Library of Congress's Blog, page 134

The Ottoman Armenian Merchant from Arapkir

(The following is a guest post by Levon Avdoyan, Armenian and Georgian area specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division.)

The opening page of Poghos Garabedian’s memoirs and genealogy. African and Middle Eastern Division.

Poghos Garabedian started his personal memoirs with a flourish. Within the next 41 pages, this merchant in the Ottoman Empire – originally from Arapkir in the region of Malatya, Turkey – would detail his extensive mercantile travels to Constantinople, the Crimea, Arapkir and Eastern Europe. He would also, in good patriarchal fashion, advise his children on the way to be good merchants, Christians and Armenians. Garabedian also details his days as the purveyor of the pantry in the Khedive’s court in Cairo. Last, he describes the donations he has made to Armenian institutions in Constantinople, Arapkir and many of the other places he has journeyed.

The Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division recently acquired this manuscript, which was created in Cairo around 1877 and was written in what the Armenians call hayatar Turkeren (Turkish in Armenian letters) – now known as Armeno-Turkish. Curiously, Garabedian appends a family genealogy on pages 41-45, written in Armenian with Arabic numerals. Why this dichotomy? Could it have been that Garabedian intended the memoirs for a broad audience of both Armenians and others, while he realized the genealogy would be of interest only to Armenians?

Armeno-Turkish is a phenomenon in the Ottoman Empire that started in the early 18th century and lasted well into the mid-20th century. These works – hand-written manuscripts, published books, newspapers, journals, serials and pamphlets – were literally written in the Turkish language but with the use of the Armenian rather than the prevalent Arabic script. The simplistic explanation has always been that Armenians who knew Turkish used Armeno-Turkish but not when it was written in the Arabic script. Recently, scholarship has debunked this explanation and has revealed its use as a separate and creative phenomenon. Works written and published in Armeno-Turkish were known and used not only to Armenians but also to Ottoman intellectuals and functionaries.

Engraving of the Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte from Hovsep Vartanian’s two-volume history. African and Middle Eastern Division.

The Library’s growing collection of Armeno-Turkish works includes a two-volume history of Napoleon Bonaparte by Hovsep Vartanian, which gives us a potential answer. During the course of a lecture he delivered in Yerevan, Armenia, in 2014, Murat Cankara of the Social Sciences University of Ankara theorized that Vartanian was also the author of the anonymous Armeno-Turkish “Akabi Hikayesi,” the first novel published in the Ottoman Empire. (Alas, the Library only has a 1991 edition of this seminal work). What was especially intriguing, however, was Cankara’s translation of a passage from the history of Napoleon in which Vartanian discussed his reasons for using Armeno-Turkish.

“Before we conclude, a reservation comes to mind: there will also be people who ask ‘in any event, wouldn’t our mother tongue, the Armenian language be preferable for writing such a history?’ Our humble answer to them [is this]: Turkish or Armenian, whatever the language is, in order to be able to benefit from reading such a history one should have studied thoroughly either of these languages. As a matter of fact, the number of those who are familiar with classical Armenian is quite limited and vernacular Armenian’s rules have not been established as yet, so writing a book in this language necessitates using words from Classical Armenian in every line. And in order to understand a book written in the vernacular, one needs to take on the burden of learning classical Armenian. It seems also that some Ottoman Armenians from that same period advocated the use of the Armenian script over the Arabic for much the same reasons.”

The Mausoleum of Sultan Mahmud II and his son Sultan Abdülaziz. Prints and Photographs Division.

Whatever the reasons for its use, works in Armeno-Turkish span several disciplines, although the preponderance of them are either translated or original religious works and of those, most are of the New Testament. The Library of Congress’s expanding collection includes inter alia, novels, histories, philosophical and geographic works, almanacs, veterinary studies, dictionaries and newspapers. Researchers may find a comprehensive list in our online catalog by entering the key word “armeno-turkish.”

