Library of Congress's Blog, page 4

Native American (Artistic) Visions

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

When Zig Jackson was a broke college kid in the 1970s, he found himself wandering the country with his beloved camera, taking pictures that nobody wanted of people who had been shoved to the edges of the American landscape.

He was born and raised on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the seventh of 10 children. His name there was Rising Buffalo, and he was an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes — Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara.

He endured brutal treatment at one boarding school for Native Americans or another, coming out of the experience with not much other than an artistic vision and vague plans for a better life. He wanted to show Native Americans as they were, with an eye that was as humorous as it was empathetic.

“Bob and Mary Apachito, Diné, Alamo, New Mexico,” 2019. Photo: Zig Jackson. Prints and Photographs Division.

“I was just a lonely kid driving in my VW bus, driving to reservations to take my pictures,” he says now. “I didn’t have any idea anyone would want them.”

Time, talent and perseverance paid off. In 2005, by then a well-established art photographer, he donated — at the Library’s request — 12 large silver gelatin prints of his work, becoming the first contemporary Native American photographer to be actively collected by the Library.

Jaune Quick-toSee Smith, who passed away earlier this year, in 1998 had become the first modern visual artist to be collected by the Library. These acquisitions formed a watershed moment.

The Library already had some 18,000 images of Native Americans — including the iconic images taken by Edward Curtis in the early 20th century — but nearly all of those were the work of non-Native artists. Many portray Native Americans in the soft focus, romanticized light of an exotic other — the “vanishing Indian” motif — that manipulated history and isn’t reflective of the modern world.

The Smith and Jackson acquisitions, though, proved to be the start of a two decade-and-counting project to preserve a unique viewpoint on American history and culture — art from the descendants of the continent’s first peoples.

The Library now holds more than 200 prints and photographs by more than 50 contemporary Indigenous printmakers and photographers from the United States, Canada and Latin America.

These artists have won fellowships and awards from the nation’s top rank of artistic supporters, such as the MacArthur Foundation and the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Many have works in the nation’s most prestigious art museums and private collections.

The artists include well-known names such as Wendy Red Star, Jim Yellowhawk, Shelley Niro, Kay WalkingStick and Brian Adams. More than 100 photographs, including 38 more from Jackson, have come in over the past five years.

“Triphammer,” 1989. Artist: Kay Walkingstick. Prints and Photographs Division.

The project was originally led by Jennifer Brathovde, a reference specialist for Native American images in the Prints and Photographs Division. It now involves staff from multiple divisions, who coordinate their work with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian to build complementary collections.

Thematically, these show concerns about the environment, personal and communal identity, social justice and the passage of daily life in kitchens, living rooms and back porches. These are presented in a blend of modernist, abstract, figurative and traditional styles, often with bright new images colliding with traditional art forms. Taken together, they give the nation a widened viewpoint on American art and history.

“We continue to add new works, most recently by Rick Bartow and Lewis deSoto,” says Katherine Blood, fine prints curator in P&P. “And we’ll keep going.”

The images come with all sorts of backstories that enhance their impact.

“Segyp Kas’Ket Suit Taup,” 1997. Artist: Rick Bartow. Prints and Photographs Division.

Consider Inuit photographer Adams’ story about one of his most well-known photographs — that of fellow Alaskan and Inuit tribal member Marie Rexford, chopping up bowhead whale flesh for a family Thanksgiving Day dinner in Kaktovik, Alaska, in 2015.

It’s at the top of this article and was the cover image of his photo book, “I Am Inuit.” Kaktovik is a village of about 300 people on Barter Island in the Arctic Circle. Even in summer, the average temperature is just above freezing. Muktuk, the blubber and skin of the whale, is a traditional food of the Inuit.

Adams was shooting with medium format film (the negative is 6 by 6 centimeters) and had decided the entire project would be shot with natural light. Given the latitude and that it was late November, he had precious little daylight in which to shoot.

How it happened: Rexford’s family is inside the house behind her, butchering the whale. She’s come outside to place the muktuk on a clear sheet of plastic, which can barely be seen in the dim light. She’s using the stick in her hand to separate it so that it doesn’t all congeal. She’s going to let it freeze, then wrap the chunks in plastic to store for the holiday.

“There was only 40 minutes of daylight at the time,” Adams says. “I had brought a tripod and luckily there was a LED streetlight behind me. I shot it at one-eighth of a second, a really slow shutter speed, with the aperture wide open. I was like, ‘Marie! Hold still!’ I took about three frames, and we went back to what we were doing.”

The image, though, is so striking and well composed that it has found a lasting place in Alaskan culture.

WalkingStick, a member of the Cherokee Nation, in 1995 became the first Native American included in the influential “History of Art” textbook by H.W. Janson. The Library now has five of her works, including a tongue-in-cheek lithograph from her artist’s book, “Talking Leaves.” (The 45-page book is huge; 2 feet wide and 2 feet high, with a wooden cover.)

