Library of Congress's Blog, page 36

Protest Preserved: Signs from D.C.’s Black Lives Matter Memorial Fence

 

Some of the 78 sections of the protest fence on June 19, 2020. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints and Photographs Division.

It was a year ago this week that the Black Lives Matter signs came down from the Lafayette Park fence where they had garnered national attention as a rallying point for protests for nearly a year. The park, across the street from the White House, had been fenced off to keep protesters at a distance. Protestors, in turn, made artwork of the fence.

“I Can’t Breathe.” “Matter is the Minimum.” “Say Their Names.” “Fight the Power.”

There were hundreds of signs, protesting the police killings of George Floyd and others, as well as the nation’s long history of racial injustice. Some signs lasted days. Some lasted months. Some were torn down by counter-protestors and replaced. When volunteers removed the signs  on Jan. 30, 2021, there were some 800 of them. A number of those have since been collected by the Library and Howard University. A small selection was exhibited in Tulsa, Oklahoma, last year as part of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. A digitization project is underway at the Enoch Pratt Free Library in Baltimore and the D.C. Public Library that will ultimately make them all available online.

You can see 33 of them now on the Library’s website.

“The World is Watching.” Creator unknown.

The Library’s Prints and Photographs Division has a long history of collecting protest art, both from the steady stream of protests along the National Mall and from across the world. The largest single example is the Yanker Collection of Political and Propaganda Posters, which features thousands of examples, mostly between the 1920s and 1970s. The Library preserves material from nationally significant protests, the most famous of which may be 1963’s March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, which culminated in Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

Protestors used mass-produced signs during the 1963 March on Washington. Photo: Stanley Tretick. LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection. Prints & Photographs Division.

In this case, the Library’s collection effort was spearheaded by Aliza Leventhal, head of the technical services section in the Prints and Photographs Division, who visited the Lafayette Park site daily for eight months. She became entranced by what she saw as an evolving work of art, with signs being moved and rearranged to speak to one another.

“The signs ranged from crafted works of art either brought from home or created on the site, as well as scrap pieces of paper with hastily written messages,” she said. “Every day new signs were showing up, another person sharing their story and adding valuable layers to the ongoing conversation on the fence.”

“Matter is the Minimum.” Creator unknown.

The fence’s de facto curator was Nadine Seiler, an activist who took on care and maintenance of the site. She was joined by Karen Irwin, another activist. The pair went so far as to sleep at the site to prevent vandalism overnight. They eventually donated a group of posters to the Library to ensure broad public access.

“I was more drawn to the humorous protest signs,” Seiler said. “I guess it’s the vein of, ‘If I don’t laugh, I’ll cry.’ For me, it’s taking tragedy of our dehumanization and lightening it so it’s not so heavy on my psyche.”

Protests ebbed after Joe Biden was elected president, and protestors decided to remove the signs a year ago this week. Before it was removed, however, activists photographed each panel to capture the final positions of signs. Volunteers then took 800 signs off the fence, preserving nearly all of them.

They were gone from their spot in the national limelight, but headed for preservation and public access in the national library.

 Untitled by Luther Wright. Prints and Photographs Division.

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Trailblazing American Women on Quarters

The U.S. Mint quarters saluting women trailblazers for 2022.

Maya Angelou broke ground as a multifaceted author, poet, actress, recording artist and civil rights activist, while Adelina “Nina” Otero-Warren left an indelible mark in New Mexico’s suffrage movement. This year, both are among five trailblazing women to appear on the U.S. quarter — on the flip side from George Washington — for the first time, so keep an eye on your pocket change and get your coin collector boards ready!

Angelou is the first Black woman to be featured on U.S. currency. Her coins will begin circulating this month. Otero-Warren is the first Latina to do so, with her coin appearing in August. Both will help ensure that future generations learn about these remarkable women’s place in American history.

“It is huge to have her (Otero-Warren) on the coin,” Anna M. Nogar, an associate professor of Hispanic Southwest Studies at the University of New Mexico, said in an interview. “She is a very significant figure in New Mexico. She worked so hard for women’s suffrage  ̶  that was extremely important  ̶  but she also spearheaded efforts in other parts of the political sphere.”

Through its American Women Quarters Program, established by a 2020 bill, the U.S. Mint is paying tribute to women who have contributed to social advancement in this country. The list of honorees for this year’s rollout includes Sally Ride, the first American woman astronaut in space; Wilma Mankiller, the first female principal chief of the Cherokee Nation; and Anna May Wong, the first Chinese American film star in Hollywood.

The Library recognizes women trailblazers, including these and many others, in its collections, events and exhibitions. Two current exhibitions are “Shall Not Be Denied,” about the campaign for women’s voting rights, and “In Her Own Words,” about the life of Rosa Parks. Parks is featured in a short documentary. Crowdsourcing campaigns to digitize the Library’s papers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Mary Church Terrell and Susan B. Anthony and others have drawn hundreds of thousands of volunteers.