This discreet collection of materials, which is housed in the Near East Section complements other collections in the Library of Congress that testify to the important role of the Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. One such collection in the custody of the Prints and Photographs Division has also been fully digitized and made available to the public. The album presented to the United States by Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1842-1918) consists of photographs of the Ottoman Empire taken by his court photographers, who were three Armenian brothers known collectively as Abdullah frère.

Pic of the Week: My Life in Medicine

Louis W. Sullivan discusses his book “Breaking Ground: My Life in Medicine.” Feb. 24, 2016. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Louis W. Sullivan, former secretary of Health and Human Services, discussed his new book, ”Breaking Ground: My Life in Medicine” (University of Georgia Press, 2014), on Wednesday during an author talk presented by the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress. A video of the presentation will be available in the coming weeks.

Sullivan spent his childhood in Jim Crow southern Georgia. At the age of 5, he told his mother that he wanted to be a doctor. Schools in Blakely, Georgia, were segregated at the time, so his parents sent him to Savannah and later to Atlanta for his education. After graduating from Morehouse College, he attended medical school at Boston University, where he was the sole African American in his class. According to Sullivan, he was also the first graduate of Morehouse to attend. It was also the year Brown v. Board of Education came out.

“I wondered how I would be received,” Sullivan said. “Would it be with hostility, indifference, or would I be welcomed?”

He was well-received, even serving as class president for two years.

Several years later, the dean at Morehouse asked Sullivan to found a medical school there.

“The rationale for creating a medical school at Morehouse was to increase the number of black physicians,” he explained.

During that time, Sullivan developed a relationship with George H.W. Bush, who appointed him Health and Human Services secretary.

“I was impressed by the dedication of the employees,” he said of his time at the agency.

Desiree Arnaiz of the Library’s Center for the Book contributed to this report. 

Rosa Parks Collection Now Online

The Rosa Parks Collection at the Library of Congress has been digitized and is now online.

Rosa Parks collecting NAACP membership dues of $2.00, likely during her trip to Los Angeles, California, in 1956. Photograph by McLain’s Photo Service. Prints and Photographs Division. 

The collection, which contains approximately 7,500 manuscripts and 2,500 photographs, is on loan to the Library for 10 years from the Howard G. Buffett Foundation. The Library received the materials in late 2014, formally opened them to researchers in the Library’s reading rooms in February 2015 and now has digitized them for optimal access by the public.

Parks became an iconic figure in history on Dec. 1, 1955, when she refused to give up her seat to a white passenger on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama.  Her arrest sparked the Montgomery Bus Boycott, a seminal event in the Civil Rights Movement.  Parks died at age 92 in 2005.

The collection reveals many details of Parks’ life and personality, from her experiences as a young girl in the segregated South to her difficulties in finding work after the Montgomery Bus Boycott; from her love for her husband to her activism on civil rights issues.

Included in the collection are personal correspondence, family photographs, letters from presidents, fragmentary drafts of some of her writings from the time of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, her Presidential Medal of Freedom and Congressional Gold Medal, additional honors and awards, presentation albums, drawings sent to her by schoolchildren and hundreds of greeting cards from individuals thanking her for her impact on civil rights.  The vast majority of these items may be viewed online.  Other material is available to researchers through the Manuscript and Prints and Photographs reading rooms.

This video contains highlights from the collection and a look behind the scenes at how the Library’s team of experts in cataloging, preservation, digitization, exhibition and teacher training are making the legacy of Rosa Parks available to the world.

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The Rosa Parks Collection joins additional important civil rights materials at the Library of Congress, including the papers of Thurgood Marshall, A. Philip Randolph, Bayard Rustin, Roy Wilkins and the records of both the NAACP and the National Urban League.  The collection becomes part of the larger story of our nation, available alongside the presidential papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, and the papers of many others who fought for equality, including Susan B. Anthony, Patsy Mink and Frank Kameny.

To support teachers and students as they explore this one-of-a-kind collection, the Library is offering a Primary Source Gallery with classroom-ready highlights from the Rosa Parks papers and teaching ideas for educators.

Saving America’s Radio Heritage

(The following is a guest post by Gene DeAnna, head of the recorded sound section in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.)

The Library of Congress Packard Campus National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. Photo by Shawn Miller.

