Library of Congress's Blog, page 18

Q & A: Guy Lamolinara, at the Center for the Book

Guy Lamolinara is head of the Center for the Book.

Tell us about your background.

I grew up in a Cleveland suburb. After high school, I attended Ohio State, thinking I wanted to be a dentist. I took all the prerequisites — biology, physics, chemistry — but quickly learned what I most liked to do was write.

I also took a lot of English lit and earned enough credits for a major. I then went to grad school and got a master’s degree in journalism, thinking it was a great way to have a writing career.

Before coming to the Library, I worked at various publications, including the Kansas City Star, Army Times and Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report.

What brought you to the Library, and what do you do?

I came to the Library out of desperation. I hated my job at the time and was willing to go anywhere that would have me. A friend who worked at the Library told me about a job in the Public Affairs Office (now Communications) as editor of the Library’s magazine (then called the Information Bulletin). I was thrilled when I got the call that the job was mine!

But I also thought I would not stay long, that I would be bored and miss the adrenaline dose of daily deadlines. Clearly, I was very wrong.

Thirty-three years later (34 this coming May), I can honestly say I’ve never been bored, that I learn something new almost daily, thanks to the extraordinary people I get to work with and the collections we have. I never cease to be amazed at the knowledge of staff members and how eloquently they talk about the amazing things we have.

I worked in Public Affairs for 12 years, editing the magazine but also doing press relations for this new invention called the World Wide Web. When the internet came along, the Library was way ahead of just about every institution. It had already digitized thousands of items and had been distributing them to schools nationwide on CDs. So, we could immediately put thousands of items online.

The media were intently interested. It gave me the chance to get our name in the pages of virtually every major publication. Networks and newspapers like The New York Times, CNN and PBS were frequently here working on stories.

Did I mention the luminaries I got to meet or see in person? Queen Elizabeth, Prince Philip, Jane Fonda, Mikhail Gorbachev, the Empress of Japan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I shook hands with Angela Lansbury. “How lucky you are to work here,” she told me.

After Public Affairs, I went to Strategic Initiatives (now the Office of the Chief Information Officer). That unit directed the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program. That mouthful of a name was for a project that made grants to institutions wrestling with preservation of born-digital materials. I was the communications officer.

I’ve been with the Center for the Book for about 16 years and its head for about six. The center is a network of 56 affiliates in 50 states, Washington, D.C., and five U.S. territories. Our mission is to promote books, reading, libraries and literacy nationwide. The centers also have a mandate to promote their local literary heritage. Each center takes the lead on how it meets the mission.

The job has taken me to at least half of the states, including Alaska (twice) and Hawaii, and to Puerto Rico. Tracy K. Smith, then poet laureate, read her work during the launch of the Puerto Rico center.

What are some of your standout projects?

The Roadmap to Reading is one of the most rewarding projects I manage. It brings representatives from all the centers to Washington, D.C., during the National Book Festival to promote their state’s literary heritage. It’s inspiring to see families crowd the tables, eager to learn about authors and literature from across the country.

I was also part of the creation of major programs that still exist today, including the National Book Festival, the Prize for American Fiction, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature program and the Literacy Awards program.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

It would be no surprise if I told you I love reading, but you might be surprised to learn that I mostly read classic fiction of dead writers. America has many great living writers. But I think William Faulkner was the greatest writer who ever lived, and Toni Morrison was America’s last literary genius.

What is something your co-workers may not know about you?

My wife and I love taking Amtrak to New York and seeing Broadway shows. For us, there is nothing that compares with seeing a show in the theater district. We’ve been able to travel and stay for free this year in Amsterdam and Italy thanks to my miserly collection of hotel points over many years.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

Beer Runs to the White House and Other Long-ago Radio Delights

As the clock struck 12:01 a.m. on Dec. 5, 1933, a truck full of beer departed Anheuser-Busch in St. Louis — a seemingly unremarkable event. That shipment, however, was something special: Prohibition had just ended. Beer was on its way to the White House.

KMOX CBS Radio in St. Louis was on hand to broadcast the celebration to the nation.

In real time, listeners heard brewing magnate August Busch’s delight at releasing the first case of beer bottled at the plant in 14 years. “May I just add a word about good, wholesome beer, which contributes so much to good cheer, good health and true temperance?” he asked.

This slice of American history is just one example of thousands upon thousands of recorded broadcasts that members of the Library’s Radio Preservation Task Force have brought to light or helped to preserve in archives across the country since its launch in December 2014.

The task force enters its 10th year this month with a solid record: It has sponsored three major conferences, each connecting hundreds of specialists; created a searchable database of more than 2,500 radio collections at archives nationwide; and supported dozens of successful grant applications to preserve at-risk recordings.

Its newest project is Sound Submissions, an initiative to facilitate donations of digitized recordings to the Library.

The task force’s work has been “incredibly important” to communicating the breadth and depth of radio collections across the U.S. while underlining the urgency to preserve recordings, said Patrick Midtlyng, head of the Recorded Sound Section.

The National Recording Preservation Board established the Radio Preservation Task Force after a major Library study found that many broadcast recordings had been destroyed or were no longer traceable.

