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The Russian Invasion of Ukraine: Resources at the Library of Congress

This 1648 map is one of the first to use “Ukraine” as the name for the region. Geography and Map Division.

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is the latest violent development in a long and turbulent history in the land of the steppes, and the Library has international resources on the region that go back for hundreds of years.

You can learn a lot here, from one of the first maps that used the name “Ukraine” for the area (in 1648), to the poetry and writings of national hero Taras Shevchenko in the 19th century, to up-to-the-minute news and analysis from the Congressional Research Service. You can also watch an hourlong seminar, Putin, Ukraine, and What’s Likely to Happen, hosted by the Library’s Kluge Institute and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, recorded just before Russia invaded.

This article is a brief summary of the Library’s holdings regarding the region. Some descriptions are from official Library documents.

First, it helps to know that Ukraine roughly translates as “frontier” and its location between Europe and Asia has meant that human beings have traipsed through it, going east or west, for thousands of years. It has been included in any number of empires, divided into many different configurations and called by any number of names before it declared independence in its current boundaries in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Our primary documents thus refer to the region by the name (or names) it was known at the time. The maps, lithographs, books and manuscripts shine through with illuminations and hand-coloring from centuries long past.

The Library’s overview to its Ukrainian collections is a backbone of reference material, but you may want to get started with the CRS reports that will keep you abreast of breaking news. The CRS is the branch of the Library that provides non-partisan news and intelligence to members of Congress, and analysts have filed dozens of short- and long-form reports on the situation in Ukraine.

For example, Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine: New Financial and Trade Sanctions brings together the world’s latest response to the Russian invasion.  Curious about exactly how much of Russian financial reserves are being tied up by sanctions? Here’s a chart that spells it out as of this week:

If you’d like to know what the Ukrainians have to defend themselves, there’s a summary of the Ukrainian Armed Forces. Earlier, CRS analysts reported on Russian Military Buildup Along the Ukrainian Border, as well as U.S. Security Assistance to Ukraine.  More in-depth analysis can be found in a 40-page report from last October, Ukraine: Background, Conflict with Russia, and U.S. Policy, including this summary:

“Ukraine has undergone dramatic changes since the country’s 2013-2014 Revolution of Dignity (also known as the Euromaidan Revolution). Forced to confront a Russian invasion and occupation of Ukraine’s Crimea region, a Russian-led separatist conflict in eastern Ukraine, and a tightening of Russian control in the nearby Sea of Azov and Black Sea, Ukraine has developed a military capable of territorial defense, reversed a decline in economic growth, implemented reforms, maintained a democratic path, and gained formal independence for the Orthodox Church of Ukraine.”

If you’re interested in law, from the country’s constitution to its form of government and international treaties, this guide is a concise starting point.  From the Law Library, there are also the collected legal reports from Ukraine (and many other countries) that include copies of legislation and national government programs.

Shevchenko statue in Washington, D.C. Photo: Carol Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

No one looms larger in the national identity than Shevchenko, the poet, writer, artist, intellectual and nationalist leader. Born into serfdom in 1814, he railed against the Russian empire and its oppressions, wrote, painted, dazzled and rebelled with poems that forecast a revolution. He was imprisoned and exiled, sent into harsh labor at a remote work camp for years. It wrecked his health. He was released, wrote feverishly for a few years and died in St. Petersburg at the age of 47.

The Ukrainian Weekly, in a 1934 editorial, put his legacy this way: “Rarely in the world’s history has an individual gripped the hearts, the imagination, and the intellect of a nation to such an extent and degree as Taras Shevchenko has done to that of the Ukrainian people.”

The Library holds more than 800 items by and about Shevchenko, copies of his poems in multiple languages and works about his influence. His is the Ukraine of the steppe and blue skies, the rolling land and the yearning people, written in a cadence and vision that would remind many Americans of Walt Whitman.

Here are the opening lines of “My Testament.”

When I am dead, bury me
In my beloved Ukraine,
My tomb upon a grave mound high
Amid the spreading plain,
So that the fields, the boundless steppes,
The Dnieper’s plunging shore
My eyes could see, my ears could hear
The mighty river roar.

There is a statue of the man in Washington, at 22nd and P Street NW, built with congressional funds during the Cold War (it was seen as a rebuke to the Soviet Union, which then controlled Ukraine). The unveiling in 1964 drew a crowd of 30,000 marching for Ukrainian independence. The keynote speaker was Dwight D. Eisenhower, the former President and, during World War II, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe, who held up Ukraine as one of the “captive nations” of Russian rule. There were critics — the Washington Post editorialized the statue was a folly, devoted to “the implausible goal of Ukrainian nationhood.”

Historically, the Library’s collections go back centuries. Amid dozens of books, histories and manuscripts from the 16th and 17th centuries, the Library holds two major items that are important to Ukrainian identity.

First is a copy of the Ostrog Bible, the first complete Slavic Bible, published in Ostroh in 1581, in Cyrillic type. This is in modern-day Ukraine, but was in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth at the time. The printer Ivan Fyodorov published it with the Ruthenian (another name for parts of Ukraine) Prince Konstantin Ostrogski. It became a foundational text of Orthodox Christianity, hugely influential in the faith’s development.

