Library of Congress's Blog, page 27

My Job: Katie Klenkel, Connecting Visitors to the World’s Largest Library

Katie Klenkel. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Describe your work at the Library.

I’m the chief of the Visitor Engagement Office. I oversee a team of people — both staff and volunteers — who welcome thousands of visitors to the Library’s public spaces and exhibitions each day.

In addition to acting as front-line customer service, we also help visitors connect to the Library on a personal level and become lifelong users of our services and resources. Sometimes that connection is made through a guided experience or a public program, but more often it’s through a one-on-one interaction with a volunteer.

I also support special projects, such as expanding our evening hours, recruiting and training volunteers, updating wayfinding signage and building resources as well as hundreds of other tasks designed to improve every visitor’s experience.

How did you prepare for your position?

I traveled a bit of a winding road to get here. I started my career in building and event management and visitor services in higher education, with roles at the University of Maryland, the Catholic University of America and George Mason University.

I transitioned to the Library in 2015 as the public programs manager and, after four years in event and program operations, moved to program administration for the Center for Learning, Literacy and Engagement.CLLE. I became chief of Visitor Engagement in December 2020, just as we were ramping up plans to reopen to the general public. I think a lot of the qualities needed to succeed in a higher-education space (enthusiasm, flexibility, a positive attitude) translated well to visitor engagement.

What are some of your standout projects?

I will never forget the effort and dedication it took for our team to reopen the Library to the general public after the March 13, 2020, COVID-19 closure. We came back in July 2021 with timed-entry passes, capacity restrictions, virtual volunteering and masking requirements. I’m extremely proud of the way we slowly and steadily restored operations without having to drastically alter or roll back our plans.

The project involved dozens of staff members from across the Library, including leadership from the director of our center. We could not have successfully reopened without the support of the Health Services Directorate, the Security and Emergency Preparedness team and so many others. We safely restored on-site volunteering in December 2021, which was a huge milestone for us — it doesn’t feel like the Library without our dedicated volunteers.

What have been your most memorable experiences at the Library?

Some of my favorite memories have been one-on-one interactions with our incredible visitors. I’ll never forget the father-daughter duo that drove all the way from Indiana for her 16th birthday so she could get her Library of Congress researcher card and study in one of our reading rooms. I also remember a lovely couple that flew in from Atlanta for their 40th anniversary to see the Library, because the woman was a lifelong public librarian and had always wanted to visit.

And even small moments, like when I manage the line outside of the building and there are young kids bouncing with excitement because they can’t wait to see the “biggest library ever.” It’s a daily reminder to appreciate how special this place really is.

Lakota “Winter Count” Artistry

Detail from the Lakota winter count. Manuscript Division.

The winter counts created by some Native American peoples chronicle centuries of their history in pictures: battles fought, treaties struck, buffalo hunts, meteor showers, droughts, famines, epidemics. The counts — painted mostly on buffalo hides until the species was hunted to nearextinction in the late 19th century — served as a way for tribes of the Great Plains to document significant events and pass a record of them from generation to generation. Each year, a band’s elders would choose the most important event in the life of the community. The winter count keeper — generally, a trusted elder — would paint a scene on the hide to represent it, adding to the years of images that came before. Each individual image is called a “glyph.”

One such keeper was Battiste Good, born around 1821 under the name Wapostan Gi, or Brown Hat. Good was a member of the Sicangu (or Brulé) Lakota, who at the time inhabited the plains west of the Missouri River in present-day South Dakota and Nebraska. In 1868, Good was present at the signing of the Treaty of Fort Laramie, under which the Lakotas surrendered many thousands of acres of their lands in exchange for the establishment of the Great Sioux Reservation — a large part of what’s now western South Dakota, including the sacred Black Hills.

In 1878, the Rosebud Agency was officially established in South Dakota, and the U.S. government began relocating bands of Sicangus and Oglalas to the new agency. While there, Good copied his winter count into a drawing book given to him by William Corbusier, a U.S. Army surgeon. He introduced Arabic numerals to the count and labeled each event by year — the entry for 1868 shows Good himself shaking hands with Gen. William Harney following the signing of the Laramie treaty. Good died in 1894, and the responsibility of the winter count fell to his son, High Hawk. In 1907, he used watercolor, pen, ink and paper to produce the copy of the Good winter count shown below. High Hawk’s work eventually was donated to the Library’s Manuscript Division, where today it chronicles a history long gone by but not forgotten.

Two colorful lines from the winter count, each depicting a decade with one drawing above each year. Manuscript Division.

Harjo, Library Honored by Native American Tribal Association

Joy Harjo walks onstage for a performance of poetry and music at the Library. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums has presented one of its most significant awards to the Library and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo for “Living Nations, Living Words,” Harjo’s signature project during her 2019 to 2022 term.