“You’re an Indian?” 1995. Artist: Kay Walkingstick. Prints and Photographs Division.

In a lithograph from that book, “You’re an Indian?,” made at the Robert Blackburn Printmaking Workshop, the scrawled text reads, “You’re an Indian? I thought you were a Jewish girl from Queens who changed her name.” On the facing page is a self-portrait in which she’s wearing her favorite hat and a nonplussed expression.

WalkingStick, now 90, said in a recent interview that quote, like all the others in the book, were actual remarks that had been made to her by non-Native peoples (in this case, a good-natured art gallery owner in New York in the cultural hubbub of the late 1960s, when it wasn’t uncommon for artists to try on other names).

“The idea of the book was that people had trouble seeing me as an Indian because I didn’t look like I was an Indian in the movies,” she says. “My mother was Scots-Irish, and I suppose I have her skin. But I made the book out of stupid things that otherwise intelligent people had said to me.”

“Time Keepers.” Artists: John Hitchcock and Emily Arthur. Prints and Photographs Division.

Shelley Niro, a multimedia artist of Mohawk descent born in New York, has always drawn inspiration from the region’s geography and her place in it. “Knowing the Iroquois people lived in New York state, it tugs at my heart,” she said. “It’s not sentimental or nostalgic, it’s something else. … It’s memory. My father would talk about what his grandmother would talk about, and that’s four generations back. So, whatever he told me about that territory really stuck with me. I just feel that part of that landscape is mine.”

Meanwhile, Zig Jackson’s most influential work is likely his series of black and white photographs featuring him as a Native American in an elaborate headdress, confronting lost lands and history, often with him in front of a “Zig’s Reservation” road sign. In the near distance of one photograph, giving the image an ironic twist, are modern American features such as a power plant, a city skyline or just vast open land.

Now 68, he’s retired from teaching and lives in Savannah, Georgia. But the days of taking those photos, of rambling across the country from reservation to reservation, left him with lifelong friends. Most of their shared memories are positive, he says. Others, like the beatings and abuse they endured in boarding schools, are not.

“I keep in contact with all of them,” he says. “We tell each other we love each other to this day.”

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“The Tale of Genji:” 1,000 Years of Romance

“The Tale of Genji,” one of the foundational works of Japanese literature, was written 1,000 years ago and is more than 1,000 pages long. Penned over the course of a decade or so by Murasaki Shikibu, it is widely considered the world’s first novel. It’s also a landmark of women’s world literature.

The Library has many iterations of “Genji” from down the centuries — full copies, in Japanese and in translations, plus summaries, satires and what you might call graphic novel versions from 17th century. Like the endless reinventions of Western classics, from “The Iliad” to “Romeo and Juliet,” “Genji” holds a central place in Japanese culture, with new works adding to that heft as time goes by.

The Library recently added to its impressive “Genji” collections with a beautiful edition of Genji kokagami, or “A Little Mirror of the Tale of Genji,” set in wooden moveable type, from around 1625. It’s a summary of the original with excerpts and explanations, filling three slender notebook-size volumes with thin pages and delicate type. The typeface is so finely wrought that it appears at first glance to be calligraphy.

This truncated edition was extremely popular in its day, as it was important in Japanese society to be on a conversational basis about “the shining prince,” as the titular Genji was known, even if reading the entire opus was not pragmatic. Call it the shorthand for the smart set.

“It made the book much more accessible to many more people,” said Jesse Drian, Japanese reference librarian in the Asian Division, where the books are held.

A page from the Library’s recently acquired 1625 edition of Genji kokagami, or “A Little Mirror of the Tale of Genji.” Asian Division.

But “Genji” is challenging on several levels — its length, archaic language, confusing naming conventions (almost everyone is referred to by their titles, not their actual names), huge cast and a very slow pace that follows characters for decades. Genji dies two-thirds of the way through … and there’s still more than 300 pages to go.

Given all this, it wasn’t translated into English until the late 19th century. When Virginia Woolf read Arthur Waley’s landmark 1925 translation, she was mesmerized.

“All comparisons between Murasaki and the great Western writers serve but to bring out her perfection and their force,” she wrote in a review for Vogue magazine. “… But it is a beautiful world; the quiet lady with all her breeding, her insight and her fun, is a perfect artist … life expressed itself chiefly in the intricacies of behaviour, in what men said and what women did not quite say.”

The scholar Royall Tyler published a highly regarded translation into English in 2001, replete with explanations, footnotes, character lists and helpful drawings and illustrations. He was exhausted by the effort.

“After eight and a half years spent translating, pondering, and discussing it, I still cannot imagine how she created it,” he wrote in Harvard Magazine that same year.

So what’s all the fuss?