Angelou, longtime friends with Parks, was already a well-known Broadway performer, singer and civil-rights activist when her 1969 memoir “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” became an instant landmark in American literature. In raw but elegant prose, she described her birth in Missouri and her poverty-stricken, turbulent youth in segregated Arkansas. When she was still a child, she was raped by a family friend; her uncles beat the man to death.

She took her title from the refrain of a Paul Laurence Dunbar poem, “Sympathy,” composed while he worked at the Library of Congress in the late 1890s. Dunbar’s job was to retrieve reserved books that were kept behind iron grates, which were referred to as “cages.” The stacks became hot and oppressive during the summer months, and Dunbar’s poem captured their sense of being a prison enclosure.

In Angelou’s use, the title is a metaphor for the wide arches of racism and misogyny that shackle Black women as they struggle to live free, full lives. The book became a perennial classic. It’s still taught in schools.

She went on to pen more than 30 bestselling titles of poetry, essays and memoirs. Her popularity soared when she recited “On the Pulse of Morning” at Bill Clinton’s first presidential inauguration in 1993, becoming the first Black woman to write and present a poem for such an occasion. She was later awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Barack Obama in 2011. (Her autobiographical works are available in Braille through the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled.)

She died in 2014 at the age of 86.

U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-California, who co-introduced the bipartisan bill establishing the new coin program, said in a recent statement it was important to honor “these phenomenal women, who more often than not are overlooked in our country’s telling of history.”

“If you find yourself holding a Maya Angelou quarter, may you be reminded of her words, ‘Be certain that you do not die without having done something wonderful for humanity,’” said Lee.

Meanwhile, a 2020 Library of Congress exhibit noted that Otero-Warren’s militancy in the women’s suffrage movement was crucial in New Mexico, where she was tapped in 1917 by Alice Paul, a leading suffragist, to head the state chapter of the Congressional Union, forerunner of the National Woman’s Party.

Otero-Warren descended from wealthy and influential New Mexican settlers, but her family life was marked by violence: When she was still a toddler, a squatter shot her father to death. Still, her mother soon remarried and the family’s ranch prospered.

As an activist, she garnered support for a woman’s right to vote among Spanish- and English-speaking communities. Otero-Warren proved to be an ideal activist precisely because of her background. Her push for an inclusive environment and for bilingual materials helped widen the suffragists’ reach and attracted Latino support. She spearheaded efforts to have New Mexico ratify the19th Amendment in 1920.

She was an early supporter of bilingual education despite a federal English-only mandate then in place, serving as the first female school superintendent in Santa Fe County between 1918 and 1929. She promoted policies to empower rural Hispanic and Native American communities, according to biographers. In 1921, she was the first Latina to win the nomination for a Republican seat for the House of Representatives but lost the race by a razor thin margin in the general election.

Otero-Warren died in 1965, but her legacy is still alive in New Mexico. There’s a mural detailing her activism for suffrage in downtown Albuquerque, and there is a popular corrido, a narrative ballad, about her father’s murder. It resonates with people experiencing dispossession, said Nogar, the UNM professor.

From now through 2025, the mint will issue five new reverse designs each year, celebrating women’s accomplishments and contributions in fields like women’s suffrage, civil rights, abolition, government, humanities, science and the arts.

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Lionel Richie, 2022 Gershwin Prize Honoree: A Quick Look

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Lionel Richie, the Alabama-born songwriter with a smooth voice and a deft touch for the romantic ballad, is the 2022 Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song honoree.

Richie, 72, has sold more than 125 million albums, co-wrote one of the biggest singles in history, won an Oscar and, after a career that started in the late ’60s, is still a star of network television, as a judge on ABC’s “American Idol.” He wrote No. 1 songs for 11 consecutive years, was a star with the Commodores, on his own, and as a mellow voice on any number of hit duets.

“In so many ways, this national honor was made for Lionel Richie, whose music has entertained and inspired us — and helped strengthen our global connections,” said Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. “Richie’s unforgettable work has shown us that music can bring us together. Even when we face problems and disagree on issues, songs can show us what we have in common.”

“This is truly an honor of a lifetime, and I am so grateful,” Richie said. “I am proud to be joining all the other previous artists, who I also admire and am a fan of their music.”

“Endless Love,” one of his biggest duets, was the eponymous hit from the 1981 film, which he memorably sang with Diana Ross. The song was No. 1 on Billboard charts for more than two months. His “Say You, Say Me,” a No. 1 hit from the 1985 film “White Nights,” won the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

But as anyone who had FM radio knows, there were plenty more. “Three Times a Lady,” “Still,” and “Easy,” all with the Commodores. Then, a flurry of solo hits: “All Night Long.” “Hello.” “Penny Lover.” “Dancing on the Ceiling.” “Truly.” He wrote “Lady” for country artist Kenny Rogers in 1980. It became the one of biggest songs in Rogers’ career. Richie  recorded it on his own later in the decade, and it was a hit again.