Harjo, the first Native American to hold the nation’s poet laureate position, was honored with the ATALM’s Outstanding Project/Non-Native Organization Award for her work that shows the dynamic, living poetry being written and performed by Native Americans across the country. The project features 47 Native American poets through an interactive StoryMap and a newly developed Library audio collection. The map is marked by dots showing the home region of each Native poet and features their photo, biography and a link to hear them recite and talk about one of their works.

“I conceived the idea of mapping the U.S. with Native Nations poets and poems,” said Harjo, an enrolled member of the Muscogee Nation. “I want this map to counter damaging false assumptions — that Indigenous peoples of our country are often invisible or are not seen as human. You will not find us fairly represented, if at all, in the cultural storytelling of America, and nearly nonexistent in the American book of poetry.”

As part of the project, Harjo edited a companion anthology, also titled “Living Nations, Living Words,” published in 2021 by the W. W. Norton & Company in association with the Library. Harjo also edited “When the Light of the World Was Subdued, Our Songs Came Through: A Norton Anthology of Native Nations Poetry,” published by W. W. Norton & Company in 2020.

The ATALM presented the award during its October annual meeting, saying it “applauds Harjo’s work to illuminate the poetry of Native America and expresses its gratitude to the Library of Congress for a living tribute to a vibrant culture.”

Accepting the award alongside Harjo was Lori Pourier, president of the First Peoples Fund and member of the Board of Trustees for the Library’s American Folklife Center. Pourier (Oglala Lakota), an enrolled member of the Oglala Sioux Tribe, offered remarks on behalf of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

The ATALM’s Guardians of Culture and Lifeways International Awards Program identifies and recognizes organizations and individuals that serve as outstanding examples of how Indigenous archives, libraries, museums and individuals contribute to the vitality and cultural sovereignty of Native Nations. The Guardian Award takes its name from the sculpture that stands atop the Oklahoma State Capitol — the work of Seminole Chief Kelly Haney.

For more information about the Poet Laureateship as well as other poetry and literature programs of the Library, visit the Poetry and Literature website.

Vote!

A 1943 poster encouraging Americans to vote during World War II. Artist: Chester R. Miller. Prints and Photographs Division.

This civic poster from the days of World War II is always a good reminder that the right to vote is something that millions of Americans have fought to earn, protect and defend. It cost something. So, as we always do on Election Day, we encourage you to exercise that right. Vote your conscience. We keep the blog short to give you more time to get there. We’ll see you later in the week.

 

The Library’s Jefferson Building: 125 Years Old and Loving It

Design for Library’s Jefferson Building, between . Smithmeyer and Pelz. Prints and Photographs Division.

The morning of Nov. 1, 1897, dawned warmish and wet in Washington, D.C. — heavy rains were predicted through the evening. But the gray skies failed to dampen the spirits of readers anticipating a long-awaited event: the opening of the new and reportedly fabulous Library of Congress reading room.

When a watchman began allowing visitors inside at 9 a.m., an achievement a quarter century in the making came to pass: The U.S. had a national library set to rival any other, both in splendor and in function.

This November, the Library is celebrating the 125th anniversary of that milestone.

The road toward it had more than a few twists and turns, to put it mildly. But, in the end, it led to a stunning monument to America’s turn-of-the-20th-century ambitions and creative ingenuity.

As those first readers filed into the building that rainy Nov. 1, they began to grasp why popular magazines had been writing about the wonders of the new structure for months. They saw the Library’s granite exterior and imposing size; the flame of learning atop a brilliant 23-carat-gold-plated dome; and some of the artwork and sculpture that left observers breathless.

The Jefferson Building on a recent late afternoon. Photo: Shawn Miller.

“In construction, in accommodations, in suitability to intended uses, and in artistic luxury of decoration,” the Washington Post reported, “there is no building that will compare with it in this country and very few in any other country.”

The accolades went on, no doubt deeply gratifying to one man in particular: Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the valiant Librarian of Congress from 1865 to 1897, whose vision and persistence brought the new facility into being.

From the moment the former Cincinnati bookseller and journalist joined the Library’s staff of six in 1861, he saw its potential to grow into an institution on a level with national libraries of Europe — even though, at the time, it sat within the U.S. Capitol and served as a reference library for Congress.

After President Abraham Lincoln appointed Spofford Librarian of Congress on Dec. 31, 1864, he quickly gained congressional approval for several expansions. When, following a tireless campaign by Spofford, Congress revised the Copyright Act in 1870, the Library’s future as a national institution took a leap forward.

The new law centralized copyright registration and deposit activities at the Library, dramatically increasing the number of copyrighted U.S. works set to flow in — books, maps, prints, music. Spofford needed more space.

In his 1872 annual report to Congress, he advocated for a new building. He envisioned a domed circular reading room like that of the British Museum, with books arranged in alcoves “rising tier above tier” around its circumference.

