Library of Congress's Blog, page 167

A Thankful Proclamation

Earlier this month, a few news outlets ran a story about a rare document signed by George Washington up for auction at Christie’s.  According to a Christie’s spokesperson, the item in question had the potential to fetch $8 to $12 million, potentially setting a record for the most expensive American manuscript ever sold at auction. No one bought the document, but that doesn’t mean its historical value is destined to be lost.

The document is one of two known surviving copies – and the Library of Congress has the other. What makes this article so valuable and significant? The document is a proclamation establishing the first federal Thanksgiving Day!

The proclamation, signed by the first U.S. president on Oct. 3, 1789, in New York states: “both Houses of Congress have by their joint Committee requested me to recommend to the People of the United States a day of public thanksgiving and prayer …”

You can read the full transcription here.

The Library of Congress is home to the papers of George Washington.

Conservation Corner: Housing Carl Sagan Whiteboard

The Library of Congress has one of the most extensive preservation programs for library materials in the world. Each year the Library’s preservation staff provides preservation treatment for countless objects in its collection of more than 155 million items.

The Conservation Division cares for the Library’s special collections, including rare books and manuscripts, works of art and other unique documents on paper, photographs, maps, objects, and other special formats. The division also monitors storage and exhibition environments, stabilizes materials for optimized storage, exhibition, and digitization, and manages the Library’s collections emergency team.

From time to time, we’ll take a look at the important work being done by the Library’s Preservation Directorate, [link] whose work ensures long-term, uninterrupted access to the intellectual content of the Library’s collections.

(The following is a guest post by Nancy Lev-Alexander, head of the Collections Stabilization Section in the Conservation Division.)

The Conservation Division staff recently designed and fabricated a custom-made protective cover for the 4’ x 6’ whiteboard that documents the collaboration of Carl Sagan with his wife Ann Druyan for the movie “Contact,” which premiered in 1997. The whiteboard is by far the largest of the wide variety of materials in the Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive. This archival collection includes Sagan and Druyan’s treatment for the movie in 1980, transcripts of story and script meetings in 1994, various versions of the film script from 1993-1997, and discussions of the artwork and graphics for the film.

The whiteboard presented multiple preservation challenges due to the size of the object, the need to reveal both sides of the board, and the need to avoid wiping or disruption of the writing displayed on the board. To address these requirements, Preservation Specialist Jennifer Lewis first prepared the schematic drawing seen here, along with several small test cross-sections of the construction before working on the final housing.

The storage box during construction showing internal foam channels. / Photo by Jennifer Lewis

Lewis designed and fabricated the enclosure to provide full protection from light exposure, dust or accidental contact. To construct a strong but lightweight construction, Lewis used lightweight corrugated board. To create an internal surface that would prevent abrasion of the written surface, she covered the board in Tyvek, a synthetic, protective wrap. Heavier book covering cloth was used to protect board edges, and foam channels were added to secure and support the whiteboard inside the box.

The protective enclosure features removable panels that provide access to both sides of the whiteboard and are easily re-secured using a series of heavy straps and Velcro closures. All materials including board, foam, cloths and adhesives, were carefully selected to ensure their chemical stability, durability and practicality for use in such large-format construction due to the size and expense of the materials required.

Enclosure under construction in Conservation Division

The box was completed and delivered in time for the “Celebration of Carl Sagan” event held on Nov. 12, which marked the official opening to the public [link] of the Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive. The whiteboard was placed into its protective box and strapped upright in the Manuscript Division, [link ]where it will be permanently stored.

 

Conservation Division and Manuscript Division staff review white board placed in completed protective housing. / Photo by Richard Hebert

The Sound of Drums

On Friday, November 22, 1963, the students in Mrs. Maxwell’s third-grade class at Sabin Elementary School in southwest Denver got a singular history lesson: the news came in that President John F. Kennedy had been murdered.

Janet Maxwell, a popular young instructor who taught 25 kids reading, math, science and history by turns, was trying to get an educational program on a radio at the front of the classroom – a weekly radio play called “I Am an American” in which actors dramatized the lives of famous figures in U.S. history.  But she couldn’t seem to lock in the station.  So she went next door to Mrs. Grossman’s room to see if they were having difficulty there, as well.

When she came back, perhaps 10 minutes later, her students – I was one of them — were startled to find her weeping.

“Boys and girls, I don’t know how to tell you this,” she said. “President Kennedy has been shot.  I hope he will be all right.”

We were stunned.  A couple of kids began crying, too.  We were old enough to understand that the leader of our country was fighting for his life, and might even be dead. The president! The president of the United States. 

This was not an era of instant communication. There might have been one TV in the whole school.  But we did have the radio in the classroom, and Mrs. Maxwell began dialing around to find news coverage of the shooting.

It was only a matter of minutes before the announcement came: President Kennedy was dead.

Mrs. Maxwell tried to project an air of calm, but her grief could not be hidden, and it upset all of us.