But it was another cooperative effort, this one with Michael Jackson, that turned into a massive international hit for charity. Richie and Jackson wrote “We Are the World,” for USA for Africa, a fundraising effort to address a devastating famine in northeast Africa, principally Ethiopia. Along with Harry Belafonte, they recruited a cast of all-star talent to perform it, including Ross, Rogers, Stevie Wonder, Bette Midler, Ray Charles, Bob Dylan, Tina Turner, Bruce Springsteen, Cyndi Lauper, Willie Nelson, Paul Simon, Dionne Warwick, the Pointer Sisters and so on. It sold more than 20 million copies and raised more than $63 million.

Bestowed in recognition of the legendary songwriting team of George and Ira Gershwin, the Gershwin Prize recognizes a living musical artist’s lifetime achievement in promoting the genre of song as a vehicle of entertainment, information, inspiration and cultural understanding. The honoree is selected by the Librarian — in consultation with a board of scholars, producers, performers, songwriters and other music specialists. Previous recipients are Nelson, Simon, Wonder, Sir Paul McCartney, songwriting duo Burt Bacharach and the late Hal David, Carole King, Billy Joel,  Smokey Robinson, Tony Bennett, Emilio and Gloria Estefan, and Garth Brooks.

Richie will receive the Gershwin Prize at an all-star tribute in Washington, D.C., on March 9. PBS stations will broadcast the concert — “Lionel Richie: The Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song” — 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. It will also be broadcast to U.S. Department of Defense locations around the world via the American Forces Network.

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Researching Nannie Helen Burroughs: Danielle Phillips-Cunningham

Danielle Phillips-Cunningham. Photo courtesy of author.

Danielle Phillips-Cunningham

Danielle Phillips-Cunningham teaches multicultural women’s and gender studies at Texas Woman’s University and writes about race and women’s labor history. She is writing a book about Nannie Helen Burroughs, who founded the National Association of Wage Earners, a little-known but important Black women’s labor organization. Phillips-Cunningham has researched the book in the Library’s Nannie Helen Burroughs papers.

Who was Nannie Helen Burroughs?

Burroughs was an African American labor leader, suffragist, educator and civil rights organizer born in Orange, Virginia, in 1879. In 1909, she founded the National Trade School for Women and Girls (NTS). Located in Washington, D.C., the NTS served as a trade school for Black girls and young women throughout the African diaspora until the 1960s.

Her primary mission in creating the NTS was to improve the working conditions of Black domestic workers. With formal education in domestic science, Burroughs believed, Black women could demand higher wages from household employers and could be more selective about the homes where they worked.

Burroughs also wanted Black women and girls to have the option of becoming entrepreneurs and pursuing a variety of professions where they were underrepresented because of discriminatory hiring practices. She created an extensive school curriculum that included courses in cooperative farming, stenography, printing, barbering and public speaking, to name a few.

What inspired you to tell Burroughs’ story, and how are you documenting it?

I was blown away when I discovered that Burroughs established the National Association of Wage Earners (NAWE) in 1921, one of the first national Black women’s labor organizations in U.S. history. The organization operated like a labor union and had an extensive membership of domestic workers, clubwomen, educators, pastors, insurance agents, beauticians and many other workers from across the country who fought for labor rights for Black domestic workers.

I am documenting Burroughs’ history for a wide range of people to learn about her work and possibly become inspired to research the Burroughs papers at the Library for themselves.

While writing my book, I have published an op-ed about Burroughs in the Washington Post.

Nannie Helen Burroughs in a portrait made between 1900 and 1920. Photographer unknown. Prints and Photographs Division.

What do you most want to let people know about Burroughs?

Nannie Helen Burroughs should be a household name. There is only one surviving building of the NTS, and her history could be lost if we do not continue to tell her story.

Burroughs contributed extensively to the labor and civil rights movements through her school, writings, speeches and leadership in women’s organizations. She worked on multiple fronts to push for Black women’s access to living wages, quality education, voting, safe living and working conditions and protection from lynchings and sexual assault.

While presiding over the NTS and NAWE, she took on other important roles as well, including as co-founder and president of the National League of Republican Colored Women, a women’s voting group that organized against lynchings and Jim Crow laws. [https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women...]

What are a couple favorite discoveries from the Burroughs papers?

Thousands of people from around the world came to Washington, D.C., to visit Burroughs’ remarkable school. I was heartened to see the names of professors from my alma mater, Spelman College, in an NTS guest book from the early 1910s. I later learned that Burroughs regarded Spelman as a model for her own school. I also found NAWE membership cards from professors of the Atlanta University Center, a group of historically Black colleges and universities that includes Spelman College.

Another favorite gem is the subscriber lists of The Worker, a paper that Burroughs started in the printing department of her school to circulate her writings about labor organizing, civil rights and religion. People from Cuba, Jamaica and large bustling cities and small rural towns of every single U.S. state subscribed to her paper.

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

Get to know the archivists! I’ve found that many people at the Library have been working there for several years and have deep knowledge about the collections that you cannot get from secondary sources.