I’m often asked what sound recordings are most at risk of being lost before we are able to preserve them. The fact is, the two-headed monster of physical degradation and technological obsolescence can make virtually any recording a challenge to preserve. But there are two analog formats, lacquer discs (also called “acetates” or “instantaneous discs”) and magnetic tape (in a multitude of sizes and formats) that standout as particularly vulnerable and challenging to archivists. This is especially true given their long and widespread use for both commercial and non-commercial audio recording. What is more, with very few exceptions our entire recorded radio legacy, spanning from the early 1930s into the 1990s, was recorded on one of these fragile mediums. Consider also that from 1940-1945 the World War II aluminum embargo resulted in the adoption by radio stations of glass-based lacquer discs, perhaps the most fragile audio medium of all.

This week, the Radio Preservation Task Force of the Library of Congress National Recording Preservation Board convenes a two day conference, “Saving America’s Radio Heritage: Radio Preservation, Access and Education.” The conference will feature scholars, media professionals and audiovisual archivists discussing the cultural and historical significance of radio, the challenges to preserving and providing increased public access and awareness, and the strategies we’ll need to meet all these challenges.

The United States Congress mandated the preservation of broadcast recordings 40 years ago in the 1976 revision of the copyright law, which included the instruction to the Library of Congress to create the American Television and Radio Archives (ATRA) to “preserve a permanent record of the television and radio programs, which are the heritage of the people of the United States.” Since then, under the aegis of ATRA, the Library has acquired, cataloged and preserved tens of thousands of radio broadcasts. Major collections at the Library include the NBC Radio Collection, WOR (Mutual) Collection, Office of War Information (OWI), Voice of America (VOA), the vast Armed Forces Radio and Television Collection (AFRTS) and the National Public Radio Collection.

Audio engineer Brian Hoffa loads cassettes for parallel digitization. Photo by Gene DeAnna.

At the Packard Campus for Audiovisual Conservation, the digital preservation of radio recordings is an ongoing priority of the Recorded Sound Section. To maximize productivity we employ two modes of digital preservation that are determined by the format, playback characteristics and the audio content of the recording. A high throughput parallel transfer mode is used for tapes with predictable and low fidelity content (e.g, spoken word), like professionally recorded cassettes and radio broadcasts on reels.

Just to gauge what a typical day’s radio preservation work might cover, I took a walk through the Audio Preservation Unit, stopping in each sound studio to see what radio recordings were being digitized. Even my high expectations were exceeded:

In the A2 high-throughput studio where up to eight cassettes can be transferred in parallel, the syndicated interview and call-in radio show “Sports Byline” was in process. I saw programs from 2003 featuring basketball legend Kareem Abdul Jabbar and the late Baseball Hall of Famer, Kirby Puckett being preserved.

A reel from the Studs Terkel Collection is ready for digitization. Photo by Gene DeAnna.

Next door in a parallel transfer studio for reel-to-reel tape digitization, several reels of the Studs Terkel radio show were running, including a 1970 program on the life of the great French cabaret singer Edith Piaf. Under a cooperative agreement with the Chicago History Museum, the Library of Congress is preserving the entire Studs Terkel Collection, covering over 20 years of his WFMT Chicago radio show. WFMT has launched a website, the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, where the public can listen to many of the programs preserved at the Packard Campus.

In an A1 “expert transfer” studio for recordings from the American Folklife Center, I was surprised and excited to find a lacquer disc from the Alan Lomax Collection of a BBC radio program of Argentine folk music from the late 1930s on the turntable. What a great representation of the breadth and richness of recorded radio!

Audio Engineer Robert Cristarella preserves a lacquer disc of a BBC broadcast from the Alan Lomax Collection. Photo by Gene DeAnna.

In the next studio, a master tape of the classical music program “Adventures in Sound” was rolling and the dazzling sound of Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherazade” poured from the room as I opened the soundproof doors. “Adventures in Sound” featured high quality recordings on FM stereo broadcasts for classical music connoisseurs in the 1970s. It is easy to forget how good radio could sound even 40 years ago.

