Phil Michel, digital project coordinator in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.)

A new, oversize scanner is putting the Library’s collection of panoramic photographs in focus.

One of the great joys in looking at a panoramic photograph is finding small details in a picture that can be several feet in length and show an entire city, or the whole crew of a battleship. It’s an experience that’s hard to reproduce in a smaller space, such as in a book or on a computer monitor or on a magazine page. But new viewing technologies let us zoom in and pan around to see the fascinating details, on computers and mobile devices. And new scanning technologies are helping the Library produce higher-quality digital images in a single exposure.

The Library’s Panoramic Photograph Collection contains more than 4,000 of these richly detailed photographs, most from the early 20th century, when panoramas were at the height of their popularity. They include cityscapes, landscapes and group portraits from all 50 states and several other countries.

They document the nation, its enterprises and its interests such as agricultural life; beauty contests; disasters; such engineering work as bridges, canals and dams; fairs and expositions; military and naval activities, especially during World War I; the oil industry; schools and college campuses; sports; and transportation. Ranging in length from 28 inches to six feet, the panoramic photographs were acquired when photographers submitted copies of their works to the U.S. Copyright Office in the Library of Congress for copyright protection.

The Library first began reproducing the panoramas in the 1990s by taking photographs of overlapping segments and then “stitching” the sections together to show the whole image on laser videodiscs in the Prints and Photographs Division Reading Room. Later, these copy photographs were converted to digital files and re-stitched to make them accessible on the Library’s website. The process was labor-intensive and the panoramas fit nicely on a screen, but it was difficult to see small features.

Now, with a recently acquired oversized flatbed scanner, the Library is capturing entire panoramas (up to 6-½ feet long) in a single pass exposure and at higher levels of resolution, so every little detail can be seen clearly. The Library relies on standard techniques that were developed with other government imaging experts to produce the best image possible. Using an image target with wine lines and color patches, the Library can check the scanner for sharp focus and lighting balance and ensure that the colors are accurately reproduced in the scan.

The image quality of the newly scanned panoramic photograph of Buffalo, New York, showing Genesee and Main Streets was greatly enhanced using a new, atbed scanner. W.H. Brandel, 1911, Prints and Photographs Division.

You can read the November/December 2016 issue in its entirety here, along with issues from previous years. 

Library in the News: November 2016 Edition

Smokey Robinson made headlines as the Library celebrated his work and career during the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song celebration concert.

“Amid multiple standing ovations from an audience filled with political dignitaries at DAR Constitution Hall, the Motown star reflected on his humble Detroit roots as he accepted the prestigious Gershwin Prize for Popular Song,” wrote Brian McCollum for the Detroit Free Press.

Robinson had previously spoken with McCollum about the honor on the eve of the concert.

“If I’m being even mentioned in the same breath with the Gershwins — whose music is everlasting — then that’s a crowning achievement for me as a songwriter. I want to be Beethoven, man. I want to be Bach, Chopin,” he said. “Five hundred years from now, they’ll still be playing Smokey Robinson music: If possible, that’s what I want to be. So this is the first step.”

“Robinson’s songs — whether written for himself and the Miracles or other Motown artists — have soundtracked so many lives because of their emotional universality. They transcend time, space, performer and genre, and the event was programmed to illustrate that fact,” said Chris Kelly for The Washington Post.

In a special video presentation, the Post featured fans reminiscing on their favorite Smokey Robinson songs and how his music affected their lives.

“The audience sang and clapped along to “My Girl,” the night’s show closer, as a testament to Robinson’s enduring compositions,” reported Joshua Barajas for PBS NewsHour.

Other stories ran on CBS, WTOP, Billboard and Broadway World, among others.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden continued to make headlines in November.

“At different times in the library’s history, the people who have served as Librarian of Congress—scholars, librarians, lawyers—have each brought different skills,” she says. “As a librarian, I might have experiences to bring as the library faces a new part of its history, and a lot of that has to do with technology and accessibility,” Hayden told Greg Landgraf of American Libraries Magazine.

Hayden also spoke with Rebecca Sutton of NEA Arts Magazine. “I’m just discovering the depth of the collection. I think the arts community would be very pleased by the treasures here. I’m looking at photography books now: One’s a book on lighthouses; there are others on canals, dance, furniture, documentary. It’s like being in a treasure chest,” Hayden said. “It’s a beautiful place, but it has beautiful things too. Not just beautiful, but things that make you think.”