I am so glad that I met Patrick Kerwin in the Manuscript Reading Room during my first visit to the Library. Over the years, he has directed me to sources at the Library that I did not readily see online or in finding aids. He also suggested that I contact people who are connected to the Burroughs papers and whose names are not mentioned in published articles or books that cover Burroughs’ history.

Resplendent in their white dresses, nine students of the National Training School for Women and Girls pose for an unknown photographer. Taken between 1911-1920. Prints and Photographs Division.

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Mystery Photographer: Who Is the Altamont Filmmaker?

Mick Jagger (in red) and Keith Richards (in shades and white shirt) at the Altamont concert. Photo: Image from newly discovered home video.

This is a guest post by Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Images Section.

We’ve been gratified by the international reaction to our having discovered a never-before-seen home movie of the 1969 Altamont concert, one of the darker hallmarks of the 1960s.

That story, picked up by several national media outlets, has triggered an international mystery: Who was the heroic filmmaker? Who shot this remarkable 26 minutes of footage, from right at the stage, dropped it off for processing but never picked it up? Is it possible, more than half a century later, to identify that person?

Possibly. We’d love your crowdsourcing help. Ready?

First, more than 300,000 people showed up for the free, day-long show, featuring Carlos Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and, of course, the Rolling Stones. The concert was the subject of “Gimme Shelter,” the Maysles brothers 1970 documentary. There was news coverage, too, and lots of the young fans took their cameras, so there is plenty of documentation of who was on and near the stage. Despite all that, there is no wide-shot film of the stage for the entire concert.

The images we have reveal four primary contenders, all appearing to be young white men. Here are our limitations: We have yet to come across an image or footage that show all of them at once, which might us identify the filmmaker by matching his position with the home footage. The images of the filmmakers are not entirely clear, and in one instance is just the back of the guy’s head. There may be images of one of these men on the home footage itself — we haven’t verified that yet — which would rule that person out as our filmmaker.

Still, we have some good clues.

Mystery filmmaker #1. Image from “Gimme Shelter,” documentary by the Maysles brothers. 

Filmmaker #1: Blue Shirt Man, seen here in a screen grab from the Maysles film. He’s in the correct place for the daytime scenes (stage right, house left), so that makes him a solid contender. But our film experts note he’s using a Keystone K-27 camera that didn’t shoot Super 8 film. The home movie footage is Super 8. So, unless he was working with two cameras, he’s not our guy. Nice smile, though!

Mystery filmmaker #2.

Filmmaker #2: Brown Jacket Man. He’s in the correct place, too, and appears to be using a Super 8 Kodak Instamatic camera. Right camera, right place, right time. He checks out. There’s nothing we’ve seen to disqualify him.

Mystery filmmaker #3.

Filmmaker #3: Green Shirt Man. This gentleman is using a Super 8 camera—a Canon 318, we think — so he definitely makes the first cut. But he appears to be camped out at center stage. All of the daytime footage in our mystery video is shot from stage right. That apparently rules him out … unless there were two cameramen and his footage got separated from our film. See below for more on this theory.

Mystery filmmaker #4. Screen image from “Gimme Shelter.”

Filmmaker #4: Night Shooter. This guy, with the beard and blue shirt at the bottom left, appears in this, another shot from “Gimme Shelter.” He’s shooting with a Super 8 camera, a Technicolor Super V, which could have shot our footage. He’s at center stage, just in front of Stones guitarist Keith Richards. This is a different position from where the daytime footage was shot, but it roughly matches our nighttime footage. Can’t rule him out.

So there you have it. The footage is in two reels. It was dropped off at Palmer Films in Los Angeles and never picked up. Collector Rick Prelinger bought all of Palmer’s stock when they went out of business and eventually donated it to the Library as part of his vast collection.

Now, as some of you have theorized, it’s possible that the two reels were shot by different people – say, two or more guys on assignment for an as-yet-unknown client – and turned their film into Palmer for processing. The client, in this scenario, is the one who never picked it up.

Or, possibly, there was much more footage shot for this client, by multiple filmmakers, and said client picked up all of it … except for our two orphan reels, which had gotten separated from the rest of the footage. (In this scenario, yes, that would mean there’s a heck of a lot more Altamont footage out there that’s still never been seen, presuming it still survives. Also possible it was thrown away or lost years ago.)

At the moment, it’s our best guess that our mystery man is #2, Brown Jacket Man with the Instamatic. He’s in just the right spot working with just the right camera. As luck would have it, he’s the only one whose face we can’t see.

That’s it from us. Put your thoughts  in the comments, identifying each guy by the filmmaker’s number, one through four. We’ll track down any reasonable ideas, and thank you in advance.

Meanwhile, we hope you’ll check out some of the other titles in the National Screening Room. They’re not as buzzy as this, but they’re still fascinating. And your friendly national film preservation institution encourages you to preserve your own home movies. You never know what they might turn up.

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Mystery Photographer: Who Is the Altamont Cameraman?

