Library of Congress's Blog, page 23

A Civil War Story: Rebecca Pomroy, Lincoln’s Nurse

This is a guest post by Michelle Smiley, an assistant curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division. It appears in the May-June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Chris Foard went to the Civil War collectors show in Nashville back in 2007, looking for artifacts that combined his two passions, a career as a registered nurse and a devoted pursuit of historical nursing research.

What he found was unexpected and important: a trove of material that sheds light on the sufferings of Abraham Lincoln and his family during the most trying years of his presidency — and the woman who helped them get through it.

Paging through a series of correspondence at the show, Foard discovered a handwritten letter on stationary bearing the Executive Mansion insignia and a vague connection to Lincoln.

Intrigued, he investigated further. The letters, it turned out, came from a collection of correspondence, photographs and personal artifacts related to the life of Rebecca Pomroy, who served as a private nurse for the Lincolns during a time when, in addition to facing the traumas of a bloody war, they had suffered a devastating personal loss.

The collection Foard discovered now resides in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division, thanks to a recent donation by Civil War collector Tom Liljenquist. Lincoln’s papers are in the Manuscript Division.

Rebecca Pomroy. Photo: Brady’s National Photographic Portrait Galleries. Prints and Photographs Division.

Pomroy, born in Boston in 1817, had tended to ailing family members as a young woman and, after she married at 19, to her husband suffering from chronic asthma. Over a five-year period, Pomroy’s husband, two of their children and her mother passed away.

The losses deeply wounded Pomroy. At a friend’s request, she attended a religious camp in Boston, where she experienced a “calling” to do God’s work. Inspired, by July 1861, she had responded to an advertisement in a local paper seeking nurses to tend to soldiers wounded in the recently begun war. By that September, she was in Washington, D.C., doing just that.

With the diversion of able-bodied men to the front lines, nursing presented a new professional arena for women. Pomroy believed they could make unique contributions: “There is so much that a woman can do,” she wrote,” that a man never thinks of.”

In February 1862, as the war raged, Lincoln and his wife, Mary Todd Lincoln, lost their 11-year-old son Willie to typhoid fever, leaving the family in shambles. Their youngest, Tad, still was suffering from the disease. Mary was so distraught over the loss of another child — their son Eddie had died of tuberculosis 12 years earlier at age 3 — that she remained in bed for three weeks and didn’t attend Willie’s funeral.

Willie Lincoln shortly before his death. Photo: Mathew Brady. Prints and Photographs Division.

Fearing for his wife and child, Lincoln sought help. On the recommendation of Dorothea Dix, the superintendent of Army nurses, Pomroy was chosen to serve the Lincoln family. She did not, however, immediately jump at the invitation.

“Dorothea Dix meets with Rebecca Pomroy at Columbian College Hospital and tells her, ‘Pack your bags. We are going to the White House,’ ” Foard said. “But she did not want to go. She was really upset because she thought, ‘Oh, I don’t want to leave my boys.’ ”

Pomroy’s devotion to “my boys,” as she called the soldiers she tended to at the hospital in nearby Meridian Park, testifies to her deep commitment to human care.

Despite her reservations, Pomroy agreed to help the Lincolns, and her talents as a caregiver — and her own experiences of loss and grief — allowed her to grow close to the family. They confided in her. The president discussed the Emancipation Proclamation with her. He accompanied Pomroy on a carriage ride through town and made a special visit to Columbian Hospital, to the surprise and delight of the soldiers and staff.

Although hesitant to request anything in return, Pomroy asked Lincoln to award her only surviving son, George, a commission as second lieutenant in the Army. He obliged. As Pomroy later recounted, “When the President left me, he said he felt that he was still in my debt.”

Still, Pomroy’s inner conflicts lingered — she wanted to get back to the hospital but also to serve the Lincolns. So, Lincoln arranged for Pomroy to resume work at the hospital but still make frequent visits to the White House.

“I have seen the whole of the mansion, and all that pertains to it,” Pomroy wrote on April 23, 1862, “but let me be found sitting at the bed of the poor soldier, wetting his parched lips, closing the dying eyes, and wiping the cold sweat from his brow, rather than be in Mrs. Lincoln’s place with all her honors.”

The letters demonstrate a small sample of the ways in which the correspondence, photographs and artifacts — now part of the Library’s Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Photographs — provide an unparalleled insight into Pomroy’s most intimate thoughts and experiences.

It was customary in the late 19th century for personal mementos to be made from hair. This is a cross made from Rebecca Pomroy’s tightly woven locks. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The collection also includes personal objects — a cross made from Pomroy’s hair, a pair of earrings and an assortment of dried flowers picked from the White House garden — that enliven this seldom-told history of the Lincoln family’s private nurse.

“Pomroy deserves recognition given to other heroic women throughout history,” Foard said. “She was an admirable person not to be forgotten. I think that the Library of Congress will see that through.”

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Paul Newman, Marilyn Monroe, Harry Belafonte: A Star-Studded Day at the Actors Studio

This is a guest post by  Laura Kells, a senior archives specialist in the Manuscript Division. I t also appears in the Library of Congress Magazine.

Imagine all the talent in one room.