Second is the Beauplan Map of 1648, one of the first maps to denote Ukraine as a unique entity. Guillaume Le Vasseur de Beauplan was a French military engineer and architect, working for Wladislaw IV Vasa, king of Poland and grand duke of Lithuania, who ruled much of the territory at the time.

The Library’s 19th century holdings on Ukraine are anchored by the remarkable collection of Gennadii Vasil’evich Yudin, a Siberian businessman and book collector. The Library acquired the collection in 1906, and while it spans the tsarist Russian empire, it contains a wealth of material on Ukraine, such as the complete set of an important journal of Ukrainian history, literature, folklore and language, “Kievskaia Starina.” The Library is the only library in the Western Hemisphere that holds a complete set of Kievskaia Starina with the index. Remarkably, we have the tsars’ copies of books on Ukrainian geography and history, including the Crimean War in the mid 19th century,

There’s Jewish history in the region, too, partially stemming from the Pale of Settlement era, when imperial Russian policy forced Jews to live in mostly rural areas in the western parts of the empire, including modern-day Ukraine. A researcher has used Library maps as part a historical collection, “An Atlas of the Shtetl,” that shows where Jews lived across the region. The Library also has some of the only copies of the world’s first illustrated children’s books in Hebrew, published in Odessa in 1917, chronicled in The Russian Revolution and Jewish Children’s Book Publisher. There’s also a fascinating look at Jewish cultural and publishing history in Ukraine during the early 20th century in  “The Mystery of Yakiv Orenshtain’s Little Red Riding Hood.”

In politics of past eras, you’ll find original documents in the papers of presidents, diplomats, national security and foreign policy experts in the Manuscript Division. They trace the arc of U.S. relations with Ukraine, from the limits of Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination, at least as they applied to Ukraine following World War I, to former Jimmy Carter national security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski’s leadership of the American-Ukrainian Advisory Committee and his defense of Ukraine’s right to choose its own political identity — a decision that reverberates today.

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Researcher Stories: Walter Stahr

Walter Stahr. Photo: Lissa Schairer.

Walter Stahr turned to writing books after a career of more than two decades as a lawyer. His first was “John Jay: Founding Father” in 2005. He has earned praise and awards for biographies of William Henry Seward and Edwin Stanton. His latest, about the antislavery activist, treasury secretary and chief justice Salmon P. Chase, will be published this month. Here, he discusses his research at the Library.

How did you get started writing biographies?

I was always a reader. One day in Hong Kong, while reading an American history book, I said to myself that even I could do better. And then it seemed as if another voice said to me, “Stahr, if you think that, do it; write a book.” I started thinking about topics and settled on John Jay, sort of a forgotten Founding Father. 

How do you select subjects?

I look for important Americans who have been, if not overlooked, at least not fully considered in recent books. In the case of Seward, for example, nobody had appreciated that his wife was a close friend of those who organized the Seneca Falls Convention — the start of the women’s movement in America. In the case of Chase, nobody had noticed an early essay in which he declared that antislavery political pressure would end slavery in America.

Why did you decide to delve into Chase’s story?

When my editor, the late Alice Mayhew, suggested that I should write about Chase, I was not initially enthused. Like many Abraham Lincoln buffs, I viewed Chase as ambitious and arrogant. But after a little reading, I decided that Chase deserved a new biography. I did so because we would not have had Lincoln without the work that Chase did in the two decades before the Civil War, creating and building antislavery political parties. While Lincoln was still a loyal Whig, almost silent on the subject of slavery, Chase was speaking out against slavery and in favor of Black rights and building up antislavery political parties, culminating in the Republican Party.

Chase helped Lincoln in the Lincoln-Douglas campaign of 1858 and in the presidential campaign of 1860. And Lincoln relied heavily on Chase as his treasury secretary during the Civil War, not just in financial but also in political and even military matters. Chase resigned in summer 1864, but soon thereafter he was out on the campaign trail, urging men to vote for Lincoln. At the end of the year, Lincoln named Chase as our next chief justice, the role he filled until his death in 1873.

Which books have you researched at the Library?

I have researched all of my books at the Library. Indeed, as a young Washington lawyer, I spent hours in the Library. In those days, we relied on books, and many books were available only in the Law Library Reading Room. I have used so many different reading rooms over the years: the Main Reading Room (the most inspiring room in America); the Law Library Reading Room; the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room; and, above all, the Manuscript Reading Room.

For the Chase book, the online version of the Chase papers was essential. I now live in Southern California, so it would have been hard to review all that material in person. Indeed, it would have been impossible, for I was midway through the Chase book when the Library closed because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Every day, as I was writing and revising in 2020 and early 2021, I was using the online version of the Chase papers.

Do you have any advice for other researchers on navigating the Library’s collections ?