Lunchtime came, and we took our sack lunches and went out on the gravel field beside the school.  Some kids were hysterical.  Other kids were silent, a little frightened by the effect this news had on adults.  I wondered what my Mom and Dad were thinking.  I knew they liked President Kennedy and had voted for him.

We tried to have a normal afternoon in school, but no one could keep their mind on the work.  One boy cracked an inappropriate joke; Mrs. Maxwell upbraided him.  At 3:20 we got to go home.

That night I went to my friend Jonnie Sue’s house for a sleepover.  My mother urged me to have fun and not to dwell too much on the sad event.

But all Jonnie Sue and I did Saturday morning, when we would ordinarily have been watching cartoons, was to stay glued to the wall-to-wall television coverage of the assassination, the swearing-in of LBJ, the speculation about the arrested man, Lee Harvey Oswald.  I walked home at noon and a few hours were spent away from the TV.

Sunday morning I got up and went to the basement, where we had a big black-and-white tube set. As I sat there in my pajamas, police officers were seen moving Lee Harvey Oswald along a corridor crowded with people.  A man—later identified as Jack Ruby — stepped forward, and suddenly Oswald’s face contorted in pain.  He had been shot, right there on live TV, and I had witnessed it as it happened.

I ran upstairs, delivering my first “flash” in a lifetime that later included 18 years as a newspaperwoman: “Dad! Dad! Somebody shot Lee Harvey Oswald!”

The true tragedy came through to me as I watched the state funeral Monday on TV.  JFK’s children stood by their mother as their father’s casket rolled past.  I was only a little older than those kids.  The roll of the drums was unforgettable:

Brum – brum – brum – brrrr

Brum – brum – brum – brrrr

Brum – brum – brum – brrrr

Brum

Brum – ba – brum.

It may be hard for people born more recently to grasp the impact John F. Kennedy had on lives in that era.  In later years I met several people who had been inspired by his challenge to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country” and in response had actually joined the Peace Corps or done some kind of public service.  Kennedy’s killing did great damage to their collective spirit.

Within five years, both Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were dead at the hands of assassins.  It was a profoundly disquieting time.

But this is America.  New leaders step forward, and we build the bench so new leaders can step forward. Democracy can be untidy, and not always satisfying, but it still beats the alternatives.

Who will fill out that bench – by serving on the city council, or the school board, or in the legislature?

What can you do for your country?

A Celebration of Mexico: Honoring a “Living Legend”

Miguel León-Portilla

Mexican anthropologist and historian Miguel León-Portilla is the newest recipient of the Library of Congress Living Legend Award for his work in studying the Náhuatl language and literature – the ancient, still-spoken tongue of the Aztecs. The award will be conferred upon León-Portill at the Library’s “Celebration of Mexico”on Dec. 12.

The Living Legend Award honors those who have made significant contributions to America’s diverse cultural, scientific and social heritage. León-Portilla is the world’s foremost authority on Náhuatl philology and philosophy. He has spearheaded an entire scholarly discipline to evaluate and understand Náhuatl literature and thought, extending from pre-Columbian times to the 1.5 million speakers of Náhuatl today. The language of the Aztecs, Náhuatl has been spoken in Central Mexico since at least the 7th century AD.

León-Portilla discusses his work in a set of podcasts, both in English and Spanish.

Subscribe to other podcasts and listen to interviews with select conference participants in advance of the celebratory event, including novelist/poet Carmen Boullosa and author Sandra Cisneros.

The first Living Legend awards were given in 2000 during the Library’s bicentennial (1800-2000) celebration. Recipients through the years have included artists, writers, filmmakers, physicians, entertainers, sports figures, public servants and musicians who have enriched the nation through their professional accomplishments and personal excellence. Madeleine Albright, Katharine Graham, B.B. King, David McCullough, Gordon Parks, Alan Lomax, I.M. Pei, Sally Ride, Martin Scorsese, Yo Yo Ma, Bill Cosby and Mario Andretti are among the more than 100 recipients.

“A Celebration of Mexico,” a two-day conference and accompanying display at the Library of Congress, will open on December 12, the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a popular national holiday in Mexico. For more information, visit the website.

You’ve Heard The Phrase “100-Year Storm?”

As the world turns its sympathy toward the Philippine islands devastated, just days ago, by the largest typhoon in recorded history, a fascinating fact has emerged and moved explosively across the Internet:

Just over a century ago, those same islands – indeed that same nearly destroyed town on the island of Leyte, Tacloban – were raked by another death-dealing typhoon that was estimated to have killed 15,000.

How was this fact verified? By reference sources available right on the web, housed here at the Library of Congress on a site known as “Chronicling America.”  The site offers hundreds of old newspapers, online, and is searchable. It’s a joint project of the Library and the National Endowment for the Humanities.  Activity on that site (especially from mobile devices) suddenly spiked starting two days ago – it was five or six times the traffic of a normal day — and when our web analysts looked into it, they found typhoon links and a big upsurge in traffic from users in the Philippines underpinning that.

Here’s the link that went viral.