From the mid-1920s until well into the 1950s, radio was the nation’s major source for entertainment and news, as well as a mirror of the times, the 2010 report states. Yet “little is known of what still exists, where it is stored and in what condition,” threatening “an irreplaceable piece of our sociocultural heritage.”

The task force — a consortium of academics, archivists, recording professionals and independent scholars — has responded by raising awareness of the riches of radio history and its power to fill gaps in the American story.

“One thing we started to find almost immediately was different primary source trails in sound that you don’t necessarily find on paper,” Josh Shepperd, the task force director, said. “In other words, the manuscript reading room might have NAACP history, but maybe it doesn’t have the sound history of civil rights activism in Indianapolis.”

Shepperd is a media studies professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. The Library’s vast radio collections and its expert staff and technology quickly attracted him and many others to the project.

“The Library of Congress name has so much resonance with historians,” Shepperd said.

The Library started collecting radio broadcasts in 1938, not long after recording technology — 16-inch lacquer discs at the time — made it possible to capture more than a few minutes of broadcasts.

Networks, with their ample budgets, recorded most early radio.

The NBC collection — around 40,000 hours of news, comedy, live music and drama from 1935 to 1978 — is the Library’s largest and most used radio collection. It includes such iconic recordings as the network’s June 5–6, 1944, broadcast narrating D-Day and Marian Anderson’s April 9, 1939, concert at the Lincoln Memorial after DAR Constitution Hall refused to let her perform because of her race.

The task force’s first project involved inventorying lesser-known American radio collections in archives around the country and developing a searchable database to expand their use.

Shepperd estimates the effort has identified about 80% of existing collections. “I’m certain we haven’t found everything, but we’ve been pretty successful,” he said.

Researchers anywhere can now easily find the Gay Peoples Union Records at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, including the nation’s first regularly scheduled gay and lesbian radio show; a public radio collection on rural life at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that includes programs like “Shepherds, Bumpkins and Farmers’ Daughters”; and Campus Radio Voice at Columbia University, provider of content to U.S. college radio stations in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Following the task force’s first conference in 2016, its project attracted major media attention. Shepperd recalls doing 30 to 40 interviews, leading to stories on NPR and in The Atlantic, Time and elsewhere.

“All these people realized the same thing we realized, that there’s this whole history here,” Shepperd said. “Why haven’t we touched this?”

An elevated profile led to funding to digitize and preserve collections, including projects previously rejected for support. “Before the task force, there really wasn’t much funding for radio preservation,” Shepperd said.

In 2018, University of Oklahoma Libraries, for example, received $49,900 from the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) to digitize the “Indians for Indians” radio show, broadcast from 1941 to 1976 on the University of Oklahoma’s AM radio station.

Broadcasts include host Don Whistler’s April 20, 1948, entreaty to listeners to “run, don’t walk, to the nearest telegraph station or post office, and get your protest on the way to Washington.”

A congressional committee was then considering abolishing the commission that decided tribal claims against the U.S. government.

Now available online, the recordings are “an important microcosm of U.S. history told through a Native perspective,” in the words of task force member Lina Ortega, a curator at the university.

Shepperd and others helped draft applications to CLIR, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Mellon Foundation and other funders to preserve collections curated by task force members and affiliates — other radio research and preservation groups — and they’ve written letters to support upward of 90 applications.

“We’ve been very successful at attracting grants over the years,” Shepperd said.

He believes the biggest challenge now is saving the local and community collections, many fast deteriorating, that are still out there.

“They’re in people’s basements, attics or garages. It’s usually the people who did their own show,” he said. “So, you have a local talk show host, and they saved all of their recordings. But the station didn’t want it, and they just have it at home.”

Once such collections are digitized, they need an archival home.

Shepperd sees Sound Submissions, the task force’s latest project, as a potential model. Based at the Library, it seeks donations of already digitized small radio collections for the permanent collections.

“Digitization removes a large obstacle to getting a collection,” Midtlyng said. “Much more work and resources are needed to take in a physical collection.”

Task force member Frank Absher, a longtime St. Louis broadcaster and media historian, obtained and digitized the live broadcast documenting the end of prohibition.

“It’s still fun,” he said. “You can hear the end of prohibition the way the rest of the world heard it.”

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

“Maestro” — A Look at Leonard Bernstein’s Papers at the Library

{mediaObjectId:'08B53F07756A6102E063CAE7938C8C2B',playerSize:'mediumWide'}

“Maestro,” the film biography of composer Leonard Bernstein, hits theaters this week starring Bradley Cooper as the world-famous musician. Bernstein’s life is documented at the Library in a collection that also seems almost larger than life — some 400,000 items, brought to the Library over half a century.

Not suprisingly, the filmmakers researched the Library’s holdings, spending time particularly on his correspondence. But they also drew on many other items to help the props and costume departments recreate things accurately. The full sweep of the collection includes original music manuscripts, personal letters, photographs, scrapbooks, film scores, audio and film recordings, business papers, concert programs and date books. “Maestro” is a feature film, not a documentary, but it draws deeply from the Library’s well of Bernstein material.

Mark Horowitz, a senior music specialist at the Library and the archivist for the Bernstein Collection, gives a brief tour of the material and its cultural significance in the video above, offering a peek behind the scenes at some of the images and moments that the film dramatizes. (One hint: Bernstein really did have a license plate that read “MAESTRO1.”)

