Library of Congress's Blog, page 21

National Book Festival This Saturday!

This Saturday, when book lovers descend on the D.C. convention center, many will no doubt lose themselves in a good book (or two). But if they also find themselves in the process, the festival’s carefully crafted lineup will have achieved its mission.

In its 23rd edition, the National Book Festival’s theme is “Everyone Has a Story” — meaning those attending as well as onstage. From 9 a.m. to 8 p.m., more than 70 authors will engage readers on topics across American life and beyond.

Festival-goers will encounter poetry, history, memoir, horror, sci fi, children’s lit, popular fiction, literary fiction, food, social justice and science. The list goes on. The breadth of offerings guarantees every type of reader will hear conversations reflecting their own stories or deepening their understanding of the world.

A few things are new this year. For one, the date. The Library moved the festival earlier in the summer — Aug. 12 as opposed to Labor Day weekend — based on the convention center’s availability.

Mary Louise Kelly will speak about her book “It. Goes. So. Fast.” Photo: Courtesy of NBF.

The festival also has fewer authors this year and will unfold over less square footage: six stages compared with 11 last year. The 2022 festival — the first held in person since 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic — attracted smaller crowds than past festivals at the convention center.

In response, Library organizers recalibrated, seeking to determine what size festival audiences are comfortable with in a post-pandemic world in which COVID-19 remains on people’s minds.

“This is an experiment this year,” said Jarrod MacNeil, director of the Signature Programs Office. “We’re seeing what it looks like to have a smaller footprint, to have fewer stages.”

Clay Smith, the festival’s literary director, sees potential benefits in bringing readers and sessions closer together.

“When you have the geography of the festival smaller, you’re having more interactions between readers. That’s very positive,” he said. “And when you are making it easier for people to get to sessions, you increase the sense of discovery.”

Each of this year’s six stages — Creativity, Inspiration, Insight, Understanding, Curiosity and Discovery — mix genres. Session titles alert festival-goers to subject matter.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden will officially welcome festival-goers on the Creativity stage at 9:30 a.m., followed by a session with beloved children’s author R.J. Palacio. She adapted her graphic novel “White Bird: A Wonder Story” into a prose novel with Erica S. Perl, who will appear with her. National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Meg Medina will moderate the session.

Tahir Hamut Izgil will be speaking at this year’s festival. Photo: Courtesy of NBF.

Medina and Palacio are among 12 authors of Hispanic heritage to take the stage at this year.

Although last year’s festival may have had smaller crowds, the group was the most diverse of any National Book Festival. The Library aims to build on this success, understanding that authors’ backgrounds do not necessarily correlate with those of audiences.

“We want to diversify our overall attendance at the festival,” MacNeil said. “We want to have a good representation of Americans.”

The sessions following Palacio on the Creativity stage — which, like the Inspiration stage, will be livestreamed — reflect the variety of genres festival-goers can expect on stages this year.

David Grann will discuss his new release, “Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,” with National Book Festival Co-Chair David M. Rubenstein. TJ Klune will present “In the Lives of Puppets” about artificial intelligence robots and their human son. And Beverly Gage will discuss her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about J. Edgar Hoover, “G-Man,” with author James Kirchick.

Then, Oscar-nominated actor and trans activist Elliot Page will discuss his memoir, “Pageboy,” and NPR journalist Mary Louise Kelly will speak about hers, “It. Goes. So. Fast.”

Their memoirs are among 10 the festival will showcase, including Uyghur poet Tahir Hamut Izgil’s “Waiting to Be Arrested at Night”; teacher Chasten Buttigieg’s “I Have Something to Tell You”; football player R.K. Russell’s “The Yards Between Us”; and Atlantic writer John Hendrickson’s “Life on Delay: Making Peace with a Stutter.”

In other highlights, author Amor Towles will discuss his latest bestseller, “The Lincoln Highway.” Tananarive Due and Grady Hendrix will talk horror fiction in a session titled “Hauntings Aren’t Just for Houses.” Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist Matthew Desmond will discuss his latest book, “Poverty, by America.” And festival stalwart Douglas Brinkley will pair up with David Lipsky in the session “History Is Heating Up,” about climate change. Food as a key to people’s hearts takes center stage in “Dig In” with authors Cheuk Kwan and Anya von Bremzen.

At 5:15 p.m. on the Inspiration stage, Hayden will confer the Library’s 2023 Prize for American Fiction on acclaimed author George Saunders, after which Saunders will speak.

As always, the festival will feature rich selections for children and young adults, the aforementioned titles by Palacio, Medina, Buttigieg, Due and Hendrix being only a small sample.

Children can also enjoy a new offering on the expo floor, Story District, where festival authors will read to families. At Roadmap to Reading, kids can visit Center for the Book affiliates to learn about authors from different states and win prizes.