In 1951, actor, director and teacher Lee Strasberg became artistic director of the Actors Studio, an influential workshop that helped revolutionize the art of acting.

Over a quarter century, Strasberg drew an amazing assemblage of professional actors to the studio for classes in his system of “method acting,” or simply The Method. His pupils would bring a new, more realistic style of acting to stage and screen.

The Strasberg papers, held in the Manuscript Division, provide a unique glimpse inside the studio. Attendance sheets for 1952 to 1977 reveal which actors took part. Most are typed, alphabetized rosters of names. The sheets from 1955 are an exception: That year, attendees signed in on plain paper, usually in pencil.

Paul Newman, Jack Lord (future star of “Hawaii Five-0”) and Marilyn Monroe consecutively signed into the Actors Studio one day in 1955. Manuscript Division.

The rosters reveal a galaxy of stars, in class honing their craft: Marilyn Monroe, Paul Newman, Harry Belafonte, Eva Marie Saint, Patricia Neal, Rod Steiger, Geraldine Page and Eli Wallach, among many others.

The pages offer signatures to analyze and connections to make: On April 29, Newman signed in boldly as P L Newman, followed soon after by Marilyn Monroe with a faint but distinctive signature. Also in class that day: television actor and director Leo Penn, who would raise one of modern cinema’s biggest stars — two-time Oscar winner Sean Penn.

Picture the scene: On Nov. 19, Martin Balsam signs in, followed immediately by Ben Gazzara, Monroe and Maureen Stapleton, who collectively would win nine Oscars, Tonys, Emmys and Golden Globes and earn 29 more nominations. Just a few spots ahead is Doris Roberts, who a half-century later would win four Emmys as the meddling mom on the TV’s “Everybody Loves Raymond.”

Presumably, the actors signed in and didn’t give it a second thought. But, today, those sheets are an invaluable resource for research into the history and influence of the Actors Studio — and intriguing artifacts for fans of movies, television and theater.

The sign-in sheet from the Actors Studio on Feb. 25, 1955. Manuscript Division.

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Ada Limón Gets Second Term as Poet Laureate

Ada Limón, named the last year, will serve two more years, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden has announced, making the California native the third laureate to serve for as long as three years.

Limón, the author of six poetry collections and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry, is the nation’s 24th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, as the post is officially known. She began her her term in September 2022 and will conclude it in April 2025. She joins Joy Harjo and Robert Pinsky in serving for three years.

“During her first term, Ada Limón has done so much to broaden and promote poetry to reach new audiences,” Hayden said. “She also laid the groundwork for multiple laureate outreach efforts to come, many with federal agencies. A two-year second term gives the laureate and the Library the opportunity to realize these efforts and showcase how poems connect to, and make sense of, the world around us.”

On June 1, Limón will return to the Library to reveal a new poem she has written for NASA’s Europa Clipper mission.  Limón’s poem will be engraved on the spacecraft that will travel 1.8 billion miles to explore Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons.

In August, she will appear at the National Book Festival. Later in the fall, the Library will announce details of Limón’s signature project — a first-ever partnership with the National Park Service and the Poetry Society of America to present poems in national parks across the country — as well as laureate initiatives with federal and nonfederal partners.

“I am beyond honored to serve for another two years as the poet laureate of the United States,” Limón said. “Everywhere I have traveled during my first term, both nationally and internationally, I’ve been reminded that poetry brings people together.”

During her first year, Limón participated in two events hosted by Dr. Jill Biden, first lady of the United States; one for the National Student Poets Program; and the other with Brigette Macron, wife of the president of France, during a state visit.

Limón also participated in an event hosted by Beatriz Gutiérrez Müller, wife of the president of Mexico, for the North American Leaders Summit in Mexico City. In Buenos Aires, Limón participated in a conversation with Argentine poets Laura Wittner and Daniela Auginsky for the Library’s Palabra Archive.

In April, for National Poetry Month, Limón served as the guest editor for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day series in a first-ever series collaboration between the academy and the Library.

Limón is the author of six poetry collections, including “The Carrying,” which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and “Bright Dead Things,” a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award. She is the recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Provincetown Fine Arts Work Center and the Kentucky Foundation for Women.

Her newest poetry collection, “The Hurting Kind,” was published as part of a three-book deal that includes publication of “Beast: An Anthology of Animal Poems,” featuring work by major poets over the past century, to be followed by a volume of new and selected poems.

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Researcher Story: Georges Adéagbo and Abraham Lincoln

This winter, President Lincoln’s Cottage in Washington, D.C., exhibited “Create to Free Yourselves: Abraham Lincoln and the History of Freeing Slaves in America,” an installation by Georges Adéagbo. In creating it, Adéagbo visited the Library’s Manuscript Division to research Abraham Lincoln’s words and handwriting.  Stephan Köhler, Adéagbo’s collaborator and interpreter, accompanied him and translated his remarks here.

Since 1971, Adéagbo has been assembling found objects into award-winning private installations and environments. He studied law in Côte d’Ivoire, continued his studies in France and returned afterward to his native Benin.

Part of Georges Adéagbo’s installation on Lincoln.

How do you conceive of projects?