Mick Jagger (in red) and Keith Richards (in shades and white shirt) at the Altamont concert. Photo: Image from newly discovered home video.

This is a guest post by Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Images Section.

We’ve been gratified by the international reaction to our having discovered a never-before-seen home movie of the 1969 Altamont concert, one of the darker hallmarks of the 1960s.

That story, picked up by several national media outlets, has triggered an international mystery: Who was the heroic cameraman? Who shot this remarkable 26 minutes of footage, from right at the stage, dropped it off for processing but never picked it up? Is it possible, more than half a century later, to identify that person?

Possibly. We’d love your crowdsourcing help. Ready?

First, more than 300,000 people showed up for the free, day-long show, featuring Carlos Santana, Jefferson Airplane, the Flying Burrito Brothers and, of course, the Rolling Stones. The concert was the subject of “Gimme Shelter,” the Maysles brothers 1970 documentary. There was news coverage, too, and lots of the young fans took their cameras, so there is plenty of documentation of who was on and near the stage. Despite all that, there is no wide-shot film of the stage for the entire concert.

The images we have reveal four primary contenders, all appearing to be young white men. Here are our limitations: We have yet to come across an image or footage that show all of them at once, which might us identify the cameraman by matching his position with the home footage. The images of the cameramen are not entirely clear, and in one instance is just the back of the guy’s head. There may be images of one of these men on the home footage itself — we haven’t verified that yet — which would rule that person out as our cameraman.

Still, we have some good clues.

Mystery cameraman #1. Image from “Gimme Shelter,” documentary by the Maysles brothers. 

Cameraman #1: Blue Shirt Man, seen here in a screen grab from the Maysles film. He’s in the correct place for the daytime scenes (stage right, house left), so that makes him a solid contender. But our film experts note he’s using a Keystone K-27 camera that didn’t shoot Super 8 film. The home movie footage is Super 8. So, unless he was working with two cameras, he’s not our guy. Nice smile, though!

Mystery camerman #2.

Cameraman #2: Brown Jacket Man. He’s in the correct place, too, and appears to be using a Super 8 Kodak Instamatic camera. Right camera, right place, right time. He checks out. There’s nothing we’ve seen to disqualify him.

Mystery cameraman #3.

Cameraman #3: Green Shirt Man. This gentleman is using a Super 8 camera—a Canon 318, we think — so he definitely makes the first cut. But he appears to be camped out at center stage. All of the daytime footage in our mystery video is shot from stage right. That apparently rules him out … unless there were two cameramen and his footage got separated from our film. See below for more on this theory.

Mystery cameraman #4. Screen image from “Gimme Shelter.”

Cameraman #4: Night Shooter. This guy, with the beard and blue shirt at the bottom left, appears in this, another shot from “Gimme Shelter.” He’s shooting with a Super 8 camera, a Technicolor Super V, which could have shot our footage. He’s at center stage, just in front of Stones guitarist Keith Richards. This is a different position from where the daytime footage was shot, but it roughly matches our nighttime footage. Can’t rule him out.

So there you have it. The footage is in two reels. It was dropped off at Palmer Films in Los Angeles and never picked up. Collector Rick Prelinger bought all of Palmer’s stock when they went out of business and eventually donated it to the Library as part of his vast collection.

Now, as some of you have theorized, it’s possible that the two reels were shot by different people – say, two or more guys on assignment for an as-yet-unknown client – and turned their film into Palmer for processing. The client, in this scenario, is the one who never picked it up.

Or, possibly, there was much more footage shot for this client, by multiple cameraman, and said client picked up all of it … except for our two orphan reels, which had gotten separated from the rest of the footage. (In this scenario, yes, that would mean there’s a heck of a lot more Altamont footage out there that’s still never been seen, presuming it still survives. Also possible it was thrown away or lost years ago.)

At the moment, it’s our best guess that our mystery man is #2, Brown Jacket Man with the Instamatic. He’s in just the right spot working with just the right camera. As luck would have it, he’s the only one whose face we can’t see.

That’s it from us. Put your thoughts  in the comments, identifying each guy by the cameraman’s number, one through four. We’ll track down any reasonable ideas, and thank you in advance.

Meanwhile, we hope you’ll check out some of the other titles in the National Screening Room. They’re not as buzzy as this, but they’re still fascinating. And your friendly national film preservation institution encourages you to preserve your own home movies. You never know what they might turn up.

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Jason Reynolds: Grab The Mic: Welcome to 2022

Ahem. Is this thing on? It is? Well …

Happy … New Year.

Here’s the thing: Screaming “Happy New Year” has felt so strange over the last few years because of everything going on. And I’ll be honest with you all: This year, my New Year’s Eve was spent lying on a beanbag in my house alone, binging a Netflix show. It came and went and there was a part of me that felt so exhausted by the last year — the last two years — that I didn’t even have the energy to welcome 2022 with cheer. Well, that’s not the only reason. I think I also have become a bit nervous about being joyous about the new year just because life still seems to be in a strange knot, one that seems to be tightening due to what seems to be an immortal virus. Oof. But on New Year’s Day, I woke up and realized … I woke up. Again. And even though it’s been a complicated time, joy is still not only possible, but … inevitable. It’s coming. Because it has to. And guess why it has to? Guess?