Cheuk Kwan, author of “Have You Eaten Yet?’ Photo: Courtesy of NBF.

Book sales and signings and Library merchandise will also be on offer on the expo floor (located where the Main Stage was last year), as will a Library of Congress area where staff members will present Library-based content and activities.

Those who visit will get to try their hands at transcribing historical documents; learn how to research LGBTQ+ history in Chronicling America; find out about culinary treasures and comics in the collections; and discover the Library generally, including through a Spanish-language overview.

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Q & A: Hannah Whitaker, Preserving Live Music from Long Ago

Hannah Whitaker is pursuing a master’s degree in library and information science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is interning this summer as a junior fellow in the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center (NAVCC).

Tell us a little about your project.

I’m working with Erika Cooley, a junior fellow from the University of South Florida, at NAVCC in Culpeper, Virginia. We’re processing 16-inch lacquer discs from the Universal Music Group collection.

The collection contains thousands of discs that were created between the 1930s and the 1950s, primarily under the Decca label. Notable artists featured in the collection include Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday and Jimmy Dorsey, among countless others.

Lacquer discs, which are made by coating an aluminum disc with a thin layer of nitrocellulose, were used in the early 20th century to capture live recording sessions. The lacquers were then used to form metal masters and stampers, designed to mass-produce discs to be sold commercially. Our job is to inventory the original lacquers and create metadata for them so they can be cataloged.

Describe a typical day.

Each day, Erika and I input the metadata we create into an Excel spreadsheet.

First, we remove the discs from their original — and often damaged — sleeves and insert them into sturdy sleeves on which we write the disc’s identifying matrix number that was assigned at the time of recording, the artist’s name and the song title. We then assign each disc a new number — called an IDC (instantaneous disc) number — so archivists can easily identify specific materials within the vaults.

When working with discs that are nearly 80 years old, it is not uncommon to find broken or damaged discs. When we inevitably do, we inventory the discs, then place them into broken disc housing. From there, NAVCC audio engineers will digitize them before further damage can be done. Our goal is to mitigate any damage and preserve the music.

When creating metadata, Erika and I include as much information as we can glean from the contents of the disc and its accompanying sleeve, including who the artist was, the song title, how many tracks are cut into the disc and any notes that may have been written or etched directly onto the disc. Once the lacquer discs are inventoried, researchers will be able to more easily access the collection.

What have you discovered of special interest?

What I find most interesting about this project hasn’t been one specific thing, but rather the time period during which many of these lacquers were cut, including during World War II.

During the war, aluminum was rationed, forcing recording studios to adapt and use glass as the base for lacquers. Erika and I processed a glass-based lacquer from 1939. I can’t help but become emotional when I realize that during the darkest time in global history, artists continued to create, bringing light into the lives of petrified, weary individuals. Still, we danced.

Additionally, Erika and I were taught about IRENE, which stands for Image, Reconstruct, Erase, Noise, Etcetera. IRENE can play back damaged discs that cannot withstand a stylus by using a camera with microscopic capabilities to detect the edges of the grooves. It was fascinating to learn how broken discs can still be digitized with ingenious technological advances. 

What attracted you to the Junior Fellows program?

As a library science master’s student, I was searching for a fellowship that would allow me to draw on my knowledge of music trivia while providing me with relevant archival experience. This junior fellowship is doing just that. I have learned so much in the few short weeks I have been here and know that I will carry these preservation and conservation skills throughout my career in libraries, wherever it may take me.

What has your experience been like so far?

Both Erika and I find working at NAVCC educational and exciting. We got to attend the 2023 Audio Engineering Society’s international conference on audio archiving, preservation and restoration, which was hosted here in Culpeper, providing us with invaluable networking opportunities.

NAVCC is staffed by such intelligent and supportive librarians, archivists, engineers and technicians who are gracious and eager to teach. This fellowship has granted us a strong foundation in audio preservation and archival practices and will only serve to benefit our future careers as librarians and archivists.

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Hannah Carson: “Like a Fire in All My Bones”

This is a guest post by Sara Augustin, a 2023 Junior Fellow in the Office of Communications.

Nestled in the archives of the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection is a short account of the remarkable life of Hannah Carson. It’s a small, 50-odd page book called “Glorying in Tribulation: A Brief Memoir of Hannah Carson, For Thirteen Years Deprived of the Use of All Her Limbs.” It was published by the Protestant Episcopal Book Society in Philadelphia shortly after Carson’s death in 1864.

It’s actually a short biography written by her friends rather than a memoir penned by herself, but no matter. Though almost completely disabled by severe rheumatism for the final years of her life, Carson’s Christian faith, “like a fire in all my bones,” was deeply moving to those around her. They regarded her as something near a saint.