All my projects are site or theme specific. I do not work like a painter or sculptor, who finishes the production of his works in his studio and then sends them in crates to galleries or museums. All my installations are custom-made, and I realize them after months of preparing the components in the exhibition space, which becomes my studio so to speak. It is a dialogue of request and proposal.

When invited to a group show with a set theme, I start with its title and discuss my contribution with the curators. If it’s a solo show, I will decide on the title. I take my time to think about it, as it influences the perception of the audience.

How do you go about selecting objects?

For each project, I do a research visit to study the space and get the energy of a city or a house, as in this example of the President Lincoln’s Cottage. I see my work as archaeology of mentalities.

In many installations, I write: “Archaeology is the research and discovery of the mysteries and the energies that form a person, a city or an entire country.”

I collect over months both things and images in the city the exhibition takes place and bring them to Benin. There, I write texts about what I saw and glue them with the photos on a big sheet of brown packing paper. Then they are reproduced by sign painters and sculptors.

What drew you to Lincoln?

I first read about him in the late 1990s and was impressed by his determination to educate himself, become a lawyer, run for president and write the Emancipation Proclamation, which led to abolition of slavery.

When I was invited to have a solo show in New York City in 2000, I decided to dedicate it to Lincoln. It was called “Abraham, l’ami de Dieu.” I use references to the Bible as metaphors for justice and prudence, not because I am adherent of the Christian church. I think a lot about Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his son. I think achievements and changes can be achieved only through a person making sacrifices.

In 2007, the Philadelphia Museum of Art invited me to reinstall the work in an extended version and bought the installation. At that time, my research was based only on books and the internet.

For the Installation “Create to Free Yourselves,” I received a Smithsonian Institution artists’ research fellowship and spent November 2021 in Washington, D.C.

What did your research involve?

My adviser was Nancy Bercaw, curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. She and her colleagues showed me items Lincoln used — his golden wrist watch, his black coat with worn-out edges — and life casts made of his face and hands. I also viewed the announcement of his death and many lithographs showing him with his family and satires of him by his opponents. I had these images realized by the artist Benoît Adanhoumè, and they appeared on the paintings and banners in the exhibition.

I also viewed images of Lincoln on horseback, commuting everyday between the White House and the cottage. I was impressed by him refusing to have bodyguards. So, I had a sculpture of Lincoln on horseback carved in Benin by Hugues Hountondji, who often works for me.

On the walls of Lincoln’s cottage, I saw quotes in Lincoln’s writing and thought they were very inspiring — reproductions of letters and the Emancipation Proclamation. Original handwriting transmits the energy and spirit of the person writing.

So, Stephan Köhler and I asked Nancy Bercaw if she could get us in touch with the curators at the Library of Congress. That’s how we met Michelle Krowl, a Manuscript Division historian, who generously showed us manuscripts by Lincoln from the Library’s collections.

I write a dozen pages myself every day, and I almost felt my hand moving in front of Lincoln’s writing as I gazed. We took photos of Lincoln’s famous April 4, 1864, letter to newspaper editor Albert G. Hodges, in which Lincoln recounts words he uttered in an earlier conversation: “I am naturally anti-slavery. If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” That seems to me the essence of Lincoln’s attitude.

Almost exactly a year before the end of the war, Lincoln writes a newspaper editor: “If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong.” Manuscript Division.

How did you incorporate Lincoln’s writing?

I made a collage with the photo of the manuscript and my hand holding Lincoln’s golden pocket watch and gave it to Adanhoumè, who made a wonderful painting from it.

I integrated it in the installation in the Lincolns’ cottage bedroom, where he wrote the Emancipation Proclamation. The process and motivation for abolition was complex, I know, and others were involved, including Frederick Douglass, for example. Yet, Lincoln made this important first step, which opened doors for others.

What’s next for the installation?

It will soon be reinstalled in a modified version at Chesterwood, the former summer home and studio of Daniel Chester French, in Stockbridge, Massachusetts. He is the artist who created the Abraham Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C. [French’s papers are at the Library.] The opening will be July 29. Then, toward the end of this year, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African Art will host the installation.

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Danny Elfman, Legendary Film Composer, Debuts Classical Work at LOC

Danny Elfman has composed or produced scores for more than 100 films, including blockbusters such as “Batman” and “Men in Black.” He’s composed themes for TV hits, as classic as “The Simpsons” and as recent as “Wednesday.”

He was at the Library this week to present something more subtle: the world premiere of his latest classical work.

“Suite for Chamber Orchestra” debuted Thursday night at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill as part of an evening concert by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, honoring the legacy of composer Andre Kostelanetz. The Russian-born Kostelanetz moved to the U.S. in 1922, where he became hugely popular during the middle years of the 20th century. The Library has his papers and commissioned Elfman’s work along with the Andre Kostelanetz Royalty Pool, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.

“The beautiful thing about concert music is that you can always go back and develop it more,” Elfman said in an interview earlier Thursday with the Music Division’s Paul Sommerfeld, while touring some of the Library’s musical treasures. “With film music, you write it, it’s recorded and it’s gone forever.”

“Suite” is Elfman’s ninth major classical piece, with commissions coming from entities such as the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Czech National Symphony Orchestra. His first classical piece, “Serenada Schizophrana,” debuted in 2005 at Carnegie Hall in New York and was commissioned and performed by the American Composers Orchestra.