I urge researchers to enlist the Library’s staff members. I always mention my subject, and staff members often respond with something like, “Have you looked at this?” Jeff Flannery, the former head of the Manuscript Reading Room, pointed me to the records of books checked out of the Library during the Civil War. These enabled me to determine that Seward consulted some international law books, but not as many as his friend Charles Sumner, who seemed to be the most bookish member of Congress.

What’s next for you?

I am working on a proposal about a man whose manuscript collection is (I fear) the largest presidential collection at the Library.

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Haiti: The Liberation Connection

Taylor Healey-Brooks.

This is a guest post by María Peña, a public relations strategist in the Library’s Office of Communications.

I recently interviewed Taylor Healey-Brooks, the Librarian-in-Residence in the Latin American, Caribbean and European Division. She joined us from the University of Washington. She’s used a chunk of her 10-month stint to co-author a remarkable resource guide that explores Haiti’s contributions to liberation movements in the U.S. and across Latin America. “Freedom in the Black Diaspora: A Resource Guide for Ayiti Reimagined” is a terrific site for researchers, students, teachers and readers in general. (“Ayiti” is the Creole spelling of Haiti.)

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

How did this project get started?

I saw a lot of news and social media focused on Haiti. Most of the coverage was negative. As a Black woman who had some research expertise in African American Studies, I knew a little about Haiti, but not enough to contextualize the stories I saw in the news. There was a lot of online talk among scholars about the need to contextualize Haiti properly and understand its contributions in the Americas. I wanted to address that issue and create resources to explore Black experiences and the connections between African Americans and the Caribbean.

Scholars saw the need for new narratives…  

Scholars wanted their voices amplified in talking about these issues. I reached out to a handful of them to talk about Haiti’s representation in the media, the longstanding relationship between African Americans and Haitians, and what the Library can do to preserve and emphasize these topics in our collections and services.

What sorts of items are in the guide?

In the video “Ayiti Reimagined,” Jean Eddy Saint Paul, a Haitian-American sociologist, says that the U.S. would not be what it is today without Haiti. The Louisiana Purchase evolved out of the success of the Haitian Revolution and its impact on the French economy. The connection between the fight for liberation in Haiti and this country’s territorial expansion is a crucial history reference.

How significant was the Haitian Revolution in the Americas?

Haiti became a beacon for people in the Americas, specifically those of African descent, as a nation that fought against slavery and for equality. The Haitian Revolution inspired uprisings and established Black-governed cities and towns in Brazil, Cuba, Jamaica, Mexico and the U.S. among others.

People often think about Haitians immigrating to the U.S., but there was a time when Black Americans immigrated to Haiti. For many African Americans, in the early 19th century, Haiti represented Black freedom and an opportunity to thrive in a nation that embraced equality.

What were relations like between African Americans and Haitians?

I believe that there was always a sense of collaboration and solidarity, but there were tensions, too. Brandon R. Byrd details these connections and tensions in his book, The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti, which we have at the Library. He also speaks in the video Ayiti Reimagined.

Was there agreement among Black leaders about Haiti?

You had people like Frederick Douglass, a former runaway slave and abolitionist leader, who became an American ambassador to Haiti from 1889 to 1891. He saw Haitians as a positive force for all Black people. Others criticized Haiti every time it fell short of expectations for a perfect society.

Do Black Americans have common bonds with Afro-Caribbeans?

I think there are connections, especially when you look at the history. Haitians were so welcoming to African American immigrants in the early 19th century, both groups shared a common thread of fighting for freedom, equality, and respect. But, similar to what Black Latinos experience, Haitians deal with what some scholars describe as a “triple consciousness” ̶  being Black, American and Caribbean — I think that leads to different means for showing up in the world and representing one’s community. People have to code switch in order to express themselves in response to their immediate audience.

The influence of West Africa on Haitian and African American culture is notable in food and music … and you can see it in the U.S. The connections are present. What’s missing is the ability to reflect on them.

What do you want people to get from this resource guide?

More about connections between the United States and Haiti. Many scholars and writers like Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and other figures in the Harlem Renaissance were inspired by Haiti and Haitians, and it is seen in their work. Hughes had a well-known friendship with Haitian poet Jacques Roumain, and this is one example of the long-standing connections between African Americans and Haitians.

I would also want people to think about the power of proximity as it relates to the diaspora, all those connections in the Americas and communications between enslaved people during that time period. I’d like people to know that Freedom Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper published in the United States, was co-edited by John B. Russwurm, a Jamaican immigrant who promoted migration to Haiti and Liberia.

What’s next for the resource guide?

It’s a centralized source of information that includes books, manuscripts, and other formats. The first part is focused on the relationship between Haitians and African Americans, Haitian history, and culture. I hope the guide will support the development of a story map, podcast, and/or video interview series on the Black diaspora.

If you don’t approach history from a global perspective, there are lots of things you won’t learn.

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The Unexpected (and Illustrated) Dante

“The Unexpected Dante” draws on thousands the Library’s items related to “The Divine Comedy.”

Dante Alighieri’s “The Divine Comedy” had been an epic religious and literary work for 150 years when a publisher in Florence attempted to do something that had never been done — illustrate it in a printed book.