At the ecumenical service after she died in her own bed on March 8, 1864, at the age of  55, “Her little room was crowded by her friends, both white and colored, who assembled to pay the last tribute of respect” to her, the book notes. She was buried in Lebanon Cemetery. (More on that in a minute.)

The book was not a bestseller but came to the attention of Murray, who in 1871 became only the second Black person to work at the Library of Congress. He would stay for half a century, becoming an assistant librarian and prominent in Washington society and politics.

During his tenure, he compiled a Preliminary List of Books and Pamphlets by Negro Authors, which surveyed the field up to 1900. Carson’s memoir is featured on Murray’s list, and a copy is now in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

Carson’s story was as straightforward as it was heartbreaking.

She was born Hannah Tranks in southern Pennsylvania in 1808 to free parents. She was raised in the Methodist Church. At 18, her mother died and she was left with the care of her six younger siblings, according to the book. She eventually moved to the Philadelphia area and married Robert Carson. They had three children, but only one, a son, survived infancy.

Robert Carson died in 1841, leaving her a widow and single mother at age 33. She cheerfully took to hired housework to pay the bills. After half a dozen years of this labor, she noticed a soreness one day in her right thumb that stretched up her arm and into her shoulder. She continued to work, but the pain eventually spread down her left arm and then into her legs. It was diagnosed as acute inflammatory rheumatism, an autoimmune disease.

Over four years, the disease progressed until she was completely bedridden, unable to feed herself or brush a fly from her face. She was almost completely paralyzed and would remain so for the remaining 13 years of her life.

For Carson, like other disabled Americans at the time, there was neither a federal safety net nor any other government-backed accommodation that could provide for her. As a Black woman on her own, her situation was even more difficult. She was completely dependent on the charity of family and friends. With that aid, she hired “a little girl who waited on her.” Her apartment was “scrupulously neat and clean,” but she was constantly in need of basic supplies.

If someone came to visit, it took work to get her into a sitting position: “…she would request her attendant, a little colored girl, to raise her by means of a girth fastened round her waist, and by which she was elevated to a sitting posture; her limbs were then slowly drawn around, until they reached the floor; her back was propped with pillows, and her arms stretched out, resting on her lap, the palms inwardly.”

Carson’s religious beliefs, meanwhile, gave her a new career: Evangelizing for her faith.

Long a faithful member of “the colored Bethel church in Sixth Street, below Pine,” she was well known to the Christian community. At her home, Carson emulated the environment of the Negro church and benefited from creating her own sanctuary: “always welcomed, who beheld, with astonishment, an unlearned mulatto woman discoursing on Divine things with a spirituality and unction that the pulpit well might emulate.”

In the still of the nights, she prayed until she could see visions of heaven. During the days, she often read a Bible placed in her lap, a helper turning the pages. Once she proclaimed that she had seen a vision of Christ himself. She prayed constantly for her “absent, wandering son,” who seldom visited.

And yet her faith was a beacon. As she told one group of friends who visited: “While you have been with me, the love of Christ has kindled like a fire in all my bones, and has driven out the pain and anguish, till I am full of joy.”

The disease finally took its final toll: “she passed away without a struggle, quietly as a child falling asleep on its mother’s bosom.”

The book’s reverence for Carson’s life is touchingly sincere — her many admirers were both white and black, her funeral ceremony included speakers from several Christian denominations who attested to the testimony her life had been — but respect and admiration could only go so far in 19th-century Philadelphia.

After the ceremony, Hannah Carson was buried in a segregated cemetery, as whites did not allow the Black dead in their own burial grounds.

Carson’s life not only proved to be a deep testament to her Christian faith but also offers a unique window into the life of Black disability in the late 19th century.

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Let’s Dance!

This article also appears in the July-August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Garth Fagan is known around the world for bringing Simba, Mufasa and Scar to life as choreographer for Broadway’s “The Lion King.” More than 100 million people have seen the beloved musical since its debut a quarter century ago, either on Broadway itself or in one of 25 global productions.

But Fagan’s renown extends well beyond “The Lion King.” Over the decades, he has developed a unique form of American dance combining the strength training and precision of ballet with the Afro Caribbean rhythms and movements of his native Jamaica.

When the Library acquired Fagan’s papers earlier this year, they joined, and built on, Music Division collections of an array of dance luminaries: Martha Graham, Alvin Ailey, Bronislava Nijinska, Katherine Dunham and the American Ballet Theatre to name a few.

The Library’s dance-related materials cover the American art form from Colonial times to the present. Early on, materials came into the collections mostly by virtue of their connection to other subjects — dances depicted on sheet music covers, for example, or instructions and commentary in books.

But dancing can be hard to document, dance curator Libby Smigel said: “Transmission is often through person-to-person teaching and coaching.”