An illustrated edition of “Genji,” with words and sketchings filling the pages. Photo: Shawn Miller. Asian Division.

Like most ancient epics, it’s complicated.

“Genji” is a poetic, delicately wrought story about the life and loves of the dashing, sophisticated Genji in Heian period Japan, around 1000. He’s courtly, refined, educated, generous and handsome, but denied a shot at the throne by his father.

But rather than a tale from a long-ago oral tradition finally set down into print, or the rousing tale of a swashbuckling prince out to claim the throne denied him, it’s an intricate examination of aristocratic manners and romantic relationships in the royal city, with a keenly sensitive eye turned toward nature. It’s often said that the book is more a series of independent stories set around a central character rather than a single narrative.

Shikibu was a lady in waiting amid the aristocracy at court and spent more than a decade writing “Genji,” perhaps composing the elegant chapters one at a time for her patron and others. (Woolf admired a passage in which flowers unfolded themselves “like the lips of people smiling at their own thoughts.”) The most refined art at the time was poetry, and in the book she wrote some 800 short poems in Genji’s voice, exquisitely wrought verses that illustrate the book’s sophistication.

The author knew this world well. The capital at the time was modern-day Kyoto, and Shikibu’s father was a poet and aristocrat in the lower branches of government. It’s fitting that Murasaki Shikibu is a nickname of sorts, following the mores of the period in which women were often referred to by references to their male relatives.

“Shikibu” translates as “Bureau of the Ceremonial,” a position her father had held, and “Murasaki” is a plant that produces lavender dye used in clothing. It is also the name of the book’s heroine. (No one is certain of the author’s actual name, although many of her life details are known.) She kept to that practice in the book. As Tyler notes in the introduction to his translation, women without a title “may have no personal appellation at all in the narration.”

Also, verbs don’t always have a clear object. Even after hundreds of years of scholarship, Tyler notes, “it is still possible to argue that this or that speech or action should be attributed to someone else.”

As you might expect, this gets confusing over the course of 1,000 pages covering decades of time and a cast of a couple hundred characters.

Finally, it was composed in a formal version of the language that passed from common use, making it difficult even for Japanese readers to comprehend. (Think of trying to read a work written in Middle English.)

So began the centuries of summaries, the quotations, the heavily illustrated satires — all from one book bringing a country, and then the world, a little bit closer together. Things are different now, but people? As Shikibu shows us, not so much.

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Raúl Ruiz, La Raza Collection Lands at the Library

This is a guest post by Zoe Herrera, an intern in the Office of Communications.

It’s the last half of the 1960s. The Vietnam War is at its height. Martin Luther King Jr. is assassinated. The battle for civil rights stretches across the country.

Passion, grief and change come with protests, riots and strikes.

That is exactly what journalist, photographer and activist Raúl Ruiz captured when he joined La Raza, a newspaper and magazine in East Los Angeles started by Chicano activists and creatives in the last half of the ’60s.

Ruiz and the magazine focused on covering the struggles of Chicanos (Mexican Americans), his photographs capturing the community’s mobilization that flourished despite hardships.

The Library will preserve that legacy, announcing today that it has acquired the Raúl Ruiz Chicano Movement Collection, some 17,500 photos by Ruiz and original page layouts for La Raza. It also has nearly 10,000 pages of manuscripts, which include original correspondence, the unpublished draft of Ruiz’s book on Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar and handwritten minutes from the staff meetings of La Raza.

“The Ruiz collection speaks to the heart of the Chicano movement and will be an important resource for the study of journalism and Latino history and culture at the Library of Congress,” said Adam Silvia, curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division.

A young child holding a sign at a Chicano protest in Los Angeles. Photo: Raúl Ruiz. Prints and Photographs Division.

As an undergraduate at California State University, Los Angeles, Ruiz became active in student and community organizing during the height of the civil rights era. Once he began reporting for La Raza, it was apparent to him what role the publication played for the community.

“A lot of us wanted to bring out the truth of who we were,” Ruiz recalled years later on “Artbound,” a documentary series by Public Broadcasting SoCal. “We wanted to come out with our own news, with our own version, with our own story.”

As the Chicano community in East L.A. began to mobilize, so did La Raza’s staff. They covered school walkouts, marches and the police crackdowns that often came along with those protests.

Protesters gather for at protest for education reform in Los Angeles in the late 1960s. Photo: Raúl Ruiz. Prints and Photographs Division.

During a school walkout, Ruiz tried to intervene when a student was being violently arrested by police.

“I was taking pictures,” Ruiz said on the “Artbound” series. “Taking pictures of the kids, taking pictures of the cops, of things that were going on and acting responsibly as a journalist.”

His attempt to deescalate the situation led to him being thrown in the back of a squad car and beaten by police in an alley. He came back and kept reporting, though, as police arrested 13 more protesters. Among them was Sal Castro, a high school teacher accused of disturbing the peace.