Elfman looks over a selection of classical music scores during a Library tour. Paul Sommerfeld of the Music Division points out highlights. Photo: Shawn Miller.

It might sound like heady work for a guy who started out fronting the rock band Oingo Boingo and whose first film composition was for “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” but Elfman’s classical interests run deep. 

He grew up in Los Angeles and didn’t take any interest in music until his parents moved across town when he was in high school, meaning that he had to make new friends. One of those was into classical music and played some recordings by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky.

It opened up a “whole new world,” Elfman said. Stravinsky led him to Dmitri Shostakovich and Béla Bartók and finally to Sergei Prokofiev, his true inspiration.

“The first time I heard Prokofiev, I just felt like this was music from my blood,” he said. “I have Russian roots, but knew nothing of Russian music. I was connecting on this deep, almost cellular level.”

Still, he had little formal training – he didn’t finish high school, only getting a diploma later, he said – and fell into a musical troupe in France while on a youthful travel jaunt that was intended to take him around the world on the cheap. Instead, after months of travel, he was back in L.A.,playing in a surrealist music group his brother was putting together, The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo.

Elfman later became the front man as the group transitioned to being a more straightforward rock group just known as Oingo Boingo. The band was more of a cult favorite than a mainstream attraction, but one important fan was an aspiring film director named Tim Burton.

Burton asked Elfman to score his first feature film, “Pee-wee’s Big Adventure,” in 1985. A film/musical partnership was born. “Beetlejuice,” “Batman,” “Edward Scissorhands,” “Batman Returns,” “Big Fish,” “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and “Corpse Bride” among others followed.

The Library’s copyright deposit of Elfman’s 1988 score for “Beetlejuice,” on display for Elfman during his Library tour.

He’s also done dramas (“Good Will Hunting,” earning one of his four Oscar nominations), and any number of superhero films, from “Spider-Man” to “Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness.”

It’s this work that’s won Elfman, now 69, a host of younger fans.

David Betancourt reports on all aspects of comic books culture for the Washington Post and teaches a course on the subject at the University of Maryland. There’s a  scene in “Batman” in which our hero (Michael Keaton) is driving his Batmobile with Vicki Vale (Kim Basinger) through Gotham that he always plays for students.

“I always tell the class to listen to Elfman’s score in a scene with few words and feel how impactful it is in pushing the tension, mystery, fear and suspense,” he says. “I want them to know that Elfman’s score is a strong supporting character in the movie that helped it become a classic.”

Given all this success in a high-profile industry, why pursue the hard work of composing classical music, in which the audiences and public attention are but a fraction?

“I love writing for film, but you can’t write what you want to write,” Elfman said. “You have to write to serve the film.” Besides, he added: “I’m just trying to challenge myself. You keep yourself moving or you die, artistically. You become a relic.”

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LGBTQ+ at the LOC!

Lilli Vincenz on a personal camping trip. Photo: Unknown. Lilli Vincenz collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

 

One evening in the late summer of 1961, a young woman named Lilli Vincenz walked into a “kind of a lesbian bar” called the Ace of Spades in Provincetown, Massachusetts. She had never been in such an establishment before, and this was a “very strange-looking shack, half-hidden behind a restaurant, with all kinds of old utensils hanging on the outside as ornaments.”

She was never the same again.

“I feel different,” she wrote that night in her journal. “To look at someone and smile and see the smile returned by a girl — this has never happened to me before. … Oh, it was wonderful to flirt with a girl!”

Vincenz, whose papers are preserved at the Library, would go on to be one of the nation’s most influential lesbian activists in the early days of the gay rights movement. Her delightful moment of self-discovery is just one dot in the Library’s sprawling collection of LGBTQ+ material that captures the joy, pain and perseverance of a demographic that has challenged the nation to uphold its post-Enlightenment ideals of fair play.

“Vincenz is a really important collection,” said Ryan Reft, who, along with fellow historian Elizabeth Novara, oversees LGBTQ+ collections in the Manuscript Division. “First, her papers, along with those of activist Frank Kameny, serve as a window into the homophile movement of the midcentury and its fight for equal rights, as well as documenting the developments in the LGBTQ+ community that followed. Second, Vincenz also provides a lesbian voice, which our collections sometimes lack. While one can discover in our collections pockets in which notable figures appear, we are working to diversify the voices archived in the division generally but particularly as it pertains to LGBTQ+ history.”

Frances Benjamin Johnston . 1896 Self portrait. Prints and Photographs Division.

Major American lives and subjects fill significant collections — Frances Benjamin Johnston, Leonard Bernstein, Alvin Ailey, Alla Nazimova, Cole Porter, the AIDS Memorial Quilt Archive — as well as midcentury activist groups such as the Daughters of Bilitis and the Mattachine Society.

Behind the big names, there are countless moments of smaller lives and subjects. There is the tiny collection of photographs of gender-nonconforming older adults by photographer Jess Dugan from the 2018 book “To Survive on This Shore.” There are wonderful moments, such as the recording of Audre Lorde reading her poetry in a 1982 appearance in the Coolidge Auditorium.