Most choreographers and dancers did not maintain personal collections until the mid-20th century, a fact the Library’s holdings reflect.

Programs, photos and recordings form the core of most dance personal collections, along with scrapbooks assembled by a loving relative or fan, Smigel said. “I’m excited when we get a special prop.”

Two of her favorites: the umbrella Judith Jamison danced with in Ailey’s “Revelations” and fans and masks from Java that dancers from the Denishawn Company used in South Asia.

Some of the Denishawn Company masks. Photo: Shawn Miller.

A concerted effort to acquire dance at the Library grew out of a pilot program in the 1980s with the nearby John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. The pilot aimed to advance knowledge about dance and inspired the Library’s purchase of multiple collections.

Early acquisitions document pioneers such as Russian-born ballet choreographer Nijinska and modern dancer Ruth St. Denis, co-founder of the Denishawn Company.

In 1998, the Library purchased the eagerly sought-after archives of Graham, followed by acquisitions of complementary collections — some 20 of them, including those of dancers from her company.

“The Library is a cornerstone for serious research on Graham now. You can’t really do without it,” Smigel said.

Even before acquiring her archive, the Library had a special relationship with Graham.

In 1942, Library benefactor Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge commissioned a collaboration between Graham and composer Aaron Copland to produce a ballet. “Appalachian Spring” premiered in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on Oct. 30, 1944.

Graham danced the role of the bride in the tale of 19th-century rural Pennsylvania newlyweds. Erick Hawkins, a dancer from her company (whose papers the Library also has), played her husband — a role he later assumed in real life.

Martha Graham in 1959. Photo: Unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

 

The ballet earned Copland a Pulitzer Prize for Music and has continued to resonate with audiences ever since.

To celebrate the acquisition of Graham’s archive, the Library presented a 54th-anniversary performance of “Appalachian Spring” in the Coolidge Auditorium by the Martha Graham Dance Company.

“It was a really moving way to honor Graham’s relationship with the Library,” Smigel said.

Graham’s collection includes some 100,000 items in more than 400 boxes: photographs, recordings of rehearsals and performances, music, posters, Graham’s choreographic notes and her correspondence with major 20th-century figures, as well as her personal papers. Researchers can access these collection items at the Library along with magazines, books and films that shed light on Graham’s legacy.

A particular strength of the Library’s dance holdings, Smigel said, is the rich context in which they exist: alongside other collections that deepen understanding of productions.

The American Ballet Theatre’s production of “Fall River Legend” is Smigel’s go-to example.

Agnes de Mille choreographed the ballet, which premiered in New York City in 1948. It interprets the story of Lizzie Borden, famously acquitted of hatchet-murdering family members in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1892.

The Library also has costume designs by Miles White and the papers of set designer Oliver Smith, breakthrough lighting designer Peggy Clark and composer Morton Gould. (His scrapbooks contain a Life magazine story that reprints photos from the original crime scene.)

But the Library also has publicity photos of the original cast by Louis Melancon, news stories from across the country about the Borden murders, a book de Mille wrote about her research to create “Fall River Legend” and another book from 1893 by journalist Edwin H. Porter, who made a case for Borden’s guilt.

De Mille relied heavily on Porter’s book to research the Borden story, Smigel said. And contrary to the jury’s conclusion, de Mille ends “Fall River Legend” with Borden’s hanging.

“Each of these pieces comes from a different collection,” Smigel said. “You can’t tell any story with just one piece of information or one person’s papers or special collection.”

Now, Smigel is looking forward to the stories that will be told from Fagan’s materials. “How did he transform his start-up company in Rochester, New York, into the company that did ‘Lion King?’ ”

“At long last,” Smigel said, “we’ll have the material to celebrate his achievement.”

 

Free to Use and Reuse — Gardens

It’s been a while since we’ve checked in on our Free to Use and Reuse sets of photographs, those delightful copyright-free images that you can use any way you like for anything you like. We’ve featured dozens of these on the blog, including those covering autumn and Halloween, wedding pictures and everybody’s favorite, travel posters.

Since we’re in the middle of summer, let’s take a look at gardens.

There are various ways to define the word, but what better way to kick things off than with a hand-colored lantern slide by the most wonderful Frances Benjamin Johnston? She was a pioneer of portrait photography, architectural photography and women’s rights. Born into an educated family, she was a striver who worked to be well-connected in the upper realms of society. She photographed presidents (she took the last photograph of President William McKinley before he was assassinated), socialites, industrialists and artists. Her landscape photography is famous today, but she didn’t start until she was 50.

“Blue Garden,” part of her “Beacon Hill House” series, takes us back to the summer of 1914 and the mansion of Arthur Curtiss James, whose 33-acre estate on Beacon Hill Road in Newport, Rhode Island, was quite the spread. James, largely forgotten today, was a railroad baron with an enormous fortune.