Ruiz, La Raza and the greater East L.A. Chicano community followed Castro’s detainment and eventual release. When the local board of education refused to allow Castro to teach again, Chicano activists held sit-ins at the school board. Some three dozen activists, including Ruiz, stayed after being told they’d be arrested if they didn’t leave.

“Determined to make our point clear, and our commitment clear, we were willing to risk arrest,” Ruiz said in the documentary.

The school board eventually allowed Castro back into the classroom, but other events ended in tragedy.

Crowd celebrates activist and teacher Sal Castro. Photo: La Raza staff. Prints and Photographs Division.

In August of 1970, more than 20,000 people marched as part of the National Chicano Moratorium in East Los Angeles to protest the disproportionate number of Mexican American soldiers dying in Vietnam. Ruben Salazar, the most famous Mexican-American reporter of his generation — he was the news director at a local television station and a well-known columnist at the Los Angeles Times — was also covering the event.

Police had moved in, the protest was becoming chaotic and Ruiz was taking pictures of police firing tear gas canisters into the open doorway of the Silver Dollar bar. One canister hit Salazar in the head, killing him. It became a major event in the Chicano movement, particularly as police were never charged with any wrongdoing.

“I kept thinking, ‘Oh my god, we were there,’ ” Ruiz said in the documentary.

Raúl Ruiz in Los Angeles around 1971. Prints & Photographs Division.

Ruiz’s photographs ran on the on the front page of the L.A. Times and have since become well known. His images from the Moratorium, some of which have become part of the permanent collections at institutions such as UCLA and now at the Library, served as visual testimony of the violence inflicted on peaceful protestors.

After La Raza’s dissolution in 1977, Ruiz became a college professor, teaching Chicano studies and journalism at CSU, Northridge until his retirement in 2015.

Ruiz died in 2019. He was 79. He left a legacy as a witness, a storyteller and an early voice of the Chicano movement. He captured a critical era in American history from the perspective of those who lived it. His work is a testament to the idea that journalism, at its best, can be a revolutionary act.

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Ashley Dickerson, Powerlifting Librarian

Ashley Dickerson is the acquisitions and cataloging librarian for Finland and the Baltic states.

Tell us about your background.

I was born in Washington, D.C., and lived in the area my entire life. My family is from North Carolina. I studied anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. My focus was biological anthropology with a subfocus in archeology and a minor in creative writing. I’ve been at the Library for most of my professional career. I started as a work-study student during my senior year of high school at Forestville Military Academy, left for college and came back as a contractor in 2013 after I graduated.

What brought you to the Library, and what do you do?

I told myself when I was a workstudy student in the Regional Cooperative Cataloging Division (RCCD) that I wanted to come back, because I truly enjoyed this place. I worked with so many languages. I always had an interest in languages prior to that experience, but what I learned deepened my interest. I worked with Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Persian, Arabic and Hebrew. At the time, I had studied Spanish and French in school and Finnish on my own, so all of the newer languages were so exciting. I went off to college, but I never forgot the Library. I visited when I could, and I always made sure to see who came and went. I made sure to always find David Maya Hernandez. He was my rock in RCCD when I was growing up, and now we work together in the Germanic and Slavic Division. For me, working at the Library was meant to be, I think.

What are some of your standout projects?

My favorite would have to be the DK Reclassification Project for the Baltic states. DK is the classification for the history of Russia, the Soviet Union and former Soviet Republics. Most of the countries I work with (Finland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania) were occupied by Imperial Russia, the Soviet Union or both. Finland was occupied by Imperial Russia from 1809 to 1917. The Baltic states were occupied by Imperial Russia from the late 17th century to 1918 and by the Soviet Union from 1940 to 1990. Regardless of their independence, those countries were classed in the DK schedule. Finland moved to the DL schedule, which covers northern Europe and Scandinavia, during the late 1970s and early 1980s. But the Baltic states remained under DK even though their independence from the Soviet Union was restored between 1990 and 1991. Last year, I was asked if the Baltic states would be receptive to reclassification. I asked when I could start. I’d wanted to begin with at least Estonia when I first became a librarian in 2017, but I did not yet have the knowledge to make the massive changes needed. I’m passionate about what I do and enjoy the countries that I work with, so this to me is important work. The DK Reclassification Project did not start with the Baltic states — it began with Ukraine, which was moved from under the history of Russia to the history of Ukraine. But when I complete the project for the Baltic states, hopefully later this year, I will consider it one of my major achievements.

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

I enjoy finding new restaurants to go to with friends. Food is culture, and sharing a meal with someone is to see them, know them and love them. I’m truly a nerd at heart. I’m always watching a new anime or trying to tackle my manga backlog, but I keep adding four titles for every one I take off my list. It’s a toxic cycle.