Eric Weibel, kid reporter for Scholastic, sat down with Hayden to talk about the Library and her thoughts on children’s literature and literacy.

The Librarian also spoke with Maryland Public Television. You can see the interview beginning at the 16:16 mark.

The Library’s Veterans History Project also received media coverage in November.

Michael Ruane of The Washington Post wrote a story about the project’s online presentation, “The Art of War.”

“The collection highlights the art of servicemen and women whose only canvas was the paper they might have in their pockets,” he wrote. “It captures the mundane and dreary aspects of war, as well as the dignity of its participants, and the drama of its battles.”

Several regional outlets shared stories of collecting efforts, including New Hampshire Public Radio, the Chicago Tribune, The Sentinel Record and Tucson News Now.

Pic of the Week: A&E Makes Donation to VHP

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Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Veterans History Project Director Karen Lloyd present a certificate of appreciation to A&E Networks President and General Manager Jana Bennett following the donation of Pearl Harbor veterans’ oral histories. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Staff from A&E Networks’ HISTORY stopped by the Library this week to donate interviews from some of our nation’s oldest World War II veterans — specifically those who witnessed the attack on Pearl Harbor. On the eve of the attack’s anniversary, these stories offer meaningful testimony to the American entry into World War II.

These 25 A&E oral history recordings will complement more than 250 VHP Pearl Harbor collections.

There are many evocative manuscripts and recordings among these collections, including Leon Jenkins’ diary. He witnessed the Attack on Pearl Harbor and although his diary begins in 1942, its pages are nothing less than evocative.

Owen Edward Rogers contributed to this post. 

New Online: Presidents, Teachers & More Website Updates

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

From the Thomas Jefferson Papers, a draft of Jefferson’s 1804 Inaugural address, in Jefferson’s own hand. Manuscript Division.

Presidential Collections

With the next presidential inauguration quickly approaching, we’ve updated a popular presentation from our old American Memory site on U.S. presidential inaugurations: “I Do Solemnly Swear…” A Resource Guide highlights items from the Library’s collections such as diaries and letters written by presidents and those who witnessed the inaugurations, handwritten drafts of inaugural addresses, broadsides, inaugural tickets and programs, prints, photographs and sheet music.

For Teachers

New for educators is a major overhaul of the popular Thanksgiving Primary Source Set, which has been updated with new content and a revised Teacher’s Guide. We’ve also put this set together as a Student Discovery Set for the iPad. You can see the full list of Student Discovery Sets on the teacher’s site.

 

 

 

 

Website Updates

Following up on our big home page and user experience improvements release last month, we continue to modernize key parts of the Library’s website. News from the Library of Congress is now updated with a simplified design of our news releases to make the content easier to read and use on all devices. We’ve also gone back and touched up the data for thousands of news releases going back to 2001, making it possible to filter searches of news items by topic.

Last month, we completed the latest release of the Legislative System of the United States, Congress.gov. The release included enhancements to the homepage, alerts and saved searches, legislation, Congressional Record and Congressional Record Index, committee reports and new capabilities for the advanced search form for legislation. You can see a full list of changes or check out the Law Library’s detailed blog post on the release.

Ladies Behind the Lens

(The following is an article, written by Brett Carnell and Helena Zinkham of the Prints and Photographs Division, for the November/December 2016 Library of Congress Magazine.)

“If one is the possessor of health and strength, a good news instinct … a fair photographic outfit, and the ability to hustle, which is the most necessary qualification, one can be a news photographer.”

Jessie T. Beals, West Park, New York, 1908.

So said Jessie Tarbox Beals in a 1904 interview with a St. Louis newspaper. Beals was known as America’s first female news photographer because The Buffalo Inquirer and The Courier hired her as a staff photographer in 1902. For most of her career, Beals worked as a freelance news photographer.

News photography is a great strength of the Library’s collections, but work by women photojournalists can be hard to find among these millions of pictures. A new Library web presentation, “Women Photojournalists,” sheds light on these talented individuals through a series of 28 biographies written by Beverly Brannan, photography curator in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division.

For almost 100 years, newspapers and magazines relied primarily on male photographers because photojournalism was seen as physically demanding work considered too rough for women. As a result, many of the women who succeeded in this field had remarkable life stories as well as skill with the camera. Brannan explores their contributions to the field of photojournalism, tracing their work behind the camera from the advent of photojournalism in the late 19th century up to today. The biographies provide insight into the challenges faced by women photographers as well as their achievements in American photojournalism.