Today, the Library collects LGBTQ+ material at the research level, and the Pride in the Library: LGBTQ+ Voices in the Library’s Collections research guide is an excellent starting point. There also are specially curated exhibits such as “Serving in Silence: LGBTQ+ Veterans.”

“I’m glad that we’re able to talk now,” said Tedosio Louis Samora, a U.S. Army veteran who served in the 519th Military Intelligence Battalion in Vietnam, in a filmed interview with the Veterans History Project. Samora, part of a Mexican-American family that has a tradition of military service, discussed the confrontational, even violent emotions involved in coming out to his brothers, who also served in the conflict.

Bayard Rustin at a press conference on the Civil Rights March on Washington. Photo: Warren K. Leffler. Prints and Photographs Division.

The nation’s engagement with queer issues began almost as soon as the first settlers landed at Jamestown in 1607. Take, for instance, the 1629 Virginia General Court case of Thomas(ine) Hall. Hall was an intersex person whose genitalia and gender identity confounded local authorities. A judge finally ruled that Hall was both a “a man and a woeman” and ordered Hall, then about 28, to always wear a man’s breeches and shirt and a woman’s apron and cap.

Skip to a summer night in 1870 and we find Walt Whitman, the nation’s poet, dashing off a few quick lines to Peter Doyle, his intimate companion two decades his junior: “Good night, Pete, — Good night my darling son — here is a kiss for you, dear boy — on the paper here — a good long one.” The final “o” is smudged, as if Whitman did indeed give the page a smack.

A generation later, Johnston — a renowned photographer of everything from U.S. presidents to architecture — took a provocative self-portrait. She posed as a “new woman” in 1896: Hiking her skirt to the knee, holding a beer stein in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She would go on to become not just a pioneer of photography but as a lesbian icon.

In the 1910s, few people were more glamorous than stage actress, director and producer Eva Le Gallienne. Among her other female lovers, she sometimes dated the equally glamorous actress and producer Alla Nazimova.

Alla Nazimova, one of the most famous actress in the first three decades of the 20th century. Photo: Unknown. 1908. Prints and Photographs Division.

Nazimova’s papers at the Library document her larger-than-life persona. A Russian actress and accomplished violinist who studied under the legendary actor and director Konstantin Stanislavski, she immigrated to the U.S. and became a huge stage and film star. In 1918, she was making $13,000 per week, even more than Mary Pickford.

She was also “Broadway’s most daring lesbian,” according to “The Sewing Circle,” a 1995 history of “Female Stars Who Loved Other Women” by Axel Madsen. (She had a “lavender marriage” for several years to help disguise her relationships.)

Most famous for her work in the plays of Ibsen and Chekhov, she produced and starred in the avant-garde silent film “Salome,” a 1922 adaptation of the Oscar Wilde play. It was a disaster when released but was added to the National Film Registry in 2000 and today is regarded as a key moment in the history of gay cinema. In a 2013 book, “The Girls: Sappho Goes to Hollywood,” author Diana McLellan dubbed Nazimova “the founding mother of Sapphic Hollywood.”

Nazimova’s most lasting contribution to Hollywood-wide lore may have been her Sunset Strip estate, which she called, tongue firmly in cheek, “the Garden of Alla.” It was a huge mansion on 2.5 acres and a haven for exclusive parties. She sold it in the late ’20s with the stipulation she could stay rent-free for the rest of her life. The new owners added an “h” to “Alla,” to complete the Islamic reference, and two dozen private villas.

It became a prominent (often scandalous) backdrop to the golden age of Hollywood, the subject of histories and novels, mentioned in films and plays. A name-check of guests is astonishing: Clara Bow, Errol Flynn, Greta Garbo, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Frank Sinatra, D.W. Griffith, Barbara Stanwyck, Eartha Kitt and Ronald Reagan.

By the 1940s, Nazimova was in her 60s and her career, a good bit of her health (she’d had cancer) and most of her income was gone. Still, she was the affectionate godmother of actress Nancy Davis, who later married Reagan and became first lady of the United States. And she was living openly with her longtime partner, actress Glesca Marshall.

A new era began just a few years later, with activists beginning to wage battles for open acceptance at work, play, military service, worship and marriage. The Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian activist group, was formed in 1955, published a magazine called The Ladder and was a mainstay to early activists such as Vincenz.

Frank Kameny at DC’s Capital Pride Parade in 2010. Photo: Elvert Barnes.

Which brings us to the vast collection of Frank Kameny, founder of the Mattachine Society of Washington.

A native New Yorker, gay World War II combat veteran and a Harvard-educated astronomer, he became one of the nation’s most influential gay voices from the late 1950s until his death in 2011. He was particularly involved in the “homophile movement” of the 1960s before the Stonewall Riot in 1969 in New York created the modern gay-rights era. So profound are his contributions to the American cause that his house in northwest D.C. — the Mattachine Society’s headquarters, salon and nerve center — is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

His papers at the Library are vast — more than 56,000 items. Perhaps his greatest victory came in 1973, when his decadelong campaign to have homosexuality removed from the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders finally bore fruit. The organization declared that being gay was no longer considered a mental illness.