The Library would continue to support Congress, of course, but it also would serve the public and have ample room for collections and exhibits.

Ainsworth Rand Spofford. between 1870-1880. Photo: Brady-Handy. Prints and Photographs Division.

“In every country of where civilization has attained a high rank, there should be at least one great library, universal in its range,” Spofford wrote, referencing France’s Bibliothèque nationale and the British Museum.

The capital’s political climate favored Spofford’s expansive vision. “It was a time when America was feeling its oats,” Library historian John Y. Cole says. “The Civil War was over. Washington, D.C., was growing. Spofford took full advantage of the situation to promote his national library idea.”

Congress funded a design competition for a new building in 1873, and the Washington, D.C., firm of John L. Smithmeyer and Paul J. Pelz won the $1,500 first prize with an Italian Renaissance design that included a circular reading room.

Hopes were high that construction would soon follow. Alas, it was not to be.

Just a year later, Congress reopened the design competition when some members wanted an even grander structure. That move set off more than a decade of squabbling by committees and commissions — revisiting whether to construct a new building, arguing about its location, debating its style.

Ironically, after all that, Smithmeyer and Pelz won again with a more ornate 1885 version of their Italian Renaissance design. In 1886, Congress authorized construction of a new building across from the Capitol, yet the controversies continued.

Smithmeyer, appointed project architect, became embroiled in a dispute about cement for the foundation, leading to delays and congressional hearings, followed by his dismissal. The humiliation devastated him — he was later found with pistol in hand inside the Library, apparently planning to take his own life. (He didn’t.)

The troubled project got back on track when Congress appointed Brig. Gen. Thomas Lincoln Casey, chief of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, and Bernard Richardson Green, a Harvard-educated civil engineer. The pair’s reputation preceded them: They had successfully collaborated to construct the Washington Monument and, more recently, the lavishly decorated State, War and Navy Building.

“Their momentum and nationalism carried the day,” Cole says.

Workers erect the southwest clerestory arch of the Library’s new building in 1892. Prints and Photographs Division.

Soon, Casey submitted a plan for an even bigger structure, and Congress approved around $6.5 million to construct it. Pelz designed the larger building, retaining the general features of his and Smithmeyer’s Italian Renaissance design, and he created sketches for the interior. But then he, too, lost his job after yet more infighting. Neither he nor Smithmeyer were ever fully compensated.

When it became clear Casey and Green would complete the building for less than what Congress appropriated, more money became available for interior embellishment.

“Casey and Green seized the opportunity and turned an already remarkable building into a cultural monument,” Cole says.

Casey’s son, Edward Pearce Casey, a trained architect, succeeded Pelz in 1892 and oversaw a program of majestic interior decoration that used tiles, mosaics, rosettes and columns to set off scores of sculptures and paintings. For guidance, Casey drew on the example of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago.

In fact, most of the more than 40 American painters and sculptors commissioned to contribute to the Library’s interior were involved in some way with the exposition, and many repeated idealistic themes from it. One of them, Edwin H. Blashfield, painted “The Evolution of Civilization” in the collar of the circular reading room Spofford had so desired. The mural is among the building’s most famous artworks.

It depicts 12 historical cultures and eras that contributed to Western civilization, starting with Egypt and ending with America. In the dome above, a painted figure lifts a veil of ignorance, signaling the nation’s intellectual progress.

Form did not, however, crowd out function. The new Library was one of the first public buildings in Washington, D.C., equipped with electricity. And Green himself designed its steel bookstacks, nine tiers high and serviced by the first efficient library pneumatic tube and conveyor system in America.

The tubes carried books back and forth between the reading room and each level of the stacks, while one tube each whisked books to and from the Librarian’s office and the Capitol.

“The book-carrying apparatus is a marvel of ingenuity,” one observer reported.

Even such a wonder, however, could not produce the first book requested on Nov. 1, 1897, about three minutes after the reading room opened. “Roger Williams’ Year Book” was not on the shelf, having just been published. Fortunately, the second book asked for, Martha Lamb’s “History of the City of New York,” was available.

In the 125 years since that rainy day, elements of the grand building have evolved. Copper replaced the dome’s gold plating in the 1930s. In 1980, the no-longer-new structure, by then one of three Library of Congress buildings, was renamed for Thomas Jefferson.

The Main Reading Room today. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Then, over a dozen years in the 1980s and 1990s, a major repair and renovation program restored the splendor of artwork and architecture obscured by decades of wear and tear, enabling people today to understand the awe of early witnesses.

“All good Americans should hope to visit the new Congressional Library before they die,” one advised in 1898. “It is one of the world’s wonders, well worth a trip across a continent to view.”

Based on the millions who visit the Library each year now, many Americans still share that view.

