Library of Congress's Blog, page 16

Womens History Month: Filling in the (Almost) Lost World of Maggie Thompson

  This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan, a reference librarian in the History and Genealogy Section.

A teenage girl filling a photograph album with the images of family and friends.

Though the technology may change, the sentiment seems timeless. This girl was Margaret Virginia “Maggie” Thompson, who spent most of her life in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The photographs were cartes de visite and cabinet cards, so popular in the 1870s and 1880s. We turn the album’s pages to see the girl become a woman and her social circle expand. Siblings, neighbors and classmates are eventually followed by a spouse, in-laws and children.

It’s a thick volume of 42 cardstock pages. There are 58 photos, one or two per page with a few loose images in between, nearly all of them bearing a neat, handwritten caption. Since the handwriting appears to be in a more modern style and in a different ink than the dates written on the back of the photos, it may have been one of Maggie’s descendants who affectionately sat with her, late in her life, to pen the inscriptions. Doubtless, unwritten memories and stories were shared.

Then, somehow, the album was left behind. Years later, discovered in a vacant building, Maggie’s keepsake was rescued and brought to the Cornerstone Genealogical Society in Waynesburg for preservation. Though I’m now a genealogist at the Library, I grew up around Waynesburg (in Greene County, in the far southwestern corner of the state) and still run a volunteer digitization project for the community.

When Maggie’s album was handed to me, I was transfixed. Here was this unknown woman’s personal life story, summed up in a single volume.

Photographs are historical records, not merely illustrations. A personal album is a window into the vanished social life of a family and community. Scrapbooks are particularly valuable because they amount to a visual diary, with as much unintentional historical information in the pictures — clothing and hair styles, prices, cars, roads, stores, landscapes — as intentional information.

I was further compelled by Maggie’s album because it portrayed a woman’s personal history. Any genealogist can tell you that while researching centuries of archival documents, official records and narratives of public events, one sees just how often women have been minimized or omitted completely.

So I felt a personal responsibility and an almost compulsive need to decipher her story, to reconstruct the full life only hinted in the photographs. I began to research the contents of the album, digging through local cemetery, census, courthouse and newspaper records; federal and military records; and the kaleidoscope of archival material at the Library.

First, I built genealogical/local history profiles for every person in the album to understand how Maggie may have known them so as not to miss any clues or connections.

The biological family tree was no problem.

Maggie was born in 1855, the daughter of John Thompson and Maria Meegan, in tiny Waynesburg, where the population was between 1,000 and 5,000 for all of her life. She married John Flenniken Pauley and raised five children. She died in 1937.

It turns out that Maggie’s paternal grandmother — pictured in the album — was the sister of my great-great-great-grandfather. It also was easy to distinguish family names and relationships and to identify local friends. Photographer stamps revealed where the images were taken, filling in some of the geography of her life.

But there was a mystery here, too.

Several images were not from Greene County and seemed to have no connection to her at all. I focused on nine pictures taken in Trumbull County, Ohio, during the 1870s. What made that place and these people so important to her?

There was only one clue. One man, identified as “Chas. Bradley” in the Trumbull photographs, had a surname that was also found in Greene County. So I delved into the local records on the Bradley family to see what I could find out.

Charles Bradley’s photo in Maggie Thompson’s scrapbook. Photo: O. Warren. Cornerstone Genealogical Society Collection.

Charles Bradley, it turned out, was a Greene County native about a dozen years older than Maggie. He enlisted in the Union Army at 18 when the Civil War broke out and served a little over a year as a musician with Company I, 8th Pennsylvania Reserve Infantry Regiment band. His enlistment records at the National Archives list him as standing 5’7” with blue eyes and brown hair. He came home to resume his work with his father as a tanner and saddler and married a local woman, Mary Ann Cooke.

But he also apparently met a fellow musician in the Army, William Henry Dana, who had served with two units from Ohio. After his discharge, Dana pursued formal musical education and in 1869 founded Dana’s Musical Institute in Trumbull County (now known as the Dana School of Music | Youngstown State University).

Now, back at the Library, I went to the card catalog and looked up local histories of Trumbull County and bingo! There was the Dana family and the institute. Since the Library has extensive holdings in the nation’s music history, I checked the Music Division’s archives and was delighted to find original sheet music from the institute, which captures the spirit of the school’s compositions.

More importantly for my research, I discovered that the division also holds an 1875 edition of the Catalogue of Dana’s Musical Institute. It’s more or less the school’s yearbook.

Sure enough, familiar names popped up. Dana shows up as “Teacher of Theory and Organ; Conductor of Oratorio” and Bradley as “Teacher of Cornet and all Instruments in Brass Band Department, and Band Master.” In the graduates list? None other than “Maggie Thompson, Waynesburg, Pa.”

The Dana Institute’s list of graduates includes Maggie Thompson.

So that was the connection to the Trumbull photos — she’d studied here and made friends. Four more graduates appear in her album, all of whom graduated between 1873 and 1875. Three were men. The one woman, Hettie Jones, was no doubt a friend, as she hailed from Waynesburg, too.

Charles Bradley was likely the common thread. It’s not hard to picture that he started working at the institute and told friends and acquaintances back home. In such a small town, no doubt the young women heard of this and, perhaps since a familiar and trusted face was there, decided to attend.