“He was such a larger-than-life figure that I think he fascinates people as a human being, not just as a musician, but the life he led, the influence he had on people and social issues — it just reverberates,” Horowitz says.

Bernstein burst onto the public stage at the age of 25, when he had to fill in as conductor for the New York Philharmonic Orchestra on short notice. His debut, broadcast live on national radio, was such a success that the New York Times published a story about it on the front page. He would go on to lead the Philharmonic for four decades, write the unforgettable score for “West Side Story” and other productions, as well as composing, writing, conducting and educating on almost every platform that existed at the time.

He died in 1990 at the age of 72 after a heart attack.

He has remained such a towering figure that in 2018, on the 100th anniversary of his birth, “More than 2,000 concerts are scheduled on six continents, along with exhibits, including a Grammy Museum touring exhibit; several books; two documentaries in Germany alone; a 25-CD box set of just his musical compositions; and a 100-CD box set of him conducting,” Horowitz noted in a Library of Congress Magazine story that year.

Since then, Stephen Spielberg directed a new version of “West Side Story” and now, in theaters across the country, Cooper is directing and starring in a new feature film about the man himself.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

160 Years Later … Where Did Lincoln Stand While Delivering the Gettysburg Address?

“Four score and seven years ago….” those six words, spilling out into the Pennysylvania air in 1863, marked the beginning of one of the greatest speeches in American history and a new era in the life of the nation.

The 160th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address falls on Nov. 19. Thanks to some creative work by researcher Christopher Oakley, historians now have a bit more insight into exactly where the Civil War president stood when he called for a new birth of freedom in the country.

Following a long career in animation — Oakley’s credits include “Dinosaur,” “Stuart Little 2,” “Scooby Doo” and the videogame “Medal of Honor” — he transitioned to a position at the University of North Carolina, Asheville, as a new media studies professor.

There, he has combined a lifelong interest in all things Lincoln with 21st-century digital technology and, for his latest discovery, Library of Congress photographs.

How did your Lincoln Gettysburg Address project come about?

I transitioned from being a digital 3D character animator to an educator in 2009, when I began teaching animation at UNC Asheville.

To challenge advanced students learning Maya, one of the main programs used for digital animation, I created an undergraduate research endeavor in which we would digitally re-create and animate someone everyone knew. I’d always had a fascination with Abraham Lincoln, so I chose him as our subject.

In “The Virtual Lincoln Project,” over 100 students and I spent several years modeling Lincoln in digital 3D, then animating him delivering the Gettysburg Address.

What led you to research where Lincoln was standing?

Our initial plan was to animate Lincoln delivering his Gettysburg Address against a gray, neutral background. But as the project progressed, I decided to put Lincoln in the Soldier’s National Cemetery (now Gettysburg National Cemetery), since he was in Gettysburg to consecrate it.

However, my first foray into what the scene looked like revealed that Lincoln probably was standing in neighboring Evergreen Cemetery when he delivered his remarks. We wanted our depiction of Lincoln delivering the address to be as accurate as possible, and I realized there was a great deal more digging to be done.

I told the students to continue developing the tech, while I did the research on the location, shape and size of the speaker’s platform. Little did I know this would add years to the project!

Experts say Abraham Lincoln is the hatless, bearded man, apparently seated, in the middle of the frame. He is just to the left of the tall, bearded man with a stovepipe hat. Photo: Attributed to David Bachrach. Prints and Photographs Division.

Which photographs at the Library did you use?

There are only six known photographs of the actual dedication of the Soldier’s National Cemetery on Nov. 19, 1863. Experts attribute them to three photographers: Alexander Gardner, Peter Weaver and David Bachrach.

Three of the photos are attributed to Gardner, two to Weaver and one to Bachrach. Bachrach’s is the most famous because, when you zoom in, you can clearly see Lincoln seated on the speaker’s platform. But all six photographs were absolutely critical to the success of my research.

We needed each of them in Maya, combined with Civil War-era maps, Google maps and 3D geographical information system topological maps, to determine definitively where the speaker’s platform was located.

One other Library photograph also played a crucial role. We know that Weaver took the photo held by the Library from the second floor of Evergreen Cemetery’s iconic gatehouse. But the other photograph attributed to Weaver (the one in the private collection) was taken from the attic of the house of local resident William Duttera. The house is no longer standing, and no photographs of it were known to exist, which made it difficult to place Weaver’s location with certainty.

I had a Civil War-era map that indicated the location and footprint of the Duttera house, but I didn’t know what it looked like. I spent a few days looking through the Library’s online Gettysburg photograph collection in hopes of catching a glimpse of it.

In a turn-of-the-20th-century photograph, I found a structure that matched the footprint and was situated exactly where the map indicated the Duttera house was. If not for the photo’s availability on the Library’s website, I would never have been able to confirm that Weaver took his photo from the attic of the Duttera house.

Different locations have been suggested. How did you reach a conclusion?

The written record and eyewitness accounts of where the speaker’s platform stood vary wildly.

In Maya, you can create something called an image plane, which sits in front of the software’s digital camera lens. By loading each Gettysburg photograph into this plane, you can move the camera around in a digital re-creation of the cemetery until what the computer sees exactly matches the photograph.