 

Indigenous Cultures at the Library: Kislak Family Foundation Gives $10 Million for New Gallery

An artist’s sketh of part of the new Kislak exhibition.

The Kislak Family Foundation is donating $10 million to create a new exhibition at the Library that will share a fuller history of the early Americas, featuring the Jay I. Kislak Collection of artifacts, paintings, maps, rare books and documents, the Library announced today. The new Kislak Gallery will be part of a reimagined visitor experience at the national library in the years ahead.

The gift will both develop the exhibition gallery and establish a permanent endowment for its maintence and renewal over time.  The announcement of this major gift was announced on the 125th birthday of the Library’s historic Thomas Jefferson Building.

“The Kislak Family Foundation continues to be such a special partner to the Library of Congress in telling the magnificent story of our world,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “With this generous gift, we are honored to continue Jay Kislak’s legacy through this newly renovated gallery that thoughtfully shares with visitors the rich and complex histories of those who came before us.”

“Voices of the Early Americas: The Jay I. Kislak Collection” is slated to open in 2024. The exhibition will explore both the history of the Native cultures of the Americas before and after European colonization.  Curators aim to show how complicated this story is, how Native American cultures were violently conquered, sometimes enslaved, and how vibrant they are today. This deep past continues to inspire many people, including modern artists, writers and poets, whose works will also be featured.

“My father wanted this collection to live on well beyond his own time at the finest institution in the world,” said Paula Kislak, chair of the Kislak Family Foundation. “By reimagining how this unparalleled resource informs and inspires the American people, the Library of Congress will ensure that his vision comes to fruition for future generations. We are pleased to make this gift to the Library of Congress.”

In 2004, Kislak first donated nearly 4,000 items from his collection to the Library. Select pieces from the collection were featured in a previous exhibition. These included rare masterpieces of Indigenous art, maps, manuscripts and cultural treasures documenting more than a dozen Native cultures and the earliest history of the Americas.

The new exhibition will provide a fuller narrative and chronology to tell the story in an immersive and informative new gallery. It will display more items from the Kislak collection as well, with some artifacts dating back some 3,000 years. Many objects will be displayed for the first time through a state-of-the-art, transparent artifact wall. The exhibition also will incorporate select items from other Library collections, mixing in textiles, rare books, manuscripts, photography, and other artistic works. These will put the Kislak collection in context and provide visitors with a comprehensive view of the profound impact of these early civilizations.

An artist’s sketch of the Kislak exhition.

“‘Voices of the Early Americas’ will give voice to the pre-Columbian cultures of the Americas,” said John Hessler, the exhibition curator. “It is my hope that our visitors will have a different idea of the history of the early Americas after they explore this gallery. A central theme will examine how the  Americas we know today grew out of a polyphony of voices – a mixing of Indigenous, African and European cultures.”

An external advisory committee of scholars and curators will help shape the exhibition’s development. Ralph Appelbaum Associates is designing the exhibition.

The Library is committed to observing legal and ethical standards in acquiring and displaying cultural artifacts. Kislak acquired many of the pieces between 1981 and 2003. He donated his collection to the Library  in 2004 so that the public might better appreciate the history and cultures of the civilizations in the ancient and early Americas.

Each object that will be on display has a significant story to communicate to current and future generations about the craftspeople, painters, potters and metalworkers who produced them.

The gallery is part of the Library’s plan to build “A Library for You,” transforming the experience of its nearly 2 million annual visitors, sharing more of its treasures with the public and showing how Library collections connect with visitors’ own creativity and research.

The Kislak gift will build on the significant investments of Congress and private philanthropy in the Library’s infrastructure, exhibitions and programs, all delivering on the Library’s commitment to open its doors wider to all people everywhere. In 2020, philanthropist David Rubenstein announced a lead gift of $10 million to support the visitor experience plan. Congress has appropriated $40 million as part of this public-private partnership.

 

Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Maps of American Racism

Ida B. Wells, the investigative journalist and activist from Mississippi. Illustration from “The Afro-American Press and Its Editors,” 1891. Prints and Photographs Division.

Ida B. Wells was 30 years old in 1892, living in Memphis and working as a newspaper editor, when a mob lynched one of her friends.

Distraught, the pioneering journalist set out to document the stories of lynching victims and disprove a commonly asserted justification — that the murders were a response to rape. Wells’ own friend was killed after a dispute over a marble game.

Wells is renowned for her fiery writing and for her precise reporting that now is recognized as trailblazing: She won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for destroying the myth about rape and lynching and for her reporting generally on racist violence. She is not known, however, for her contributions to demographics.

Yet, she compiled extensive place-based statistics on lynching deaths, mostly from newspaper reports. This summer, two interns injunior fellows progmam  in the Geography and Map Division mined Wells’ numbers using geospatial tools and combined them in a StoryMap with historical cartography, 20th-century redlining maps and census data to offer insights of racial injustice, from the legally systemic to incidents of violent terrorism.