I obtained fantastic evidence of this from the National Archives in Bradley’s Civil War records. Bradley died in 1891, at just 42 years old. His widow, Mary Ann, filed for a military pension. Maggie, then 33, was such a close friend that she filed a handwritten deposition on Mary Ann’s behalf with the pension board.

“I have been well acquainted with Mary A. C. Bradley since 1873,” Maggie wrote in a clear, strong hand. “I was acquainted with her husband Charles R. Bradley, now deceased, before I knew her. I boarded with them from September 1874 till June 1875 … (their) son ‘Joe’ was born in February 1875 while I was boarding with them.”

Maggie Thompson’s handwritten deposition. National Archives.

She goes on for a few lines, saying how she’d played with Joe when he was an infant, adding that the couple later had a daughter, Sarah Mabel. Mary Ann Bradley’s pension request was approved and one can see that the two women had a bond that would have lasted throughout their lives.

The connections with the Bradley family illuminate Maggie’s life in ways that could have easily been lost. Family history is always human history, and humans like to do and see and go. Full histories can rarely be assembled. But in this case, Library collections, together with resources from Maggie’s hometown and Civil War files scanned at the National Archives Innovation Hub, made it possible to reconstruct this chapter of Margaret Virginia Thompson’s story.

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Black History Month: Spike Lee and “Bamboozled”

Spike Lee has been making films that respond to “The Birth of a Nation,” D.W. Griffith’s influential 1915 film that glorified the Ku Klux Klan and made extensive use of blackface, throughout his career.

In the early 1980s while still in graduate school, he made “The Answer,” a short film about a Black filmmaker who is given $50 million to remake Griffith’s film. In 2018, he co-wrote and directed “Black KkKlansman,” based on the true story of a Black cop who infiltrated the Klan. It was nominated for six Academy Awards, including for best picture. (Lee and three other writers won for best adapted screenplay.)

And then there was “Bamboozled,” his 2000 satire about Black actors in blackface in a television series. The show’s creator, a Black television writer, intends it to be a scathing condemnation of blackface, only to see the show become a massive hit. The film, which Lee intended as a direct response to “Birth,” was inducted into the National Film Registry in December, his fifth film to be so honored.

His focus on “Birth” stems not just from its role in the early 20th century, but how it was being taught at the end of it. The day the film was screened for his class at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, he says there was nothing about the film’s glorification of the KKK, its demonization of Black people or its proud embrace of white supremacy.

“All they talked about was the great techniques, or how D.W. Griffith was called the father of cinema,” he said in an interview for the film registry. “But they never talked about the fact that this film gave new life to the Klan. This film was directly responsible for Black people being lynched, killed. … It brought back the Klan’s prominence.”

“Birth” was the nation’s first blockbuster, so much so that it is credited with being the birth of Hollywood as the film industry’s headquarters. Based on Thomas Dixon’s 1905 novel “The Clansman” and the hit play that ensued, the three-hour film version portrays the South as being the victim of Reconstruction, with white women in danger of lecherous Black men. The Klan comes in to save the day.

While the book, play and film all drew strong condemnation from several quarters of society, including Black social organizations, much of white America loved it, many thinking it to be an accurate history. This included President Woodrow Wilson, who screened it at the White House and famously called it “history written in lightning.”

Klan membership boomed across the country. Lynchings and violent racist attacks grew. In 1925, some 30,000 Klansmen marched down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington. As late as the 1970s, Klan leader David Duke was showing the film to potential recruits.

Blackface entertainment, meanwhile, was accepted by white audiences for most of the 20th century, before eventually becoming reviled — if not career-killing — by the turn of the century, when “Bamboozled” came out.

Not surprisingly, the film was controversial upon release, opening to mixed reviews. People just did not want to see blackface in any context, Lee remembers. The film’s advertising poster, showing caricatures of two Black children happily eating watermelon, was so shocking that Lee says The New York Times initially refused to publish it, even as an advertisement.

“ ‘Spike Lee’s off his rocker, why is he dredging all this stuff back up from the past?’ ” is how he remembers the general reaction.

He didn’t pull any punches in the movie, although he did make the film’s satirical intent plain in the opening scene, in which the movie’s main character gives the definition of “satire” in voiceover. He didn’t want anyone to miss the point.

But time has a way of telling the truth, and the issues in “Bamboozled” remain persistent. One example: “American Fiction,” the new film about a Black novelist whose book mocking Black stereotypes is also accepted as a straightforward hit, is up for several Oscars, including best picture. It’s based on the book “Erasure,” which was published the year after “Bamboozled” came out — more than two decades ago.

“Eventually people see what I was trying to do at that time and understand it

somewhat better,” Lee says. “One of the most powerful sequences I think I’ve ever done is the closing scene of ‘Bamboozled,’ where we show historically, visually, the hatefulness of white people in blackface — Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney, Eddie Cantor, Bing Crosby — just the debasement of who we are as a people.”

It’s a stark message, he says, that’s been current in cinema since “The Birth of a Nation” and the birth of the film industry.

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Library Conservation Specialists Help Save Books, Artifacts After Disasters Around the World

It was late November last year, and journalist Peter Hirschfeld waded through a dark basement on the outskirts of downtown Montpelier. More than four months earlier, a massive flood had inundated the Vermont state capital and cleanup continued.

“There’s ankle-high water, and it smells like raw sewage,” Hirschfeld said on the Brave Little State podcast. The July 10 and 11 flood, he told listeners, was the worst “anyone who lives here can remember.”