It’s a shame that it takes a tragedy – make that two tragedies – to bring this excellent research tool into focus.  And, while this is indeed a sad story, looking at old newspapers isn’t exactly drudgery – you may notice, while doing research in old papers, how easy it is to be distracted by the highly opinionated writing, the ads for everything from corsets to cure-all medicines and the odd, sometimes ridiculous illustrations. If you’re not careful, you’ll never get that research done!

The suffering denizens of Leyte will include no one who can remember their past as far back as 1912; sadly, they were condemned to repeat it.  But there’s a glimmer of hope in this history as well – Tacloban made a comeback after that horrifying storm 100 years ago. Presumably it can again.

Inquiring Minds: Commemorating the Gettysburg Address with Author Jonathan Hennessey

Photo by David Shoenfelt

A 10-year veteran of the film and television production industry, Jonathan Hennessey is a Los Angeles-based writer. Hennessey is the author of “The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation,” on which he collaborated with illustrator Aaron McConnell. In their newest work, “The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation,” the duo commemorate the 150th anniversary of this pivotal battle of the Civil War and use Lincoln’s address to tell the whole story of the war.

Q: Tell us about your book, “The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation.” What inspired you to write about Abraham Lincoln’s seminal speech and the Civil War?

Please, let me start by thanking the Library of Congress for the opportunity to talk about this project. The sesquicentennial of the Gettysburg Address is a too-good-to-pass-up opportunity to take a look back at American history, to contemplate what we’ve been as a nation and still might be. So it’s thrilling to have my collaboration with Aaron McConnell be even a small part of the discussion.

“The Gettysburg Address: A Graphic Adaptation” is an experimental use of the comic book of graphic novel format for nonfiction storytelling. It’s a way to experience the whole sweep of Civil War history both through Lincoln’s carefully crafted words and through the power of visual art.

Brilliant scholarly works have been written that analyze the Gettysburg Address. There are books and papers that even break it down almost line-by-line. This graphic adaptation very much does that as well, because to understand and appreciate the speech, it’s crucial to get at the deep levels of meaning in nearly every one of its phrases. Sometimes there is even a tremendous amount of significance to Lincoln’s individual word choices.

But what this book does is divide the whole speech into 17 chronological sections. And it then uses those sections to retell the story of the Civil War — from “Four Score and Seven Years Ago,” that is, from 1776 — to the present. Lincoln intentionally wrote the Gettysburg Address with an elegant past-present-future structure. So we have taken Lincoln’s inspiring chronological cue one big leap forward. We use the speech to examine parts of the Civil War’s legacy that Lincoln himself never lived to see. With this method, we begin the book in colonial times, carry the narrative through the Secession Crisis, recap the entire war and the Battle of Gettysburg in particular, and continue through the Reconstruction Era to Civil Rights and beyond.

For me, this book organically grew out of our previous collaboration, which was to create a graphic novel edition of the entire U.S. Constitution. As a lifelong student of American history, I had thought I’d had an appropriate working knowledge of the institution of slavery’s role in the development of our country. But researching the Constitution’s formative debates and the times of the early republic utterly changed my mind. It had never been made plain to me before how slavery affected our form of government at so many consequent levels — even impinging on the shape of many states themselves. Slavery even helps explain why we have an Electoral College and a bicameral Congress.

I did not feel it was the place of the Constitution project to examine this quite so thoroughly, so I wanted a follow-up work to go in that direction.

Just as importantly, though, I think there are pressing contemporary issues that arise from the same sources of conflict that underpinned the Civil War. Besides the need to settle the issue of slavery, the Civil War was also caused by pervasive disagreements about what the United States “is” — and the question of what is the proper scope and mission of the federal government. I don’t think we’re moving towards another Civil War. But I do think we’re moving towards a potentially large-scale, consequential reckoning on those two other issues. And I believe Lincoln’s vision of the Union can significantly influence that dispute.

Q: Why use the medium of the graphic novel?

Most of us primarily experience the world through our vision. That is one reason why there’s a lot of truth to the old platitude, “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Storytelling with pictures, as many comics writers will remind you, is an ancient art form that vastly predates words alone. Think of cave paintings, hieroglyphics, medieval tapestries, and even graphic-based languages. I think that lends the graphic novel reading experience certain immediacy. We relate to the material intuitively. We read text and at the same time we consciously and subconsciously work out the meaning of a mother lode of details in the picture itself. These might involve a character’s facial expression, what that character might be wearing, nuances of body language, how the composition is framed or cropped, how large or small the panel is, what surrounds it, how the image is colored, and so on. All this gives the material a high degree of impact. It gives your imagination and critical thinking skills a vigorous workout. I think it even makes the ideas and/or story being expressed more memorable.

One of the great strengths of the graphic-novel medium is that you can convey so many ideas so compactly. When done well, there is an alchemy of the pictures and words working together. There is a complex interplay of images, text and time — by this I mean the implied forward pace you get when your reading experience flows from panel to panel. The words and pictures are capable of adding up to much more than the sum of their parts.