Finally, in a parallel transfer studio with seven tape decks running concurrently, 10-inch reel tapes from the vast NBC Radio Collection were being digitized. Here I found a 1960 Oscar Hammerstein Memorial program running next to a 1946 broadcast of a speech by President Harry Truman. Three reels of miscellaneous news and information programs from the late 1940s were followed by reels holding “Portia Faces Life” and “Backstage Wife” episodes, both classic radio “soaps” from 1941. So here were exemplars of music history, political history and popular culture being preserved for posterity in a single pass of parallel digitization.

A 1945 NBC Radio broadcast on a 16-inch glass-based lacquer disc. Photo by Gene DeAnna.

These tapes and tens of thousands others were recorded from original NBC lacquer discs by Library of Congress engineers, in what could be the longest ongoing audio preservation project ever. The original NBC Collection arrived at the Library in 1978 in the form of 170,000 16-inch lacquer discs dating from 1933-1960s, including 40,000 wartime glass-based records. In all, about 42,000 hours of airtime is captured in these thin layers of cellulose lacquer, and for decades our engineers transferred them, one 15-minute disc side at-a-time, to tape.

In conjunction with a decades-long cataloging effort, the project brought this remarkable broadcast collection to the public’s ear for the first time since the programs were broadcast into the ether, and it made our current digitization effort possible as well. In what is our 38th year of preserving NBC radio, the tapes are themselves being reformatted to archival standard, high-resolution broadcast wave files, which are archived in the Packard Campus digital repository. The original lacquer discs, considered the master source recordings, are shelved under ideal storage conditions in the Packard Campus’ underground vaults.

Radio broadcasts – and the NBC Collection in particular – continue to be our most publicly requested audio materials. Files from the digital archive are played “on demand” by listeners in the Recorded Sound Research Center in the Library’s Madison Building in Washington, D.C.

Forty years ago Congress declared broadcasts to be an important part of our national legacy and mandated they be preserved for future generations. The Library of Congress continues to play a significant role in that effort, and this week’s conference provides an important opportunity to expand awareness of our recorded radio legacy and develop preservation and access strategies for the 21st century.

Obamabilia at the Library

(The following is a guest post by Eve M. Ferguson, reference librarian for East Africa in the African and Middle Eastern Division.)

A sampling of African newspapers with Obama’s election headlines. African and Middle Eastern Division.

As President Barack H. Obama gave his final State of the Union Address last month and this month is , there is no better time to recount the birth of a unique collection at the Library of Congress: the Obama Memorabilia from Africa collection housed in the African and Middle Eastern Division (AMED).

Son of Barack Obama Sr., a native of western Kenya, President Obama has long been well-respected by Africans for his unique journey into becoming the first African American president of the United States. The Library of Congress’ Obama Memorabilia from Africa collection was thus born out of the enthusiastic response Africans had to Obama’s election in 2008, resulting in a plethora of ephemera first acquired by the Library’s Nairobi Office – one of the six Library of Congress overseas offices – and then joined by the collection developed by AMED.

The Obama Memorabilia collection did not come together easily. In 2008, on the very day when the Nairobi office staff set off to acquire memorabilia items, the Nairobi City Council initiated a crackdown on unregulated street vendors, which was the main source for such Obama memorabilia. Fortunately, patience and persistence paid off. A few days later, those street vendors reappeared and the Nairobi Office staff was able to quickly complete their acquisition.

At the same time, the Library’s AMED staff in Washington D.C. were planning to acquire any publications available in Africa on the 2008 election. This would not have been achieved without tremendous support from the State Department Information Resources Officers across the African continent. The result of this seamless collaboration was a comprehensive collection of local newspapers and magazines announcing the results of the U.S. presidential election.

Music CDs inspired by Obama’s historic election. African and Middle Eastern Division.