In the weeks after the flood, federal agencies, including a team from the Library’s Conservation Division, traveled to Vermont to offer services and expertise. The Library’s involvement reflects a decades-long history of advising on ways to salvage cultural artifacts after disasters.

“We’re a library, and we provide information to people and answer their questions. So, if you have questions about damaged items, we will help you,” said Andrew Robb, head of the Photo Conservation Section. “It also informs us of what we can do better internally.”

Robb coordinates the Library’s Preservation Emergency Response Team. Working with the U.S. Capitol Police, the Architect of the Capitol and the Library’s Security and Emergency Preparedness Directorate and Facility Services Division, its members respond around the clock to incidents in Library buildings that might harm collections.

By deploying off-site, Conservation Division staff members add to the division’s first-hand knowledge about how disasters, most of which involve water, can affect cultural artifacts.

After Vermont’s floods, four division staffers — book conservator Katherine Kelly, objects conservator Liz Peirce, preservation education librarian Jon Sweitzer-Lamme and Lily Tyndall, a general collections conservation technician —  traveled to locations around Vermont for 16 days as part of an effort organized by the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

They supported a program called Save Your Family Treasures, which provides demonstrations on how to salvage wet artifacts. The program is a joint effort of the Heritage Emergency National Task Force, a FEMA subdivision, and the Smithsonian Institution’s Cultural Rescue Initiative.

Upon arriving in Vermont, the Library team trained fellow responders in techniques such as mold mitigation. In turn, the staffers familiarized themselves with how Save Your Family Treasures operates and learned how to interact with people after traumas. Then they hit the road.

At stations in FEMA disaster recovery centers and at state fairs, they educated people about low-cost methods to rescue soaked and dirty possessions.

“If you’re talking with someone whose basement flooded, you need to give them information about things they can buy at the dollar store or in the hardware isle of their local store,” Kelly said.

Team members demonstrated how to immerse photographs in make-shift baths made from aluminum roasting trays, gently brush away grime, then hang them to dry.

“It wouldn’t look exactly as pristine as when you had those photos before, but at least you wouldn’t have lost your family history,” Kelly said.

Objects conservator Peirce spoke with people about resuscitating a “surprising range of things” —  wedding sets, a cookie jar someone’s mother made, a baby book that included scraps of textiles.

The Conservation Division’s external outreach began in 1966 in Italy. A flood in Florence killed dozens of people, destroyed or badly damaged many masterpieces and submerged tens of thousands of books in the city’s Biblioteca Nazionale, Italy’s national library, in water.

English conservator and bookbinder Peter Waters, known for his work on such world historical tomes as the “Book of Kells,” traveled to Florence with a group of others to help. They came to be known as “mud angels” for their rescue of artifacts and books — not just fine art volumes but also general collections.

At the time, the Library had a preservation officer, but its conservation program was in its infancy. The flood raised a bright red flag about the need for more.

“It’s a real pivot point in the history of conservation in this country,” Robb said.

Following his work in Florence, Waters came to the Library with members of his team. As the Library’s first conservation chief, he applied lessons from Florence to care of the Library’s collections. He also established a policy of providing technical assistance beyond the Library’s walls.

“We are structured and founded in a way that’s directly related to how he responds to all of these things in Florence,” Robb said of the Conservation Division.

In the decades since Florence, Library specialists have advised disaster victims around the world.

Specialists traveled to Saint Petersburg, Russia, after water damaged millions of volumes in a 1988 fire at the Academy of Sciences Library; to the University of Hawaii, Manoa, after a 2004 flood drenched some 90,000 maps; to Japan’s National Diet Library in the wake of the country’s devastating 2011 tsunami; and to New York City after Hurricane Sandy in 2012.

Most often, though, Conservation Division experts offer guidance by phone or email. Before Robb went to New York after Sandy to help set up a recovery center recommending ways to treat water-damaged items, he answered questions from his office in the Madison Building.

“Frankly,” he said, “the most impact I had was on the phone.”

Timing was a definite impediment for conservators in Vermont — the Library team arrived weeks after the flood when mold had set in, causing permanent damage to many belongings. Even earlier, some people had thrown out valued possessions, thinking they were beyond salvage.

“The more effective teaching we were doing was how to prepare for next time,” Kelly said. “We delivered the message that with fairly swift, easy action, you can save the things that are truly treasures.”

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Tim Gunn on Fashion

—Tim Gunn is an academic, bestselling author and television star. He won an Emmy Award for his role as host of “Project Runway.” He wrote this piece for the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, which is devoted to fashion.

I make a pronounced distinction between fashion and clothes. Fashion bubbles up from a context, one that is societal, historical, cultural, economic and even political. Fashion designers are a barometric gauge of our society and culture. They need to know the news headlines, what books and films are commanding attention, the frequented blogs and podcasts and the daunting content and volume of streaming platforms, not to mention social media. These elements are responsible for fashion’s constant change.

Clothes, on the other hand, don’t have to change. They can remain static for decades. Consider the L.L. Bean catalog (for which I have tremendous respect and from which I own quite a few items): Bean’s clothing staples have remained largely unchanged for years, and that’s a good thing. Let’s say you want to replace a worn out pair of blucher mocs you bought 12 years ago. That same pair is still there, waiting for your purchase.