This book jumps around in time and place quite a bit. We are picturing the Americas of the Age of Exploration in one chapter, the 1850s in another, and the 1960s still later. The art tracks along with the story’s multiple time frames. This, I like to think, gives the illustrations a great deal of diversity and range — and helps the reader imagine different places and different times.

The graphic medium also lets us do things we would never be able to do well using the written word alone. As one example, we are able to take occasional intermissions between sections of drier, historical material. In these instances we bring the reader a variety of short, dramatic vignettes: Lincoln receiving his first news about the Battle of Gettysburg in the telegraph office of the old War Department Building, a Massachusetts woman finding the body of her Union soldier husband months after he was killed, a sensitive Confederate infantryman trying in vain to help a wounded officer. If we were telling these vignettes with straight-up prose alone, they would require all manner of written description and exposition to even get going. And they might seem out of place or cheesy. As another example, we were also able to make the book — in part — a kind of guided walking tour of Washington, D.C. An unnamed character travels on foot from the Lincoln Memorial, to the National Archives, to the Newseum, to the Jefferson Memorial, to the African America Civil War Memorial and so on. We never know exactly what this character is pondering or feeling. And so she becomes a kind of Rorschach Test for our own feelings about the Civil War and race relations in the United States. This would be a huge challenge to pull off elegantly working with words by themselves.

Q: How does your book reflect Lincoln’s speech and the surrounding events differently then other books out there on the same subject(s)? Does it give a different perspective and/or insight?

As I mentioned earlier, there are already great books about the Gettysburg Address already on the shelf. The works of Gary Wills and Gabor Borritt, for example, were definitely big influences to me.

But I don’t believe any previous publication has ever used the speech’s intrinsic chronology to retell the whole Civil War. And so maybe other books weren’t as well positioned to present the Civil War in the context of the far bigger picture of American history. For instance, other books on the subject didn’t quite give themselves the same opportunity to examine Reconstruction and the 20th century through the lens of the Gettysburg Address. Our approach does that.

Our story also pays very close attention to the politics of the day: specifically about Lincoln’s need to deal with some highly unflattering rumors about the way he had conducted himself at a visit to the Antietam/Sharpsburg Battlefield in 1862. So I like to think that we tell a less idealistic and less naïve version of how the Gettysburg Address came to be — and how it came to be remembered as so important.

One thing that I think many will find provocative in the book is the idea that after the Civil War there were two “New Births of Freedom” for Americans, segregated by race, and no less than a century apart. Many other authors and readers are content to end the story on the high note of slavery’s being permanently vanquished. But Lincoln himself, for all the lofty rhetoric, tragically had no plan for the emancipated slaves. Consequently, African Americans were left with a “freedom” that in important ways was only on paper.

Q: What are the challenges and benefits of presenting such history in context using the graphic novel?

Well, there is a very real challenge that comes with a commitment to be as historically accurate as possible. This book deals almost exclusively with actual, documented people rather than abstractions or fictional characters. So their likenesses have to be chased down and honored by my artist. This is easy for folks like Abraham Lincoln and Robert E. Lee but involve a lot more “boot leather” for lower-ranking military officers and politicians. We also have to be constantly on the lookout to be portraying appropriate period dress and firearms, and for architectural details like the U.S. Capitol dome’s being refurbished and the Washington Monument sitting unfinished like it did during the Civil War. As it turns out, a lot of state capitals have had multiple capitol buildings burn down or be demolished, and it took some work to make sure we were always depicting the right building. But when you work to get these things right — and I hope we did, we haven’t been called on anything yet — I think being a stickler for accuracy is a great aid to piquing the reader’s imagination and giving her as immersive an experience as possible.

Q: Tell me about your research in writing the book. Did you make any new discoveries about Lincoln, Gettysburg and/or the Civil War?

Research involved the obvious — a lot of reading, in a lot of different institutions, and standing on the shoulders of so many different scholars. It involved a fair amount of travel too. Aaron and I went in person to the National Battlefield and to Washington in 2009 in preparation for the book: neither of us had been to Gettysburg before, and it was a moving and humbling experience.

New discoveries about Lincoln and the Civil War are not a dime a dozen these days. When they come, they usually involve a stupefying amount of time and data collection and/or a wondrous instance of luck, like coming across a sheaf of letters in an attic. New discoveries also tend to shed light on somewhat finer points of history, or figure in the lives of less principle players in the Civil War. So that kind of exhaustive, academic grindwork was beyond the scope of this project. As someone who writes popular history works, I can only aspire to the level of training and intense degrees of specialization professional historians are out there working with every day.

I do think the book makes a couple of innovative and hopefully interesting arguments, though. There are still people who insist the Civil War had nothing to do with slavery, and more to do with states’ rights. But if that’s the case, then arguably when it came to enforcing Civil Rights legislation in the South, the “heavy-handed” acts of the federal government should have sparked a serious secession crisis of its own, or perhaps even Civil War.

Q: In addition, you’ve written “The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation.” Why use pivotal moments in American history as subject matter? Do you feel they lend themselves to this genre?