The year was 1481. Gutenberg’s revolutionary printing press was just 26 years old. Nicolaus Laurentii took on the ambitious idea of using copper plates to illustrate Dante’s monumental poem — a 14,233-line trip through the nine circles of hell, purgatory and then ascension to heaven. It was to be a big, luxurious volume, nearly 400 sheets of thick paper that was 17 x 23 inches, filled with the poem in one typeface, commentary in a different typeface, and lavishly illustrated. Such a sumptuous project would be a fitting tribute, as Florence was Dante’s hometown and the book was written in the local vernacular.

The grand plan for illustrations didn’t pan out, though, and only a few copies of one edition had as many as 19 illustrations. Most only had two or three. Dozens of spaces were left empty for illustrations that never came.

Today, more than half a millennium later, one of the few surviving copies of that 19-engraving edition is at the Library.  Though it didn’t accomplish what Laurentii wanted, it still represented a transformative moment in publishing history — an ambitious marriage of European literature and the developing art of printing. It was also a major political statement at the time, as Florence was asserting its power across Italy, and Dante’s work in the local tongue would become the foundation of the modern Italian language.

The Library’s 1481 copy of “The Divine Comedy.” One engraving and two empty spaces for others show how the project never fully materialized. Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

“I consider it one of the most precious copies (of the Comedy) at the Library,” says Lucia Wolf, the Library’s Italian collections specialist.

Laurentii’s edition is one of the key documents featured in “The Unexpected Dante: Perspectives on the Divine Comedy,” a new book that collects five essays by scholars that examine the poem’s shimmering imagery, religious allusions and how both have impacted world art and culture. It draws on more than 5,000 items at the Library that are related to Dante’s masterpiece – dozens of editions of the book, prints, photographs and works of art. It’s edited by Wolf, and published by the Library in association with Bucknell University Press and distributed by Rutgers University Press.

In Laurentii’s 1481 edition, the illustrations are by Baccio Baldini. Contemporary reports say that he based them on drawings by Sandro Botticelli, one of the most famous painters of the era. They are black-and-white, finely etched engravings that take up about a third of a page. They depict scenes from the book — a man in hell being tortured among lost souls; Virgil and Dante in Purgatory, with Beatrice in the distance — that would come to be standard visual ideas of the Christian afterlife. The 15th-century printing techniques were a work in progress, as some of the engravings extend beyond the lines of type, and the image reproduction isn’t always crisp.  There are also dozens of blank squares at the beginning of some paragraphs, where an engraving was planned but not filled in.

“Why this was the case — and what happened to the other illustrations for the book — has been the subject of speculation by historians for generations,” writes Sylvia R. Albro, the Library’s recently retired senior paper conservator, in her essay, “A Florentine First.” Most likely, she writes, a combination of factors, from printing quality to downsizing the copper plate engravings from the size of original drawings to fit the page was to blame.

Still, Laurentii’s work became one of the most influential editions of “Comedy,” buoyed by its commentary by Cristoforo Landino that lauded it as a work of Florentine culture. And “Comedy” itself resonated through the ages, influencing theologians, poets, writers and artists. Even in the United States, a country founded four centuries after the book’s initial publication, people found deep meaning in its allegorical concepts. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, the eminent American poet, published one of the first U.S. translations of the poem in 1867, introducing it to a nation recovering from the horrors of war.

“It was seen as a metaphor for the Civil War,” Wolf said. “It was seen as a reflection.”

The Library has eight of the earliest print editions of “Comedy” that were published between 1477 and 1497, acquired in  the collections of Lessing J. Rosenwald and Otto Vollbehr. They remain some of the most valuable examples of incunabula, as books printed before 1501 are known, at the Library. It’s a fitting status for a work of art that has transcended the ages.

“It’s a very particular work,” Wolf said. “It’s medieval. But it has shown again and again throughout history that it’s a great work of art because people are able to repurpose it and apply it to another time.”

Portrait of Dante. Print of engraving by Raf­faello Morghen after a picture by Stefano Tofanelli. Circa 1826. Prints and Photographs Division.

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The Russian Revolution and the Jewish Children’s Book Publisher

Illustration from “La-Sevivon” (“To the Dreidel.” African and Middle Eastern Division.

It was the late fall of 1917 in Moscow, the Bolshevik Revolution was seizing printing presses and a wealthy young Jewish woman was on the run.

Her name was Shoshana Zlatopolsky Persitz. She was 24.

She carried a revolutionary text of her own – short stories for children, written in Hebrew. When she arrived in Odessa, some 800 miles south, where the Lenin-led Bolsheviks had not yet reached, she arranged for artists to illustrate them.

She then published small editions of six books, with titles such as “To the Dreidel,” “Trying to Please Everyone” and “The Roosters and the Fox.” They were just eight or 10 pages each. The only paper to be found was so thin that it was almost transparent.

When they rolled off the presses, they were the world’s first illustrated children’s books in Hebrew.