For the sake of comfort, propriety and protection, we need clothes. But we don’t need fashion. We want fashion, but we don’t need it. The cultural forces that exist will have us believe that it’s our responsibility as citizens of the world to know, and ideally embrace, the latest fashion trends and movements. Furthermore, fashion is a pendulum; it swings one way, then another. A current trend is loose, even voluminous, pants. It’s a reaction to the prevalence of form-fitting ones. Fashion wants us to buy things. Otherwise, fashion becomes static and morphs into clothes. Ergo, trends. And a trend is only relevant if it works for you. Otherwise, don’t even consider it, because you’ll look like a fashion victim.

Personal style is a form of semiotics. The clothes we wear send a message about how the world perceives us. That’s a very tall order and one for which we must accept responsibility. I tell people that I don’t care how they dress as long as they accept responsibility for their decision making. Some people tell me that this stance is shallow and inappropriately judgmental. Is it? When we meet someone for the first time, we immediately assemble a collection of thoughts and assumptions based on how they’re dressed. Actually, we do this with everyone we see on the street! Is that person neat and tidy or an unmade bed? Are they a traditionalist or a hipster? Are they saying, “look at me!” or “go away”? People tell me this stance is overly judgmental. Yes, it is. But how do we distinguish between the staff in a restaurant versus the diners? Hospital personnel versus patients? The guides in Central Park? Answer: their clothes.

While I appreciate, and even admire, people who regularly change their fashion according to whims and impulses (my beloved Heidi Klum is one), I sincerely believe in the efficacy of a uniform; that is, clothing that you can effortlessly reach for in your closet, that looks good on you, makes you feel confident and won’t look dated in six months or a year. I personally subscribe to this belief, because, quite frankly, it’s easy.

The wonderful thing about fashion today is that you can be whoever you want to be. Gone are the decades of highly prescriptive dressing. So, consider the power of semiotics and think about how you want the world to perceive you.

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Gershwin’s “Rhapsody” at 100; Still Capturing the American Character

George Gershwin’s “Rhapsody in Blue,” a rapturous burst of music that has become a motif of the nation’s creative spirit, turns 100 today. It was first performed in New York on the snowy Tuesday afternoon of Feb. 12, 1924.

Commissioned and premiered by the popular conductor Paul Whiteman at a concert designed to showcase high-minded American musical innovations – with the 25-year-old Gershwin on piano – the concerto-like composition, mixing jazz and classical themes, eventually became synonymous with American musical flair and sophistication. In its various forms and orchestrations, it has been recorded thousands of times the world over, become a classical concert staple a theme song for an airline and was performed simultaneously by 84 pianists at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles.

The Library is home to the George and Ira Gershwin Collection, including George’s piano and a leather-bound copy of his original manuscript of “Rhapsody.” We’re marking the centennial with several things, including an around-the-nation video tribute that highlights the piece’s continuing role in musical education, performance and spectacle.

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“It’s one of the most recognizable pieces of music,” said Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. “When you hear the first few notes you can’t help but start humming the rest.”

There’s a sold-out concert tonight at the Library featuring “Rhapsody” as the finale, to be performed by the U.S. Air Force Band with special guest pianist Simone Dinnerstein. The evening also features a lecture by Gershwin scholar Ryan Bañagale.

The video, meanwhile, features more than 20 performers from New York to Los Angeles to Seattle. There are stops in music havens such as Nashville and New Orleans, as well as unlikely locations, such as a Baltimore Ravens practice facility and the caverns of Luray, Virginia.

“The project shows how ‘Rhapsody’ and the rest of the Gershwins’ music is for everyone,” said Hayden. “You can enjoy their music in a grand symphony hall, in the classroom, in a parade, the practice field or while tapping your feet in the sand.”

Justin Tucker, the Ravens’ placekicker, is not only the most accurate kicker in National Football League history, but can also sing operatically in seven languages. (He graduated from the Sarah and Ernest Butler School of Music at the University of Texas.) For him, humming “Rhapsody” while practicing was a natural. Béla Fleck, the 17-time Grammy winning banjo player, soared through Gershwin’s most difficult progressions; he’s just released a new album that features “Rhapsody” in three different variations.

The cover of Gershwin’s manuscript copy of “Rhapsody in Blue,” dated Jan. 7, 1924.

Gonzalo Rubalcaba, the Cuban-born jazz pianist and composer, turns in a virtuoso performance from Florida while Kat Meoz, a singer-songwriter-composer, gives us a take from California. That’s Otto Pebworth playing the Great Stalacpipe Organ in Luray Caverns; the School Without Walls Orchestra, the Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington, D.C.,and international whistling champion Chris Ullman from the nation’s capital; the Arrowhead Jazz Band and the New Orleans Baby Doll Ladies from the Crescent City; the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and country/pop singer Nick Fabian from Music City; tap dancer and choreographer Caleb Teicher from New York, along with many others. The animated caricature of Gershwin playing “Rhapsody” is from Disney’s “Fantasia 2000.”

The origin story of “Rhapsody” is well known. Whiteman, the most popular jazz conductor of his day (though hiring only white musicians), commissioned the young Gershwin to write a composition that could show off American originality with classical sophistication. Gershwin, reluctant to take the assignment, only had about six weeks to put it together, while still keeping up his work on Broadway musicals.

