Library of Congress's Blog, page 184

Curator’s Picks: Fab Five

The collections of the Library of Congress are vast and varied. And, what better way to get to know them but through our many wonderful curators. In this inaugural edition of “Curator’s Picks,” jazz curator Larry Appelbaum discusses a few prized items housed in the Music Division.

 

A hand-written letter from Leonard Bernstein to his mother in 1948 documents the 30-year old composer and conductor’s first trip to the newly formed state of Israel. In the midst of war, he writes about his adventures and passions for the land and the people.

“The letter is beautifully illustrated by his friend, the artist Jossi Stern,” said Appelbaum.

 

 

In 1955, trumpeter, singer and entertainer Louis Armstrong participated in a sociological survey about jazz musicians and the use of habituating drugs.

“Armstrong’s hand-written response reveals much about his insight, mother wit and humanity.”

 

Composer Avery Claflin (1898-1979), who was known in professional circles as a lawyer, banker and President of the French-American Banking Corporation, composed this madrigal titled “Lament for April 15.”

“It includes text taken from the 1955 Internal Revenue Service tax form.”

 

Composed by George Gershwin for a 1924 Aeolian Hall concert by Paul Whiteman and his Palais Royal Orchestra, “Rhapsody in Blue” combines elements of classical music with the flavor of jazz. Pictured to the right is Ferde Ferde Grofé’s holograph orchestration of one of the most famous American concert works.

“On the first page of the score is the famous trill and glissando played that night by virtuoso clarinetist Ross Gorman. There are also blank portions in the score where the piano soloist, Gershwin himself, played but didn’t have time to write out his part.”

 

The Library’s collection of work by the celebrated jazz photographer William P. Gottlieb includes this 1947 image of jazz great Dizzy Gillespie making goo-goo eyes at “First Lady of Song.”

“All 1,600 images in the Library’s Gottlieb Collection are in the public domain and available for download.”

(You can view the collection here.)

 

In Retrospect: July Blogging Edition

Here’s a roundup of what’s been going on in the Library of Congress blogosphere in July.

In the Muse: Performing Arts Blog

Six Degrees of Ernst Bacon

Pat Padua connects composer Ernst Bacon to Kevin Bacon, among others.

The Signal: Digital Preservation

 One Family’s Personal Digital Archives Project

Mike Ashenfelder relates the story of Vernon James and his son James.

Picture This: Library of Congress Prints & Photos

 Celebrate Sparkling New FSA Scans

New photos in the Farm Security Administration Collection have been digitized.

From the Catbird Seat: Poetry & Literature at the Library of Congress

Sagan’s Papers Offer a Window into His Literary Pursuits

Carl Sagan’s papers include his reading list.

Inside Adams: Science, Technology & Business

 A Fortune Made from Fur: John Jacob Astor

Ellen Terrell gives a brief biography of the businessman.

In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress

180th Anniversary of the Law Library of Congress

The Law Library celebrates a milestone.

Teaching with the Library of Congress

Sharing Summer Teacher Institute Discoveries

Visiting teachers make collection discoveries.

Library in the News: July Recap Edition

Leading the news headlines in July was the conveyance of the $1 million John W. Kluge Prize for the lifetime achievement in the study of humanity to Fernando Henrique Cardoso, former president of Brazil. He was honored in an awards ceremony for his study of the social structures of Brazilian government, economy and race relations and its transformation from a military dictatorship to a democracy.

Cardoso spoke with Washington Post reporter Eva Rodriquez.

 Young people have dreams. My dream was to learn how to devote my time and my energy in creating a better Brazilian society,” he said.

When I remember as a child in Rio, on Copacabana Beach, in Rio, it was also a very backward country,” Cardoso told Jeffrey Brown of PBS Newshour. “And now I can see a much more dynamic society in Brazil. And now we have democracy. Now we have people asking for more. Now we have protests. Now we have the free press. Now we have universities. Now we have contacts across the globe. My God, it was an enormous progress.”

Other outlets featuring stories included the Associated Press (AP), WTOP, América Latina and other international outlets.

The Washington Post also did a feature story on a special, private display for members of Congress on the history of U.S. presidential elections, culled from the several collections in the Library. Reporter Michael Ruane called the items “attention getting.”

CNN ran a video piece as part of its State of the Union with Candy Crowley program.

In appy news, the Library has added to its Apple offerings with new applications for the Congressional Record and its new digital collection of Aesop’s Fables (also available online). Running announcements were the Washington Post, WTOP and Education Week.

Several of the Library of Congress’ previously announced initiatives continued to make news in July, including its list of “books that shaped America.”

An interesting take on the book list was featured by the Chicago Tribune, which looked at the cookbooks included in the influential tomes.