What is something your coworkers may not know about you?

I did archery and kendo in college. I want to get back into archery, but judo and powerlifting have my attention at the moment.

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Ada Limón’s Final Lecture as Poet Laureate: “You have to love.”

Winding down her historic two- term, three-year appointment as the 24th U.S. poet laureate, Ada Limón defended poetry as a tool for courage, personal healing and community connection.

More than a farewell, her final lecture last week in the Coolidge Auditorium was a love letter to poetry, to libraries and librarians and to the collective soul of a country still learning how to feel. Her lecture, titled “Against Breaking: On the Public and Private Power of Poetry,” framed poetry as a shared, not solitary, experience and as a celebration of humanity’s range of voices and perspectives at its core.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden praised Limón as “one of the greatest voices of this century” and said her work “has helped to extend and deepen the Library’s outreach and partnership, moving us closer to the vision of connecting all Americans.”

Limón’s signature project as poet laureate, “You Are Here,” involved creating permanent poetry installations in seven national parks.

Through a collaboration with NASA, she also composed the first poem ever to launch into space — it began its journey to Jupiter’s moon Europa last year engraved on NASA’s Europa Clipper. Limón recalled visiting communities across America as poet laureate and meeting people who turned to poetry as solace or a lifeline during grief, isolation or transition. She met a grandfather who memorized poems and left them to his grandchildren before he died and a woman born in Mexico who wrote poems in Spanish and translated them into English to witness the world in two languages. People told her about carrying poems in their back pockets, reading them in hospitals, at funerals, or writing them again after years of silence.

Addressing the rise of AI and its role in creating art, Limón noted that poetry’s true value is its human element and unrivaled power in capturing human experiences and providing comfort and understanding. She praised libraries as sacred spaces and repositories of memory “for anyone with curiosity to learn and explore.”

Limón’s lecture carried a quiet undercurrent of activism in uncertain times, not loud or preachy, but rather to stress the power of words to bring people together. Looking out into the packed auditorium, the soft-spoken poet encouraged people to “stand in poetry” to gather courage and find hope and strength again.

“If you need to be reminded of what makes us human, tender, brave, flawed and worthy of love, then you need poetry.…You do not have to love poetry, but you have to love something; even simpler: You have to love,” she said, drawing a rousing ovation.

In an interview, Limón, 49, said she has always believed in poetry’s enduring power to help people connect.

“My whole life, I really felt that,” she said. “As a kid, I was very moved by going to poetry readings at the local bookstore, and I felt that it was important to hear poetry out loud.”

Limón’s lecture was a reminder that the ancient art of poetry still holds a vital place in society.

“As she said, the right poem can make us recommit to the world,” said Karen González, a member of Tintas DC, a group of budding Hispanic writers in the Washington, D.C., area. Limón, an award-winning author of six books of poetry, is the first Latina to serve as U.S. poet laureate. Her latest book, a compilation of new and earlier poems, will come out in September.

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The Librarian as Hero: Ainsworth Spofford

With about 175 words, elegantly inscribed in ink and set off by the Great Seal of the United States, Abraham Lincoln unknowingly put the Library of Congress on course to be the world’s largest, greatest library.

“Know ye,” Lincoln proclaimed on New Year’s Eve in 1864, “That reposing special Trust and Confidence in the Integrity, Diligence and Discretion of Ainsworth R. Spofford of Ohio, I do appoint him Librarian … .”

Spofford would serve as Librarian of Congress for over 32 years — a period during which, thanks largely to his drive and vision, the Library grew into a position of national prominence.

At the time of Spofford’s appointment, the Library was a small institution that served only Congress. The Boston Public Library, Boston Athenaeum and Astor Library in New York City were bigger, as were the Harvard and Yale libraries.

The Library wasn’t in good shape, either. Dust coated everything, Spofford noted, large numbers of books needed repair and the collections suffered “remarkable deficiencies” — the newest encyclopedia available to members of Congress was 20 years old.

Spofford argued for more funding and bigger, more current collections. He expanded the Library’s physical space in the Capitol. Working with Congress, he centralized all copyright activities at the Library, adding two copies of every copyrighted work to the collections, enormously expanding their size and range.

With the collections growing quickly, the Library soon needed more space. Spofford doggedly lobbied for the Library to get a building of its own — today’s magnificent Jefferson Building.

He also supplied the Library with something new and important: a vision of the institution as a library, not just for Congress, but for the nation and its citizens. More than 160 years after Spofford first took the job, the Library still holds his vision — a library for all.

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A Precious Bible Blessed By Pope Francis at the Library

-This is a guest post by Courtney Pomeroy, a social media specialist in the Office of Communications.

In 2015, when Pope Francis became the fourth pope to visit the U.S., he blessed a modern masterpiece of a Bible that was then donated in his honor to the Library.