The Library’s manuscript copy of his work is in pencil, with his block lettering spelling out “RHAPSODY IN BLUE – FOR JAZZ BAND AND PIANO” atop the first page. It’s dated Jan. 7, 1924, a few days into the assignment. He was greatly aided by Ferde Grofé, who arranged the score. The first performance, at a packed house at Aeolian Hall, drew mixed reviews from critics, though it was popular with the crowd.

You can hear an early recording on the Library’s National Jukebox from 1924 by Whiteman’s orchestra with Gershwin on the piano. Recording limitations of the time forced the nine-minute piece to be recorded in two sections, with the second part here.

So identified was Gershwin with the Jazz Age that when he died in 1937 at the age of 38 (a brain tumor), the New York Times obituary identified him along with “The Great Gatsby” author F. Scott Fitzgerald as a “child of the Twenties.”

“What he wanted to do most, he said, was to interpret the soul of the American people,” the Times wrote.

Ferde Grofé, the arranger of much of “Rhapsody.” Photo: Bain News Service. Prints and Photographs Division.

One of the curious things about “Rhapsody” has been its elasticity. There a short versions and long versions and pieces for solo piano and full orchestras and everything in between. Leonard Bernstein, arguably the most famous American conductor of the 20th century, loved “Rhapsody” but famously noted that it had such a loose structure that you could leave out or rearrange segments and the piece would still work.  Leonard Bernstein, “Why Don’t You Run Upstairs and Write a Nice Gershwin Tune?” in The Joy of Music (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1959), 52–62.

The Library also has the papers of Grofé, who also arranged the 1942 orchestral version of “Rhapsody” that almost immediately became the standard rendition and the one you likely think of today when the song comes to mind. Taken together, the Grofé and Gershwin collections give the Library all three manuscripts of “Rhapsody” that led up to its historic debut.

The nation is a far different place today than it was in 1924, but it’s part of the song’s famous elasticity, part of its peculiar magic, that enables it to still speak so eloquently, so broadly, to the national character.

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It’s Sew Complicated

This article also appears in the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

For 10 cents a copy, Harper’s Bazar magazine opened up a wide world for the modern woman of 1902.

In its March issue, there are essays on the growing women’s movement and advice on husband management. There are European travelogues, bedtime stories, home improvement suggestions, fiction series and spreads illustrating the latest styles (one indelicately headlined “Fashions for Old Ladies”).

For DIYers looking to save a buck on clothing, Harper’s also offered help, tucked between the regular “Recent Happenings in Paris” column and a how-to titled “Poultry Raising as a Vocation.”

There, a large foldout sheet lays out sewing patterns for the thrifty homemaker to use in making clothes for the family — “at the lowest computation,” Harper’s assured readers, a value of $3.50.

Harper’s 1902 foldout sheet with 60 designs for pieces of clothing.

When unfolded, the sheet reveals a bewildering tangle of dots, dashes, lines, X’s and ovals that crisscross a total of 1,134 square inches of paper in an unholy mess covering both front and back. The marks delineate patterns for a whopping 60 different component parts of articles of clothing.

From the chaos, nine outfits could emerge: a girl’s bodice, a baby’s petticoat, a boy’s shirtwaist, a girl’s corset cover, a little girl’s dress, a dress for a girl of about 12, a woman’s lawn waist, a tucked fancy lawn waist and a fancy stock and tie.

The trick, of course, was making them happen. The magazine provided instructions, perhaps easier read than done: Simply place transparent paper over a pattern and trace the lines with a pencil or, alternately, place the pattern itself over a sheet of paper and use a tracing wheel to copy the design. The seamstress then would extrapolate the proper size of each piece, take out the sewing machine and, voilà, the kids have new clothes.

Today, with the benefit of hindsight and easy modern clothing options, we can admire the resourcefulness of any Harper’s reader willing to tackle that job and, then, silently offer up a few words of gratitude: Thank goodness for off the rack.

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Life and Fashion in the American 20th Century

This is a guest post by Sahar Kazmi. It appears in the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

In between drawings of corseted debutantes and ads for breeches and hair tonic, the 1892 first issue of the iconic Vogue fashion magazine includes a brief feature on the origins of its namesake. Vogue, the excerpt explains, comes from the Italian “voga,” the French “voguer” and the German “wogen” — all of which refer to rowing, sailing or floating.

The words are fitting roots for a publication about fashion, an art form famous for bouncing along the waves of change. Throughout the ages, fashion has responded to social events and reflected the shifting culture of its time. It’s been an avenue for reference and reinvention, expressing societal viewpoints and political movements through fabric and adornment.

As the Library’s collections demonstrate, this was especially true for 20th-century fashion in the U.S. The story of American style is depicted in the Library’s century-old newspapers and magazines; in department store catalogs and home-sewing pattern books; in vintage lithographs and high-gloss photography.

Fashion is a tale of changing conventions: the loosening of a silhouette, the rise of a hemline. It’s a history of attitudes embraced and rejected: the anxieties of war or the delights of social liberation. Often showcased as the terrain of women, it routinely embodies their fantasies and evolving place in society.

Part of a page from McCall’s Magazine in 1930, showing womens’ sportswear designs. 

Publications in the first decade of the 1900s depicted mainly women of wealth and status, richly ornamented with embroidery and tailored lace. Their ideal shape, achieved with what was dubbed a “health corset” in advertisements, was the contorted S-curve.

“It is the result of much study of all the points most essential to a perfect figure and conformity to the present fashion,” proclaimed an ad for the Paris Model corset in a 1903 issue of Vogue.