His garden was all about Gilded Age wealth and prosperity, about making America beautiful. “Garden” here is about landscaping in the highest sense of the art form, a cultivated landscape for a particular effect. It was part of a movement to beautify the nation, to turn the riches of the industrial age into refined, classic beauty. Johnston’s composition of the manicured landscape — the tranquil pool, the delicate purple of the flowers, the urns, statuary and columns — matches its expensive elegance.

This photo is something of a Library darling, as it was the focus of the “Every Photo is a Story” video series about how to read, or interpret, photographs. The image was also an important find by Sam Watters, an architecture and landscape historian, in his work into Johnston’s career, as more than 1,100 of her images at the Library were uncatalogued for decades. Most had little or no identification. Watters selected 250 for his book, “Gardens for a Beautiful America, 1895-1935: Photos by Frances Benjamin Johnston.” was co-published with the Library in 2012. The pictures had not been seen publicly since the 1940s.

As Watters noted in a 2013 lecture, Johnston never quite made it into those upper social realms of the people whose lives, houses and gardens she photographed so beautifully.

“She never gets to be a member of a garden club; she is the hired help,” he said. “Photographers like Johnston were down below artists, and so were landscape architects.”

Today, her work outlives many of the names and reputations of those she photographed.

Bob Jarrell working in his West Virginia vegetable garden. 1996. Photo: Mary Hufford. American Folklife Center.

This right here is Bob Jarrell’s vegetable garden in West Virginia. The year is 1996 and that is Jarell in the foreground. It’s one of about 1,250 photos in the Coal River Folklife Collection in the American Folklife Center.

This photograph is pretty much the opposite of “Blue Garden” — not pretentious in manner, composition or subject matter. The beauty is not in its grandeur but in its working-class simplicity. The sagging sunflowers. The soft sunlight of late summer.

It’s also a more recent window into our past. If you grew up in rural America in the second half of the 20th century, then “garden” almost certainly meant “vegetable garden,” a place your parents made you go almost every day in summer, picking things you didn’t want to eat at a time you didn’t want to do it. Also, there were bugs. These gardens were family affairs, for canning and preserving for the winter ahead.

“Garden” in this sense carried an implication of self-reliance, of independence, of a work ethic that involved sweat and dirt. There were no trendy raised and boxed beds for planting, no irrigation systems and nobody used the word “artisanal” when they put the butterbeans on the table. The pressure cooker or canner was probably the one that your grandma used; it weighed a ton didn’t look like it came out of a Williams-Sonoma catalog.

That’s an American garden, too.

The Medici Fountain in Luxembourg Gardens, as it appeared in the 1890s. Photochrom print: Detroit Publishing Company. Prints and Photographs Division.

Let’s do something completely different for our third example — Luxembourg Gardens, the delight of Paris and one of the world’s great promenades. It was built by Marie de Medici, the widow of Henry IV and regent on behalf of her son. She started in 1612, inspired by the Boboli Gardens of Florence, Italy, where she grew up.

The Medicis knew how to make a grand garden, a regal blend of open space, trees, flowers, walkways, grottoes, statues, art and architecture. The Boboli would become the model for royalty across the continent and Marie had a stunning example built in Paris. She started with 2,000 elm trees. Eventually, it would expand from its original 15 acres to nearly 60 acres of landscaped loveliness around the equally stunning palace that is today home to the French Senate.

One of the highlights of the garden always has been the Medici Fountain. It was originally constructed as a grotto, or artificial cave, also like ones she remembered from the Boboli. But centuries passed and the fountain fell into disrepair. A major revision in the 1860s moved the fountain about 30 yards, added the urn-lined basin in front and replaced the statuary.

Our photo from the 1890s is a photochrom by the Detroit Publishing Company, which was famous for making these sorts of early color images for postcards. You can almost feel the peace of the Parisian sunlight on this afternoon when the photographer trundled his equipment through the park to the fountain and set to work. The afternoon passed. The light glinted. Perhaps a breeze. It was a job, sure, but it’s not hard to imagine that the photographer, like visitors before and since, wanted to linger. Rarely do we find places so beautiful.

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NLS Debuts Site for Spanish-Language Audio and Braille

This is a guest post by Kathryn Marguy, a public affairs specialist at NLS.

At the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS), we’ve been delighted by the enthusiastic reader response to the rollout of a Spanish site at the top of our home page.

Since the site’s February debut, readers have jumped at the chance to find the newest reading materials in Spanish-language audio and Braille. The new site also features Spanish-language guides to our most popular resources, including frequently-asked questions about our BARD Mobile reading app, information about our accessible music scores and details on how to obtain a free currency reader for blind and visually impaired users.