I actually don’t think that either the Constitution or the Gettysburg Address transfer to graphic novels with particular ease. But I love trying to work those problems out and struggling to creatively rise to the occasion. As subjects for graphic adaptations, these documents come prepackaged with all sorts of conceptual challenges. With the Constitution — how, for starters, do you graphically represent ideas as abstract as federalism, popular sovereignty or the judicial branch? With the Gettysburg Address — how, for starters, can you take a 272-word speech and extrapolate it to an entire book?

And if you do figure out how to turn these documents into graphic books, how can you try to assure that what you put out there are more than simple novelties? How do you make them something other than what people might expect?

Q: You’ve collaborated with illustrator Aaron McConnell on both your book on Gettysburg and the Constitution. How did you two work together to ensure an accurate and appropriate portrayal of these significant historical events?

Aaron likes to do a lot of research on his own. But I honestly can’t write a panel description like, “We see the entire membership of the Supreme Court of the United States at the time of Plessy v. Ferguson” or something without instantly feeling guilty about having heaped too much work on my partner. So I take it as part of my job to collect a trove of reference images of people, places and things so Aaron can concentrate on the actual work of drawing. The Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Online Catalog is absolutely instrumental for me, and I try (and likely fail) to keep up an appropriate appreciation for the work all those archivists and digitizers do to make that available to the public. It is mind-boggling how much great material is available online through the Library of Congress — and at such high quality.

Q: Why do you think it’s important to seek new ways to present history, such as in a graphic novel?

There are legions of people out there who will never sit down to read a 600-page monograph on Constitutional law or even a comprehensive one-volume book on the Civil War. But they can sit down with a book like mine for a few hours and get, or reclaim, a fairly workable foothold on the subject.

I think that kind of investment of time and interest can make someone a better citizen, a more informed voter and a more energetic pursuer of knowledge. And with that knowledge, who knows what insights they might have? Who knows what they then might contribute to society, using their own talents? Like many, many others, I love our country and want to make it a better place. And I do think good books can play a role in that ambition. There are, to me, a few absolutely unforgettable books that just completely shook up the way I saw things. After reading them I felt like I understood the world — why things are they way they are — so much better. It would be a great privilege for me to be someday able to affect a reader in that same way.

Q: And, of course, in closing, any final thoughts on your book, the Gettysburg Address and commemorating its anniversary?

The Gettysburg Address is honored and remembered because of the events that prompted it and also because of the high order of its eloquence. But it’s also honored and remembered because people intentionally set out to make sure it would be. Groups like the Grand Army of the Republic — essentially a special-interest lobbying group for Union Army veterans throughout Reconstruction and beyond — took great pains to have the speech reprinted, placed on plaques in public places and included in textbooks.

They did this as a way of promoting their vision of what the United States really is: a kind of transcendental covenant between people who are devoted to the ideas of freedom, liberty and good government, no matter what part of the country they dwell in. To them, the Union was far more than just a kind of practical cooperative that performs certain narrow tasks in the ultimate servitude of a handful of sovereign states. The Gettysburg Address rhetorically served the pro-Union, Republican Party agenda. And that’s because the speech speaks in terms of our being a single unified nation, ultimately dedicated to bringing into practice the radical idea of equality — not just managing the economy and establishing a court system and a military.

The United States is still divided over what the federal government’s role should actually be. I don’t know what it will take to reconcile these fundamental differences. But the Gettysburg Address shows us how potent and long-lasting the effects of the written word can be. I hope that someone, someday, may — like Lincoln — thoughtfully examine the ideas this country was founded on and go on to compose as powerful and poetic a vision of how we can be truer to our first principles.

A Celebration of Mexico: Masterpieces of Aztec Material Culture

One in 10 people living in the United States of America is of Mexican origin. One in five Americans is Hispanic. The Library of Congress is hosting a special “Celebration of Mexico” next month to honor this segment of the population and provide some important educational opportunities along the way.

The Library has the largest collection of Hispanic materials in the world, including rare items of Mexican origin. As part of the celebration, several of the institution’s curators have highlighted a few of the Library’s most treasured artifacts in a series of brief webcasts.

Here, John Hessler, curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection for the History of the Early Americas at the Library, takes a look at a stone portrait fragment, ca. 1400-1520, and the revolutionary Aztec technology that created the masterpiece, in addition to the story behind the 15th-century Oztoticpac Lands Map.

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“A Celebration of Mexico,” a two-day conference and accompanying display at the Library of Congress, will open on December 12, the Day of the Virgin of Guadalupe, a popular national holiday in Mexico. For more information and more videos, visit the website.

Portraits of the Solar System: Talking with Carolyn Porco About Carl Sagan

On Tuesday, the Library of Congress celebrated the life and work of noted astronomer and educator Carl Sagan with an event that featured a veritable who’s who of the science community. The event also launched the official opening of The Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive to the public at the Library. MacFarlane himself was in attendance and joined many of Sagan’s colleagues in giving glowing remarks to a man he said had a profound influence on his life, although they never met.