Because I say so.

That’s how it works. We choose it. We go searching for it. We reach for it and hold onto it as tightly as possible. But we have to decide that it’s so.

Know what it reminds me of? Trying to hold water. I know, strange transition, but go with me.

If you’ve ever tried to hold water, you know that it’s such a strange experience because it never actually feels like you’re holding anything. And then when you open your hands, the water drips out and now you’re holding nothing. So the question is, how do we keep water in our hands? Well, we keep it there by trusting it’s actually there. And if we believe it’s there, we just hold it tighter. There’s no need to check and see. There’s no need to doubt it because doubt will leave us empty-handed. That’s what we have to do with joy this year.

It’s there for us. It’s in us and around us and we just have to trust that. Which means as we enter into this new year, and we wish people a Happy New Year, we have to mean it despite our circumstances. We have to trust that the newness of the year guarantees happiness, and that our belief that it belongs to us will make it so that Happy Old Year will be an accurate statement.

So buck up, Buttercup. We’re still here. Laughter still lives in us. Beauty still blossoms around us. Love has never lost and is even more infectious than you-know-what.

I love you, and Happy Happy Happy New Year.

Jason

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Building the Library’s Collections: From (and for) The People

Image from “Visions of the Daughters of Albion,” by William Blake, 1793. Lessing J. Rosenwald Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division. 

Over the past two centuries, the unparalleled collections of the Library of Congress have, in no small part, been built by America’s citizens themselves — truly collections for and by the people.

Generations of civic-minded folks have donated important collections to the Library, allowing them to remain accessible to the public for posterity.

In this way, the Library has acquired an amazing array of material that collectively chronicles centuries of human achievement, history and culture.

Lincoln’s original drafts of the Gettysburg Address, the diaries of Theodore Roosevelt, Walt Whitman’s notes for “Leaves of Grass,” the journals of Alexander Graham Bell documenting his invention of the telephone, Irving Berlin’s handwritten score for “God Bless America,” the papers of Rosa Parks, the diaries of Orville Wright chronicling the first powered flight — all were obtained by the Library via donation, gifts from citizens to the American public.

The list of donated treasures stretches on and on: first folios of Shakespeare’s plays, the original Disney storyboards for Mickey Mouse, the first photographic “selfie,” Sigmund Freud’s home movies, Steinbeck’s typescript for “The Grapes of Wrath,” 3D models of Normandy beaches used to train troops for D-Day landings, and thousands of rare baseball cards collected by businessman Benjamin K. Edwards and donated to the Library in 1954 by poet Carl Sandburg.

The Library is the oldest federal cultural institution in the nation and, with over 171 million collection items, the largest library in the world.

From the start, 221 years ago, it has been funded through the generosity of Congress and the U.S. taxpayer.

In 1800, President John Adams approved legislation that appropriated $5,000 to purchase “such books as may be necessary for the use of Congress.” After the British burned the U.S. Capitol in 1814, Congress spent $23,940 to buy Thomas Jefferson’s personal library — 6,487 volumes that formed the foundation of the modern Library’s collections.

Congressional funding built the Library’s magnificent facilities on Capitol Hill and, today, pays for operations and acquisitions with money that ultimately comes from taxpayers.

But the collections likewise have been directly built by America’s citizens, by folks who follow their passions and invest their time, money and energy into researching and acquiring material, then hand over this life’s work to the Library for safekeeping in the public trust.

Collectors are the ultimate crowdsource, gathering material on whatever subjects strike their particular fancy, adding to our knowledge of our world and our past.

Early in his career, Jay I. Kislak moved to Florida and began to study the history of his new home. Over five decades, he amassed a comprehensive collection on the early history of Florida, the Caribbean and Mesoamerica and, in 2004, donated it to the Library.

Hollow sculpture of a kneeling man from western Mexico. Made between 200 B.C.-A.D. 300. Jay I. Kislak Collection. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

The collection is among the finest of its kind — rare masterpieces of indigenous art, original manuscripts written by historic figures such as King Philip II of Spain, conquistador Hernán Cortés, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, great maps such as the Martin Waldseemüller’s 1516 Carta Marina.

An unidentified Black Union soldier, posing with his wife and daughters. The picture was found in Cecil County, Maryland. Liljenquist Family Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.

Inspired by a chance encounter with a Civil War photograph in a shop in Ellicott City, Maryland, Tom Liljenquist and his three sons spent some 15 years building a major collection of rare photographic portraits of Union and Confederate soldiers and their families. The family gave the collection to the Library in 2010 and continue to add to it — its value has surpassed $4.5 million.

Gertrude Clarke Whittall grew up hearing musicians perform live in her Massachusetts home, fostering a lifelong love of classical music. Later, as she traveled the world, Whittall saw great examples of musical instruments on exhibit, sitting behind glass, and had an idea: Wouldn’t it be nice to build a collection of instruments by the supreme makers and make them accessible to the public back home in America, to not just be seen but also heard in concert?