News of the site was picked up in the media by the likes of Telemundo and Voice of America. Our network libraries across the country have been good partners in getting the word out. For months after the February launch, NLS sitewide traffic was led by areas with large Spanish-speaking demographics, including Puerto Rico.

This focus on Spanish readers is part of NLS’s efforts to expand our offerings of books in international languages.

Thanks to a landmark international copyright agreement known as the Marrakesh Treaty in 2013, NLS has built its collection to offer accessible-format books in more than 26 languages (and counting!) including Japanese, German and Arabic. We’ve seen our catalog of books in languages other than English bloom from a few hundred to tens of thousands. This includes popular new releases, beloved classics and everything in between. More than 50 countries now participate.

The result? NLS readers have downloaded more than 100,000 books made available through the treaty. That’s part of the explosion of titles that helped us launch our new Spanish-language site.

Of course, this is just an extension of what NLS has always done. For more than 90 years, we have distributed free books in audio and Braille to patrons across the country who otherwise cannot read print books because of a visual, physical, or reading disability. We are always adopting new technologies — from circulating the first ever audiobooks on vinyl records in the 1930s to designing our celebrated BARD Mobile app and our Braille eReaders, where patrons can download titles instantly, from a library of hundreds of thousands of books and magazines.

In the years ahead, we look forward to helping more of our patrons share the transformational power of reading. If you or someone you know could benefit from accessible reading materials, visit us anytime.

Remembering Tony Bennett, Gershwin Prize Winner

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Tony Bennett, the Gershwin Prize-winning singer who knew his way around torch ballads, jazz standards and just about every nook and cranny of the Great American Songbook, has passed away at 96. He dazzled and charmed everyone at his Gershwin concert in 2017 and we won’t forget him, his grace and his impeccable touch with a song, anytime soon.

“Tony’s music and voice transcended generations and musical categories and his name is synonymous with the ‘Great American Songbook,’ which he has enriched with a multitude of songs known and loved throughout the world,” Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, said in a statement. “Most importantly, he has stood for ‘the best of the best’ in music, with an unshakeable commitment to excellence and integrity. Our thoughts are with his family and friends.”

His 2017 Gershwin Concert was a stunner, including him performing a spirited version of George and Ira Gershwin’s “They All Laughed.” Stevie Wonder sang, as did Gloria Estefan, Vanessa Williams, Josh Groban and Brian Stokes Mitchell.

“The Gershwins created some of our most beautiful music,” Bennett said at the time. “Their songs had gorgeous poetry and wonderful musicality.”

He sold more than 50 million records in a 70-year career that resulted in a stunning number of awards. He was a Kennedy Center honoree, won a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Grammy Awards and was recognized as a National Endowment for the Arts Jazz Master.

The Library’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song honors the legendary Gershwin songwriting team. Bennett was a natural fit. From his first big hit “Because of You,” to his signature song, “I Left My Heart in San Francisco,” to his late-career duets with an array of stars, Bennett found his way into everyone’s playlist. He was the elder statesman of the Gershwin Awards, as other recipients have included Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Sir Paul McCartney, Carole King, Willie Nelson, Smokey Robinson and, most recently, Joni Mitchell.

His life was a journey through the heart of the 20th century. Born Anthony Dominick Benedetto in Queens, New York, on August 3, 1926, he was just 10 years old when his father died. It was 1936, the Depression hung over the nation, and the family had little money. He had already started singing, though, and with an uncle involved in vaudeville, he had a start. He also had already begun developing his other lifelong artistic endeavor, drawing and painting.

He was drafted into the U.S. Army in 1944 and fought in the infantry as the allies marched across France and into Germany. His unit took part in liberating a concentration camp.

He was back home in 1946. After three years of studying and singing, he got his first big break when jazz star Pearl Bailey asked him to open for a show in New York. Bob Hope was in the audience and took Bennett on the road with him. That first No. 1 hit, “Because of You,” a lush ballad, came when he was 25.

It was 1951, and he was on his way.

Tony Bennett waves farewell to the audience at his 2017 Gershwin Prize concert, surrounded by fellow performers. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Barbara Millicent Roberts is at the Library — But Just Call Her Barbie

Barbara Millicent Roberts debuted in 1959, when Elvis reigned supreme and Berry Gordy had just founded what would become Motown. “The Twilight Zone” dazzled television viewers. It was long ago and far away.

Sixty-four years down the road, Barbie is bigger than ever and hasn’t aged a day. Her latest film adventure, “Barbie,” hits theaters today, turning the world pink for just a little while, but it seems certain she’ll still be a pop-culture icon long after this escapade fades into the rear view.