“Often, maps reflect our history in deep and profound ways, allowing us to grasp what they have to communicate immediately, as if we are looking into a mirror and seeing ourselves,” said John Hessler of G&M, who directed the work.

The project was inspired by a discussion Hessler had last year with Rep. Jim Himes of Connecticut, chair of the House Select Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth. For a committee report, Himes asked Hessler how the Library’s GIS (geographic information system) data visualization capabilities might make the committee’s findings come alive for readers.

Himes also wanted to bring to light “some of the missing history of how we got to where we are today and how inequality developed, especially in the post-Civil War period,” Hessler said.

Himes’ inquiry led Hessler to search through historical maps he knew were relevant and to discover additional sources.

One of W.E.B. Du Bois’ maps of Georgia, circa 1900.

The civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois is perhaps the most well-known Black intellectual and activist to use cartography to bring attention to racial disparities. Du Bois also mapped African American land ownership and wealth in the late 19th century.

The Library has held a selection of  Wells’ and Du Bois’ work for many years, but the resources are not heavily used. Likewise for related but more ephemeral maps in the collections, including those published in The Crisis, the magazine of the NAACP, of which both Wells and Du Bois were founders.

“Much of this material is completely unknown,” Hessler said.

He concluded it warranted a deep dive, and he organized a junior fellows project as an initial step. The result is “The Mapping of Race in America: Visualizing the Legacy of Slavery and Redlining, 1860 to the Present,” a StoryMap by junior fellows Catherine Discenza and Anika Fenn Gilman.

It pulls together Wells’ lynching statistics, Du Bois’ maps and much more — the project expanded as the fellows discovered new resources and information.

The list of lynchings in Wells’ “A Red Record” was used to create this map, showing how widespread the killings were.

Some historical maps appear as they were published, but Discenza and Gilman also used GIS to create their own visualizations from data. All the data in the StoryMap is downloadable, and links take researchers to sources used. About 75% of the content originates from Library collections — population and census data from the nation’s earliest years, images from digitized statistical atlases, county-by-county maps of the enslaved population.

Also included are redlining maps from the 1930s to ’60s from the University of Virginia’s Richmond Center. Redlining maps “are something that came up right away” in discussions with Himes and his committee, Hessler said.

Cover of “A Red Record,” Ida B. Wells groundbreaking research into lynching. Image: New York Public Library

Unlike Wells’ data tracking racial injustice and Du Bois’ maps visualizing African Americans’ economic contributions, redlining maps served an entirely different purpose. Banks used them to deny loans to homeowners and would-be homeowners in neighborhoods deemed undesirable, leading to neighborhood decline. Red shading marked these neighborhoods, in which people of color had been forced to live, hence the maps’ name.

Combining redlining maps with the other data from the project highlights important questions: What does the history of mapping of race look like in the United States? Who was doing it? Who was using it? What were they using it for?

The redlining maps in the StoryMap focus on three cities: Baltimore; Tampa, Florida; and New Orleans. Baltimore served as an initial case study. Hessler and the fellows combined redlining data from the city with more recent spatial data, including modern median income, health insurance coverage and housing occupancy.

“The correlations between redlining and economic development and growth was very clear in Baltimore,” Hessler said.

Next, he invited Discenza and Gilman to each elect a city. A senior at the University of Florida, Discenza majors in medical geography and minors in health disparities. Originally from Tampa, she chose that city.

Gilman is a senior at Tulane University double majoring in mathematics and international relations, and she has a certificate in GIS. She selected New Orleans, home to Tulane.

Both found inspiration in the project. “I’m really happy to be getting this specific experience. It’s the sort of thing that I’m genuinely interested in pursuing,” Discenza said.

“Seeing how what I’m interested in can play out in a public arena definitely gives me a lot of ideas about how I can use the skills I’m developing now,” said Gilman, who plans a career in geopolitical analysis.

The StoryMap builds on a growing body of research and documentation about the nation’s history of white supremacist violence and policies that have created the physical landscape we live in today.

Historian Richard Rothstein, for example, wrote about redlining in the bestselling 2017 book “The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America,” showing that boundaries of urban slums were often created by white-run governments, monetized by banks, legalized by courts and enforced by police. The history of lynching is also well documented, and in 2018 the Equal Justice Initiative opened the nation’s first memorial documenting the nation’s centuries of violence targeting Black Americans: the National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama.

The project points to how other complex issues might be examined, too — one need only look at its treatment of Wells’ data to understand the power of the approach.

“GIS and a StoryMap application can bring this data back and show that these were real people, not just old lifeless statistics.”

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Leslie Jordan: Farewell, and We Are Not Doing Okay.