Since then, the Obama Memorabilia collection has continued to grow. In addition to the Library’s regular acquisitions channels, a series of displays at the Library between 2009 and 2015 attracted donations from the general public to the Library, which further augment this collection. Today, the Obama Memorabilia collection includes newspapers, electoral buttons, photographs, magazines, textiles and music CDs from various African countries, as well as other parts of the world such as France, Lebanon, United Arab Emirates and the United Kingdom. This collection documents not only the historic event in 2008 but also President Obama’s reelection in 2012 and his two visits to Africa in 2013 and 2015.

As President Barack Obama concludes his presidency, he leaves a legacy in ephemera at the Library as a historic record of important research value that documents the enthusiastic responses of African people to his presidency.

For Multitudes, the Book of a Lifetime

Just as life is a motive force, so can a book be a motivating force in the lives of readers.

Author Harper Lee’s long life has ended, but the book for which she is best known, “To Kill A Mockingbird,” was for untold numbers of people all over the world their “book of a lifetime,” the book they considered to have the most impact on their lives and minds. It won the Pulitzer Prize and sold more than 30 million copies.

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Cover of the first edition of “To Kill A Mockingbird,” 1960

Evidence of this effect came through again and again when the Library of Congress, in 2012, presented an exhibition titled “Books That Shaped America,” inviting those who attended that exhibit and others who went to that year’s Library of Congress National Book Festival to cite the book that most shaped their lives. (In our NBF “Books That Shaped the World” informal survey in 2013, which drew more than 500 responses, “Mockingbird” was outflanked only by the Bible).

We also are proud to host an essay contest for young people, here at the Library, called “Letters About Literature,” in which children and teens write to an author, living or dead, who has made a major impression upon them. Daniel Le, who won honorable mention in this contest in 2008, wrote to Harper Lee:

Dear Ms. Lee,

I have only begun to appreciate the power of your work To Kill a Mockingbird. Even on my first reading, I was enthralled by this moral drama of good and evil set in the “deep” South during the Great Depression. I was most indignant when the verdict went against Tom Robinson, but I did not immediately relate it to any personal experience. At a family gathering, however, a chance discussion about your book unleashed a torrent of passionate personal stories from my usually reticent and reserved family. Clearly, your historical fiction about social injustice and discrimination struck a chord. My grandfather recounted how he silently endured racial epithets for years and how he had to pay blackmail to a white city inspector to keep his laundry open. My dad will never forget how his family was treated when they attempted to rent apartments in Manhattan’s Upper West Side in the 1960s. Speaking perfect English, he had no problem getting appointments to see the apartments on the phone. When he went with my grandparents to see the apartments, however, he was told pointedly, “We don’t rent to your kind.” (The rest of Daniel Le’s letter can be read here.)

I remember the effect that book had on my own family in the early 1960s, when it came out in print and very quickly was made into a movie we now consider a classic. My parents read the book and saw the film, and shortly after took my brother, my sister and me—ages 13, 11 and 7, respectively—to a matinee to see it, all together. They wanted to teach us what “character” meant.

Many fans hoped for another Harper Lee novel in vain. Then, through third parties, another work she had written earlier in her life came to light, and was published: “Go Set A Watchman.” It viewed the fictional lawyer Atticus Finch through a new, less-glowing lens, causing real disappointment to many readers.

Well, I haven’t read it. But even if I do, it won’t take the joy out of “Mockingbird” for me. Many authors of acknowledged masterpieces wrote other stuff too, and we don’t hold it against them: “Tom Sawyer” is not “Huckleberry Finn.”  “Timon of Athens” doesn’t get performed, or even studied, as much as “Macbeth.”

Thanks, Harper Lee, for Atticus and Scout and Boo Radley. You said what you had to say, and for thousands upon thousands of people, its resonance still rings.

Pic of the Week: Combating Illiteracy

David Rubenstein, benefactor of the 2016 Library of Congress Literacy Awards, interviews Rubenstein Prize-winner Kyle Zimmer, president and CEO of First Books. Photo by Shawn Miller.

 The Library of Congress on Wednesday honored the recipients of the Library of Congress Literacy Awards – three groups working to alleviate the scourge of illiteracy in this country and around the world. Recipients were First Book ($150,000 David M. Rubenstein Prize), United Through Reading ($50,000 American Prize) and Beanstalk ($50,000 International Prize).The Literacy Awards, first announced in January 2013, help support organizations working to alleviate the problems of illiteracy and aliteracy in the United States and worldwide. The awards highlight and reward organizations that do exemplary, innovative and easily replicable work.