When you do this for each photograph, you get a highly accurate map of where each photographer stood and what their angles of view were. And because the three photographers were triangulating each other, you can determine the size, shape and location of anything within their views.

We determined the size, shape, and location of our digital platform by how it matched the photographers’ views through our image planes.

If we moved the digital platform just a few inches in any direction that wasn’t correct, it didn’t match any of the views. The same is true for the platform’s size and shape. We also added digital people into our re-creation and placed them according to the photographs, and they match.

What value does the platform’s location add to the historical record?

For well over 150 years, its size, shape and location have been hotly debated. According to the National Park Service, the most-asked question among Gettysburg visitors is about where Lincoln stood.

For the past four decades, scholarship has placed the speaker’s platform — and therefore Lincoln — entirely within Evergreen Cemetery. My research reveals that the speaker’s platform straddled Evergreen and Soldier’s National cemeteries and that Lincoln stood well within the Soldier’s National.

So, for the first time in 40 years, Lincoln is back to where he was actually supposed to be — standing near the graves of the fallen soldiers.

For visitors to Gettysburg, knowing you are standing on the very spot where Lincoln delivered his immortal address transports you in time. In your imagination, you can become a living witness to the event.

A National Park Service marker shows the photo (above) of Lincoln at Gettysburg and notes that he stood nearby while delivering his address. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

View a lecture Oakley delivered about his research at the Lincoln Forum last fall.

My Job: Nathan Dorn, Curating Rare Books in the Law Library

Nathan Dorn is the curator of the rare books collection in the Law Library.

Describe your work at the Library.

I am the curator of the rare books collection at the Law Library of Congress, which is mostly a collection of historical printed law books from Europe, the British Isles and the Americas. That role includes a handful of different tasks. I’m the recommending officer for the collection, which means I spend a lot of my time analyzing the collection and shopping for books to acquire that would grow it in useful directions. I’m the reference librarian for questions that relate to objects in the collection or to the subject matter it covers. In addition, I do a lot of outreach work. That includes frequent table-top displays and also longer-lived presentations. I’ve curated two Library of Congress exhibitions. I also write for the Law Library’s blog.

How did you prepare for your position?

Like most of the librarians at the Law Library, I have a Juris Doctor and a master’s in library science. When I was finishing my master’s, I had the good luck to work as an assistant to the previous rare book curator here at the Law Library. I was studying history of the book and descriptive bibliography, so I was really grateful for the opportunity to engage with the collection in hands-on ways.

Before I worked in libraries, I studied classics and then religious studies at the University of Chicago and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. I was in a doctoral program at the University of Chicago when the subject of religion and law pried my attention away from the history of mysticism, which had been occupying me for several years. When I started to look at the history of law, I came to the subject with a raft of foreign language skills that definitely helped prepare me for my work today.

What are your favorite collection items?

This definitely changes all the time. New acquisitions always get my attention. The Law Library recently acquired a copy of the Hamburg Quran, an early edition of the Quran printed in Europe in 1694, and I’m excited to grow the Law Library’s Islamic law collection.

But I also like oddities of law — publications in which law and the administration of the state bump up against the edges of what can be known or realistically controlled: for instance, works on prosecution for witchcraft or heresy; adjudication of miracles; early laws related to mental illness; and medieval and early modern criminal procedure and rules of evidence. Some of my favorite items have been examples of renaissance mnemotechnics, or the art of memory training for lawyers. For example, the works of Johannes Buno are jaw-dropping just from the point of view of their ingenuity.

What have been your most memorable experiences at the Library?

My interactions with visitors are some of the most memorable. Here’s just one unexpected experience: I’m a huge fan of the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” so it was especially fun that I had a chance to take the actor Richard Dreyfuss and his wife on a tour of the Jefferson Building along with a colleague of mine. Dreyfuss and I found our way into a long conversation about historian Nancy Isenberg’s book “Fallen Founder,” which tries to rehabilitate the reputation of Aaron Burr. He was a big fan of the version of Burr that came out of that book, and he told me about it in detail.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

World War II’s Navajo Code Talkers, In Their Own Words

This is a guest post by Nathan Cross, an archivist in the American Folklife Center. It also appears in slightly different form in the November-December issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Before radio communications could be encrypted through technological means, the U.S. military struggled to find fast and effective means to send secure messages. Perhaps the best method they found was to employ Native American troops as Code Talkers — radio operators who communicated to each other using their native languages. Native American languages were rarely written and almost entirely unknown to enemy nations on other continents. This meant even their casual onversations could not be understood or translated by the enemy, much less their messages being decoded.

Code Talkers from 14 different Native American nations served in World War I and World War II, including over 400 Navajo Marines during World War II. After the war, the Japanese chief of intelligence acknowledged they never broke the Navajo code. The original 29 Najavo Marine Code Talkers were awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 2001. The Veterans History Project maintains oral history interviews from more than 20 Navajo Code Talkers.

In their interviews, the troops speak of the lifelong adversity they had faced. Growing up in an era of forced assimilation, most attended boarding schools that forbade them from speaking in Navajo. The irony of later being asked to use this language at war was not lost on them.