One of the presenters was planetary scientist and science communicator Carolyn Porco. In the 1980s, Porco was an imaging scientist with NASA’s Voyager mission to the outer solar system. Among the best-known of these images is a 1990 image of Earth as a “pale blue dot” – an image that Sagan had encouraged NASA to take. The image itself is rather pixelated, with earth as a tiny speck in a beam of light.

The cameras on NASA’s Cassini spacecraft captured this rare look at Earth and its moon from Saturn orbit on July 19, 2013.

Coming full-circle during her presentation at the event, Porco revealed, for the first time, an updated version of the remarkable image taken by the Cassini spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. She offered it as a tribute to Sagan.

Recently, Trevor Owens, a digital archivist with the Library’s National Digital Information and Infrastructure Preservation Program, spoke with Porco about working with and knowing Carl Sagan, in addition to discussing some of her correspondence with Sagan found in the archive.

Q: Could you tell us a little about how you met Carl Sagan? What were your first impressions of him?

A: I don’t really recall when I first met Carl, but I am clear on when I first heard him speak. I was an undergraduate in the Earth and Space Sciences Department at Stony Brook University on Long Island, and an astronomy professor from whom I was taking a class invited Carl to come to Stony Brook and give a presentation to the department. It was the spring of 1972, and the Mariner 9 spacecraft had been inserted into orbit around Mars the previous November. Carl spoke of the recent findings from this first orbital mission to Mars and, in particular, the evidence it provided that some liquid, presumably water, had once flowed on the surface, cutting distinctive channels. It was a big deal.

Before Carl’s arrival, we were assigned to read the book “Intelligent Life in the Universe,” by I.S. Shklovskii and Sagan. In brief, this eye-opening book propelled me, like Alice in Wonderland, to a whole new and fantastic place. I was completely transfixed by it.

His [Sagan’s] talk that day in 1972 had exactly the same effect on me. To paraphrase my own review article [of the book], “Whatever spell Carl Sagan had begun to cast on us all back then had surely taken hold of me.” I became an enormous fan.

Thereafter, for nearly 25 years I interacted with Carl as a graduate student and then as a professional colleague, collaborating with him on the 1990 Pale Blue Dot image of Earth and later, in 1994, at his invitation, as the character consultant to the movie “Contact.” He was a gentleman through and through, always very respectful and kind, and always ready with a word of praise. I am especially warmed when I remember his praise of my popular science writing and his encouragement of me to get into hosting science documentaries, like he had done. Coming from Carl, that was saying something!

Carolyn Porco and Carl Sagan

Q: Reading over the idea for and draft of the “Portrait of the Solar System” paper you and Carl Sagan were collaborating on in 1992, what things strike you?  I would be particularly interested in how your ideas and perspective have developed over time and any thoughts you have on your connection to Carl in the piece you were writing.

A: The “idea” piece, which is an outline of the proposed paper, and the draft of the paper that came from this outline, were both written by me, in response to Carl’s request (or maybe my offer) to get the ball rolling. And a few things impress me now as I go over these particular documents.

The first is that I had a very clear idea of, and was surprisingly articulate about, the cultural significance of the series of pictures we had just taken, as well as the historical nature of the Voyager mission, which is of course why I proposed to take such a series of images to begin with. (Carl proposed this “Portrait of the Solar System” to the Voyager project two years before I did; others also had the same thought. It was an obvious thing to do.)

The second is how long-standing my notions about these matters have been. It reminds me that I was initially drawn to the study of the astronomy for spiritual reasons – for the way that it moved me to consider, from a very young age, my own existence and the meaning of it, and my physical place in the grand scheme of things. In proposing an image of the Earth from the outer solar system, I was merely taking these considerations and trying to convey them to others by highlighting the widening perspective of our place in the cosmos that the Voyagers’ departure from the solar system allowed. And this is why I was so drawn to Carl and his message: It was clear he felt the same things.

Q: In a letter to you on Jan. 22, 1992, Sagan situated the discussion of the images of Earth from space as going “back to the very beginning of the space program when it was argued that there was no need for imaging systems on spacecraft because imaging systems nether posed nor answered crisply formulated scientific questions and were good for something disdainfully dismissed as ‘PR.’” What do you think of this reflection?

A: You might think that a collection of some of the brightest people on the planet would be more rational about the scientific utility in placing a bunch of visual detectors, arrayed into two dimensions, at the focus of a telescope. There were some very myopic individuals – and, relatively speaking, a lot of them – in the early days of the space program who thought, essentially, that images were for kids. Carl waged this battle (among many others) with his colleagues. He lost the first one: There was no imaging system on the first interplanetary mission, Mariner 2, to Venus. But he eventually won the war. Imaging systems have been included in the core set of instruments taken on virtually every planetary mission since.

To the basic objection – that imaging systems can neither pose nor answer “crisply formulated scientific questions” – I say, take a gander at the vast number and breadth of scientific results that my team and I have produced with the Cassini cameras. Some of the most fundamental discoveries that have been made at Saturn since 2004 have been made with our cameras.