“There’s something incredibly powerful about a child holding the same book in his hands that his mom had held, reading it to him from halfway around the world,” said Sally Ann Zoll, CEO of United Through Reading. The organization unites military families facing physical separation by helping them read together, no matter where they are in the world.

“It’s important to … join the cause, do something and make sure we can change the lives, change the story for thousands and thousands of children and parents,” said Beanstalk CEO Ginny Lunn. London-based Beanstalk uses a corps of volunteers to provide one-on-one reading assistance to children who struggle with their ability and confidence.

Concluding the program was a one-on-one interview with Rubenstein and First Book’s founder and CEO, Kyle Zimmer.

“We know every day that we have to grow faster, that we have to do more,” Zimmer said.

Sources: The Gazette, the Library of Congress staff newsletter

10 Stories: Glorious Food! Chronicling America

In celebration of the release of the 10 millionth page of Chronicling America, our free, online searchable database of historical U.S. newspapers, our reference librarians have selected some interesting subjects and articles from the archives. We’ve been sharing them in a series of Throwback Thursday #TBT blog posts.

Today we return to our historical newspaper archives for stories about food. Recipes, spreads for special occasions, peculiar ingredients and much more.

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“German Pickles,” illustration from the San Francisco Call, May 28, 1911.

“California Women Who Cook”

This regular feature in the San Francisco Call features, in its May 28, 1911, edition, a cornucopia of recipes and suggestions, from “Two Ways to Prepare Chicken” to “Some Excellent Raisin Recipes” to guides for the preparation of whole wheat bread, roast breast of veal with potato stuffing and German pickles.

“From Soup to Nuts on Christmas Day”

Both are appropriate holiday victuals, but this article from the New York Tribune of Dec. 19, 1915, offers much more, including Coeur Sensible aux Fraises (Iced Heart Sensible with Strawberries), Potatoes Champs Elysee and Chaudfroid of Pheasant Jeanette.

“War Bread”

War bread “is good bread when baked in a safe, sure oven of a Gas Range,” says Pacific Gas & Electric, not unexpectedly, in an ad complete with recipe (including lard!) from the Arizona Republican, January 9, 1918.

“State Chocolate Recipes”

In another installment of “California Women Who Cook,” various states of the union are represented by recipes for their traditional chocolate favorites, including that classic crowd-pleaser, Kansas Prune Chocolate. San Francisco Call, May 12, 1912.

“Mysteries of Cake Baking”

Expert Helen Louise Johnson reveals the hidden culinary arts, including “Cake-Baking of Ante-Bellum Days” and warns that there is “No Such Thing as Luck in Cooking,” in the Marion (Ohio) Daily Mirror, April 15, 1911.

“Peanut Butter Omelet”

Among other peanut butter recipes in this special section of “Helpful Hints for the Thrifty Farmer” is this unusual item that doesn’t sound too bad. Also included are a peanut butter loaf (with bread crumbs, rice and chopped olives) and peanut butter salad dressing. Williston (N.D.) Graphic, Feb. 27, 1919.

“Walnut Catsup”

There was a time when catsup was not particularly synonymous with tomatoes. The Chicago Day Book of Sept. 23, 1912, featured a recipe for the sauce based on walnuts, then described variants based on shellfish (oysters, mussels and cockles) and mushrooms.

“Possum”

“Senator Garland of Arkansas” (apparently Augustus Hill Garland, who served in the Senates of both the United States and the Confederacy) gives advice on the proper preparation technique for this critter in the Morehouse Clarion of Bastrop, La. of August 26, 1881. He observes, “Rather than miss him entirely … I would try to eat him in any way I could find him, and really I am of opinion that he is better hot or cold, according to the state he is in when I last partake of him.”

“Different Ways of Preparing Sweetbreads”

From the New York Tribute, Feb. 20, 1915, and including roasted, creamed, braised, croquettes, with peppers, and in salad. Yum.