“VICTORY!!!!” he wrote in the subject heading of a Dec. 15, 1973, letter to his friends and supporters. “We have been ‘cured’!”

He might have been premature in predicting the acceptance of LGBTQ+ life in the U.S., but his enthusiasm at the moment is preserved at a pivotal moment in national history.

This article appears in the May-June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

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Jeffrey Yoo Warren: Seeing Lost Enclaves

This is a guest post by Sahar Kazmi, a writer-editor in the Office of the Chief Communications Officer. It also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

The Library boasts many ways history-lovers can immerse themselves with its treasures from afar. They can explore online collections, tune in to virtual lectures, discover extraordinary tales on our blogs.

Now, 2023 Innovator in Residence Jeffrey Yoo Warren is building another doorway to the past with his project, “Seeing Lost Enclaves: Relational Reconstructions of Erased Historic Neighborhoods of Color.”

Using 3D modeling techniques and insights from the collections, Yoo Warren is developing a virtual reconstruction of the once-bustling Chinatown district in Providence, Rhode Island. A vibrant enclave 100 years ago, the Chinatown of Providence largely has been erased from historical memory.

In his work with the Library, Yoo Warren will expand his research to include other early 20th-century Chinatowns in places such as New Orleans, Denver and Truckee, California.

Using the Library’s archival photos, newspapers, maps, film and audio recordings as well as work with local communities, Yoo Warren’s “relational reconstruction” process aims to make these places “visitable” again, if only virtually. He’ll also experiment with multisensory elements like virtual weather and soundscapes.

The full effect, he hopes, will give audiences a visceral — and maybe even deeply personal — feeling of walking into a forgotten reality.

Although his 3D visualization is centered on Chinatowns, Yoo Warren’s work also will produce a “relational reconstruction toolkit” to inspire the public to develop similar recovery efforts for other ancestral spaces. The toolkit will feature resources and tutorials on using the Library’s place-based materials to reclaim lost histories through immersive digital reconstructions.

As an artist and educator, Yoo Warren believes the historical erasure he’s addressing is not only a challenge of archival documentation but a matter of community meaning and loss. In creatively rebuilding the sights, sounds and emotion of lost spaces, his work will help the Library enrich the nation’s cultural memory and, with some technological help, construct another bridge between the records of the past and the potential of tomorrow.

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Midori: Music and the Instrument That Makes It

This is a guest post by Midori, a classical violinist who made her debut with the New York Philharmonic at age 11. She plays the 1734 Guarnerius del Gesù “ex-Huberman” and uses four bows — two by Dominique Peccatte, one by François Peccatte and one by Paul Siefried. This article appears in the March-April 2023 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

What is the relationship between musicians and musical instruments and the music that, together, they ultimately produce? To me, that is almost a spiritual question, of alignments, of meldings of purpose.

I consider my violin to be my partner in music-making. It is almost 300 years old, with so much history animating it. Any number of renowned violinists have played this august instrument over time, so that it is a repository of our legacy of iconic music — a keeper of many secrets, as it were — now abetting me in my own forays as an interpreter of so many amazing works that have enriched and continue to enrich humankind through the centuries.

For me, this instrument is all but alive. When I hold my violin in my hands, I know it so well. I feel that the violin has a personality, it has force of character, and its particularity has become a part of what I do.

After several hundred years, this violin does not merely defer. A long-lived instrument, one that requires ongoing maintenance (at certain times it must be deeply cleaned, or a new bridge is needed, the fingerboard planed, etc.), it is changeable and it is challenging. It plays differently from day to day, depending on the weather and the atmospheric conditions in a performance space. But that constant challenge, of responding to the different colors this great instrument provides in different circumstances — it inspires me.

An instrument of so many moods and needs, my violin forces me to work hard to commune with it successfully. In return, it has so much to offer, an incredible range of colors and sounds. Its sound can be rich but also velvety at times and light as a feather at other times. The music it is prepared to yield is crystal clear, deep and complex — all at the same time.

A great instrument, tested over centuries, ever changing and ever deepening, does not merely succumb to any player, but through joined effort it offers great rewards. My violin may be a “diva” (as my luthier calls it), but I respect its lineage and its prideful uniqueness. Music-making is a living process, and I work hard to bring out this instrument’s brilliance, allowing our music to reach toward a higher place.

This partnership spurs me ever forward, now over decades. I continue to strive to interpret great compositions of many eras both thoughtfully and boldly, while carrying our art form forward into future realms. In today’s increasingly interconnecting world, I pursue the added goal of bringing music to people who in some ways are left out, who often don’t have ready access to live performance (because of trying circumstances or where they live) — in the doing providing joy, consolation, solace, healing, contemplation. My violin, finicky as it may be, has survived and thrived over centuries, and so long as I treat it carefully and lovingly, we can sing out together, sharing an endless range of timeless ideas and beauty — and, hopefully, inspiration.

This article first appeared in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

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Wynton Marsalis, “Black Codes” and Thoughts on the Highway

It is midafternoon on a recent weekday and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis is driving across the Southwest, taking the call on speakerphone that his 1985 album, “Black Codes (From the Underground),” has been inducted into the 2023 class of the National Recording Registry.

