Library of Congress's Blog, page 35

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden’s Statement on Ukraine

We at the Library of Congress, in our role as the national library of the United States, are inspired and deeply moved by the role libraries and librarians are playing in Ukraine. We wholeheartedly support and admire their work.

Librarians across Ukraine are still working, when possible, to carry out their daily tasks of providing information, supporting community events, and providing children with books and programs. But they are also using their valued public spaces for life-saving bomb shelters. For first-aid training classes. For refugee meeting points. For protection of cultural treasures.

By their courage and commitment, Ukrainian librarians are proving their role as part of the national backbone. No nation exists without its culture, and no culture can long survive without keepers of that heritage. Those cultural attendants are often in libraries, they are the librarians.

With outposts around the world, the Library of Congress is proud to also work with more than 10 established partners in Ukraine as well as with our partners in the Ukrainian government. The Library has assisted national libraries in other nations after manmade and natural disasters, most recently in Afghanistan and Haiti.

Today, the Library will continue our ongoing work in and with our steadfast friends and partners as they strive to provide service in the most challenging circumstances. In the words of the great Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, in this time of trouble and grief, our hearts hurry to the twilit gardens of Ukraine.

Black Cowboys at “Home on the Range”

Nat Love, one of the most famous Black cowboys of the Old West. Photo: Unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

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

Black men were among the first cowboys in the U.S. They roped, branded and saddled up for cattle drives. Some gained fame, such as Bill Pickett and Nat Love.

“I eventually brought up at Dodge City, Kansas, which at that time was a typical frontier city, with a great many saloons, dance halls, and gambling houses, and very little of anything else,” wrote Love, who was born enslaved in Tennessee, in his 1907 autobiography, “The Live and Adventures of Nat Love.”

Pickett, credited with creating the bulldogging technique of bringing a young steer to the ground in a rodeo, was featured in a silent film, “The Bull-Dogger” in 1921.

Bill Pickett in a detail from a poster for “The Bull-Dogger.” Print: Ritchie Lith. Corp. 1923. Prints and Photographs Division.

But mostly, as time passed, pop culture erased Black cowboys from the Western milieu, creating a misleading image of the Old West as peopled by white men on horseback, riding the lonely grasslands.

The Library’s collections help document a more accurate picture of what cowboy culture, and life in the Western U.S., actually looked like in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, during the cowboy heyday. They include resource guides, newspaper archives, an American Folklife resource project, a 2020 concert of old Black cowboy songs, books, magazines, photographs and posters that document the role African Americans played, particularly in the 1870s, when many newly freed Black people headed west.

“The myth of the cowboy is only one of many myths that have shaped our view of the West in the late 19th century,” reads the Library’s introduction to “The American West, 1865-1900” resource timeline. “The stereotype of the heroic white cowboy is far from true, however.”

One quick example: The origins of “Home on the Range,” the unofficial anthem of the West, are famously muddled, but it’s not disputed that the first recording was by a Black saloon keeper and former cowboy in San Antonio, who performed it for folklorist John Lomax in 1908.

In fact, Lomax’s influential publication of 1910, “Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads,” traced several standards to Black cowboys, including “Git Along Little Dogies.” (The Lomax Family Collection is housed at the Library as John and his son, Alan, worked directly with the Library for more than a decade in recording and archiving American folk songs.)

But, as much as film stars John Wayne, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry come to mind when “cowboy” is mentioned, the first actual cowboys in the Americas were Spanish vaqueros who introduced cattle to Mexico in the 1500s. Early Spanish missionaries played a major role in establishing cattle country in the West and training Native Americans as cattle herders.

The Louisiana Purchase in 1803 sent White settlers west of the Mississippi, driven by a sense of “continentalism,” later known as “manifest destiny,” the belief that white Americans should control a vast section of North America from coast to coast. The War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War in the 1840s were fueled by this belief, with settlers marching further west, warring with Native Americans.

In these vast swathes of open terrain, where law enforcement was most often nonexistent, cattle were a source of wealth. There was no adequate fencing to pen them in, however. This left cowhands to fend for themselves in open country, keep up with their cattle by horseback and protect themselves from rustlers and bandits.