“It’s [the list] meant to start a conversation,” said reporters Judy Hevrdejs and Bill Daley. “And it did when we came upon the cookbooks on the list, each a reflection of their times.”

The two highlighted “American Cookery” (1796), by Amelia Simmons, “The American Woman’s Home” (1869), by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Catharine E. Beecher and “Joy of Cooking” (1931) by Irma Rombauer.

Also still in the headlines was the Library’s initiative marking the 150th anniversary of the Morrill Act.

Brett Zongker’s article for the Associated Press highlighted the history of the law that would establish a network of land-grant universities. Librarian of Congress James H. Billington ranked the movement as one of the great milestones in American history.

The Denver Post, Boston Globe and the Southeast Missourian were among the outlets carrying the story.

The Library conducted week-long Teacher Institutes in July to promote the use of primary sources in the classroom. Community newspapers far and wide ran stories of local teachers who participated in the program. Teachers came from California, Illinois, Ohio, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, Virginia and Alaska, to name a few.

Fear and Desire

I was reading an article the other day on the possibility of a prequel to “The Shining” (1980), Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel. Apparently, the project is in its early stages of development but would focus on what happened at the haunted Overlook Hotel before the Torrance family arrived. While I’m not sure how I feel about that idea, I can say the original movie, starring Jack Nicholson, was a disturbing one. Frankly, I love horror movies, and the ones that have a psychological bent, like “The Shining,” always get me. Noted director Martin Scorsese ranked the film as one of the 11 scariest of all time.

“The Shining” certainly isn’t the only film of Stanley Kubrick’s that has provoked, mesmerized and entertained moviegoers for decades. “A Clockwork Orange” (1972) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (1968) are illustrative of a body of work that explored and pushed multiple genres to unforgettable effect.

Credit: Kino Lorber

Now, the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Va., has restored Kubrick’s first feature-length film, “Fear and Desire” (1953), which foreshadows his later war-themed works “Full Metal Jacket” (1988) and “Paths of Glory” (1957). The film, which follows a squad of soldiers who have crash-landed behind enemy lines and must work their way downriver to rejoin their unit, has rarely been shown since its original release.

 

Kino Lorber Inc. will make the restored film available for sale on Blu-ray and DVD in October.

The restoration of “Fear and Desire” is among the most recent illustrations of the Library’s efforts to ensure America’s audio-visual legacy is preserved for future generations. Some of the institution’s other major preservation projects include “All Quiet on the Western Front” (1930), “Mr Smith Goes to Washington” (1939), “The Emperor Jones” (1933), and the pre-release version of “Baby Face” (1933).

The Library’s Packard Campus acquires, preserves and provides access to the world’s largest and most comprehensive collection of motion pictures, television programs and sound recordings. It is home to more than 6 million collection items and provides support for the Library of Congress National Film Preservation Board and the National Film Registry.

And, Kubrick has a pretty solid presence on the film registry. In addition to “Paths of Glory” (named in 1992) and “2001: A Space Odyssey” (named in 1991), 1964′s “Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb” was named to the inaugural Registry list in 1989.

Keep the Ball Rolling

(This is the first in a series of posts featuring presidential campaign items from the Library’s collections.)

In Washington, there’s always a time and place to talk politics, even more so in an election year. Today we get televised speeches and conventions, commercials, celebrity endorsements and citizens proudly showcasing their candidate choice through stickers, buttons, car decals and t-shirts.

Our political forebears weren’t beyond their own pomp and circumstance, albeit not televised ones. As a publicity stunt in the 1888 presidential campaign, supporters of Benjamin Harrison rolled a huge ball covered with campaign slogans halfway across the country.

Benjamin Harrison campaign ball, 1888 / Prints and Photographs Division

Inscribed on the ball was:

“Old Allegany in 1840 started the ball for Harrison; In ’88 as they did then, We roll it on for Gallant Ben. Roll along, Roll away, Keep the ball in motion; The spirit of our men is up from Rocky Hills to Ocean.”

The ball was a replica of one built for Harrison’s grandfather, William Henry Harrison, for his 1840 presidential campaign. The gimmick gave rise to the phrase, “Keep the ball rolling.”

D. E. Brockett of Cumberland, Md., built the steel-ribbed and canvas-covered sphere and rolled it approximately 5,000 miles and several states to Benjamin Harrison’s home state of Indiana.

Harrison, a republican, challenged democrat and sitting president Grover Cleveland in the 1888 presidential election. Harrison lost the popular by a narrow margin but became president by winning in the Electoral College.

Typical of the era, neither candidate hit the campaign trail themselves, although Harrison conducted a successful “front porch” campaign from his Indianapolis home, helping him win the key states of Indiana and New York.

Cleveland would turn around and defeat Harrison in the 1894 presidential election making him the first president to serve two nonconsecutive terms in office.