“Now my mind went back to the past — first they told me not to speak Navajo, but now they want me to speak Navajo in combat,” recalled Teddy Draper, who served with the Marines on Iwo Jima.

In addition to being a fascinating chapter of military history, the Code Talkers’ unique experiences have much to teach us about the human dimensions of war. They faced almost continuous combat. Due to high demand for their services, the Code Talkers frequently were sent directly from one battlefield to another instead of rotating to the rear with their units. Many are open and honest about the stress combat placed on them and how that affected them after the war.

Upon coming home, some participated in traditional Navajo ceremonies that provided healing and reintegration and often speak highly of these ceremonies’ effectiveness. All of them offer valuable insights into the importance for veterans of finding community and purpose after their service ends.

These accounts of their life experiences can be accessed through the online research guide, “Navajo Code Talkers: A Guide to First-Person Narratives in the Veterans History Project.”

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

Eavesdropping on Ernest Hemingway at Finca Vigía

In the middle of the 20th century, when Ernest Hemingway was living in Cuba, his friend and future biographer A.E. Hotchner got the man to record himself on a wire recorder — the precursor of the tape recorder — so that one of the world’s most celebrated personalities could pop off about anything he’d like whenever he’d like.

The idea was to capture the sound and feel of Hemingway himself, unguarded and spontaneous, joyful and opinionated, comfortable in his own home, a part of him not on public display.

These off-the-cuff recordings, then, would give Hotchner hours of raw material from one of greatest literary minds in American history. Who, after all, would not think it an unforgettable experience to have plopped on Papa’s couch, listening to the man go off about war, writing, bullfights or fishing the Gulf Stream?

The closest you can get to that today is sitting in a soundproof booth at the Library, headphones clamped over your ears. Those 1949-50 tapes, initially recorded on 15 wire reels and lasting about 41/2 hours, are preserved in digital form as part of the Hotchner Collection. (They are not online and require an in-person appointment at the Library. There are other recordings of Hemingway, most notably at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum. )

The front entrance to Hemingway’s home in Cuba, Finca Vigía (“Lookout Farm”). It’s now a state-run museum, just outside Havana. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith, Prints and Photographs Division.

The recording quality is low and scratchy, but you can listen as Hemingway reads a poem about World War II, part of a play he wrote, gripes about criticism of his recent work, dictates letters and book introductions, and offers salty recollections of working as a bouncer in a bordello. There’s also small talk among friends, live music and singing.

The last scenario is the case one afternoon in which things went (briefly) just at Hotchner must have hoped. The recorder was running in one of the open areas of the house, likely the living or dining room. There was a male voice singing an operatic tune in Spanish, one or two people clapping at the end, and then Hemingway speaking into the mic.

“Here, here we are at, ah, Papa’s this afternoon, with most of the old familiar gang around,” he says, a little stilted. He then lists his pals: Roberta Herrera, Sinsky Dunabeitia, Father Don Andres. The guests were Spaniards who had decamped to Cuba. Herrera, a doctor, and Andres, a Catholic priest, had both fought on the losing side of the Spanish Civil War. Dunabeitia wa a “salty, roaring, boozing, fun-loving Basque sea captain,” as Hotchner later described him.

Mary Hemingway, the writer’s fourth wife, was also there. The chatter was about an upcoming fishing tournament in which Hemingway hoped he might win some money for a hunting club in Idaho, where the couple also had a place.

“We’re thinking mostly today of preparation for the, for the coming tournament, in which Mary and I are teamed and are going to fish for the Ketchum Rod and Gun Club.” He laughs, a rapid ha-ha-ha. “We hope — Mary has been training this morning, she said made about five laps in the swimming pool, in getting herself in shape for it. I took a long walk into the back country and feel fit. We’re looking forward to this thing and I hope it’ll be a success.”

Hemingway aboard the Pilar in June 1956. Photo: Earl Theisen, Look Magazine. Prints and Photographs Division.

He’s clearly trying to have a good time, but the fun seems a little forced. His cadence is awkward, slowing and then accelerating for a burst of a few of a years words. And instead of the baritone, barroom bravado that one might expect from such a big man (his voice was high and uneven, with a hint of his Midwestern roots), what we really hear is how self-conscious he was with a microphone in front of him.

“It seems I’m doing very badly at this now,” he says at another point, likely in 1949 when he was working on “Across the River and Into the Trees,” “but I wrote 1,260 words this morning and am not overly enthusiastic at the moment about talking into something that feels as dead in the hand as this does.”

Hotchner, writing in “Papa Hemingway,” a biography published in 1966, noted that this discomfort extended to telephone calls. “Ernest advanced upon a telephone with dark suspicion, virtually stalking it from behind. He picked it up gingerly and placed it to his ear as if to determine whether something inside was ticking. When he spoke into it his voice became constricted and the rhythm of his speech changed, the way an American’s speech changes when he talks with a foreigner.”

Paul Hendrickson, the author and journalist, spent years working on “Hemingway’s Boat: Everything He Loved in Life, and Lost, 1934-1961,” published to critical acclaim in 2011. He was also struck by the odd delivery: “Years ago, starting out on this book, I used to go into small soundproof booth at the Library of Congress and listen to Ernest Hemingway’s voice on old wire recordings,” he wrote. A few lines later: “…he was said to be very tentative with it at first, and I can picture him holding the mic like a man holding something that’s about to bite. Six decades later, I could go into a room and hear the disembodied self of Ernest Hemingway spookily speaking in my ear in a thin, precise, high-timbered pitch.”