Thus, the romantic legend of the cowboy was born: A quiet man, capable, tough, honest, respectful of ladies and possessed of a poetic respect for the land (and his horse). In the hugely popular Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill in the late 19th century, the cowboy novels of Zane Grey in the early 20th century, then the Western films and television shows in the midcentury, those cowboys were almost always white.

It was only part of the picture, though. No history of cowboy culture would be complete without contextualized narratives about the role that Native Americans, African Americans and Mexicans played.

No one knows exactly how many cowboys there were (or exactly how that title was defined). But a number of estimates by historians, including Kenneth Porter, estimate that of the 35,000 or so cowboys of the era, about 6,000 to 9,000 were Black. They worked as ropers, trail cooks, wranglers and bronco busters. Some hunted game, sang, played an instrument on the trail or performed other duties for white cattlemen. In Texas, where enslaved Black people had been more than a quarter of the population before the Civil War, as many as one in four cowhands was Black.

For Black cowboys, it wasn’t paradise, but it was often better than the harsh racism east of the Mississippi. Eleise Clark, a volunteer with the Black American West Museum & Heritage Center in Denver, said in a recent interview that the West was so vast and difficult that “racism took a backseat to survival sometimes. It’s hard to be prejudiced when you’re hungry and you’re thirsty.”

Even in film history, Black cowboys were around, if behind the scenes. James Arthur Walker invented the “Hollywood Hop,” where a rider jumps off to the side of a walking or running horse, lands on the ground and bounces back into the saddle.

A cowboy competing in the  Martin Luther King, Jr., African-American Heritage Rodeo in Colorado in 2016. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

Today, younger African Americans have been leading efforts to promote and protect the legacy of early Black cowboys in the American West by forming riding groups in many states, organizing parades or competing in national rodeos.

The Black Cowboy Parade has been a popular annual event in Oakland, California, for the last 74 years. New York Times reporter Walter Thompson-Hernandez wrote a book about cowboys in Los Angeles County last year, “The Compton Cowboys: The New Generation of Cowboys in America’s Urban Heartland.”

The Bill Pickett Invitational Rodeo, which celebrates African American men and women who are keeping the cowboy tradition alive, has entertained over 5, 5 million people since its launch in 1984.

Black cowboys, it would appear, didn’t disappear with the Old West

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Researcher Stories: Melissa Koch

Melissa Koch. Photo: Charlie Langton.

Melissa Koch writes nonfiction for children and young adults. Her picture book about Lucy Stone, the suffragist and abolitionist, will be published soon, followed by a children’s novel about Stone. She has researched both at the Library.

How did you get started writing nonfiction for young people?

Writing was always a big part of my career in educational technology and the learning sciences. I’ve led engineering and design teams to develop new learning technologies. As part of that development, I’ve written nonfiction for young learners, parents, teachers and funders. While I enjoy fiction, I like the challenge of nonfiction. There are so many amazing stories to tell. The trick is to tell them well.

About 10 years ago, I asked myself what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I don’t see myself as ever fully retiring, but I was in a position to semi-retire. Writing and publishing books was the answer: It gives me the alone creative time I crave plus the fun of interacting with readers and traveling to promote my books. Once I saw how my toddler son interacted with books, I was hooked. Add the fabulous children’s book writing community to the mix, and I feel like I’ve found a great home.

I published “3D Printing: The Revolution in Personalized Manufacturing” in 2017 and “Forest Talk: How Trees Communicate” in 2019.

How do you select topics?

I write because I see patterns in the world that I want to share. When I see a pattern in something that others may have overlooked, I want to spotlight it in a way that inspires people to see the world in a new way and then act in new ways. All of my nonfiction children’s books focus on making STEM and social justice personal and valuable to kids. When it’s personal and valuable, it becomes a part of you.

What drew you to Lucy Stone?

Lucy Stone is a big part of who I am, but for most of my life I didn’t know about her.

In third grade, everyone in my class had to choose a superhero. I chose Susan B. Anthony. She was all that I wanted to be: She stood up, she spoke out, she made people listen to the importance of women’s rights. She challenged societal norms and asked everyone to see how women’s rights benefited all of us: women, men, children.