The incredible collection she built and donated to the Library in the 1930s — five stringed instruments by Stradivari and five others by Amati, Vuillaume and Guarneri — is available to researchers and, today, the instruments still are regularly played for public audiences, just as she’d intended.

Not all collections are so grand in ambition; they often reflect the extremely specific interests of the folks who build them.

Charles B. Sonneborn, a music-loving ophthalmologist, collected nearly 800 examples of sheet music that feature the word “eyes” in the title, putting classics (“Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”) alongside long-forgotten efforts that, nevertheless, instantly evoke the sensibilities of eras gone by (“Never Make Eyes at the Gals with the Guys Who Are Bigger Than You”).

During the mid-20th-century golden age of travel, railway engineer György Rázsó so enjoyed the colorful, arty luggage labels produced by hotels that he planned vacations around collecting them — and, naturally, declined to actually stick them on his luggage so that they would remain pristine.

Noemi Razso donated her father’s collection of luggage labels from hotels across the United States in the mid-20th century. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Rázsó gathered 1,882 such labels over 30 years and eventually donated them to the Library — a collection of perhaps trivial-seeming things that nonetheless presents a visual record of American hotel advertising.

Collections of such things, of so-called “ephemera,” help bring history to life.

Travelers today, accustomed to the cattle-car quality of modern travel, can look at a luggage label for the Clover Inn, tucked cozily away among the giant redwoods, and just feel the difference in the eras. A music lover could leaf through Sonneborn’s collection and appreciate the seismic shifts in artistic sensibilities across the generations.

The Library and, ultimately, the public get the benefits of not just the collectors’ time, energy and resources, but also their expertise.

Collectors spend years searching and researching, finding important and unique items and learning about them. In the course of doing so, they often develop specialized knowledge that is an invaluable resource in itself.

The world is big, the material that might be collected from it is endless, and the Library’s time and resources are finite. Billions of photos are taken in a year; the Library can’t assess, gather or accept them all.

Collectors, using their knowledge and experience, select out the best. As a result, they build remarkable, important compilations that chronicle countless aspects of our history.

Lessing J. Rosenwald, heir to the Sears, Roebuck and Co. fortune, built a collection of thousands of exceptionally rare illustrated books and prints that bring the most pivotal eras of Western history to life — great works such as “Epistolae et Evangelia,” the finest illustrated book of the 15th century; a supreme gathering of books, drawings and engravings by poet and artist William Blake; or the Giant Bible of Mainz, the last large handwritten Bible produced before the advent of the printing press.

Katherine Golden Bitting, a food chemist for the Department of Agriculture, amassed a personal collection of materials about growing, preparing, cooking, preserving and eating food — including a 15th-century Italian manuscript that served as the basis of history’s first printed cookbook. After Bitting died, her husband presented the 4,346-volume collection to the Library.

Dayton C. Miller grew up in Ohio obsessed with science and music — at his high school graduation, he delivered a lecture about the sun and, as part of the ceremony, played the flute.

Miller studied astronomy, became an expert on acoustics, helped design sonically perfect music venues, debated Einstein on relativity and pioneered the use of X-rays in medicine — he toured the country promoting them and once underwent a full-body X-ray to demonstrate the procedure’s value.

He also became one of the world’s foremost experts on the flute. Miller collected enormous numbers of music scores, reference books and related material and thousands of flutes, creating the definitive collection on the instrument.

He also wrote music for the flute and built his own — including one of 22-karat gold that, he calculated, took 2,250 hours to make. He was such an expert that makers from around the globe traveled to him to consult on manufacturing their instruments.

That continues today, in a way. Miller donated his collection to the Library and, 80 years after his death, researchers and musicians from around the world still come here to study it and play the instruments.

Likewise, shelves are lined with Civil War books whose pages feature portraits from the Liljenquist collection, staring back at you across the generations. Researchers from across the globe have applied modern technology to their studies of the Whittall Strads to learn how a maker from a small town in 17th-century Italy could make a violin that still sounds so good 300 years later.

Those things wouldn’t happen without the civic-minded citizens who play their own role in the preservation of our cultural heritage, building collections and sharing them with the rest of the world — gifts that keep on giving.

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The Rolling Stones, Hell’s Angels and Altamont: A New View

Mick Jagger (in red) and Keith Richards (in shades, natch), just off stage at the Altamont concert, hours before their segment turned deadly. Dec. 6, 1969. Home video footage. National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

This is a guest post by Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Image Section. 

Here at the Library, we’re dedicated to the acquisition, description, preservation and accessibility of our film, video, and sound recording collections regardless of perceived “worth.” We really do want to make it all available for future generations  ̶  so we don’t necessarily prioritize beloved classics over a refrigerator ad or the song “Fido is a Hot Dog Now.”