The S-shaped corset pushed the bustline forward while tilting the hips back, creating a narrow waist and curvy profile. The look wasn’t a dramatic departure from the rigid styles of the 1890s, but bulky skirts and bendy waistlines began to loosen as the 1910s approached.

The empire waist dress, popularized during the late 18th-century Greco-Roman revival, made a comeback in fashion literature. Its shape featured a fitted bodice with fabric flowing down from the bustline, creating a relaxed silhouette around the waist.

Clothing with room to move and breathe was key as World War I erupted in 1914. European women put on trousers and overalls to serve in wartime factories. American women, already familiar with the simplified tunics and uniform-style jackets of the suffrage movement, followed suit when the U.S. joined the fray in 1917.

Even the wealthiest women who never stepped foot in a munitions plant or military unit took part in the shifting aesthetics of the day. A 1917 newspaper spread touting the latest designs from British clothier Lady Duff-Gordon showcased, “A new walking dress with a military touch.”

As the war ended and women gained the right to vote in 1920, fashion publications highlighted the vibrancy of the Roaring Twenties. Alcohol was prohibited nationwide, but the postwar economy was booming and the middle class was richer than ever. Speak-easies popped up like weeds to sell homemade liquor to the war-weary masses as jazz rang out through the night.

Women’s fashion championed straight lines and much shorter skirts — all the better for dancing the Lindy Hop and the Charleston. A once-voluptuous bodily ideal gave way to a more androgynous form, with the loose and swingy flapper dress quickly becoming a favorite of the period.

When the party came crashing to end with the Great Depression, hemlines once again fell to the ankles. Simplicity still reigned supreme, in large part because it was more affordable. For working and middle-class women struggling to make ends meet in the 1930s, the sensuous fashions of Hollywood stars provided the romantic standard of the day.

A fashion model poses on the steps of the Jefferson Memorial in 1952. Photo: Toni Frissell.

Their garments, made of slinky silk and satin, were cut “on the bias,” hanging diagonally across the body. In an age of uncertainty and financial fear, figure-hugging femininity was back in vogue. At the same time, women’s fashion embraced structured suiting, incorporating wide shoulders and crisp jackets.

But drapery wasn’t only for women. Black, Latino and other men of color favored the flamboyantly wide legged and long-jacketed “zoot suit” as a symbol of political subversion in the 1930s. Labor activist César Chávez was said to have sported zoot suits in his teens, and Malcom X even describes purchasing his first zoot suit (“Sky-blue pants thirty inches in the knee”) in his famed autobiography.

The Delta Rhythm Boys, a popular mid-century quartet, wearing zoot suits. Wikimedia Commons.

Eventually, just as World War I had dominated the styles of the 1910s, the Second World War came to have an outsized effect on the clothing of the 1940s. Skirt suits retained their popularity, now simplified even further by material rationing into regulated “utility dresses.” Overalls and trousers for women came back strong, with functional fabrics like tweed and cotton finding prime place in women’s wardrobes.

The end of World War II gave way to what became known as “The New Look.” In 1947, the French couturier Christian Dior debuted his “Corolle” collection, a line of tiny-waisted, voluminous skirts and exaggerated padded hips. Fashion publications hailed it as a return to formalized femininity and luxurious use of fabrics after the deprivation of war.

But as with the continuous reimagining of the female form, each era of fashion was in some way a reaction to the styles that came before it. By the time the 1960s rolled around, the U.S. was in the throes of a cultural rebirth — the civil rights movement was growing in urgency, students were protesting the Vietnam War and second-wave feminists were widening the gains of their suffragist forebears.

Popular fashion in magazines was no longer prim and dainty. This was the age of the miniskirt and knee-high go-go boot. The “Black is Beautiful” movement spotlighted traditional African prints and fabrics, and the burgeoning hippie look turned to flowing peasant shirts and bell-bottom jeans for men and women alike.

Fashion icon Bianca Jagger at a gala in 1977. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd.

While the short, straight-line dresses of the 1960s had harkened back to the linear fashions of the ’20s, the aesthetics of the following decade drew inspiration from the 1930s. Disco outfits and prairie dresses held prime place in the 1970s, but the everyday woman might just as easily be found in a smart suit or below-the-knee skirt. Designer Diane von Furstenberg’s iconic wrap dress touted a flattering, body-skimming silhouette reminiscent of bias-cut favorites from the ’30s.

Fashion was more democratized than ever, available everywhere and increasingly casual. Sportswear as day-dressing had been popular since the pleated tennis dresses of the ’20s, but everything was bigger and louder in the 1980s. This was the era of dancewear and sweatshirts, leggings and high-cut leotards. Shoulders were wider even than those of the ’30s, accessories bolder than the embellishments of the early-1900s and sleeves as puffy and ballooning as the ones in the original European Renaissance.

It’s no surprise then that 1990s fashion publications featured a more minimalistic direction. Plain white T-shirts and denim were all the rage, and sportswear reached new heights with hip-hop artists popularizing tracksuits and luxury sneakers.

Casually oversized looks, from baggy grunge and plaid to practical puffer coats found their way into catalogs and magazine spreads. Even on red carpets, women wore simple column and slip dresses.

“Fashion is and has been and will be, through all ages, the outward form through which the mind speaks to the material universe,” the scholar George Patrick Fox once said in his 1872 treatise on the philosophy of style.