He notes that others don’t recall Hemingway sounding quite like that, and Hemingway, after playing back another segment, didn’t think it sounded like himself at all: “Ed, I just listened back to that voice, and it could not be more horrible.”

There are a few casual moments in the tapes, but he still sounds like he’s reading a script someone just handed him: “Here, Mary is lovely and we work every day and the animals are still eating. Gregorio has the boat on the waves and is painting her for the marlin season. I am jamming, trying to get work done so that I can fish.”

Hemingway’s house featured an open floor plan that he used to accommodate his frequent guests. It has not been changed since he left. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

Hemingway was as famous at that point for his larger-than-life persona as he was for his novels, short stories and nonfiction. He was arguably the most famous author on the planet. He would win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for “The Old Man and the Sea” in 1953 and the Nobel Prize in Literature the following year.

It was also in 1954 that he suffered the final of several major concussions he had absorbed over the years (as many as nine), this time in two plane crashes in a remote part of modern-day Uganda. Further, the Hemingway family suffered from genetic mental disorders, including severe depression and bipolar disorder. His father, sister and brother all committed suicide as he did; later in life, facing serious health issues. His youngest son, Gregory, who eventually underwent gender reassignment surgery and was also known as Gloria, suffered from bipolar disorder and died in a holding cell in a Miami jail. His famous granddaughter, the model and actress Margaux Hemingway,  suffered from severe depression and committed suicide at age 42.

For Hemingway himself, the combination of genetics, brain injuries, aging and alcohol further degraded his mental abilities until he committed suicide in 1961, a few weeks short of his 62nd birthday.

So these recordings in 1949 and 1950 give us a poignant window into some of his last good years. There are moments of startling clarity. He dictates a touching letter to Gregory, a father in anguish. Another time, frustrated with the whole recording project, he snaps at the impossibility of what Hotchner has asked him to do, at the paradox of being a novelist asked to explain his art: “It’s hard enough to write a damned story without talking about it and maybe it would be better to write and not talk at all, period.”

Hemingway often wrote just this way at Finca Vigía: standing at his bedroom bookcase, pecking away at a typewriter. One of his dogs sleeps just behind him. Photo: Earl Theisen, Look Magazine. Prints and Photographs Division.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

The Wright Brothers History Takes Wing at the Library

This article will appear in the November-December 2023 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

You know this story. Or at least the story in the famous “First Flight” picture above.

It goes like this: At 10:35 on the morning of Dec. 17, 1903, on a remote sand dune in Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, mankind flew for the first time. Orville Wright piloted a homemade airplane powered by a homemade engine for a few wobbly seconds while his brother and co-creator Wilbur ran alongside the right wingtip.

“Success four flights thursday morning” Orville telegraphed their father back home in Dayton, Ohio.

The world would never be the same. Humans flew to the moon 65 years later. We live in a different universe. Et cetera.

But here’s the more complicated story, one that becomes clear by looking through the Wright brothers remarkable collection in the Library.

“Flight” was such a tricky term at the time that the Wright brother’s achievement was barely noticed, much less celebrated. Germany’s Otto Lilienthal had become internationally famous as the “flying man” in the early 1890s for making the first heavier-than-air flights in a glider. After that, so many “fliers” from so many countries made so different claims of incremental gains in the field that the public tired of the spectacle.

So that December, about the only notice paid to one of mankind’s greatest achievements — the first heavier-than-air powered flight — was a largely incorrect wire-service story that ran in several papers around the country. It was treated as an unverified curiosity. Typical of the coverage, the St. Paul Globe put the three-paragraph report at the bottom of page four under the headline “This Flying Machine Actually Flies.”

Even the Wright brother’s father, Milton, recipient of one of the most momentous telegrams in world history, didn’t exactly run screaming into the streets.

The historic telegram that relayed the news of the first flight. Prints and Photographs Division.

“Well, they’ve made a flight,” he told the family cook, after scanning the telegram she handed him. Dinner was slightly delayed.

It was not until Aug. 8, 1908 — more than 4½ years after the Kitty Hawk breakthrough — that the world finally sat bolt upright. In Le Mans, France, in front of a skeptical crowd, Wilbur flew two circles above a racetrack at a blazing 60 mph. He turned, he swooped, he went up, he went down and he coasted back to a stop on the ground just so. The crowd went bananas.

“WRIGHT FLIES EASILY,” read the front-page headline in the Washington Sunday Star in the nation’s capital the next day as news shot around the globe. “WRIGHT’S AIRSHIP IN RAPID FLIGHT,” The New York Times reported, also at the top of the front page, adding “Wildly Cheering Spectators” loved the spectacle.

Only then did the Wright brothers become the historical entities, the fathers of flight, the icons of the age, that we know today.

Wilbur (left) and Orville Wright in 1909, a year after their Paris flights made them world famous. Photo unknown. Prints and Photgraphs Division.