As the world mourns the pontiff, we wanted to share this beautiful artifact and remember that special moment.

The pope’s time in the U.S. was filled with all the pomp befitting a papal visit. He was greeted by huge crowds in each city of his six-day trip: Washington, New York and Philadelphia.

President Barack Obama and the first family escort Pope Francis from the tarmac at Joint Base Andrews. Official White House photo by Pete Souza.

The journey began just outside the nation’s capital at Joint Base Andrews on Sept. 22, where he was received by President Barack Obama and his family. Two days later, he made history as the first pope to address a joint session of Congress.

Later that same day on Capitol Hill, Pope Francis was present for the donation of an Apostles Edition of The Saint John’s Bible — the first entirely handwritten and illuminated Bible commissioned by a Benedictine monastery in more than 500 years.

Commissioned by St. John’s University and St. John’s Abbey in 1998 and directed and overseen by Donald Jackson, a British master calligrapher, it is a 1,130-page, seven-volume, art-filled edition of the Bible. Its vellum pages are 2 feet tall, and the open volume measures 3 feet across. Jackson and his team used the ancient crafts of calligraphy and illumination but brought the book to life with the help of modern tools and understandings of world history. The project took 13 years and was completed in 2011.

The structure of this illumination reflects the seven-day progression of the Bible’s creation story, with seven vertical strips, one for each day. Photo: Shawn Miller.

St. John’s holds the original manuscript version of the Saint John’s Bible. Just twelve precious “Apostles Editions” were also created. They reside at institutions such as the Library, the Vatican Museum and Library and the Morgan Library.

St. John’s Abbey and St. John’s University donated a copy to the Library in 2015 to mark the papal visit.

“The Library of Congress is truly honored to receive this priceless work of human creativity and divine inspiration in honor of Pope Francis’ visit,” said then-Librarian James Billington.

The Library’s copy was then put on display in the Jefferson Building for three months. Parts of it were also on display during a 2006 national tour while it was being made.

The Bible is now part of the Library’s extensive collection of holy texts of many religions from around the world, including one of only three complete vellum copies of the Gutenberg Bible and the Giant Bible of Mainz.

The Gutenberg Bible on display at the Library. Photo: Shawn Miller.

“The St. John’s Bible is a rare work of art and a commemoration of divine inspiration in honor of Pope Francis,” said Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. “The Library of Congress is honored to have it as part of our special collection after His Holiness blessed it during his visit to Washington, D.C., in 2015. The Bible is now available to researchers for study as part of the Library’s extensive collection of Bibles and religious texts from all the world’s religions.”

In a lecture at the Library in 2016, Tim Ternes, director of The Saint John’s Bible, spoke about the creation of the Bible. He detailed how Jackson had dreamed of creating a handwritten and illuminated Bible since childhood and brought the idea to the monks at Saint John’s Abbey in 1995 as a way to mark the millennium.

The idea moved from there and 20 years later, a copy was blessed by Pope Francis. It is now preserved at the Library for future generations.

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Keeping Your Powder Dry

“Keep your powder dry” has been a military maxim for at least 400 years. But how was one to do this in an age when gunpowder had to be manually loaded into an unsteady firearm, outdoors and in a hurry?

Let us now praise the lowly cow (or ox) horn, savior of many a soldier, hunter or marksman in need of a handy supply of the stuff at a moment’s notice. The light, hollowed-out horn, with a base and spout tamped in, was ubiquitous among early colonists to the United States, so much so that they needed a way to identify their personal horn.

Which brings us to praising the artisans, cartographers or just a bored guy with a knife, all of whom whiled and whittled away many an afternoon in turning a utilitarian object into a personal work of folk art: the engraved powder horn.

Three of the Library’s powder horns on display. Geography and Map Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The Library has 10 brilliant pieces of these relics of frontier life in the Geography and Map Division. The Library’s are all from the 1750s to early 1800s, just before they began to be replaced by paper cartridges. The Library’s well-preserved pieces, like the tens of thousands that filled the countryside during the Revolutionary War era, are carved with an array of images: maps, houses, cityscapes, trees, animals, birds or personalized motifs.

“ABEL CHAPMAN AND HIS HORN – MAID (sic) IN PROVIDENCE,” reads the inscription on one 1777 horn from Rhode Island, engraved with etchings of many buildings, a church and roads. Another has scenes from around the state of New York.

“During the mid-eighteenth century practically every American male owned a powder horn for hunting or military service,” wrote John S. duMont in “American Engraved Powder Horns,” a 1978 book that explores the history and art of the horns. “Ornamental as well as useful, the powder horn was almost as necessary a part of a man’s dress as his shoes or hat.”

Animal horns had been used for thousands of years, either to blow signals or to store almost anything – ink, snuff, grease, water – so gunpowder was a natural addition, particularly as a horn could be easily made water and spark proof.