“It was such an important moment in Jewish history and for the rise of the Hebrew language,” says Ann Brener, a specialist in the Hebraic Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division. “It’s representative of Jewish identity.”

Today, the only known first editions of the three books named above are held at the Library. The other titles printed there in Odessa, or later in Germany, also extremely rare, are at the Library as well. They are among 60 rare and unique books now online in Rare Illustrated Children’s Books in Hebrew and Yiddish, 1900-1929. Despite the poor paper used in the printing – many of the books are now undergoing conservation work  ̶  they are still, more than a century later, bursting with vibrant colors, images and stories.

“They arrived on the wings of the Russian Revolution, catching the tail end of the art nouveau and all the excitement and energy of the Russian avant-garde,” Brener writes in the historical introduction to the collection, describing the books’ style.

For centuries after Gutenberg revolutionized printing, books for children were not a serious consideration. But as literacy rates gradually increased, printed fairy tales began to gain hold. By the 19th century, landmarks such as “Fairy Tales Told for Children,” by Danish author Hans Christian Andersen in 1837, and “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” by British author Lewis Carroll in 1865, changed the landscape. Illustrated children’s books soon caught on. By the early 20th century, they were in full flower in a range of languages, particularly in Europe.

But Jewish children in Tsarist Russia – and the rest of world, actually  ̶  had no such books in Hebrew or Yiddish. When the tsar was deposed in the 1917 revolution, there was a burst of creativity across the Russian empire. Persitz seized the moment to found the Omanut Press (“The Art Press”) to pursue her dream. She named the project the Gamliel Library, in memory of her late son, who had died at the age of 4.

“I felt this burning sense of shame,” she said in an interview years later. “Here we are, the People of the Book, yet millions of Jewish children in Russia have no books of their own; no books with which they can grow up with.”

Omanut Press didn’t last long in Odessa, as Bolshevik rule advanced into the Ukraine. She fled with her work to Germany, published more titles, and eventually moved to Tel Aviv, where she had a productive career in publishing, education and politics, eventually being elected to the Israeli Knesset.

But, before leaving Odessa, she or someone in her circle mailed out copies of those first books. One was addressed to the Library of Congress.

“My guess is that the copies we have were printed in 1917 and mailed directly here, to an up-and-coming country across the Atlantic,” Brener said.

Another image from “La-Sevivon” (“To The Dreidel”) features a goat, his Hebrew Bible and a dreidel. African and Middle Eastern Division.

As Soviet rule, then the Holocaust, destroyed so much of Jewish history across Europe, nearly all of the other copies of the books were lost.

“The same countries that gave birth to so many of these beautiful books were also the countries in which the Jews experienced pogroms, forced deportations and, eventually, the Holocaust,” Brener said. “It’s not surprising if they survive only here.”

That said, the books didn’t strike anyone’s fancy at the Library. They were single copies from a tiny press no one knew in a language that few spoke or read. They were tucked into envelopes, placed on shelves in the stacks and left.

Fast forward nine decades. Brener, who had recently started working at the Library, was poking around volumes of Talmud and rabbinic commentaries, peering into brown old envelopes filled with papers. Pulling a book out of one such envelope, she found herself gazing at an illustration from a Hebrew picture book for children.

“I was stunned by its avant-garde beauty and its whiff of the early 1900s,” she said.

Now, in another place, in another century, Persitz’s publishing dreams can be seen again, just as they appeared when they first came into the world

Free to Use and Reuse: Aircraft!

 All-Story Magazine, cover, Oct. 1908.Artist: Harry Grant Dart. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library’s Free to Use and Reuse copyright-free prints and photographs are among the most popular items in the Library’s vast collections. They’re great images from days gone by and they’re yours for free! You can check out the pictures in travel posters, autumn and halloween,  weddings,  movie palaces and dozens more. You can download them, make posters for your home or wallpapers for your phone.

Let’s check out a few from our aircraft collection.

As the 1908 illustration above shows, we have a very liberal definition of “aircraft.” This contraption, with a nattily-attired couple purring through the heavens, appears to be akin to a two-seater convertible with wings, perched below a zeppelin. Our heroine has taken the wheel and her gentleman companion is, no doubt, mansplaining how to Fly This Danged Thing.

It’s not clear how high or fast they’re going, but nobody needs goggles and their hats are unbothered. She sensibly has her hands at 9 and 3 on the wheel and appears to be looking at the gauge in front of her. They’ve got a fancy brass headlight but … are they really going to flying that thing at night?

Stunt woman Lillian Boyer, performing “The Break Away” in 1922. Photo: Unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

Next, it’s good to remember that it took human beings millions of years of existence to develop the airplane — and then about 15 minutes get out of them in midair. Welcome to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when barnstorming pilots fanned out over the country at festivals and county fairs, taking cash-paying passengers for a quick ride or performing death-defying aerial stunts.

This became a national phenomenon after World War I, when nearly all of the nation’s first military pilots trained on a Curtiss JN-4, a biplane nicknamed a “Jenny.” It had a 90 horsepower motor (less than most motorcycles today) and topped out at a daring 75 mph. After the war, the military sold surplus planes on the cheap. Pilots snapped them up. Barnstorming was born.