But every so often something comes along that attracts a lot of attention – such as a never-before-seen home movie from the notorious Altamont Free Concert in 1969, in which the Hell’s Angels, who had been hired to provide security, stabbed a fan to death during a confrontation over a gun. It was a major cultural turning point of the era, and the heart of the Maysles Brothers 1970 documentary “Gimme Shelter.”

But this new find was home footage from the event that had never seen the light of day and it’s now available for viewing on the National Screening Room. (There is no audio, so don’t try to fix your sound.)

And as is so often the case, the tale of how this remarkable video emerged from a mass of unprocessed films is a pretty good story on its own.

It starts in 1996 when archivist/historian/collector/polymath Rick Prelinger — one of the most influential thinkers in our field—acquired a cache of reels from Palmer Labs, a San Francisco company that was going out of business. He added them to his burgeoning collection of ephemeral films.

In 2002, the Library acquired the roughly 140,000 reels in the Prelinger Collection. A press release predicted it would “take several years before the Library will be in a position to provide access to these films.” As it turns out, that was optimistic — we are still making steady progress on the collection 19 years later.

Then, not long ago, a technician working on the Prelinger Collection came across two reels of silent 8mm reversal positive—a  common home movie format. The handwritten note on the film leader read “Stones in the Park,”  so that was the title he gave it for our inventory.

When I saw that, I immediately thought that it could be a home movie of the July 5, 1969, Rolling Stones Hyde Park concert held in London a couple of days after the death of guitarist Brian Jones. But it could also be a copy of a documentary of the same name, which would make the discovery considerably less interesting.

Regardless, I sent the reels up for 2K digitization by our film preservation laboratory. A couple of days later, I heard from some very excited colleagues that the scan wasn’t the Hyde Park show. It was from the Altamont Speedway concert in California and it definitely wasn’t footage from the 1970 documentary.

Many people know the “Gimme Shelter” documentary pretty well, but there’s a lot more in this home movie.

Carlos Santana performs at Altamont, Dec. 6, 1969. Home video footage. National Audio-Visual Conservation Center.

Although the footage is silent, we were all thrilled to see close-up footage of concert performers who were cut from the film, such as Carlos Santana and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. (CNSY wasn’t pleased with their performance and refused to let the Maysles include them.) It was especially great to see Gram Parsons fronting the Flying Burrito Brothers, since you only see the back of his head in “Gimme Shelter.” Even better, there are good shots of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards off-stage watching him perform!

The second reel is from the Stones’ evening performance, which, while it captures some of chaos so memorably seen in “Gimme Shelter,” doesn’t add anything to our understanding of the death of Meredith Hunter at the hands of a member of the Hell’s Angels.

So what’s the legal status of this home movie? After checking in with Rick to see if he had any inkling of the film’s existence—he didn’t—and not discovering any pertinent documentation, we believe that it is an orphan work, in this case  abandoned at Palmer Labs by whoever shot it. They just never picked it up.

We have a particular fondness for home movies here at the Library. Several are on the National Film Registry and of course the Prelinger Collection is full of them, so who knows what further treasures will emerge?

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World War II: The Debut of G.I. Joe

David Breger with his alter-ego, G.I. Joe. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Meg McAleer, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It ran in the Nov.-Dec. issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

The “Private Breger” cartoon was born under mosquito netting in densely humid Louisiana. David Breger, a successful freelance cartoonist, drafted into the Army in 1941, created the cartoon during his off-duty hours at Camp Livingston. It quickly caught on, and  “Private Breger” became a popular feature in the Saturday Evening Post, one of the most popular magazines of the day. That’s where the Army discovered it and wanted it for its own — just under a different name.

That was how “Private Breger” acquired an identical twin, “G.I. Joe,” Breger’s name for his new cartoon character. It appeared in Yank, the Army Weekly, and then Stars and Stripes, while “Private Breger” remained stateside. As David Breger had to explain repeatedly, the “G.I.” in G.I. Joe stood for “government issue.”

American soldiers quickly adopted the G.I. Joe moniker as their own, but not because the cartoon portrayed an ideal warrior. The Private Breger and G.I. Joe characters bore a striking resemblance to Breger himself with comic embellishments — freckles, soft bodies of short stature, wide eyes encased in round glasses, upturned faces, forward-leaning postures and innocent expressions that occasionally betrayed mischievousness, but never cynicism.

G. I. Joe, as drawn by Breger. Prints and Photographs Division.

Breger’s G.I. Joe was the antithesis of the muscled Hasbro action doll of the same name in the 1960s, yet he was somehow more. He represented a generation that found itself in unimaginable situations and yet went all in, summoning all that it had, not always performing to perfection, yet giving its best.

Breger’s children recently donated their father’s collection to the Library, where it is housed in the Manuscript Division and Prints and Photographs Division. The gift was one of many donated during the pandemic, the result of people having more free time to sort through attics, but also from a desire to give generously during a world crisis. This particular gift has renewed American memories of an old hero who bore tough times with resilience, humor and imperfect humanness just as we grapple with our own challenging times.

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