Women photojournalists had at least two things in common—they were willing to push hard to succeed and they wanted to tell stories through pictures. Beyond that, the women’s backgrounds are as diverse as the subjects they documented. Many needed to earn a living, but quite a few were financially independent. Many had a college education or formal training in art, but others came to photography through family interests. Several gravitated to war zones or social justice issues, while others focused on local events and daily life.

The new site builds on “Women Come to the Front,” a 1995 Library exhibition that featured eight women photojournalists who covered war: Therese Bonney, Toni Frissell, Marvin Breckinridge Patterson, Clare Boothe Luce, Janet Flannery, Esther Bubley, Dorothea Lange and May Craig.

Frances Benjamin Johnston shows children her Kodak camera, circa 1900.

“While preparing an overview of the Prints and Photographs Division’s collections, I realized that women had played a more prominent communications role during the Second World War than seemed to be appreciated by those studying the era,” said Brannan, who curated the exhibition.

In the new web presentation, Brannan includes gifted women from every generation of photography, including some like Frances Benjamin Johnston and Toni Frissell, whose papers are housed in the Library of Congress.

Johnston’s family’s social position in Washington, D.C., gave her access to the presidential administrations of Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt and other notables, which helped launch her career as a portrait photographer and photojournalist with the Bain News Service. Her interest in social justice is reflected in her images of such vocational institutions as Hampton Institute in Virginia and the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. In the 1910s and 1920s, her photographs of estates and gardens around the country illustrated her lecture series titled “Our American Gardens.”

Toni Frissell in Red Cross Uniform, 1942.

Frissell is best known for her high-fashion photography for Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. But during World War II, she used her connections with society matrons to aggressively pursue wartime assignments at home and abroad.

“I became so frustrated with fashions that I wanted to prove to myself that I could do a real reporting job,” Frissell said.

Charlotte Brooks was only one of a handful of women hired as a full-time staff photographer at Look magazine, where she mostly covered home and family life in post-war America. Her work is well-represented in the Look Magazine Photograph Collection in the Library of Congress, having worked for the magazine for 20 years, until the publication ceased in 1971.

The website includes such contemporary photojournalists as Brenda Ann Kenneally, Susan Meiselas and Marilyn Nance, whose careers began in the final decades of the 20th century. Their focus is on people—like those affected by Hurricane Katrina, those forced from their homes in Northern Iraq and working-class people in African-American communities.

“Photography should not be about the photographer,” said Meiselas when she spoke at the Library of Congress.

Yet the images produced by these women reflect their indomitable spirit and worldview.

All photos from the Prints and Photographs Division 

World War I: “Trench Blues” — An African American Song of the War

(The following is a guest post written by Stephanie Hall of the American Folklife Center.)

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John Bray, Amelia, Louisiana. Photo by Alan Lomax, 1934. Prints and Photographs Division.

In 1934, folklorist John Lomax and his 19-year-old son Alan went to southern Louisiana to collect folksongs and music in many styles from several ethnic groups in English and French. Among the songs in the resulting collection is “Trench Blues,” a World War I song composed and sung by John Bray in Ameila, St. Mary’s Parish, Louisiana. “Trench Blues” is important as a statement from one African American about the experience of going to war. Not many songs airing strong personal statements about the First World War by African Americans survive today.

We are lucky that the Lomaxes recorded this song, given that it doesn’t fit many definitions of “folk music.” John Lomax used one such definition to guide his work: the older songs and tunes of a community, which have no known author. Therefore, he did not have a strong interest in recording contemporary music like this song. Luckily, Alan’s interests were broader than his father’s; he recorded this particular song and apparently corrected its catalog card to make that fact clear.

During World War I, African Americans mainly did work in support of the combat troops, with a smaller number trained for combat. According to the Lomaxes, Bray did not serve in a combat unit. It seems likely that the Army would have valued Bray’s work skills. We learn a little about those skills in another song he sang for the Lomaxes, “Cypress Logging Holler,” which he used to coordinate workers moving logs from Louisiana swamps to the saw mill – a difficult job. According to his draft registration he was working as a pond man for the Ramos Lumber Company, famous for their cypress lumber, when he was drafted in 1917.