 

Let the Games Begin!

Tonight the 2012 Olympics in London kick off. The excitement has certainly been building all year as enthusiasts have followed the torch relay and

Olympics 1976 by Romare Bearden / Prints and Photographs Division

participating athletes and teams. I can admit that the games probably appeal to me for a few other different reasons than purely anticipating all the awesome competition.

First, my favorite band, MUSE, not only participated in the torch relay but also contributed one of five official songs for this year’s summer games. They are supposedly performing in tonight’s opening ceremony.

Second, it was announced earlier this month that roller derby is one of the contenders to be included in the 2020 games. As a player and enthusiast, this makes me beyond excited. And, trust me, the sport already has Olympic-worthy athletes. Roller sports, which would include roller derby, was actually on the list of sports considered for the 2012 Summer Olympics but didn’t make it, along with squash, karate, golf and rugby sevens. However you can catch a glimpse of derby, somewhat, in tonight’s opening ceremony, as the London Roller Girls are participating.

This year’s summer games include 26 sports, including archery, rowing, tennis, shooting and water polo. And some of these sports are further broken down into disciplines. For example, cycling includes BMX, mountain biking, road and track. For the first time, women’s boxing is also being included.

Until 1992, both the summer and winter games were held in the same year. Since then, they have been held two years apart. The original Olympic Games were first recorded in 776 B.C. in Olympia, Greece, and were celebrated until A.D. 393. The ancient stadium in Olympia could accommodate more than 40,000 spectators, while in the surrounding area there were auxiliary buildings that developed gradually up until the 4th century B.C. and were used as training sites for the athletes or to house the judges of the games. The ancient Olympic Games included running, jumping, the discus throw, wrestling, boxing and equestrian events.

Olympia, the site of original Olympic Games / Prints and Photographs Division

Interest in reviving the Olympic Games was first shown by the Greek poet and newspaper editor Panagiotis Soutsos in his poem “Dialogue of the Dead” in 1833. Evangelos Zappas sponsored the first modern international Olympic Games in 1859. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was founded in 1894 on the initiative of French nobleman Pierre Fredy, Baron de Coubertin. The first of the IOC’s Olympic Games were the 1896 Summer Olympics held in Athens.

The Library holds a range of materials on the Olympic Games, and you can find them through this guide to reference sources.

Searching the Prints and Photographs Division Online Catalog for “Olympic Games” turns up images from games in Berlin, Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City and Moscow. You can also search for early 20th-century newspaper articles featuring Olympic headlines in Chronicling America.

Want to know a little more about the United Kingdom, from a map’s perspective? The country is featured as part of this month’s Places in the News.

Make sure to check out what the other Library blogs are posting on the subject, including highlighting the London games then and now, Olympic laws, athlete Jesse Owens, Olympic poetry and the now-discontinued sport of tug of war.

Legal Cleanup on Aisle 4!

If someone set a bowl of cheese curls in front of you and declared it “breakfast,” would you be able to discern it from cereal?

Wesley Verge explains the case

Even if you’re the type who likes cold pizza at 7 a.m., odds are you would not be too quick to pour on the milk and dive in with a spoon.  But today, at the Library of Congress, team members of the Library’s Junior Fellows Summer Interns class of 2012 assigned to the Law Library laid out the 1952 trademark dispute between the Frito Co. (now known as Frito-Lay) and General Mills, the maker of the breakfast cereal Cheerios.

The Law Library fellows were among 38 such interns working in more than 20 Library divisions for 10 weeks this summer, creating archival finding aids, organizing elements of collections and in the process finding more than 130 interesting items, ranging from an opera notated in unorthodox fashion – with curved staffs – to a previously unknown demo recording by blues legends Sonny Terry and Brownie McGhee.

Back to our food fight. The Frito Co.’s owners had created “Chee-tos,” a cousin to their popular snack food, Fritos.  Both involved corn as the basis, but Chee-tos, as the name suggested, also contained cheese.

The Frito Co. applied for a trademark, but was halted by a protest from General Mills, which suggested that the similarity between the two product names (both involving “chee” and “o”) constituted infringement of the existing Cheerios trademark.  The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit barred the Frito Co. from trademarking Chee-tos.

It wasn’t over, according to Junior Fellow Mari Gavin of Richmond, Va., a graduate of the College of William & Mary who’s applying to law school. (Fellow fellow Wesley Verge also was instrumental in unearthing the Chee-tos case.) Two more rounds of appeals later, the Frito Co. won its trademark, which is why we are all munching both (trademarked) food products lo these many decades later.

Among their many accomplishments, this year’s crew of Junior Fellows detailed the provenance of a rare book of fables in the Library’s Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection

of rare books; organized the Library’s collection of operas written since 1990; worked to bring voice recordings of major poets to the Library’s website; and added descriptive detail to items being placed on the World Digital Library website.  They found fun and fascinating elements in the Copyright collections and preserved fragile maps.