The late Leslie Jordan. Photo credit: Sean Black.

Leslie Jordan died of an apparent medical emergency this morning while driving in Los Angeles. His beloved BMW crashed into the wall of a building. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No one else was hurt. He was 67.

Adorable, generous and hilarious to the very end, one of his last public appearances was at the National Book Festival in September. He was on the main stage to talk about his latest book, “How Y’all Doing? Misadventures and Mischief from a Life Well-Lived” with Megan Mullally, his Will & Grace co-star. Well, technically he was promoting the book. Actually, he was just cutting up, at which he was very accomplished, as television, film and Instagram devotees well know.

Here’s their conversation:

I interviewed him via Zoom a few weeks before the festival and again on camera that day. (“Interview” is a loose term; one just lobbed him softball questions and let him swat them out of the park.) We both grew up in very conservative Southern Baptist households, one state over and about half a generation apart, and both moved on to different lives. As soon as I clicked into the video call, he said, “We’re just gonna’ have at it.”

We did, and that was his magic: He made everyone feel they not only knew him, but that they had always known him. His humor and public persona were based on his unique identity: very Southern, very openly gay and very short. (He stood 4’11” and proudly referred to himself as a “Southern Baptist sissy.” He pronounced his hometown of Chattanooga, Tennessee. as “Chattanugga.”)  He was never conflicted about his sexuality, he often said, and his literary heroes as a young man were Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams, two Southern writers who were among the most flamboyant gay men of their generation. That took a lot of guts for those men, and I don’t think their bravery was lost on him.

“Truman Capote and Tennessee Williams saved my life,” was one of his go-to quotes on this book tour.

He was exactly like you think he would be, too: a complete lack of pretension, good natured, ready to laugh and ready to make you laugh. Surprise of the conversation? He said that he was once cast as Capote in a play — which would seem like perfect casting — but had to withdraw just before opening night. He couldn’t get past Capote the public character and the find the man himself.  And, he candidly said, the part required him to memorize large chunks of monologues, which he just couldn’t nail down.

Here’s a clip that was perfectly him. It’s from near the end of our conversation, after I asked when he knew for certain that he was gay. Like a true Southerner, he did not respond with an answer; he answered with a story:

That wit is the sort of talent that propelled him to rack up more than 130 television and film credits in a 36-year career. Most famously, he starred in “Will & Grace,” for which he won an Emmy. He also popped in several seasons of “American Horror Story,” had a supporting role in “The Help,” The United States vs. Billie Holiday” and “Sordid Lives.” He was starring in “Call Me Kat,” opposite Mayim Bialik at the time of his death.

It was not easy for him to succeed in public life during his generation with his over-the-top manner, of course. Overcoming the religious and social strictures of his youth and the larger social mores of the 1970s and 1980s took its toll in drugs and alcohol abuse, the same demons that had tormented Capote and Williams. But he found a way past it. He went sober at the age of 42 in 1997, he said, after a stint in L.A. county jail. An earlier book, “My Trip Down the Pink Carpet,” was “full of angst,” he said in our conversation, something that he was “done with.”

That was one reason why his late-in-life success was so charming — because it was so clearly earned. He had won this peace, this self-acceptance, this good humor. He became a hero of the COVID-19 quarantine (when he was in his mid 60s) by filming short comic bits and filing them to Instagram. One after another went viral, to the point he amassed some 5.8 million followers, and a whole new generation found him as he was.

“It’s very young and it’s all female,” he said of  his audience, when I asked. “I don’t have a single man following me … It’s young girls and they just adore me.”

Most everyone else did, too.

So, today, to answer his frequent conversation-starting question — “How y’all doing?” — today we have to answer, with a long sigh and a lowered gaze, “Not so good, partner. Not so good.”

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A Fond Farewell to John Hessler, LOC Polymath

John Hessler.  Photo: Courtesy of John Hessler.

Every institution has its institutions, and one of the Library’s is John Hessler, who will retire from the Geography and Map Division at the end of this month. He holds many titles, official and unofficial. One of the official ones is curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology & History of the Early Americas; one of the unofficial ones, playfully given to him by Librarian Carla Hayden, is the “Indiana Jones of the Library of Congress.” We will miss his erudition, energy and endless curiousity.

Tell us about your background.

I grew up in New York City and spent most of my youth wandering around the American Museum of Natural History.

When I was 9 years old, one of the geology curators who noticed I was there all the time invited me behind the scenes. Later, he took me on field trips and to the Rutgers Geology Museum, where I was the youngest member of the museum’s volunteer fossil preparers. It was there that I really learned about science and fieldwork.

While attending Villanova University as an undergrad, I became an avid mountain climber; I have always been drawn to remote and wild places. My graduate work and writing on Indigenous ethnobotany and linguistics in the Amazon reflects my love of fieldwork. Even now, I am studying the ethnobotany of the Cahuilla people in the deserts of Joshua Tree National Park.