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“Cypress LoggingHoller,” sung by John Bray, Louisiana, 1934. American Folklife Center

African American soldiers were segregated and often looked down on and even mistreated by white servicemen. The Army allowed African Americans to become officers, as they thought that it was better for the African American units to be commanded by their own officers. But these soldiers were not treated as equal to others of similar rank. When African American veterans returned home, there was often no fanfare. They were not regarded as heroes except in their own communities and often felt forgotten or neglected by the nation they had gone to war for. There had been great hope among African Americans that service in the war would make a big difference in how they were seen as Americans. Instead, it became a galvanizing moment that led to later efforts to gain equality.

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John Bray’s draft registration for World War I. National Archives and Records Administration.

“Trench Blues” is John Bray’s story about going to war in 1917 at 28. He tells of his experiences aboard ship while worrying about German submarines below the waves. He then describes how it felt in his “home in the trenches, living in a big dugout,” of being among “40,000 soldiers called out to drill” and going to Belgium. Listeners should be aware that he uses a pejorative word for African Americans in the song. The line explains that “We went to Berlin, went with all our will and if the white soldiers don’t get him, the [African Americans] certainly will.” It is a moment in the song when Bray takes the opportunity to comment on being regarded as inferior and to say that this was not the case, all in a short verse. The verse may also imply that the non-combat African Americans providing support to the combat troops would nevertheless stop any of the enemy from escaping.

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“Trench Blues,” composed and sung by John Bray, Louisiana, 1934. American Folklife Center.

Segregated military units and the idea that most African Americans were better suited to labor than combat set them at a lower social level within the Army. By using this insulting word to mean something positive, John Bray is taking the power back, which was not unusual in the blues of the time. You will also hear that Bray uses a nickname derived from this insult, probably given to him at lumber camps. I take this to be another way of showing that the word has no power over him.

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John Bray pretending to hold up a bridge, Amelia, Louisiana. Photo by Alan Lomax, 1934. Prints and Photographs Division.

We do not have much biographical information on John Bray to see how the song reflects the details of his service. But what we have is a song with the ring of emotional truth. He sings of his fears, other soldiers’ fears and the reactions of civilians. He tells of the many soldiers who lost their lives and of the triumph of victory. Above all, he asserts the importance of the African American soldiers – as important as any other Americans who risked their lives for their country during World War I.

The John A. Lomax southern states collection, 1933-1937 includes these recordings made with John Lomax in 1934. Joshua Caffery, 2013 John W. Kluge Center Alan Lomax Fellow, made the 1934 recordings available online as part of his work.

The Library of Congress has enjoyed a long association with the Lomax family, beginning in 1933 with John A. Lomax’s appointment as Honorary Consultant and Curator of the Archive of American Folk-Song, and his son Alan’s appointment as “Assistant-in-Charge” of the archive in 1937. During their time at the Library, which ended in late 1942, the duo made long trips through the United States and the Caribbean, documenting American culture in its diverse manifestations. Alan’s dynamic career from the 1940s to the 1990s generated a large archive that the Library acquired after his death in 2002. The children of Bess Lomax Hawes, Alan’s equally accomplished sister, donated her materials to the center in 2014.

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.

The Power of Photography

(The following is a feature story from the November/December 2016 Library of Congress Magazine, LCM, that was written by Helena Zinkham, director  of the Library’s Collections and Services Directorate and chief of the Prints and Photographs Division. You can read the issue in its entirety here.) 

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Photographs like this one of Marilyn Monroe taken by John Vachon for Look Magazine inspired a 2010 book.

What do Marilyn Monroe, Civil War soldiers and the Wright Brothers have in common? Books about these subjects all feature photographs found at the Library of Congress.

Over more than 150 years, the Library has built an internationally significant photography collection. From the dawn of photography to today’s cell phone cameras, images in the Library’s photograph collections help historians, students and teachers, curators, journalists, novelists and filmmakers—to name a few—understand the past and tell fascinating stories.

The most frequent use of the Library’s more than 14 million photographs is to illustrate publications, which have expanded to include social media and websites. And with more than 1 million of these images available on the Library’s website, the images can be accessed around the globe.

Icons like Marilyn Monroe, Jacqueline and John F. Kennedy have remained popular subjects for articles, documentaries and full-length biographies, long after their deaths. They are well-represented in the more than 4 million images that comprise the Look Magazine Photograph Collection in the Library of Congress. Covering the magazine’s publishing cycle, 1937-1971, the published and unpublished photographs depict life in America over four decades.