“Two Recipes for Making Whiskey”

Because simply one will not do. The Watauga (N.C.) Democrat of May 20, 1909, freely admits to pilfering these two recipes from the Asheville Citizen. The first, oddly enough, requires a gallon of corn whiskey to start. The second “is a little more complicated, and perhaps it is well that this is so because most of the ingredients are rank poisons.” It would be interesting to know whether circulation for the paper dropped following this issue.

Speaking of Chronicling America, the National Endowment for the Humanities (our partner in the project) has launched a nationwide contest, challenging you to produce creative web-based projects using data pulled from the newspaper archives website. We’re looking for data visualizations, web-based tools or other innovative web-based projects using the open data found on Chronicling America. NEH will award cash prizes, and the contest closes June 15, 2016.

Launched by the Library of Congress and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) in 2007, Chronicling America provides enhanced and permanent access to historically significant newspapers published in the United States between 1836 and 1922. It is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a joint effort between the two agencies and partners in 40 states and territories. Start exploring the first draft of history today at chroniclingamerica.loc.gov and help us celebrate on Twitter and Facebook by sharing your findings and using the hashtags #ChronAm #10Million.

Found It!

(The following is featured in the January/February 2016 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. You can read the issue in its entirety here.)

Grand Hotel Pupp, Carlsbad, Bohemia, Austro-Hungary. Prints and Photographs Division.

Nearly 1.6 million people came to the Library of Congress in 2015 to conduct research in its 21 reading rooms on Capitol Hill. More than 60 million users visited the Library’s website last year to access Library resources. Here are some examples of what researchers found.

Film director Wes Anderson: “The Library of Congress’s Photochrom Print Collection includes commercially produced pictures showing views of Europe around the turn of the 20th century,” Anderson told “The Telegraph.” They’re black- and-white photographs that have been colorized. “What you see when you look at these pictures are landscapes and cityscapes, from all over the world. … A huge number of them are from the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Prussia. These pictures were a great inspiration for “The Grand Budapest Hotel.” Many of the old hotels in these photographs still exist as buildings. But none of them exist as the places they once were.”

Aftermath of the Johnstown Flood, Ernest Walter Histed, May 3, 1889. Prints and Photographs Division.

Historian David McCullough: “I discovered my vocation here in the Library of Congress. I have done research on all my work at this great library. After seeing pictures of the 1889 flood in Johnstown, Pa., in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, I began writing my first history, ‘The Johnstown Flood’ (1968).” McCullough researched his latest book, “The Wright Brothers,” at the Library of Congress, where photographs and manuscript records of the aviation pioneers are housed. “I am more indebted to this great institution than I can say. It is the mother church of the library system in America.”

Theodore Roosevelt and William H. Taft, Brown Brothers, circa 1909. Prints and Photographs Division.

Historian Doris Kearns Goodwin: “For Teddy and Taft almost 90 percent of what I needed was at the Library of Congress” said Doris Kearns Goodwin about her 2013 book, “The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism.” Goodwin also spent years eviewing the Library’s collection of Lincoln papers for her 2006 book, “Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln,” from which the screenplay for the 2012 film “Lincoln” was adapted.

 

Musician, writer and actor Henry Rollins: “These people are all about collecting, databasing and preserving. I am in my element,” said Rollins about staff in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. “We are having conversations about acid-free paper and Mylar L-sleeves! Be still, my fanatic heart. … A day of nonstop awe and inspiration. Whenever any great song or album gets lost in the ether, someone is deprived of the joy of hearing it, and the great effort of those who created and recorded the work is damaged. Thankfully, the fanatics are there to make sure the jam session never stops.”

All This Jazz

(The following is a story written by Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library of Congress staff newsletter, The Gazette.)

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Sarah Vaughan performs at Café Society in 1946 in this photo by William Gottlieb. Music Division.

The human voice is music’s only pure instrument, jazz singer Nina Simone once wrote – it has notes no other instrument possesses.