But throughout my feminist-infused childhood and early adult life, I was unaware of the hero who awakened Anthony’s superpowers.

Anthony said it was Stone’s speech in 1850 at the National Women’s Rights Convention in Worcester, Massachusetts, that convinced her to become a suffragist.

Stone’s words mattered. How do we not know her name? That’s what I wanted to find out when I started researching Stone. When I looked, I found an amazing nonfiction story. Or two.

What resources at the Library have you used?

I started using the Library in the late ‘80s during college summer internships. While I don’t remember all the fabulous resources I used back then, I do remember spending D.C.-hot summer days at the Library surrounded by the cool, welcoming interior of the archives. I grew up in a small town in Iowa, so spending time in such a beautiful old building with history at my fingertips inspired me.

During the pandemic, I have missed sitting in that space as I research Stone. I’ve spent most of my time reading letters in the Library’s online archives. The letters between Anthony and Stone are of particular interest. Witnessing Anthony’s deferential tone in her early letters to Stone and how the tone changed in their letters to each other over time is extremely helpful in my research.

I am also thankful for all the people transcribing the letters from cursive through the Library’s By the People project. I thought I would be much better at reading cursive. I deciphered the many letters my grandmother wrote to me in cursive that would not have won any penmanship awards. But it’s really exhausting reading letters in cursive when you don’t have a strong context or connection to the author.

Do you have any advice for other researchers trying to navigate the Library’s collections?

Ask a librarian for help. They are fantastic! Thank you, Liz Novara, for all your help.

What’s next for you?

Publication of my picture books! I have several on submission. Fingers crossed.

I will also continue to use the Library for my Stone novel research. Actually, I’m thinking of watching what new archives the Library has coming online to inspire some book ideas. And when I can, I’ll return to the Library to sit and read.

 

Lionel Richie Brings Back the Gershwin Prize

Lionel Richie accepts the Gershwin Prize for Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Lionel Richie smiled, the cameras flashed, the bass thumped, the music soared and the concert celebrating the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song popped back into life two years after COVID-19 shut down much of public life in the nation’s capital.

It was a misty, chilly night outside Constitution Hall, but the crowd warmed up as soon as the house lights dimmed, getting on their feet for Gloria Estefan’s show-opening version of “Dancing on the Ceiling,” and later raising hands above their heads and swaying to Boyz II Men’s cover of “Easy.”

“I don’t know about all of you, but I’m just glad to be out of the house,” emcee Anthony Anderson quipped in his opening monologue, drawing an enthusiastic round of applause. “We’re here. We’re wearing proper pants.”

It really did seem that easy, with two years of pandemic shutdown blahs melting away. It was the first Gershwin concert since 2020, when Garth Brooks and friends rocked the house.

“This is absolutely outrageous,” Richie said when Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden formally presented him with the Gershwin Prize onstage, flanked by members of Congress. He invoked his Alabama roots, adding, “As my grandmother would say, ‘This is about as high a cotton as you’re ever gonna get.’ ”

The show, taped before a mostly full house (pandemic restrictions still meant that masks were mandatory) will be broadcast on PBS stations at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday, May 17,  and on PBS.org and the PBS Video App as part of the co-produced Emmy Award-winning music series.

The Gershwin Prize is named for George and Ira Gershwin, the brothers who wrote much of the American songbook in the early to mid-20th century and whose papers are preserved at the Library.

The prize honors a living musician’s work. The Librarian chooses the honoree after consulting with a panel of music specialists from across the industry. Previous recipients, in order, are Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Sir Paul McCartney, songwriting duo Burt Bacharach and the late Hal David, Carole King, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson, Smokey Robinson, Tony Bennett, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, and the most recent honoree, Brooks.

“In so many ways, the Gershwin Prize was made for Lionel Richie,” Hayden said at the show.

Richie, born in Tuskegee, Alabama, in 1949, was a student at the town’s famed university when he joined the Commodores in 1968. The band hit its stride in the mid-’70s, with huge hits such as “Brick House,” “Three Times a Lady,” “Still,” and “Easy.” He then launched into his own career and another stratosphere of success, going on an 11-year run of writing No. 1 hits. His self-titled debut album sold four million copies; the follow-up, “Can’t Slow Down,” sold 20 million. His hits during that span included “Endless Love,” “Truly,” “All Night Long” and “Dancing on the Ceiling.” With Michael Jackson, he co-wrote “We Are the World,” a 1985 ballad by a group of all-star performers that raised more than $65 million for famine relief. The music video of the song became a cultural milestone of the 80s.