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This Civil War era photograph of an African American Union soldier with his wife and daughters is one of many that inspired a recent exhibition at the California African American Museum.

Historian Jack Larkin mined the Library’s collection for images of farmers, mill girls, housemaids, gold miners, railway porters, cowboys, newsboys and stenographers to illustrate his book, “Where We Worked: A Celebration of America’s Workers and the Nation They Built.”

“I would also like to thank my unsung heroes—the visual archivists and imaging specialists at the Library of Congress,” said Larkin in the book’s acknowledgements. “They have created an extraordinary online collection, making available our nation’s greatest single resource for the visual study of the American past.”

Novelists are also inspired by photographs. The striking face of Addie Card stimulated author Elizabeth Winthrop to write “Counting on Grace”—a fictional children’s story about a girl who worked in a textile mill in Vermont at the turn of the last century. The image is one many photographed by Lewis Hine for the U.S. National Child Labor Committee—the records and photographs of which are housed in the Library of Congress. To gather background information, Winthrop hired genealogist and journalist Joe Manning to track down what happened to Card later in life. Manning became so curious about the other child laborers photographed by Hine that he launched a website, called Mornings on Maple Street, where his extensive research now chronicles the lives of more than 150 child laborers, including interviews with their descendants. “Counting on Grace” is also used in the classrooms to teach about the plight of working children.

Always a popular research topic, the Civil War continued to garner interest during its recent sesquicentennial (2011-2015). In the past six years since the Library acquired and displayed the Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War photographs, more than 30 books—and many more magazines and online resources—brought the era to life with these vivid images. In 2013, the California African American Museum honored the estimated 180,000 black soldiers who fought in the Civil War by reproducing and displaying life-size portraits from the Liljenquist Collection. For the show’s signature image, the curator selected the rare glimpse of a Union soldier posed with his wife and two daughters.

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The Library’s online Civil War photographs, like this one of President Abraham Lincoln and General McClellan on Antietam battlefield, were used to create the sets for filmmaker Salvador Litvak’s 2013 film, “Saving Lincoln.”

Documentary filmmaker Salvador Litvak was motivated to develop a new cinematic technique—CineCollage—while reviewing the Library’s digitized Civil War photographs online. Litvak created the sets for his 2013 film “Saving Lincoln” by filming 3D composites from the digital images. He captured the actors’ performances on a green screen, which allowed him to place them in front of the historic background. Litvak said his “a-ha!” moment occurred late at night while sleuthing through the Library’s online photographs.

 “I stared at a high resolution image of a glass plate negative created in 1865. The photograph depicted wounded Union soldiers in an Army hospital. I zoomed deep into the picture and focused on an emaciated young soldier sitting at the back of the room. His eyes pierced mine, and I wondered how he would react to a visit by President Lincoln.”

To celebrate the centennial of manned, powered flight in 2003, several aviation groups attempted accurate reconstructions of the 1903 Wright Brothers airplane that were capable of flying. Their work was informed by mechanical details visible in photographs housed in the Library of Congress that were not documented in the written records.

Historian David McCullough—and many other authors—have drawn on the Wright Brothers Papers and photographs in the Library’s collections to write biographies of the pioneer aviators. McCullough, whose latest book “The Wright Brothers” features a photo of pioneering plane on its cover, credits the Library’s photograph collections with launching his career.

 “After seeing pictures of the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Collection, I began writing my first history, ‘The Johnstown Flood’ (1968).”

The ability to digitize and make its collections available online has allowed the Library to provide access to these valuable resources in the classroom. The Library’s Teachers Page helps educators engage their students in the curriculum through the Library’s primary sources and photographs. The site offers primary source sets on topics ranging from America in wartime to America’s favorite pastime—baseball.

The Library is also sharing its baseball collections with new audiences at Nationals Park in Washington, D.C. In collaboration with the Washington Nationals, “Baseball Americana from the Library of Congress” opened at Nationals Park in April 2015 and remains on view.

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Baseball Americana display at Nationals Park. Courtesy The Washington Nationals.