Their collection in the Library is a rare combination of significance, detail and candor. It spreads over 31,000 items that fill more than 130 boxes, extending for 61 feet of shelf space. There are also more than 300 glass-print negatives. There are copious personal letters from family members, diaries, scrapbooks, engineering sketches and financial records. You can chart the family’s entire odyssey here, from small-town Midwestern simplicity to worldwide fame, from youthful newspaper publishers to bicycle shop owners to builders of the world’s first airplanes.

“Rare is the collection that provides so much depth and range, and all in such detail,” wrote David McCullough, the two-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author and historian, after using the papers in researching “The Wright Brothers,” his No. 1 New York Times bestseller. “In a day and age when, unfortunately, so few write letters or keep a diary any longer, the Wright Papers stand as a striking reminder of a time when that was not the way and of the immense value such writings can have in bringing history to life.”

The papers show that the family was always extremely close knit. Milton and Susan Wright had seven children, five of whom survived infancy. Milton rose to the post of bishop in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ, a Protestant group that was strongly abolitionist and ardently opposed to alcohol. Susan, an accomplished student in college and also devoutly Christian, kept the family together while her husband traveled. (She died of tuberculosis in 1889, cared for by Wilbur for the last three years of her life in which she was largely bed-ridden.)

Wilbur and Orville were the third and sixth born. Here are a few lines from the earliest written missive that survives from one of them, a postcard from the adventurous Orville to his father in 1881, when he was 9 years old:

“Dear Father …. My teacher said I was a good boy to day. We have 45 in our room. The other day I took a machine can and filled it with water then I put it on the stove I waited a little while and the water came squirting out of the top about a foot.”

Later, on the eve of their first glider test flights, Wilbur wrote to their father from the Hotel Arlington in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, on Sept. 9, 1900. He was waiting for a boat to take him to a remote barrier island with steady winds and soft sand dunes called Kitty Hawk.

The Wright brothers’ shack at Kitty Hawk in 1901 was spartan. Photo: Unknkown. Prints and Photographs Division.

“I have no intention of risking injury to any great extent, and have no expectation of being hurt. I will be careful, and will not attempt new experiments in dangerous situations. I think the danger much less than in most athletic games. I will write you again soon. Affectionately your son Wilbur.”

The striking thing here is that Wilbur wrote this “I’ll be careful, Dad” letter not as a teen, but as a 33-year-old man and successful business owner of the Wright Cycle Company, he and Orville’s bicycle business. It’s the kind of intimate communication that underscores that both brothers still lived at home with their widowed father at the time and that neither ever married.

These were not men given to poetic statements. Neither formally graduated from high school. They were no-nonsense Midwestern fellows, average-looking, determined, deliberate, frugal, practical, energetic, conservative, quiet, resourceful.

They had been fascinated with the idea of flight since their father bought them a toy “helicopter” when they were children. Later, Lilienthal’s glider flights intrigued them. His death from a crash in 1896 while pursuing the mysteries of flight galvanized them, Orville later said. They approached the problem of flight as engineers. They invested their time in computations and angles and wind speeds and physics and testing and welding iron and the sheer physical courage required to test their contraption in the air.

The overall effect was striking.

Hart O. Berg, their European business representative, wrote in May 1907 that he had recognized Wilbur Wright on first sight at a London train station though he’d never seen his photograph nor heard him described.

“…. either I am a Sherlock Holmes,” Berg wrote, “or Wright has that peculiar glint of genius in his eye which left no doubt in my mind as to who he was.”

Their sister, Katharine, also became something of a celebrity, particularly after joining her brothers in Europe after they had become a sensation. She even went flying in February 1909: “Yesterday afternoon, Will took Madame de Lambert for a five minute ride and me for a seven minute one,” she wrote her father. ‘Them is fine!’ It was cold but I was not particularly uncomfortable.”

Orville, flying away from the camera, over Huffman Prairie on October 4, 1905. Photo unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

Another surprise made clear in their papers is how short their glory days in the air actually were.

They were not widely lauded until 1908. Wilbur died of typhoid fever four years later at age 45. Within half a dozen years of Wilbur’s death, Orville stopped flying, sold the Wright Company and set up a research business, the Wright Aeronautical Laboratory. It was a modest one-story brick building on North Broadway in Dayton. It was his office, six days a week, for three decades. He largely retreated from public speaking and the limelight, save for politely turning up when monuments or tributes to he and his brother were unveiled. He was unfailingly regarded as a gentleman.

He died in 1948 at the age of 76. He was buried in Woodland Cemetery in Dayton along with Wilbur, Katharine and their parents. He and Wilbur had seemed at peace with their legacy during their lifetimes — they had given mankind flight and reaped fame and financial rewards, and that was certainly enough for a couple of bachelor brothers living in the vast ocean of the middle continent, deep among the prairies and trees and small towns and rivers and lakes and bustling cities that would come to be called, in part thanks to their own invention, “flyover America.”

The brothers Wright would, no doubt, find that ironic.

In 1915, not long after Wilbur’s death, Orville Wright (left, standing) posed on the porch of his mansion with family and friends. His hand is on the chairs supporting his sister Katharine and his father Bishop Milton Wright. Photo unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

The First Children’s Picture Book Might Be This One

Back to school in 17th-century America meant going back to cramped one-room schoolhouses where children were taught Latin, reading, writing and math, peppered with a heavy dose of religious instruction.