It didn’t take long for wing walkers to hop out of the cockpit and hang on to a strut or cables between the wings, producing gasps from crowds below. Lillian Boyer, a 20-year-old waitress from Nebraska, took exactly two flights to do this, as she most certainly did not want to remain in her seat and return her tray to the upright and locked position.

As crowds gathered at airfields, Boyer swooped past, walking on wings, hanging from them by a single hand and jumping from one plane to another — without a parachute or any sort of safety equipment. Sometimes she just hung onto a cable beneath the plane — with her teeth. Her real crowd pleaser was to stand up in a sports car tearing down a runway, reach up for a rope ladder dangling from her plane flying above, and climb up as it swooped higher in the sky. (On Youtube, you can see her do this on the backstretch of a horse racing track.) Headlines dubbed her Empress of the Skies. She performed hundreds of times across the Midwest and South during a seven-year career, until federal authorities shut down such stunts as unsafe. (Wing walker stunts were later revived at throwback shows, even in recent years. Deaths are rare, but still happen.)

“I don’t know if it was just lack of good sense, but I wasn’t afraid,” she said some 60 years after her heyday, when a reporter from Copley News Service caught up with her at an airfield near her home in San Diego. She was 82 then, in great spirits and out for a quick ride in a vintage biplane. She stayed in her seat the entire flight, the reporter noted.

A Pan American travel poster from the late 1940s. Artist: Mark von Arenburg. Prints and Photographs Division.

Lastly, let’s remember the mid-century, the final days of the golden age of travel, when flying was something you dressed up to do. This Pan American poster captures that feel, presenting an alluring version of the Caribbean, though to no specific island. There’s more than a touch of colonialism featured as romance here, most notably the Spanish conquistadors magically in the rose-colored clouds. It was a world view that would shortly change.

The artist, Mark von Arenburg, was an ace at these sort of romantic travel posters, with the big block print, the plane soaring and a tropical locale beckoning. He makes great use of red here, as a bold pop against the azure blue.

The aircraft soaring past those clouds appears to be a Douglas DC-4. It was developed in the early 1940s, used extensively in World War II (particularly in the Berlin Airlift) and then made the switch to the civilian market. The planes were capable of transoceanic travel, but the cruising speed was about 230 mph, a little than half of what jets cruise at today. If flights were longer, at least passengers had leg room most travelers today would envy — in most configurations, only 44 passengers were on board, with four seats per aisle. I know, i know — there was no middle seat. Talk about the travel of your dreams.

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Black History Month: Family Health, Hidden in DNA

The Whitney family — parents Joyce and Harvey Sr. at each end; daughters Wanda and Donna, left to right. 

This is a guest post by Wanda Whitney, head of the History & Genealogy Section. Candice Buchanan, a reference librarian in the section, contributed.

Working in the History and Genealogy Section of the Library, we routinely hear stories of surprising revelations that lie in the often-tangled roots of family histories, especially now with the growing popularity of DNA testing. I had already experienced this firsthand when I decided to take a DNA test. Still, I was shocked at the news it revealed about me and my family.

It wasn’t some unknown relative popping up in a previous century, a sibling I didn’t know I had, or that I was adopted, although those types of discoveries happen all the time. Instead, it was something that had health implications for me, my parents and my children — a genetic mutation for a hereditary type of anemia.

I thought, “What does this mean for me? For my parents and siblings, cousins, our children?”

This type of medical revelation is important to all families, but particularly for Black ones, as so many of our histories are lost and buried through slavery and its long, ugly legacy. Medical histories can be even more difficult to tease out, and this lack of knowledge can contribute to gaps affecting health outcomes for Black families. Since many times we know less about our backgrounds than other Americans, it’s a good thing to explore during Black History Month. It can be life-changing to talk to our parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins about our health history, too.

I already knew about the sickle cell anemia trait that several of my relatives, including my mother, carried. But I was floored to see DNA test results that indicated I carried a genetic mutation linked to G6PD deficiency. This is a condition that affects the health of red blood cells and can lead to anemia when one is exposed to certain medications, foods or infections. G6PD deficiency is quite common among people of African descent. Since this gene is located on the X chromosome, and females have two, I am not at high risk for developing symptoms because my second X chromosome doesn’t have the mutation. Men only have one X chromosome, so if they inherit the mutation from their mother, they are most at risk.

I read all I could about the mutation and what it might mean for my family and had several conversations with my doctors. I do not have G6PD deficiency, but I could have passed the genetic mutation to my children. I told them about the possibility and they ultimately decided that, since the condition does not cause serious symptoms for many people, they would not get tested.

I also told my parents. My father was fascinated. He has always loved delving into family history; learning about our health was just an extension of this. My mother was much more reluctant, but they went ahead with testing. The results showed that that I had inherited the mutation from her. We also were left with the knowledge that she carries two different mutations — one linked to sickle cell anemia and the other to G6PD deficiency.