Q: Carl wrote a glowing letter in support of your tenure case, dated Dec. 2, 1996. He stresses your contributions both as a scientist and as a leader of the Cassini imaging team. I would be curious to hear your reactions to reading his recommendation now. What does it say about you, about Sagan and about how you both approach science?

A: I have had this letter in my possession for quite some time now and it is one of my most treasured items. What does it say about Carl? Note the date: Dec. 2, 1996 – two-and-a-half weeks before he died. He had only a few months earlier come out of his last bone marrow transplant ordeal and was still recuperating and catching up on his own workload when he wrote this. He couldn’t have been feeling very well. But knowing how important this letter would be to me, he wrote it anyway. So, if you want to know how I feel about Carl Sagan and why, you need  look no further than this infinite kindness, because it says it all.

Q: You served as an adviser on the 1997 film version of the novel “Contact.” As I understand it, you were a reference model for Jodie Foster’s performance of the protagonist, Ellie Arroway. What can you tell us about that experience? What are your reflections on how you are and aren’t like her character? Further, what is it about you and your relationship with Sagan that prompted him to think of you as a model for the character?

A: Being involved in this movie was a fantastic experience. It really began in June 1993 when Carl and his wife, Ann Druyan, invited me to dinner at their home in Ithaca, during a time when I happened to be at Cornell University for a Cassini imaging team meeting. The conversation was very wide ranging, as you can imagine. But Carl and Ann seemed particularly interested in my experiences as a rare female in the male-dominated world of science. I remember Carl giving me some fatherly advice, too. Looking back on it, I believe I was being “interviewed” at that dinner for the job of advising on the development of the main character in “Contact,” Ellie Arroway.

A few months after that dinner, I received a phone call from Carl, inviting me to be the character consultant to the movie. I remember distinctly his saying, “Of all the female scientists I know, you come closest to being like the character we wish to portray on the screen.” I assumed he was referring to my driven, passionate, perhaps over-zealous nature, which he had had ample opportunity to observe since we both had been members of the Voyager imaging team. Needless to say, I was enormously flattered and jumped at the chance.

It was a marvelous thing, to sit around the table with members of the “Contact” team – Carl, Ann, Executive Producer Lynda Obst, and (the first) director George Miller – and brainstorm about what the on-screen Ellie Arroway should be like.

By the end of the day, the others felt that it had been a tremendously creative and inspiring session, and I was told by the director that I would be working with Foster and tutoring her on what being a scientist is like. Unfortunately, that never came to pass.  Despite several attempts made by Warner Bros. Studio over the course of a year to coordinate our schedules, Foster and I never spent time together. But she did a brilliant job capturing the essence of the character that we all had conceived, and I was told by Lynda Obst that Foster ultimately used Carl himself as her immediate role model. So, no wonder it turned out brilliantly!  I love that movie, by the way. It’s not as good as Carl’s book but it turned out really well, and I am so proud to have played a role in it.

While we’re on this topic, I will take this opportunity to dispel a long-standing myth about the “Contact” story, because I know Carl would want the truth to be known:  The main character, in the movie and even in the book, is not based on any single individual. How do I know this?  Because I asked Carl directly!

It’s pretty obvious that the voice of Ellie – the scientific musings, the outlook on science versus religion, the reasoned thinking – is unmistakably Carl’s; he himself stated this to me. And the rest of the character – her life, her experiences, her personality, her behavior, what she looked like – was cobbled together from bits and pieces taken from the real women that Carl had around him at the time. I can name at least four different women, maybe five including myself, from whom Carl “borrowed” in constructing the fictional life and characteristics of Ellie. (In fact, as the book and movie were under development, I remember Carl asking me about my long hair and why did most female scientists cut theirs short but I hadn’t. I’m sure he questioned others about things like this.)

This is, no doubt, why so many of us can look at Ellie and see ourselves in her:  It’s because there ARE bits of us in her. The truth is, she’s a composite character and wonderfully rich and fascinating because of it.

Q: I would be interested in any final thoughts or reflections you have about Carl Sagan and how he continues to inform your perspective and your work?

A: It’s hard to describe the influence that Carl and my interactions with him had on me. It’s been deep and so monumental, really. I’m not referring to the “big cosmic picture” and humanity’s place in it that he’s famous for bringing to the public, or his calling attention to the spirituality inherent in a scientific perspective. These are elements of Carl’s message that were firmly established in my own mind before I even heard his name. I’m instead referring to his professional and personal conduct and integrity, which I was fortunate to see up close.

Carl was always the most reasoned and most kind person in the room, the one who could gently guide a dispute to a rational conclusion or bring calm to a group when emotions had flared up. And he graciously withstood pointed criticism from his peers for presenting himself to the public.

Of course, I best remember the times when he felt someone had been particularly vicious or disrespectful to me and either actively came to my defense or took me aside to shore me up. I came to feel that the man had my back. I tell you, you could do worse than have Carl Sagan looking out for you!