“Where are we now?” he asks fellow passengers in the car. “New Mexico?”

“New Mexico,” a voice confirms.

Travel has been hectic of late. Marsalis, trumpeter, bandleader, the managing and artistic director of Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York and perhaps the most internationally recognized jazz musician of the era, has just wrapped up a tour in Asia with multiple stops in South Korea and Japan.

The man is 61. He’s been working gigs for 48 years, since he was a 13-year-old child prodigy on Bourbon Street. He’s recorded more than 60 jazz and classical albums, won the Pulitzer Prize, 9 nine Grammys and been a star of numerous documentaries, not least Ken Burns’ “Jazz.”

Now, he’s on the road again, heading east into the middle of America, empty desert stretching out in all directions.

“We left Los Angeles at 12 o’clock midnight — I mean, Santa Barbara — and now it’s 1:51 p.m., where we are, and we’re just in New Mexico.” He’s got time to chat, he laughs.

“Black Codes” is one of 25 pieces inducted into the NRR this year, ranging from 1908 mariachi recordings to a 2012 release of a classical piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. The Library has nearly 4 million recordings; only 625 are in the NRR.

“Black Codes” is the first recording by Marsalis to make the list. He points out that after a career that spans five decades, the Library selected an album he recorded when he was 23.

“People like it, it’s an OK record,” he allows. “But it’s some (expletive) before I even learned how to play.”

This doesn’t come across as false modesty given his straightforward, cheerfully profane delivery, but as a common assessment of most people of a certain age — who among us wants to be reminded of our work product in our early 20s?

Still, he’s happy to reconstruct the basics.

The album was recorded in New York over four days in 1985. It was his sixth record. It’s seven songs of hard-swinging jazz that addressed, if in abstract fashion, the lingering societal effects of the Black Codes, the notorious post-Civil War laws that his native Louisiana and other Southern states used to keep black citizens in a violent state of oppression. One of his brothers, Branford, himself a renowned musician, played sax. His youngest brother, Jason, then just 7, is pictured on the album cover as a school student.

“A lot of 20th-century civil rights cases were based on the Black Codes, on laws that tried to politically undress the achievements of the Civil War,” Marsalis explains.

“From the Underground” refers to Black resistance to those laws: “No matter how defeated things seem, there’s always an idea in the pursuit of freedom that is subversive to anti-democratic thinking. I was very conscious of that (when recording).”

The album cover wasn’t subtle. It’s a schoolroom photograph of a lone black child (the aforementioned Jason Marsalis), gazing at a blackboard where the “Three-Fifths Compromise” — the constitutional measure that described enslaved Black people as three-fifths of a human being — was written out in chalk as the lesson of the day. Part of it is erased. Replacing it are words also written in chalk: “Black Codes (From the Underground).” A trumpet rests on the teacher’s desk.

On the album, the family and cultural inspirations are also practical.

Marsalis drew on his father’s history as a jazz musician and teacher in New Orleans, particularly a 1960s song called “Magnolia Triangle,” for the melody line of the title cut. The bass line was inspired by the classic New Orleans standard “Hey Pocky A-Way,” by The Meters.

“We live here for whatever our time is, and people represent us in different ways,” Marsalis is saying, the miles whizzing past. “The art forms, of course, speak across time. They tend to speak more successfully than philosophy because philosophy has to be written in a symbolic language that’s easily misconstrued. Art is much more direct.”

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The 2023 National Recording Registry – Mariah Carey, Eurythmics, Jimmy Buffett, Wynton Marsalis, John Lennon (And Lots More)

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Madonna’s cultural ascent with “Like a Virgin,” Mariah Carey’s perennial No. 1 Christmas hit, Queen Latifah’s groundbreaking “All Hail the Queen” and Daddy Yankee’s reggaeton explosion with “Gasolina” are some of the defining sounds of the nation’s history and culture that will join the Library’s 2023 class of the National Recording Registry, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced today.

The 25 additions in the 2023 class span more than a century, from 1908 to 2012. They range from the first recordings of Mariachi music and early sounds of the Blues to radio journalism leading up to World War II, and iconic sounds from pop, country, rock, R&B, jazz, rap, and classical music. It also includes the first sounds of a video game to join the registry with the Super Mario Bros. theme.

Carey, Jimmy Buffett, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart (the Eurythmics), Graham Nash, Wynton Marsalis and Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich joined the Library for interviews about their defining works. You can see them in the video above and in longer interview segments on the Library’s social media channels. The interviews will be added to Library archives as well.

“The National Recording Registry preserves our history through recorded sound and reflects our nation’s diverse culture,” Hayden said. “The national library is proud to help ensure these recordings are preserved for generations to come, and we welcome the public’s input on what songs, speeches, podcasts or recorded sounds we should preserve next. We received more than 1,100 public nominations this year for recordings to add to the registry.”

A 1994 promotional still from the release of “All I Want For Christmas Is You.”

“Christmas” is Carey’s first song to make the NRR and she was delighted with the news. She cowrote the song in 1994 when she was just 22, thinking back on her often turbulent childhood years in Long Island and how she had always longed for Christmas to be a lovely holiday for the family. It rarely was, and she turned that longing into what is now a cultural touchstone.