The popular photo-sharing site Flickr also allows the Library to reach new and diverse audiences through its photographs. The site has enriched the Library’s photograph collections by opening a dialogue with end users who have “tagged” or commented on the images. Since 2008 when the Flickr Commons project started, the Library has received identifying information for many thousands of photographs. Users have also submitted their own photographs to show how historic sites look today, and many have expressed their appreciation for the rich images mounted on the site by the Library. The Library’s most popular collection on Flickr remains the color photography from the Great Depression and World War II.

The Library of Congress invites you to join the conversation on its Flickr and Instagram sites. View the national picture collection any time—online or in-person at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.—to find a piece of your family history, a new understanding of the past or fresh inspiration for your own creative endeavors.

Pic of the Week: Smokey Robinson

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden interviews Gershwin Prize for Popular Song recipient Smokey Robinson at the Gershwin piano, November 15, 2016. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The two-day celebration of Smokey Robinson’s 50-year career—and his selection as the 2016 recipient of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song—began in the nation’s capital with a touching trip down the keyboard of George Gershwin’s piano and ended with a rollicking concert of his greatest hits.

During his visit, Robinson sat down at the Gershwin piano, housed in the Library’s ongoing exhibit, “Here to Stay: The Legacy of George and Ira Gershwin,” and talked about his work and the Gershwin legacy. “The Gershwins wrote music when the song was king,” the Grammy Award-winner told Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “For me to even be mentioned in the same breath with the Gershwins as a songwriter is just incredible.” Robinson tearfully recalled how Gordy mentored him and helped him achieve his dream of becoming a singer and songwriter.

Then, actor Samuel L. Jackson hosted an all-star tribute concert at DAR Constitution Hall featuring Aloe Blacc, Gallant, Berry Gordy, CeeLo Green, JoJo, Ledisi, Tegan Marie, Kip Moore, Corinne Bailey Rae, Esperanza Spalding, the Tenors and BeBe Winans. The honoree also performed some of his favorite tunes. The concert will air on PBS stations nationwide at 9 p.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 10 (check local listings).

During the evening’s event, Robinson will be presented with the prize by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, U. S. House of Representatives Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy, U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi, U.S. Senate Democratic Whip Richard J. Durbin, U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Whip Steny H. Hoyer, U.S. House of Representatives Chairman of the Committee on House Administration Candice S. Miller and U.S. House of Representatives Vice Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress Gregg Harper.

Congressional leaders join Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden in presenting Smokey Robinson with the 2016 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song during a tribute concert at DAR Constitution Hall, November 16, 2016. Photo by Shawn Miller.

What Time Is It?

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Standard time zones of the world, January 2015. Geography and Map Division.

With the recent “fall back” of daylight saving time, we had to reset our clocks and maybe our brains to get used to the change. And, if you’re someone that conducts business in different time zones, that adjustment can take additional getting used to. I know I always have trouble remembering how far ahead or behind other places are in reference to my location, despite having essentially lived at one time or another in all four time zones.

The idea of time zones was actually introduced on Nov. 18, 1883, by North American railroads in an effort to better coordinate train schedules. Standard Railway Time ushered in ordinances enacted by many American cities, which then gave rise to the creation of time “zones.”

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The Durango & Silverton Narrow Gauge Railroad. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith, June 1, 2015. Prints and Photographs Division.

Before clocks, people marked time by the sun and the phases of the moon. With the development of the railway and the invention of the telegraph, accurate time became more important. Prior to adopting SRT, trains traveling east or west between towns had a difficult time maintaining coherent schedules and smooth operations.

The four standard time zones quickly adopted nationwide were Eastern Standard Time, Central daylight Time, Mountain Standard Time and Pacific Daylight Time. They were each one-hour wide due to the fact that 15 degrees of longitude corresponds to a one-hour difference in solar time.

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Burlington Route. 1892. Geography and Map Division.

 

 

While time zones may have been established with the railroads, the idea of standardized time had been discussed long before. In 1875, Cleveland Abbe – astronomer, meteorologist, and the first head of the U.S. Weather Bureau – lobbied the American Meteorological Society (AMS) to take action on a uniform standard time. You can read more about the history of times zones in this Today in History entry.

As one can imagine, there was some confusion, due to the border of the time zones running through major cities. For example, the border between its Eastern and Central time zones ran through Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and Charleston. However, Detroit kept local time until 1900, then tried Central Standard Time, local mean time and Eastern Standard Time. The confusion of times came to an end when Standard zone time was formally adopted by the U.S. Congress in the Standard Time Act of March 19, 1918.

Sources: Daylight Saving Time