“Robert Kelmn’s Horn,” one of the 18th-century engraved powder horns in the Library’s collection. The drawing of the horse and rider seems to be carved by a different artist. Geography and Map Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

On the armament side, the first firearms of any sort were made in China in the 10th century. By the time the 14th century rolled around, Europeans were using them and, as this tradition developed, matches, flashpans, wheel locks and flintlocks were the stuff of gun play from the from then until roughly the first third of the 18th century, when Samuel Colt patented his mass-produced, multi-firing revolver.

Until then, when gunpowder was doled out from large kegs to individuals, the gunman needed a way to mark his horn so that he could get it back. And so horn etchings, like their cousin scrimshaw art engraved onto bone or ivory, began to move from the prosaic to the ornate.

The outline typically was first penciled or penned onto the horn, then cut in with a needle, knife or graver. They could be quite elaborate. Officers and gentlemen often posed for portraits with them by their side.

Powder horns faded after paper and then metal cartridges were introduced. By the outbreak of the Civil War, they were history, save for a few hunters who pined for the old days. Still, they tended to be keepsakes.

“The soldier prized his horn, the companion piece of his musket, and invested it with the same romantic appeal,” wrote Stephen V. Grancsay, curator of arms and armor for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in his 1945 book, “American Engraved Powder Horns: A Study Based on the J.H. Grenville Gilbert Collection.”  “In times of peace, horn and musket usually hung over the kitchen fireplace, a constant reminder of fighting days and campaigns against the Indians.”

Their long afterlife endures in museums and private collections, showing up at auctions and on antique websites, a reminder of who we used to be and how we used to live.

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Book(s) Burning: The Library Survived Two 19th-Century Fires

This article also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

The Thomas Jefferson Building has awed visitors ever since it opened its doors in 1897. The grand building is more than a marvel of art and architecture, though; it’s also a monument to function and safety — fire safety in particular.

It was built that way. For good reason.

Not once, but twice, within the decades preceding the building’s design, the Library literally went down in flames.

On Aug. 24, 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops set fire to government buildings in Washington, D.C. The Library’s 3,000 or so reference books, then housed in an unfinished U.S. Capitol, provided ready fuel for the fire.

The following year, Congress purchased the 6,487-volume library of former U.S. President Thomas Jefferson to replace the lost collection.

But just a decade later, those volumes, too, narrowly escaped complete destruction. On Dec. 22, 1825, Congressman Edward Everett detected a strange glow coming from windows in the Capitol on his way home from a late-night dinner.

A candle had been left burning in one of the Library’s galleries. The fire that erupted left the Library, “so lately one of the most beautiful rooms you ever saw … a sad spectacle,” Everett wrote.

Yet, no books perished that could not be replaced.

On Christmas Eve 1851, the Library was not so lucky. A chimney fire burned through about 35,000 of the roughly 55,000 volumes the Library had accumulated by then — including two-thirds of the books from Jefferson’s collection.

“The precious accumulations of more than 30 years have been reduced, in one short, melancholy hour, to a mass of black cinders,” The Union newspaper in Washington, D.C., lamented.

These catastrophes were front of mind in 1873 when Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford publicized a design competition for a new Library of Congress building.

All parts of the new building, he advised prospective architects, must be “of fire-proof materials, no wood being employed in any portion of the structure.”

Thanks to painful lessons from the 19th century, the Jefferson Building has not suffered a significant fire since it opened.

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College Records Add New Depth to Women’s Genealogy

-This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan and Wanda Whitney in the History and Genealogy Section. Buchanan wrote the first entry; Whitney, the second.

Lucy Lazear, the valedictorian of her 1853 graduating class at Waynesburg Female Seminary in Pennsylvania, paused her commencement speech to thank Margaret Bell, a key member of the faculty.

“That sisterly devotion which labored so ardently for our good — making our interests her own, that affectionate sympathy which joined in all our sorrows, that sweet gentleness which calmed every ruffled feeling, forgave every error, and threw a mantle of charity over our weaknesses, all contributed largely to hallow our school days,” Lazear said, no doubt delighting her teacher and touching the crowd.

Today, the student-thanks-inspirational-teacher moment is standard feature of commencement speeches, but Lazear’s was strikingly original. Women were just being allowed to attend colleges and universities in significant numbers (powered by the seminary movement, designed to train women to become teachers and educators), and their intellectual, personal and professional lives were beginning to blossom in ways that would change American society.

In turn, the records female students left behind at these early institutions created a genealogical window into women’s lives that had not previously existed. For decades to come, school was an exceptional period of independence for women. It was often the only time when they were identified as individuals, rather than someone’s daughter, wife or mother.

So today at the Library, and at university and local libraries across the country, we can find a unique trove of material about those young women in their own right — matriculation cards, course catalogs, graduation programs, minutes of literary societies and other social organizations, newsletters, yearbooks and alumni directories.