If you could afford to send your children to school, “Orbis Sensualium Pictus” — considered the first children’s picture book — or a textbook based on it would have been used to help children become “wise” and learn work skills.

Often translated into English as “Visible World in Pictures,” the book was published in 1658 by Johann Amos Comenius. Born in northern Moravia (in present-day Czech republic), Comenius was a theologian and education reformer who believed in experiential, lifelong learning and in teaching children from a Christian perspective. The book intertwined education and religion in the aftermath of Europe’s brutal Thirty Years’ War.

Designed for school-aged children, Comenius’ book was first printed in Latin and German and later translated into other languages throughout Europe. Combining text, 150 woodcut illustrations and parallel columns in Latin and a local language, this extraordinary book featured myriad subjects ranging from nature to animal husbandry, science, music, cooking, the human soul and biblical references.

The popularity of Orbis extended for more than 200 years; it continued to be used into the early 19th century and helped spawn other children’s illustrated books. The earliest edition in English was published in 1659. In 2012, the Library acquired a 1664 version printed in London.

Another children’s book published a century earlier may have been the precursor to Orbis but never gained widespread acceptance. It’s the last of a three-volume set titled De re Vestiaria, Vascularia & Nauali, or “about clothing, vessels and boats,” by Lazare de Baïf. The Library holds the 1553 printing of the volume on boats and navigation, which is illustrated with eight woodcuts.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

José Guadalupe Posada’s Lively Calaveras and Enduring Legacy

The late Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison once famously said, “All good art is political! There is none that isn’t.” While the novelist never crossed paths with Mexican printmaker and lithographer José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913), her words aptly capture the essence of his work during a time of great social and political upheaval in Mexico, especially his calaveras or depictions of skeletons.

Posada’s striking illustrations graced the covers of books, newspapers, magazines, flyers, posters and commercial ads. His legacy inspired artists in the Chicano movement in the 1970s and continues to influence artists in the U.S., Mexico and beyond as they seek to address political and social issues through various art forms.

The Library of Congress boasts one of the most extensive collections of Posada’s work in the United States, providing a valuable resource for understanding Mexican culture. This treasure trove of prints, housed within the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, originated from a generous gift and bequest from Caroline and Erwin Swann, a private collector who acquired a significant cache of Posada zinc blocks and broadsides during their travels in Mexico in the 1970s.

Posada helped popularize the calavera as a satirical graphic motif, often printed with rhyming ballads or corridos. The Aguascalientes engraver created tens of thousands of illustrated broadsides and flyers brimming with biting political humor, frequently targeting historical figures and political candidates. The vivid visual content ensured that the message could reach the Mexican masses, even those who were illiterate. The songs accompanying his images became part of an oral tradition, imparting morals, customs and political commentary.

Sara W. Duke, a librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division, characterized some of these broadsides as “ephemeral,” selling for mere pennies. They resembled the supermarket tabloids of their time, covering topics like suicide and true crime.

“They were fascinating. He was really publishing quickly,” said Duke. “Some of the poetry (from these broadsides) has come down through the generations as songs, and people in Mexico and Texas still sung them in the 2000s.”

One of his most famous creations, a broadside titled “Calaveras del montón, número 1,” is featured prominently on a vibrant community altar assembled by the Library’s Hispanic Reading Room as part of the “Día de los Muertos,” an annual celebration throughout Mexico and the rest of Latin America to honor and remember deceased loved ones. The Library owns the zinc block Posada used for the image, a blend of photo etching and hand engraving.

The zinc block original to “La Calavera Oaxaqueña” by José Guadalupe Posada. (Courtney Pomeroy/Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress)

 

The print on pink ground wood paper, also known as “La Calavera Oaxaqueña,” features one of Posada’s most striking portrayals of skeletons in motion. It depicts a menacing, machete-wielding calavera surrounded by skeletons. Dressed in a charro outfit, this angry-looking male skeleton is shown clenching his fists while producing, as the title suggests, fresh new heaps of calaveras. Skulls lie at his feet, creating a whirlwind of truly morbid action.

Posada created festive representations of death, and as noted by critics, his skeletons became his undeniable contribution to art. Calavera images inspired by Posada’s oeuvre are now used to decorate altars on November 1 and 2 (the Roman Catholic celebrations for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day, respectively).
Katherine Blood, a librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division, notes that Posada was not the first to use calaveras in the Mexican popular press. Also, the motif of death had been depicted in artists’ images dating back to the Middle Ages, “featuring animated skeletons that underscore the idea of death as the great equalizer—that we all share our mortality, regardless of rank or merit.”

However, “Posada popularized them as a national symbol (in Mexico) and is deeply-associated with them today. There are many American artists in our collection and wider world whose work is influenced by Posada, including Ester Hernández, Juan Fuentes, Enrique Chagoya and numerous others,” added Blood.

A prolific artist during turbulent times in Mexico, Posada—or “don Lupe” as his friends and collaborators affectionately called him,—often used his calavera creations to lampoon the upper class, bourgeois life and the corruption of the political elite. The skulls, such as his iconic “La Calavera Catrina,” remind us that death is a universal experience that comes to us all, rich or poor.