Some of the fellows will go to graduate school, others will return to undergraduate school or scout for jobs; but some were fascinated enough by their weeks at the Library to consider careers in librarianship – for which we can all be grateful.

Tan Dun opera music with curved staffs

 

 

 

Words to the Wise

“Look before you leap.”

"The Ant & the Dove"

“Do not believe everything you hear.”

“A kindness is never wasted.”

“Heaven helps those who help themselves.”

“You are judged by the company you keep.”

Sound familiar? Sage advice given to you at one time or another likely by your parents or other loved ones, right? I know I can hear my mom’s voice right now offering up these words of wisdom when I was a kid. Well, as much as I know we’d like to give our folks the credit, these lessons can be traced back to Aesop, a Greek slave and storyteller thought to have lived between 620 and 560 B.C. His “Aesop’s Fables,” an ancient collection of 147 stories designed to teach moral lessons, are some of the world’s best known and have been translated into multiple languages and become popular in hundreds of cultures.

"The Fox & the Goat"

The Library of Congress has released “Words to the Wise: The Aesop’s Fables e-Book,” an interactive version of the classic Aesop tales, featuring the colorful illustrations of artist Milo Winter. The free e-book is available on the Library’s read.gov website and as a free app for the iPhone, iPad and Android platforms.

The interactive e-book is adapted from the 1919 book “The Aesop for Children: With Pictures by Milo Winter,” published by Rand, McNally & Co. Winter’s pictures have been transformed for this e-book, and now readers can interact with the charming illustrations to see and hear them move: a choosy heron eyes the fish swimming at his feet, a sly fox swishes his tail, a mouse chews a rope and frees a lion in straits.

The fables remain a popular choice for moral education of children today. Younger scholars will be able to trace the origin of aphorisms such as “sour grapes” and “a bird in the hand.”

What fables do you remember as a child?

Lost at Sea

Today, on what would have been Amelia Earhart’s 115th birthday, news reports are trending about a recent expedition to discover what truly  happened to the famed aviator on July 2, 1937, when she and Fred Noonan mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean.

Amelia Earhart / Prints and Photographs Division

A $2.2 million expedition that hoped to find wreckage from the famed aviator’s final flight is on its way back to Hawaii without the dramatic, conclusive plane images searchers were hoping to attain.

The group leading the search, The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR), believed that Earhart and Noonan landed on a reef near the Kiribati atoll of Nikumaroro, then survived a short time. Previous visits to the island recovered artifacts, and the group speculated a 1937 photo of the shoreline could include what appeared to be portions of Earhart’s Lockheed Electra plane. They set off earlier this month from Honolulu for a week-long expedition.

No big shiny silver airplane, obvious to all, but the data on the various storage devices may hold treasures, the group’s blog said.

While TIGHAR’s expedition didn’t uncover concrete evidence, the group still believes Lady Lindy and her navigator crashed off a remote island in the Pacific and is planning another voyage for next year, which would be its 10th effort towards discovering the truth of the disappearance.

The digital collections of the Library of Congress contain a wide variety of material associated with Amelia Earhart, including manuscripts, photographs and books. This handy guide compiles all the available resources pooled from several Library divisions and collections.

In Retrospect: June Blogging Edition

Here’s a roundup of what’s been going on in the Library of Congress blogosphere in June.

In the Muse: Performing Arts Blog

“How to Find Your Snooky Ookums: A Guide to the Irving Berlin Collection”

Pat Padua presents a guide to the Irving Berlin Collection.

The Signal: Digital Preservation

“Every Format on the Face of the Planet”

Leslie Johnston talks about the challenges of digital preservation.

Picture This: Library of Congress Prints & Photos

“Caught Our Eyes: On the Head of a Pin”

Kristi Finefield gives insight on a recent discovery.

In Custodia Legis: Law Librarians of Congress

“The Show Outside the Supreme Court – Pic of the Week”

The Supreme Court rules on the constitutionality of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.

Teaching with the Library of Congress

“Blog Round-Up: Political Cartoons”

Take a look at some previous blog posts offering help on using political cartoons in the classroom.

Inside Adams: Science, Technology & Business

“Transit of Venus: The Unsung Heroes”

Guest blogger Sten Odenwald of NASA discusses the planet Venus.

From the Catbird Seat: Poetry & Literature at the Library of Congress

“Poetry That Shaped America”

Seven poetry books are included in the Library’s “Books That Shaped America” list and exhibition.

Copyright Matters: Digitization and Public Access

“Quiet But Not Quiescent: Steady Progress on Several Fronts”

Mike Burk gives an update on Copyright Office business.