Within the larger community, school activities and interactions prompted targeted newspaper ads, articles and social columns. The networks of classmates and friends formed at school created letters, photograph albums and autograph books. All of this rich background fleshes out the individual lives of women in ways that we would not otherwise know.

Lucy, for example: She was born Sept. 23, 1835, in Greene County, Pennsylvania, where she appears in the 1850 census as a 15-year-old student in the household of her father, future U.S. Rep. Jesse Lazear. The Waynesburg Female Seminary was founded in 1849 by the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, just one year after the historic women’s rights convention at Seneca Falls, New York.

The family was comfortable; Thomas, her brother, was enrolled at Harvard.

Meanwhile, Lucy found that her seminary offered classes in grammar, rhetoric, algebra, trigonometry, geography, history, physiology, botany, chemistry, political science and religious studies. There were options to study languages: Greek, Latin and French.

Lucy excelled at her studies and, one can tell, chafed at the limitations of the era. In her handwritten valedictory speech (preserved in the Waynesburg University archives, along with the rest of her papers), she called on the school’s trustees to “open the fields of Literature to the female as to the male.”

She joined the faculty two years later, teaching instrumental music. The seminary soon was abandoned, as Waynesburg College began offering a coeducational curriculum, resulting in bachelor’s degrees for women and men by 1857.

She did not live to see the day.

Her papers show that she met and fell in love with Kenner Stephenson, her brother’s Harvard classmate. They were married on New Year’s Day, 1856, and the couple departed on a bridal trip in an open sleigh, crossing the frozen Ohio River. She contracted a cold and returned to Waynesburg. She died April 6, 1856, just 20 years old.

Without her college papers, how little we would have known of her short, vibrant life.

—Candice Buchanan.

Thaye Ann Richards Kearns graduation yearbook photo. Photo: Helianthus, the Randolph-Macon yearbook. 

In modern times, college documents helped me flesh out the experiences of Thaye Ann Richards Kearns, a family friend, fellow church member and an older classmate at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College (now Randolph College).

Ann, who would devote her life to early childhood education, was in college during the turbulent years of 1965 to 1969, when the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War were convulsing the country. She was a mathematics major, but I was able to track down much more about her from the historical records, many of them here at the Library.

For starters, she played a key role in the university’s integration, as she was one of the first two Black women admitted as regular students in 1965, as documented in “Maconiana,” a history of the college.

The school’s weekly newspaper, The Sundial, which has been digitized as part of the Virginia Newspaper Program, Virginia Chronicle, was a key source in documenting Ann’s college days, as was its yearbook, Helianthus. The annual course catalogs were invaluable. Taken together, these helped me understand what life was like for Ann and other students — dorms had maids! laundry service! — and the social milieu in which she came into adulthood.

“Your attire is to be classic,” The Sundial reported in a tongue-in-cheek editorial aimed at new students the year Ann arrived, “however, this excludes those types of drapes known by the public as ‘shifts’ because it has been called to the attention of the management that these kangaroo-pocketed apparels have been known to camouflage cups of ice and bubble gum, pretzel sticks and M&Ms.”

Ann, the records make clear, was a serious young woman. She participated in the Young Women’s Christian Association, served as the secretary in 1966 and as co-head of current issues in 1967 and helped plan the Y’s poverty symposium that year. She also worked with underprivileged children one summer in the Madison Streeht Project sponsored by four area churches and served on a committee to study religious life at the college. The yearbook showed that she was secretary of the Baptist Student Union.

So while I began to see that faith and service were a large part of who she was, I also knew she had her fun — she was in the yearbook as a member of the Gammas, one of the school spirit groups.

The most important information — Ann expressing herself — appeared in newspaper articles. She was quoted in 1968 when asked how she felt about the local high school band being banned from playing “Dixie,” the ode to the Confederacy: “It glorifies the old South and for some people this has unpleasant memories.”

After college, Ann went on to get her master’s degree in education from Trinity College (now Trinity Washington University) and worked as an early childhood education teacher and specialist in Maryland and Kentucky. She died in 2021, at 74.

To me, the most telling words Ann had to say about her life in college came years afterward. She was interviewed at length in a 2019 Sundial piece, “Looking Back: Desegregation Through the Lens of R-MWC.” In the interview, Ann described how some students and even faculty expressed hostility about Black students being on campus, but that she had an unforgettable experience.

“I met some wonderful people and formed lasting relationships,” she said. “I was involved in meaningful activities on campus and in the Lynchburg community with the YWCA. I was able to gain confidence through the respect I earned and the honors I achieved, e.g., Who’s Who. It was a profoundly pivotal period in my life.”

Thanks to these college records, we know so much more about how she came to be who she was.

—Wanda Whitney

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