Since she’s a veteran pop-culture staple, Barbie has a dream home in the nation’s library. The Barbies in the Geppi Collection, above, are held in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. They appear to come from the early 1960s, when the bubble cut was all the rage. That’s the original, 1959 style of bathing suit on the far right, but Barbie’s hair has already shifted from the original pulled-back look. Fans will recognize the early version of Midge, her best friend, on the left. Ken, who debuted in 1961, skipped our photo shoot.

Ken accessories from the early 1960s. Rare Book and Special Collections. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Their adventures would grow to include several pop-culture formats, notably including the comic book.

All these came to the Library in 2018, courtesy of collector and entrepreneur Stephen A. Geppi as part of his landmark 3,000 item collection of comic books, photos, original art, newspapers, buttons, pins and badges, all documenting pop culture. (It included the original storyboards that show the creation of Mickey Mouse.)

Barbie was the creation of Ruth Handler who, along with her husband Elliot, headed up the toy company Mattel. Ruth Handler had seen a racy 1950s German newspaper cartoon, Lilli, which was turned into a doll that was marketed as a gag gift for men. But Ruth saw a market for grown-up dolls intended for girls who could play-act with them, dress and change their looks. They were not asked to be a mother to Barbie, but a best friend.

They sold 300,000 Barbies the first year and have gone to sell more than a billion. It’s a story about a doll who grew up to tell America something about itself.

A colorful selection of Barbie magazines from over the years. Serial and Government Publications Division. Photo: Shawn Miller. Subscribe to the blog— it’s free!

Oppenheimer: The Library’s Collection Chronicles His Life

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Julius Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project and father of the atomic bomb, is the subject of “Oppenheimer,” due out in theaters tomorrow.

His morally complex, intellectually voracious life has been the subject of an astonishing amount of worldwide scientific, cultural, political and historic interest since 5:29 a.m., July 16, 1945, when the first atomic bomb was detonated in New Mexico, ushering in the nuclear era. The test site was named Trinity and the plutonium device was called Gadget. The scientific director of the project, the American who beat the Germans and the Russians to create the world’s most devastating weapon, was J. Robert Oppenheimer.

The Trinity explosion. Image courtesy of the National Security Research Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Weeks later, the bomb was put to devastating use in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

So cataclysmic were the bombs that the world was permanently altered by the work Oppenheimer led at what is now known as the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

“I think it is true to say that atomic weapons are a peril which affect everyone in the world,” Oppenheimer said in a speech in November 1945, when the atomic age was just a couple of months old.

The Gadget, the first atom bomb. Image courtesy of the National Security Research Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Today, the heart of the world’s fascination with Oppenheimer’s life lies in the Manuscript Division of the Library, where his papers are preserved in more than 300 boxes that occupy a line of files that would stretch, if stacked end to end, more than 120 feet. That’s not including more than 70 boxes of research files compiled over 20 years by Martin J. Sherwin for his part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” (Kai Bird shared the Pulitzer as a co-writer.) Those stretch another 27 feet.

It’s a stunningly complete and intellectually dizzying collection.

It’s filled with more than 76,500 items, including handwritten letters, transcripts of illegal FBI wiretaps, brain-busting physics, Nobel Prizes, Red scares, New Deal politics, his own early struggles with his Jewish identity, stormy personal letters and granular detail of lives lived under immense pressure.

Most of all, the files belie its subject’s staggering intellect. Oppenheimer, a polymath genius, spoke six languages and authored dozens of influential research papers, widely regarded by his peers as a phenom. He was friends with Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and a vast array of world-changing scientists.

He was born in 1904 into a wealthy New York family from the upper East Side and always supported by a trust fund, but seemed uncomfortable with such privileges. He often gave friends extravagant gifts, picked up the tab on group nights out and dressed plainly.

He blew through his studies at Harvard University and the University of Cambridge in the U.K. before obtaining his PH.D. at the University of Göttingen, in Germany. He was a professor in physics at two different California universities by the time he was 25.

He was charismatic and cheerfully eccentric (that ubiquitous porkpie hat), beloved by his students and adored by many of the women who passed through his life. Friends remarked on his empathy, his impeccable manners and his good taste in art, wine and literature.

He was rail thin – standing 5’10”, he often weighed less than 125 pounds – but was an accomplished sailor and horseback rider. After a family vacation in a remote area of New Mexico, bought a bare-bones house in the region, falling in love with the high mesas and the austere desert beauty. He became adept at horseback and hiking expeditions into the mountains that could stretch for more than a week in spartan conditions. Later in life, he bought a remote beachfront property on the north shore of St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands, building a house there for his family. (It is today known as Oppenheimer Beach.)

Despite his personal wealth and professional fascination with theoretical physics, he was deeply interested in the practical aspects of social injustice.