I had, of course, been very much looking forward to showing him our images of Saturn’s moons. It would have been beyond wonderful to hear what he would have had to say about the never-ended stretches of equatorial dune fields made of organic materials, or the liquid hydrocarbons dotting the polar regions on Saturn’s largest moon, Titan – a moon he spent a lot of time thinking about. Or how overjoyed he would have been to see what we have found at the south pole of the small moon, Eneladus, the most accessible extraterrestrial habitable zone in all the solar system. It’s not completely crazy to say it could be snowing microbes at the south pole of Enceladus. No doubt, that would have delighted him.

Today, when I think of Carl, I think of grace, kindness, uncommon integrity and great internal strength, and I have used in the course of my life his example as my guiding principle – something to reach for even if I never seem to get there myself. I’ve said many times, many places: I’ve led a charmed existence and having had the chance to know Carl as well as I did was a very bright light in it.

Recite the Gettysburg Address

On Nov. 19, 1862 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address at the dedication of the cemetery at the Civil War battlefield. One of the most famous speeches in American history, the speech is recognized as a literary masterpiece. In three short paragraphs—some 270 words—Lincoln proclaimed the principles upon which the nation was founded, honored the men who had given “the last full measure of devotion” in its defense, and challenged all citizens to a renewed commitment to freedom and democracy.

To celebrate the 150th anniversary of the address, documentarian Ken Burns, along with numerous partners, has launched today a national effort to encourage everyone in America to video record themselves reading or reciting the speech. Among the notables participating in the project are the Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, all the living American presidents, Taylor Swift, Martha Stewart, Steven Spielberg, Uma Thurman and Stephen Colbert.

Here you can watch the Librarian recite the speech.

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You can visit the website Learn the Address for more videos and information on the project.

The commemorate the anniversary, the Library of Congress is currently displaying the Nicolay copy of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in the spectacular Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson Building through Nov. 19, before the top treasure is placed in the Library’s exhibition “The Civil War in America.”

The Library of Congress holds two copies of the address: the Nicolay copy and the Hay copy, which are two of the five known manuscript copies handwritten by Abraham Lincoln. Likely the reading copy used at Gettysburg, the Nicolay copy was in the possession of Lincoln’s secretary John George Nicolay until his death in 1901. The Hay copy, or second draft, was made by the president shortly after his return to Washington from Gettysburg, and found among the papers of Lincoln’s other secretary, John Hay. Hay’s descendants donated both the Hay and the Nicolay copies to the Library of Congress in 1916.

A Rare Opportunity to Explore (and Take a Few Photographs)

(The following is a guest post from Michelle Springer in the Office of Strategic Initiatives.)

On Veterans Day, Monday, November 11, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m, you’re invited to a special public event. Twice each year, the Library of Congress opens its magnificent Main Reading Room in the Thomas Jefferson Building in Washington, D.C., for a public open house. This is a rare opportunity to take photographs in one of the most beautiful public spaces in Washington D.C., not normally open to photographers. (Sorry, no tripods.)

At the Spring Open House earlier this year, members of the Library’s Flickr team invited photography enthusiasts to come and take pictures of the Main Reading Room and upload them to Flickr with a special tag. Katherine Blood, Curator of Fine Prints, wrote a post about this well-attended experience. In the weeks that followed, we enjoyed looking at all the tagged images in Flickr, then created three galleries to share the images. As Katherine put it so well, she was “impressed by how the participating photographers collectively showcased not only the grandeur of the Main Reading Room’s art and architecture but also the sense you get there of a living think tank where old ideas can be explored and new ideas conceived.”

“Books and Reading” is the theme for this Fall Open House photography event. Apply your creativity and imagination and look for images in either the Main Reading Room or Great Hall that express this theme. The books and reading theme can be conveyed many ways—including the painted, carved and real books that fill these rooms; the printers’ marks from printers and publishers on the walls in the Great Hall; authors represented in murals and statues; and in the broad sense of allegorical figures that inspire reading. We know you’ll find a lot of inspiration.

Printing Press mural in “Evolution of the Book series,” by John W. Alexander, located in the East Corridor of the Great Hall. 2007. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith. 2007

Upload your photos to your Flickr account with the tag LCFall2013, and we’ll create galleries on the Library’s Flickr Commons account to share your images from the day in the weeks that follow.

Want to do more? Make your own photo treasure hunt by looking for photos of the Thomas Jefferson building in the resources listed below and then try finding the real thing in person when you visit. Library staff will be available in the Main Reading Room to help if you get stumped. Can’t attend? Take a look at these great resources online anyway!

On These Walls: Inscriptions and Quotations in the Buildings of the Library of Congress, by John Y. Cole, 1995.  (original print version)
Virtual Tour of the Library of Congress buildings
History of the Library of Congress over the last 200+ years
Thomas Jefferson Building: Art and Architecture reference aid
Library of Congress photos by Carol M. Highsmith.
“LOC Itself,” a set of Carol M. Highsmith images of the Library on Flickr