What brought you to the Library?

I came to the Library after working for many years at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, where I was part of the entomology and botany departments.

My work there was in support of field biologists — mapping species distributions for biodiversity studies. My own research centered on mapping the biogeography of high-altitude Lepidoptera in the Alps.

I was paid not as a museum employee but out of research grants. So, at 40 years old, I thought I should finally get a real job, and I came to the Library in 2002. I’m a specialist in geographic information science in G&M.

You’ve contributed to diverse projects at the Library. How did your career evolve?

I have had a great deal of support and freedom to explore at the Library. Over the course of my time here, I have somehow managed to write 12 books, including the New York Times bestseller, “Map: Exploring the World,” which combines my thoughts on the modern and historical parts of the field.

I have also written books and edited facsimile editions about some of the Library’s great masterpieces like Galileo’s “Sidereus Nuncius,” Columbus’ “Book of Privileges,” Henry David Thoreau’s maps and, of course, the famous 1507 world map by Martin Waldseemüller.

What achievements are you most proud of?

The thing I am most proud of is what I have been able to do with the Jay I. Kislak Collection. When I was asked to become its curator a little more than a decade ago, I was just finishing a stint as a Kluge staff fellow. Since that time, I feel that we have really put this collection on the map (no pun intended).

I was able to present classes on Mesoamerican archaeology and language, train my own docents, give lots of gallery talks, mentor 17 archaeological research fellows and sponsor scholarly conferences. Now, we are designing a new gallery that will open in early 2024.

Besides this, I was able to write a book about the collection called “Collecting for a New World: Treasures of the Early Americas.” For the first time, it tells the story of the collection’s amazing objects, books and manuscripts. This fall, my second book about the collection, “Exposing the Maya: Early Archaeological Photography in the Americas,” will publish. I dedicated it to Kislak’s memory.

What are some standout moments from your time at the Library?

Perhaps the two things that stand out the most are the acquisition of the Codex Quetzalecatzin and the recent purchase of the San Salvador Codex, yet to be digitized.

For someone who is interested in the Indigenous languages of the Americas, the ability to bring these spectacular objects into the Library collections is the standout moment. Never in my wildest dreams did I think it would be possible to bring two manuscripts of this rarity into our collections.

They are truly amazing pieces of Indigenous history, written in Spanish, Nahuatl and Mixtec hieroglyphs. The purchase of these manuscripts was, of course, not exclusively by me. G&M’s acquisitions specialist, Robert Morris, with whom I have worked with on numerous additions to the collections, first brought both of them to my attention. We worked closely with Library management to acquire these priceless objects.

What’s next for you?

In the coming months, I will be relocating to Nice, on the French Riviera, and I will also continue my teaching at Johns Hopkins University, where I have been on the faculty for more than a decade. I will also continue my teaching in the summer at Sorbonne Université in Paris.

Besides that, I have lots of travel in the coming months and will carry on with my writing for Alpinist Magazine, where I have been a frequent contributor for many years.

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“The Big Bang” of Cinema: Library Researcher Finds First Copyrighted Film

Some of the images from the first film to be copyrighted. 

The perfectly folded letter opened, and pictures dropped out — 18 small images imprinted in two strips on a single sheet. Three men stand around an anvil, enacting a scene from a blacksmith’s shop, hammering and then drinking.

“I froze,” says Claudy Op den Kamp, the film scholar who extracted the letter from a Library archival box this summer. “I couldn’t grasp what I was holding.” She certainly hadn’t expected the pictures.

Dated Nov. 14, 1893, the letter was signed “W.K.L. Dickson.” She knew him as the head photographer at Thomas Edison’s New Jersey laboratory at a time when Edison was racing against competitors to establish himself as the father of motion pictures — as if, she says, having invented the light bulb and the phonograph wasn’t enough.

Dickson wanted to know the status of a copyright application he’d submitted to the Librarian of Congress, Ainsworth Rand Spofford, several weeks earlier. At the time, Spofford was also head of copyright operations.

The application was for a motion picture Dickson described only as “Kinetoscopic Records.” Dickson said the pictures contained in his letter were samples from the film. He had recorded them on a new machine perfected in Edison’s lab.

The machine could take 40 pictures a second, each an inch by three quarters of an inch in size. Imprinted on film stock and viewed through a kinetoscope — another Edison breakthrough — the images appeared to move. Dickson was making new films daily, he wrote, and he wanted to protect the lab’s work from the competition.

Kluge Center scholar Claudy Op den Kamp surveys notes from her research at the Library on early motion pictures. Photo courtesy of Claudy Op den Kamp.