As the 20th century reached its end, fashion had left the exclusive domain of the elite. It had become the playground of an ever-changing culture.

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Elton John & Bernie Taupin = 2024 Gershwin Prize

Elton John and Bernie Taupin, one of the great songwriting duos of all time, will be the 2024 recipients of the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today.

The pair met in the U.K. in 1967, when John was a young piano player and Taupin was a struggling lyricist. They quickly forged a a songwriting partnership that shaped popular music, sold hundreds of millions of records and became a cultural juggernaut that continues to influence musicians today.

“Crocodile Rock,” “Tiny Dancer,” “Rocket Man, ” “Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” “Bennie and the Jets,” “Your Song” — all became pop standards.

“Elton John and Bernie Taupin have written some of the most memorable songs of our lives,” Hayden said. “Their careers stand out for the quality and broad appeal of their music and their influence on their fellow artists. More than 50 years ago, they came from across the pond to win over Americans and audiences worldwide with their beautiful songs and rock anthems. We’re proud to honor Elton and Bernie with the Gershwin Prize for their incredible impact on generations of music lovers.”

The pair still work together and the process has always been the same: Taupin writes lyrics and sends them to John, who goes to work at the piano and creates a song.

“I’ve been writing songs with Bernie for 56 years, and we never thought that that one day this might be bestowed upon us,” John said. “It’s an incredible honor for two British guys to be recognized like this. I’m so honored.”

“To be in a house along with the great American songwriters, to even be in the same avenue is humbling, and I am absolutely thrilled to accept,” Taupin said.

The pair will be honored with a tribute concert in Washington, D.C., that will premiere on PBS stations nationwide on April 8 at 8 p.m. ET.

Bernie Taupin and Elton John. Photo: Gavin Bond.

Today, John is among the top-selling solo artists of all time with more than 70 Top 40 hits over the course of six decades, including nine No. 1s and 29 Top 10s on the Billboard Hot 100. He has sold more than 300 million records worldwide. He holds the record for the biggest-selling physical single of all time with Taupin’s rewritten lyrics for “Candle in the Wind 1997,” which sold more than 33 million copies. In 2018, he was named the most successful male solo artist in Billboard Hot 100 chart history. In America, John holds the record for the longest span between Billboard Top 40 hits at 50 years.

In 1992, John established the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which continues to be a leader in the global fight against HIV/AIDS. The foundation has raised more than $565 million for HIV/AIDS grants that have funded more than 3,000 projects in over 90 countries to care for patients and provide education for AIDS prevention. His music and charitable service have been honored with a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II; the Légion d’honneur, France’s highest award; and the National Humanities Medal awarded by President Joe Biden at the White House in 2022.

Since launching his first tour in 1970, John has delivered more than 4,000 performances in more than 80 countries. His work has spanned recording studios, stadiums, stages and screens — always with music that resonates with new generations of audiences. Disney’s “The Lion King,” carried by John’s tunes, continues to be one of Broadway’s longest running shows.

In January, John won an Emmy Award for outstanding variety special for his show “Elton John Live: Farewell from Dodger Stadium,” making him just the 19th performer to achieve rare EGOT status, having also won five Grammys, two Oscars for his work on “The Lion King” and with Taupin on the movie “Rocketman,” and a Tony Award for the score to the Broadway musical “Aida.”

Soon John and Taupin will have a Gershwin Prize to add to the mix for an even more exclusive distinction.

While their work has been intertwined for decades as co-writers, Taupin often preferred to stay behind the scenes. In their first two years, Taupin and John mostly wrote for other artists. Their first album, “Empty Sky” in 1969, was followed by “Elton John” in 1970. That second album, including the single “Your Song,” helped define their style for soaring ballads and rock songs. Taupin’s narrative songwriting, influenced by folk music, blues and country, offered the words that helped John’s melodies soar.

In addition to his work with John, Taupin has written hit songs for other artists, including Starship’s “We Built This City” and Heart’s “These Dreams,” as well as songs for Alice Cooper and Brian Wilson. In 2006, he earned a Golden Globe for “A Love That Will Never Grow Old” from the movie “Brokeback Mountain.”

Taupin moved to Southern California, became a U.S. citizen, and developed a love for the American West. He competed in weekend horse shows and hosted a competition for cowboys at his Santa Barbara ranch. All along, he continued writing for John from a distance, and began writing and making music with his Americana band, Farm Dogs. Taupin also turned to another of his passions — painting abstract and contemporary mixed-media — and he considers art his full-time career.

The 1975 album “Captain Fantastic and the Brown Dirt Cowboy” has been called their autobiographical album as alter egos, with the song “We All Fall in Love Sometimes” describing their partnership as one of the most important relationships of their lives. Taupin and John were inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1992. In 2023, John inducted Taupin into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.

Established in 2007 in recognition of the legendary songwriting team of George and Ira Gershwin, the Library’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song is the nation’s highest award for influence, impact and achievement in popular music. (The Gershwins’ papers are preserved at the Library, and George’s piano is on permanent display.)

The honoree is selected by the Librarian in consultation with a board of scholars, producers, performers, songwriters and music specialists, as well as curators from the Library’s Music Division, American Folklife Center and National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. Previous recipients are Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Sir Paul McCartney, songwriting duo Burt Bacharach and the late Hal David, Carole King, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson, Smokey Robinson, Tony Bennett, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, Garth Brooks, Lionel Richie and Joni Mitchell.