Explaining the results to her did not go well. In the end, my father and I talked about what the mutation is and what it may mean for us. But my mother and I haven’t discussed it again. Communicating unexpected results when researching family histories can be tricky.

There is not a single catch-all solution to handling unexpected discoveries in the course of genealogical research. Every situation is unique and often deeply personal. One way to prevent unpleasant results is to keep in mind that anything is possible.

In the end, family history is human history. We must enter it with open hearts and minds. We must do our part to complete exhaustive research, weigh the evidence, analyze the results, and present the facts in as well rounded, honest and contextual a manner as possible. Privacy and ethical considerations determine what we share, as well as how and whom to share it. For guidance, support, and consideration, subject specialists at the Library have created resource guides and presentations on these topics.

Family Secrets: Emotional Fallout from Genealogical ResearchGenetic Genealogy: DNA and Family History

You can also use Ask a Librarian to submit questions and discuss your research.

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“The Metropolitan Opera Murders” — Crime Classics Latest

Helen Traubel as Brünnehilde in “Die Walküre.” Helen Traubel Papers. Music Division.

This is a guest post by Zach Klitzman, the editorial assistant in the Library’s Publishing Office .

As soprano Elsa Vaughn sings the role of Brünnehilde during the second act of Richard Wagner’s “Die Walküre,” she notices that prompter Rudolf Salz is making funny faces. Then he starts convulsing, grabs his throat, and falls down the steps to the orchestra pit. He’s dead!

So begins “The Metropolitan Opera Murders,” the latest entry in the Library’s Crime Classics series. (Available at all booksellers and via the Library of Congress shop.) Launched in April 2020, the critically acclaimed series features some of the finest American crime writing from the 1860s to the 1960s. Drawn from the Library’s collections, each volume includes the original text, an introduction, author bio, notes, recommendations for further reading and suggested discussion questions from mystery expert Leslie S. Klinger.

The author in this case was none other than Helen Traubel, a star soprano of the era, with the help of ghostwriter Harold Q. Masur. She knew the material well, having played Brünnehilde herself. Her only novel, “Metropolitan” offers an insider’s view of the world’s most famous opera company and the high drama that occurs both onstage and behind the scenes.

Originally published in 1951, the novel features a memorable cast of characters who might have played a role in Salz’s death. It seems as if the poison Salz ingested was meant to kill Vaughn, the soprano. And it’s not the only recent attempt to harm her: ground glass in her cold cream, toppling scenery, flowers treated to induce an allergic reaction.

Detective-Lieutenant Sam Quentin must figure out who would want her dead. Is it her understudy, the ambitious Miss Hilda Semple? What do opera financier Stanley DeBrett and his family have to do with the murder, if anything? Or was the poison truly intended for Salz, an embittered, formerly world-famous Wagnerian tenor, now reduced to coaching other singers? When a second murder takes place, Vaughn can no longer deny that she may be a target.

“The Metropolitan Opera Murders.” Cover art is adapted from a drawing by Anne Harriet Fish. Prints and Photographs Division.

Traubel, whose papers are held by the Library, lived a colorful life, though it did not involve murder. Born in St. Louis in 1899, she first sang with the St. Louis Symphony in 1923. She made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York City in 1937 and worked there for sixteen years, taking over as the primary soprano for Wagnerian roles in 1941. As one of the most famous opera singers in the country, she collaborated with Leonard Bernstein on a concert version of Wagner’s “Tristan und Isolde” in 1949. She even gave first daughter Margaret Truman singing lessons. (Truman herself would later write a series of mystery novels, including “Murder at the Library of Congress.”)

After performing at USO shows during World War II, Traubel believed that she could reach a larger audience by performing non-operatic works. She began singing in night clubs and appearing on television, often as a straight woman alongside comedian Jimmy Durante. She even appeared in an abridged production of “The Mikado” with Groucho Marx. The manager of the Met, Rudolph Bing, felt that these appearances cheapened the institution. But Traubel did not want to give up her popular acts, so she declined to renew her Metropolitan Opera contract in 1953.

The bet paid off.

In her post-Met era, Traubel appeared in films like “Deep in My Heart” and debuted on Broadway in the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical “Pipe Dream.” In 1959, she published an autobiography, “St. Louis Woman.” Two years later, she sang “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” at a gala the night before John F. Kennedy’s inauguration. She received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and had a variety of roses named after her.

Helen Traubel in 1939. Photographer: Abresch. Charles Jahant Collection. Music Division.

Thanks to her success, Traubel became a minority owner of her hometown St. Louis Browns baseball team, but could not be the fan she wanted to be. The dustjacket to the original edition of “Metropolitan” reported, “One of the sorrows of her life is that she cannot go to many games because she roots so intensely and so vocally that she might damage her voice.”

When Traubel died in 1972, her husband and former business manager, William Bass, donated her papers to the Library. The collection documents her career through correspondence, photographs, scripts, scrapbooks, and her annotated music scores and orchestra library. Also included: a box of materials related to “Metropolitan,” including a draft of the book in German.