Op den Kamp caught her breath, then cried out. In her hands, she held evidence from the birth of American cinema, a piece of paper that solved a longstanding mystery: What was the first U.S. motion picture ever copyrighted?

For years, scholars had known that an unidentified film registration had been made in 1893. But no one had been able to tie that registration to an actual motion picture title with any kind of certainty — until now.

Mike Mashon, head of the Library’s Moving Image Section, came running from a nearby office after hearing Op den Kamp’s cry. “It was a wonderful moment,” he says.

To the uninitiated, motion picture copyright might seem an arcane subject. But not to film scholars. For decades, they’ve mined copyright records at the Library — home to the U.S. Copyright Office — to piece together the story of early cinema. Under copyright law, registrants have to submit copies of their works when they apply.

When Dickson and other early producers registered, they couldn’t have known they were documenting the start of a world-changing industry.

“It only becomes clear in retrospect,” Mashon says. “But it’s from those early efforts that global cinema eventually emerges. Copyright has played an incredibly important role in preserving the record.”

Edison patented an extraordinary 1,000-plus inventions in his lifetime and zealously used legal means to protect his achievements. Dickson himself had been registering photographs with Spofford for years. So it’s not surprising Edison’s lab turned to copyright for its films.

Now, we know from Op den Kamp’s research that the first copyrighted motion picture was Edison’s “The Blacksmith Shop,” also known as “The Blacksmith Scene” or “The Blacksmithing Scene.” It runs just under 30 seconds.

The second film copyrighted, also from Edison’s lab, has long been known. Registered on Jan. 9, 1894, and inscribed in the official copyright record book as “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze,” it’s often called “Fred Ott’s Sneeze.”

A still frame from “Fred Ott’s Sneeze.”

Ott was an employee in Edison’s lab, and he’s filmed sneezing as part of the lab’s motion picture experimentation. Prints submitted with the registration were transferred from copyright archives to the Library’s collections in the 1940s, and the Library has often displayed the prints and written about the film.

Although Spofford recorded a registration in 1893 as “Edison Kinetoscopic Records” — the same registration Dickson was asking about — neither Dickson’s original letter nor any prints from the film were known to exist. Until the blacksmith pictures dropped onto the table in front of Op den Kamp.

A lecturer in film and intellectual property at Bournemouth University in England, she was in residence at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center for six months this year to study Spofford’s role in the formation of the Library’s paper print collection — rolls of photographic contact paper the earliest producers submitted to register motion pictures.

Most early films were made on nitrate stock, which is highly flammable and prone to deterioration — the Library didn’t have the capacity to house them safely at the time. Nor did a category exist in copyright law for motion pictures until 1912.

Pioneering producers, starting with Edison, exposed their nitrate film negatives on rolls of photographic contact paper to register them, mostly as photographs, a category established in 1865.

The Library has about 6,500 paper prints — now including the blacksmith images — more than any other institution in the world by far. They’re a goldmine for researchers, because most nitrate films no longer exist.

That is not the case, however, for “The Blacksmith Shop.” Business magnate Henry Ford, Edison’s close friend, had a copy, and it survived. The Museum of Modern Art later preserved it.

“The idea that Ford had that copy, that Edison perhaps gave it to him or sent it to him, shows that Edison deemed it special,” Op den Kamp says.

It even made its way onto the Library’s National Film Registry in 1995. According to the registry, it features the first screen actors in history, one of whom is allegedly John Ott, brother of Fred, and another Edison employee.

Shown to audiences in Brooklyn, New York, on May 9, 1893, the film is also considered the first of more than a few feet to be exhibited publicly. “It shows living subjects portrayed in a manner to excite wonderment,” a Brooklyn newspaper reported the following day.

For Op den Kamp, connecting “Edison Kinetoscopic Records” from the copyright record book to “The Blacksmith Shop” didn’t involve dangers beyond a little dust. But her quest did have an almost Indiana Jones quality to it.

By the time she opened Dickson’s letter, she’d consulted around 30 staff experts, current and retired; used five reading rooms; and become intimately familiar with evolving copyright archival practices. All this led her to request five pallets from storage from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, each containing 50 boxes, each associated with 2,000 registrations. And inside one of the boxes, she found the letter.

“It sat exactly where it was supposed to sit,” Op den Kamp says. She just had to figure out its path over the past 129 years.

Film scholars, she says, had long assumed “Kinetoscopic Records” implied multiple motion pictures. “The Blacksmith Shop” was strongly suspected to be among them. Other contenders included Edison’s
“Carmencita,” “Caicedo” and “Serpentine Dance” films.

“We now know that ‘records’ meant the multiple images in strips,” she says, as in the sample in Dickson’s letter.

“In some ways,” Mashon says, “the letter Claudy found is the Big Bang. Everything sort of flows from that. It was exciting to be part of that discovery.”

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