Richie’s career as a singer, songwriter and producer kept going. He’s won an Oscar, a Golden Globe, four Grammy Awards and sold 125 million albums. Since 2018, he’s known to a new generation of fans as a judge on “American Idol.”

The show capping that career had a fun vibe all night. At the red-carpet step and repeat before the concert started, fellow “Idol” judge Luke Bryan – no slouch himself, having sold more than 75 million albums — charmed the line of reporters and photographers with stories of growing up listening to Richie on the radio, then working alongside him.

“Anytime I have to sing Lionel Richie songs, I don’t have to do much homework,” he said. “I just have to go out there and karaoke.”

The show, as always, was part concert, part taped television show.

The stage setup was spare. There was a rhythm section to the audience’s left, with two keyboards and a pair of back-up singers to the right. The screen behind the stage showed clips from Richie’s career during the short breaks between performances. Richie and girlfriend Lisa Parigi sat in the honoree’s box to the audience’s left of the stage, next to Hayden.

Andra Day dazzled with her performance of Richie’s “Hello.” Photo: Shawn Miller.

Onstage, Andra Day dazzled, both in her baby-blue outfit and her rendition of “Hello.” Chris Stapleton – who also performed at the Gershwin concert for Brooks – came out in all black to sing Richie’s Oscar-winning ballad, “Say You, Say Me.” Bryan played a baby grand piano to sing “Lady.” Miguel did a smooth rendition of “You Are,” Yolanda Adams belted out gospel and before you knew it, Richie was closing the evening with two songs, “We Are the World” and, of course, “All Night Long.”

For Richie, his career of genre-crossing hits, popular with international audiences across the racial and economic spectrum, has always been about what unites people.

“Love is the only answer to everything we’re doing,” he said in his brief acceptance speech. “We may live in different places, but these songs are as popular on the other side of world as they are  here in D.C. …We’re a family, not a tribe. We’re a family, not a party.”

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Women’s History Month: Genealogy

Family of Antoinette Pothier and family, Lawrence, Massachusetts. September 1911. Antoinette stands in the back row next to her father. She grew up to work at a factory in town. Photo: Lewis Wickes Hine.

This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan, a reference librarian in the Local History and Genealogy Section.

His and her tombstones for L. D. Hunnell and Mrs. L. D. Hunnell. A young bride without a parent to sign permission for her to marry. A former slave registering to vote, paying her poll tax and standing vigil through weather’s worst in order to vote on Election Day in 1920.

These stories and so many more may be found in the records of just one rural county in southwestern Pennsylvania. They are poignant examples that range from outrageous circumstances to everyday realities for women in American history. The Library can help you track down their long-lost stories.

Finding these women in genealogical records can be difficult because throughout much of our history, women have held a secondary status to men. The traditions and laws of their societies limited their access to education, employment, citizenship and public roles. In the records, it’s often difficult to even discover something as foundational as a woman’s name. Her identity is often intertwined with the men in her life. She is her father’s daughter. Her husband’s wife.

Today, that means they are not equally represented in the records. However, every ancestor deserves honest, accurate and exhaustive research. As with any ancestor who poses a challenge, we must think creatively and broaden our perspective.

Library specialists in the Local History and Genealogy Section collaborate with researchers to find relevant records and then help decipher clues that might lead to more discoveries. What was happening when and where she lived? What laws impacted her rights to marry, divorce, maintain custody of her children, vote, speak publicly, own property, own a business or receive an education? Was she an abolitionist? A suffragist? What responsibilities did she take on during war? How did her community support or treat her if she were orphaned, widowed, single or rebellious?

In this video presentation, we delve into the past with the women from our local history and family trees. Through a series of case studies, we understand the challenges involved in uncovering their stories.

You can also use our Ask a Librarian service to reach out to the Library’s experts to discuss your research project and consider what resources and collections the Library offers to grow your family tree and better understand the women in your history.

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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