“It’s like being between the keys of a piano,” Simone wrote in a draft of an unpublished autobiography recently discovered in a Library of Congress collection. “The notes are there, you can sing them, but they can’t be found on any instrument. That’s like me.”

Simone’s simple, typed note captures an essential truth about the art of jazz singing – the subject of a new exhibition at the Library of Congress.

“Jazz Singers,” an exploration of the lives and work of such great artists as Louis Armstrong, Billie Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Simone, opened in the Performing Arts Reading Room foyer in the Madison Building last week and runs through July 23. An online exhibition also includes additional material.

The exhibition was curated by Larry Appelbaum, a senior reference specialist in the Music Division, and directed by Betsy Nahum-Miller, a senior exhibit director in the Interpretive Programs Office.

The exhibition includes video clips candid snapshots, musical scores, personal notes, correspondence, drawings and watercolors covering more than nine decades of a uniquely American art form – and reveals something about what makes a jazz singer a jazz singer.

“All of these singers have something unique that is expressed with soul, creativity and artistry,” Appelbaum said. “What it really comes down to is their ability to tell you a story with music and lyric. They’re all great musical storytellers. And to see and hear how they created in the moment – interacting, swinging and improvising with others – is not just impressive and inspiring, it’s the essence of what jazz is about.”

The Music Division holds about 30 special collections of jazz materials documenting some of the form’s great figures: Fitzgerald, Charles Mingus, Max Roach, Carmen McRae, Dexter Gordon, Billy Taylor, Shirley Horn and Gerry Mulligan, whose sax is on permanent display outside the Performing Arts Reading Room.

“Jazz Singers,” drawing on those and other collections, reveals the men and women who made the music and their vital, vibrant and sometimes painful lives.

Trumpeter and singer Chet Baker became a soft-voiced icon of cool West Coast jazz in the 1950s – his recording of “My Funny Valentine” remains a much-loved milestone even six decades later. But Baker also was a self-destructive soul, a troubled side illustrated in the exhibition with a false-alarm suicide note drawn from a recently acquired cache of material.

“I’ve been trying to kill myself for a month by shooting speed balls with large quantities of cocain [sic] and heroin,” he wrote. “I’m now down to about 120 lbs and not looking well.”

The exhibition shows happier times, too: Abbey Lincoln appears relaxed and casual at home in a contact sheet of photos, Johnny Mathis writes Horn to say how much he loves her work, Mary Lou Williams offers McRae suggestions of material to cover, and 13 video clips showcase performers doing what they do best.

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A portrait of Nat “King” Cole taken by William P. Gottlieb in New York in 1946. Music Division.

Fitzgerald and Duke Ellington perform together in a rare clip from the 1959 Bell Telephone Hour, Holiday sings “Travelin’ Light” on a French television show and others clips feature McRae, Sarah Vaughan, Anita O’Day, The Mills Brothers, Jimmy Rushing, Fats Waller, Johnny Hartman, Luciana Souza and Jeri Southern.

“I wanted people to get a sense of the many different approaches to singing jazz, to feel it,” Appelbaum said. “Once you take in the exhibit, you’ll hopefully gain a deeper appreciation for what these artists accomplished and what it means to be a jazz singer.”

“Jazz Singers” encompasses what Quincy Jones called “the roots to the fruits”: early artists such as Armstrong, Jelly Roll Morton and Ethel Waters, midcentury masters Holiday, Nat “King” Cole, McRae and Betty Carter and 21st-century performers Gregory Porter and Cécile McLorin Salvant.

Each generation, Appelbaum said, assimilates what’s gone before and produces creative artists who stretch the musical boundaries. No singer before Armstrong had taken such a daring and virtuosic approach to time and syncopation. Decades later, many performers incorporate aspects of other genres, such as hip-hop or R&B, into their style.

“Ask a creative jazz singer who they’re listening to and you might be surprised at how wide their tastes run, from jazz to classical, pop and dance music, to the latest from the underground,” he said. “We live in a shuffle age and tastes increasingly transcend traditional ideas of genre. …

“Everyone has their own way. It’s really about the individual and having your own voice.”