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The Case that “Gutted” Rosa Parks

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The Montgomery bus boycott that Rosa Parks helped ignite, plan and carry out in 1955 was the opening salvo in what became one of the most influential social movements in the 20th century. It triggered not only the modern civil rights movement for Black Americans, but also rights-based movements for so many others — Asians, Hispanics, women, LGBTQ+ and so on. Such rights and social expectations have now become part of American society, and their influences have spread abroad.

Parks’ papers are at the Library, and the exhibit that features them, “In Her Own Words,” is still on display. Timed-entry tickets are free.

But her activism began long before that Dec. 1, 1955, day that she refused to give up her seat on the bus for a white man. The incidents that helped set the steel in her spine were the sexual violence of whites against Blacks that were common to the Jim Crow South.

Parks and her husband, Raymond, worked on the Scottsboro Boys case in 1931, in which a group of nine young Black men were falsely accused for raping two white women in Alabama. In 1944, she investigated the gang rape by white men of a young black woman named Recy Taylor, also in her home state.

But the case that “guts her the most,” according to Jeanne Theoharis, author of “The Rebellious Life of Mrs. Rosa Parks,” was the 1952 arrest of a Black teenager named Jeremiah Reeves, who was accused of raping a young white woman with whom he was having a consensual relationship. He was 16 when arrested and 22 when executed.

“[Police] actually put him in the electric chair at Kilby prison and told him that if he didn’t confess, he would be electrocuted on the spot, so he gave this false confession,” said Bryan Stevenson, founder of the Equal Justice Initiative, a longtime friend of Parks. “She began writing letters and trying to organize around trying to block that execution, got Dr. (Martin Luther) King involved. And it didn’t succeed and he was executed. She would tell me how devastating that was, and how it broke her heart.”

You can see the full story in the video above. On this, the 109th anniversary of her birth, it’s important to remember that Rosa Parks is a national heroine not because her activism was always a success. It’s because she kept pushing, for years and then for decades, even when it was not.

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Black History Month: Black Military History Crowdsourcing

Black “Buffalo soldiers” of the 25th Infantry, some wearing buffalo robes, Ft. Keogh, Montana. 1890. Photo: Christian Barthelmess. Gladstone Collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

Juba Freeman was just that — a free man — when he fought for the Continental Army in 1782, and his pay vouchers document that Black Americans were fighting for the national cause from the beginning. John S. Rock was a prominent teacher, doctor, orator and abolitionist in Boston during the mid 19th-century, but he also strove to become the first Black attorney admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.

“We have now a great and good man as our Chief Justice,” he wrote to a supporter on Dec. 13, 1864, as the Civil War still raged, “and with him I have no doubt my color will not be a bar to my admission.”

He was correct.

Black History Month at the Library is kicking off with a fascinating way for you to get involved in hands-on history — transcribing hundreds of items such as these in the William A. Gladstone Afro-American Military Collection.

It’s the latest By the People project, the Library’s crowdsourcing effort that has already transcribed some of  the papers of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Walt Whitman, Rosa Parks, John and Alan Lomax, Mary Church Terrell and many more.

Gilbert Montgomery, 4th United States Cavalry, in the Civil War. Gladstone Collection. Prints and Photographs Division.

Gladstone was a private historian and collector whose principal interest was Black soldiers in the Civil War, but he also collected items about Black military service from 1773 through World War I. (He collected other publications that stretched to 1987.) The Library purchased the collection from him in 1995. While photographs and documents are online, the text has not been transcribed, which means they can’t be easily accessed by researchers, students and historians.

If you volunteer, you’ll be looking at correspondence, pay vouchers, orders, muster rolls, enlistment and discharge papers, receipts, contracts, affidavits, tax records and so on. The Revolutionary War items are primarily pay vouchers to Black soldiers in Connecticut who served in the Continental Army. World War I is represented in part by the papers of Lt. Edward Goodlett of the 370th Infantry, 93rd Division. There’s also the Honor Roll from the Harlem Hellfighters, the 369th Infantry Regiment that spent more time in combat than any other unit. In their off hours, they put together a jazz band that helped bring that world-changing music to France.

There are also printed copies of 19th-century century speeches and writings on slavery, government orders, broadsides, and 20th-century booklets and journal articles.

Many of the documents reveal a complicated, discriminatory history that targeted these military members. Juba Freeman, for example, was not a free man when he first enlisted in 1777. He was listed only as “Juba,” and half his pay went to his enslaver, perhaps to purchase his freedom, according to research by the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance, and Abolition (GLC) and the Center for Media and Instructional Innovation at Yale University.

There was also the famed Massachusetts 54th Regiment, the all-Black unit which fought in the Civil War and was the subject of the Oscar-winning 1989 film, “Glory.” The U.S. military did not begin to integrate until President Harry S Truman signed Executive Order 9981 on July 16, 1948 — although, as recent headlines point out, that discriminatory history is with us still.

An unidentified Black soldier in the Union Army poses with his pistol during the Civil War. Photographer unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

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