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The Library Wants Your COVID-19 Stories!

The COVID-19 pandemic that erupted on a global scale almost four years ago left a long trail of loss and grief. It also showcased the unity, resilience and humanity of Americans.

Now the Library, in collaboration with the nonprofit organization StoryCorps, has launched the COVID-19 Archive Activation website to encourage everyone share their COVID-19 stories.

Stories will be deposited into the American Folklife Center and made accessible at archive.StoryCorps.org. The new website will contribute to a deeper and more complete understanding of how Americans faced this public health crisis.

The outbreak was first declared a global pandemic by the World Health Organization in March 2020 after tens of thousands of cases were reported in 114 countries. The pandemic claimed the lives of more than 1.1 million people in the United States alone, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. It also triggered the lockdown of schools and the shutdown of businesses and forced Americans to adapt to an unwelcomed new normal.

By creating a tool to collect and preserve Americans’ pandemic experiences, the Library is honoring those who lost loved ones to COVID-19, those who worked on the frontlines and those who were, and continue to be, impacted during this time in American history.

“Curators and specialists at the Library are skilled at documenting history as it happens,” said Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress. “Recording the voices and stories of Americans’ experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic for our national collections will honor this history and ensure these stories will not be forgotten.”

The new website is part of the COVID-19 American History Project — a congressionally mandated initiative to document and archive Americans’ experiences with the pandemic. In addition, the AFC has contracted oral historians to document the stories of frontline workers and created a research guide to COVID-19 collections.

One person interviewed is Benjamin Ezra Ciereszynski, a student at Louisiana State University, who worked in the service and hospitality sector in New Orleans when COVID hit.

Cierenszynksi remembers “the hushed rumors” and the anxiety creeping in about the virus while other colleagues in the mom-and-pop restaurant hoped it would “blow over in two or three weeks.”

“It made the work environment a little tense; everyone was on edge because they thought they might lose their jobs for a good bit, which they did,” said Cierenszynksi. “At first (staying home) was fantastic … no work, no school, no obligations at all except for household chores, so it was just me locked in my room playing video games with my friends for about six months.”

When the novelty of the lockdown wore off and the new reality set in, “things started to get depressing. It felt like I was in a zoo enclosure … looking for any excuse to get out of the house.”

For some, COVID-19 remains part of their everyday experience. Some still are battling long-haul symptoms and sharing one’s story can be a way to heal, to commemorate and to honor others affected by the pandemic.

“Our goal for the COVID-19 Archive Activation page is to honor those who experienced this tumultuous moment in our nation’s history, commemorate those who were lost to the pandemic and to educate future generations about what life was like during COVID-19,” said Nicole Saylor, AFC director.

The website  Key to the COVID-19 Archive Activation page is the AFC’s partnership with StoryCorps.

Both StoryCorps and the AFC share a mission to collect and preserve personal-experience stories that portray the everyday, often-undocumented moments of Americans’ lives, so documenting oral narratives from the pandemic came as a natural fit.

“This partnership will build on over 20 years of collaboration between the American Folklife Center and StoryCorps and serve to further the mission of each institution to capture, describe and preserve the cultural heritage of the United States,” said Virginia Millington, managing director of program operations at StoryCorps.

To share how you experienced the pandemic, enter the COVID-19 Archive Activation website and follow the instructions to record your story or to interview someone else. The page includes tips and considerations for recording your story and a list of questions to prepare for interviews. Once finished, you can find your story, or that of others, on the StoryCorps Archive.

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“Feeling Good” About the Leslie Bricusse Collection

In the late spring of 1962, two young British songwriters were following up on their first hit play, “Stop the World — I Want to Get Off.”

The songwriting team — Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley — were up-by-the-bootstraps types, just hitting their 30s, and would become big stars. Bricusse, whose papers are now in the Library, would win two Oscars and one Grammy, writing or co-writing hits for everything from two James Bond films to “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory” to “Victor/Victoria.”

But on this day — May 15, 1962 — none of that had happened yet.

Bricusse flipped open his notebook and sketched in a song they were putting together. It was set to be the 12th piece in their new musical, “The Roar of the Greasepaint — The Smell of the Crowd,” a comic allegory about class differences in Britain. The song was a minor piece for a minor character.

He called it “Feeling Good.” The play, with its awkward title and weighty subject, was only a modest hit on Broadway.

But that song! Its simple lyrics, rooted in sunshine and swagger, opening in a cappella clarity, were set off perfectly by brassy horns that saunter in on the second verse. It’s so malleable, so simple in emotion, that it became a template for a performer with a big voice and a big personality.

Nina Simone was one of the first, stamping it as an anthem of female sensuality and self-confidence in 1965. Bolstered by her unique vocals, it hit with the knowing power of a Maya Angelou poem.

Bird flying high

You know how I feel

Sun in the sky

You know how I feel

It quickly became one of her iconic songs and is still popular with millions; a flashy new music video of it was released in 2021, featuring four generations of Black women. Canadian balladeer Michael Bublé released his swanky version in 2005, gaining worldwide audiences and more than 238 million views on YouTube. Others? Plenty, in pop and jazz, by names such as John Coltrane, Sammy Davis Jr., George Michael and, yes, The Pussycat Dolls.

Not a bad day’s work for Bricusse and Newley in the spring of ’62. One hopes they took the rest of the day off.

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