The civil war in Spain and the rise of Hitler in Germany worried him, as it did many American intellectuals in the 1930s. Domestically, he was active in causes for civil rights for African Americans, wage rights for workers and immigrants, and took leadership roles in union causes. He helped German Jews escape Nazi Germany and joined a campaign to racially integrate San Francisco swimming pools. He was sympathetic to many causes supported by communists, though he apparently never joined the party.

He never second-guessed his work in building the atom bomb, not even after its use on Japan when the war was nearly over, but he did not support nuclear proliferation and specifically opposed building a hydrogen bomb, which caused much suspicion in government circles.

Oppenheimer and Gen. Leslie Groves, military director of the Manhattan Project, at the Trinity Site. Image courtesy of the National Security Research Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory

For the rest of his life, he was hounded by federal agents for any real or perceived ties to the communism. This including being followed, his home and work phones being illegally wiretapped and FBI listening devices being placed to capture his private speech. Eventually, the Atomic Energy Commission concluded in 1954 that he was a “loyal” American, but still stripped him of his security clearances. It was, historians have agreed, one of the lowest points of the McCarthy Era.

He spent the remainder of his life leading the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He died in 1967 at the age of 62, felled by throat cancer, a result of his decades of chain-smoking.

He was widely viewed as a victim of McCarthyism excesses. Last year, the U.S. Department of Energy vacated the AEC’s 1954 ruling, saying the process was a “flawed process that violated the Commission’s own regulations.”

The passage of time and the development of research, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm wrote in a statement, had revealed the bias and unfairness of the hearings, “while the evidence of his loyalty and love of country have only been further affirmed.”

The Trinity monument. Images courtesy of the National Security Research Center at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Subscribe  to the blog— it’s free!

When Susan (B. Anthony) Met Harriet (Tubman)

This is a guest post by Amanda Zimmerman, a reference specialist in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. It appears in the July-August issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

The 15 lines, scrawled inside an aged biography on the Library’s shelves, casually record a singular moment in suffrage history: the chance meeting of two larger-than-life women at the dawn of a new century, as they looked back on past struggles and ahead to the possibilities of the next generation.

In 1903, Susan B. Anthony, pioneer of the American woman’s suffrage movement, donated her personal library to the Library of Congress. Anthony, helped by her sister Mary and suffragist Ida Husted Harper, prepared the books for their journey from Anthony’s home in Rochester, New York, to the nation’s capital.

Susan B. Anthony. Photo: Bain News Service.

During this process, Anthony annotated many of the volumes, often including personal remembrances and commentary. One noteworthy annotation recalls the day Anthony unexpectedly met another figure that looms large in U.S. history: abolitionist and suffragist Harriet Tubman.

Tubman led more than 300 slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. After the Civil War, she settled in Auburn, New York, and turned her attention to women’s rights.

In 1869, she had been the subject of a biography, “Scenes in the life of Harriet Tubman,” based on author Sarah Bradford’s interviews with her the year before. Anthony owned a copy of the second edition, retitled “Harriet, the Moses of her People,” and before sending the book to the Library inscribed it with a personal memory of meeting Tubman at a gathering in 1903:

Lines from Susan B. Anthony’s book inscription, with “Harriet Tubman” underlined for emphasis. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

“This most wonderful woman — Harriet Tubman — is still alive. I saw her but the other day at the beautiful home of Eliza Wright Osborne, the daughter of Martha C. Wright, in company with Elizabeth Smith Miller, the only daughter of Gerrit Smith, Miss Emily Howland, Rev. Anna H. Shaw and Mrs. Ella Wright Garrison, the daughter of Martha C. Wright and the wife of Wm. Lloyd Garrison Jr. All of us were visiting at Mrs. Osbornes, a real love feast of the few that are left, and here came Harriet Tubman!”

The recollection, short and matter of fact, nevertheless reveals the thrill Anthony felt: She underlined Tubman’s name each time and finished it off with an exclamation point.

Tubman was friendly with prominent suffragists and helped inform their understanding of the particular struggles Black women faced in the fight for suffrage and equality. Anthony came from a family of staunch abolitionists and met and befriended Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth and others throughout her life.

This is not to say that the campaigns for Black suffrage and women’s suffrage were in perfect accord. From the early days of the suffrage struggle, there were heated clashes over whether white women should include Black suffrage in their campaign. This tension complicated both efforts but ultimately left Black women out of the suffrage fight for many years.

While these two women fought parallel, though separate, battles, their paths occasionally did cross. Anthony introduced Tubman at the 1904 meeting of the National American Women’s Suffrage Association in New York. Perhaps it was at the chance meeting at the Osborne house that Anthony asked Tubman to participate in the association’s meeting the following year.

Though neither Tubman nor Anthony lived to see women attain the right to vote in 1920, both left legacies of progress. This book, and the happy memory it brought to Anthony, marks a moment of joy and hope between two influential women soon to pass their batons to the next generation.

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