“I tried to tap into my childhood self, my little girl self, and say, ‘What are all the things I wanted when I was a kid?’” she said. “I wanted it to be a love song because that’s kind of what people relate to, but also a Christmas song that made you feel happy.”

After working out a the lyrics and a melody line, she brought a demo tape to her then-songwriting partner and producer Walter Afanasieff, and the pair worked together to create its retro “wall of sound” production, as if it might have been a recorded in the 1960s. A modest success upon release, it’s grown to be a cottage industry unto itself. It has been featured in films, Carey wrote a children’s book based on it and filmed three different music videos. It’s hit No. 1 on pop charts each of the last four years, setting Carey’s pop-culture image as the Queen of Christmas.

“I’m most proud of the arrangements, the background vocal arrangements,” she said, describing the sessions with her supporting vocalists as one of the best experiences of her recording career.

“‘All I Want for Christmas…’ is sort of in its own little category,” she said, “and I’m very thankful for it.”

The recordings selected for the NRR bring the number of titles on the registry to 625, representing a minuscule portion of the national library’s vast recorded sound collection of nearly 4 million items.

This year’s selections features the voices of women whose recordings have helped define and redefine their genres. Madonna’s 1984 smash hit album “Like a Virgin” would fuel her ascent in the music world as she took greater control of her music and her image. Of the nine songs originally on the album, four became top 10 hits. Queen Latifah is the first female rapper to join the registry with her debut album “All Hail the Queen” from 1989 when she was just 19 years old. Her album showed rap could cross genres including reggae, hip-hop, house and jazz — while also opening opportunities for other female rappers.

Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart in their Eurythmics heyday. Photo: Eurythmics.

By the 1980s, Annie Lennox and Dave Stewart had been in and out of British-based music groups for some time without much success. Flat broke in 1982, Stewart managed to borrow enough money to buy a couple of synthesizers and a prototype of a drum machine so basic that it was housed in a wooden case.

One night in their studio — the loft of a picture-framing factory in central London — he got the drum kit going and hit a couple of chords on the synthesizer. Lennox sat up bolt upright, as if she’d touched an electric wire. She went to her own synthesizer, played a riff against his beat and soon ad-libbed a lyric, a wry, ironic comment on their impoverished status: “sweet dreams are made of this.”

“It’s a mantra, almost like a Haiku poem, a coded message, a commentary about the human condition,” Lennox said of the song. “You can use it as a happy birthday song or a celebratory song…it could be anything. Looking back, I love the way people have identified with it.”

With roots in Panama in the 1980s, reggaeton has been described as reggae, reggae en Español, dancehall, hip-hop and dembow. But it was Daddy Yankee’s 2004 hit single “Gasolina” that ignited a massive shift for reggaeton with its crossover appeal from Latin radio to broad audiences. “Gasolina” appeal was so great that it even moved some radio stations to switch formats from English to Spanish to tap into this revolution.

New Orleans jazz legend Wynton Marsalis explained that his “Black Codes (From the Underground)” album – recorded in 1985 when he was just 23 – was hard-swinging jazz that addressed the lingering societal effects of the Black Codes, the notorious post-Civil War laws that his native Louisiana and other Southern states used to keep black citizens in a violent state of oppression.

“A lot of 20th century civil rights cases were based on the Black Codes, on laws that tried to politically undress the achievements of the Civil War,” he said in an interview. The “From the Underground” part of the title refers to Black resistance to those laws: “No matter how defeated things seem, there’s always an idea in the pursuit of freedom that is subversive to anti-democratic thinking. I was very conscious of that (when recording).”

Photo courtesy of Jimmy Buffett.

And finally, for everyone who has been near a beach in the past four decades, “Margaritaville.”

It’s hard to believe now, but early in the 1970s Jimmy Buffett was a little-know singer/songwriter who had one modest hit, “Come Monday.”

But, hanging out in Austin, Texas, with friends Jerry Jeff Walker and Willie Nelson, he had a long night on the town. The next afternoon, he he had a tasty Margarita at a bar. Still sipping, he started scribbling a song on a cocktail napkin, finished it later while stuck in a traffic jam on the Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys and played “Margaritaville” for the first time in a little bar in Key West that night when it was “probably six hours old.”

People liked it and he routinely played it during his live concerts for a couple of years. When he finally recorded it in 1977, it was an instant Top 10 hit and has since become a pop culture staple. Buffett, a working-class kid from the Mississippi Gulf Coast, was appalled by the standard music contracts of the time that did not let songwriters keep the publishing rights to their works, so he was always attuned to making money on his tours and selling merchandise to fans as a means of more lucrative income.

Over time, this entrepreneurship with his biggest hit morphed into an astonishing array of “Margaritaville” themed businesses and products — now including bestselling books, a popular chain of restaurants, a radio channel, a cruise line and 55-and-older living communities. His tours are still wildly popular, too.

The key to the song’s resonance in American culture, Buffett told the Library, was that people were looking for a song to make them feel good and be happy.

“You’re lucky enough at some point to put your thumb on the pulse of something that people can connect with,” he said. “It’s an amazing and lucky thing to happen to you, and that happened with ‘Margaritaville.’”

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