Library of Congress's Blog, page 41

PBS Special: LeVar Burton and the National Book Festival

LeVar Burton. Photo: Robyn Von Swank. 

LeVar Burton, fresh from a hosting “Jeopardy,” turns his attention to hosting a special edition of the Library’s 2021 National Book Festival, a one-hour special on PBS that is studded with some of the world’s brightest literary stars.

The show, “Open a Book, Open the World: The Library of Congress National Book Festival,” premieres  Sunday, Sept. 12, at 6 p.m. ET (check local listings) on PBS, PBS.org and the PBS Video app. The show will feature 20 of the world’s most captivating authors and celebrities, ranging from actors Michael J. Fox and Lupita Nyong’o, to Nobel Prize-winning novelist Kazuo Ishiguro and Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Annette Gordon Reed.

“Books open the world to us, fuel our imaginations and show us our common humanity, especially as we confront huge challenges in society,” said Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress. “We’re proud to collaborate once again with PBS and public television stations nationwide to celebrate the power of reading from our national library.”

Burton, a longtime champion of reading, will host from the Los Angeles public library with Hayden appearing at the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill.

“I’m proud and honored to join Dr. Carla Hayden to explore the National Book Festival,” Burton said. “A good book can take you on a journey. After the last year, we’re all ready to plot a new course, and books can be an amazing compass. Join me for the National Book Festival as some of our nation’s leading literary voices bring us a sense of renewal, discuss their newest work and open up a whole new world of possibilities.”

The poster for 2021 National Book Festival. Artist:

Full interviews with each author will be featured in on-demand videos through the National Book Festival website and will be released Sept. 17. The 2021 virtual festival will invite audiences to create their own festival experiences from programs in a range of formats and an expanded schedule over 10 days, from Sept. 17 through Sept. 26.

The festival’s full lineup will be available online through videos on demand, author conversations in real time and live question-and-answer sessions, as well as a new podcast series with NPR. There will also be some in-person, ticketed events at the Library, should local COVID-19 restrictions allow gatherings.

To create the broadcast, the Library is collaborating with PBS Books, a national programming initiative produced by Detroit Public Television. PBS will distribute the one-hour National Book Festival broadcast to public television stations nationally.

“Books have been a lifeline for so many of us during this most difficult year. They have offered us an escape from the pandemic but also advice on how to cope with its challenges,” said Rich Homberg, president and CEO of Detroit Public TV. “We are delighted to be working once again with the Library of Congress, the National Book Festival and this incredible lineup of authors to celebrate our love of all things literary.”

The National Book Festival is made possible by the generous support of private- and public-sector sponsors who share the Library’s commitment to reading and literacy, led by National Book Festival Co-Chair David M. Rubenstein. Sponsors include: Festival Vice Chair the James Madison Council; Charter sponsors The Washington Post, Institute of Museum and Library Services, National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities; Additional generous support from the Library of Congress Federal Credit Union, Tim and Diane Naughton and Capital Group; Presenting Partner NPR; and Media Partner The New Republic.

You can llow the festival on Twitter @LibraryCongress with hashtag #NatBookFest, and subscribe to the National Book Festival Blog at loc.gov/bookfest.

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Researcher Stories: The Violins of George Yu

George Yu. Photo: Jon Cherry.

George Yu is an award-winning luthier based in Louisville, Kentucky, who models his handcrafted violins on rare Italian instruments, including a 1654 Amati violin at the Library .

You started your professional career as a software engineer. How did you end up making violins?

I was lucky to have parents who nurtured both my scientific and my artistic pursuits. I did some growing up in their chemistry labs while they were grad students, often asking, “Why?” —  not from defiance, but from wanting to better understand. As a child, I started playing the violin.

Later, I graduated from the University of Waterloo [in Ontario, Canada] with a bachelor’s degree from the Systems Design Engineering program, which focuses on acquiring and integrating knowledge across multiple disciplines — an approach that would become very relevant to me as a violin maker. After working as a software engineer for nine years, I decided to combine two other disciplines with my scientific one — playing violin and creating with my hands — and become a violin maker.

I was accepted into the Violin Making School of America in Salt Lake City, graduating in 1999. Afterward, I apprenticed with Ken Meyer and Di Cao in suburban Boston, then established my own workshop in Toronto. In 2018, I moved to the U.S. to marry my husband, the Rev. Dwain Lee, pastor of Springdale Presbyterian Church in Louisville, Kentucky.

How does science inform your violin making?

For me, violin making is a confluence of music, art and science. Science involves constant learning about why violins sound good or bad. It’s an engineering problem that provides no ultimate, neat solution and raises questions. There’s no room for boredom.

Before I start working with a piece of wood, for example, I take measurements to get a good idea of its stiffness and density. While working only with wood that has both good stiffness and good density doesn’t guarantee that the finished violin will have great tone and responsiveness, it is a good starting point.

My choice of drying oils in varnish also draws on science. They vary in their number of double bonds and their sequencing along fatty-acid chains, affecting how the varnish chips, crackles and wears down. This is important to know in the process of antiquing, or making an instrument look like a replica from the 17th or 18th century.

Which instruments in the Library’s violin collection have inspired you?

I became aware of the Library’s collection of rare violins before heading off to violin making school in 1996. Bob Sheldon, who was then the curator of musical instruments at the Library, and Carol Lynn Ward-Bamford, his successor, kindly gave me access on multiple occasions to study, play and photograph them.

Every visit deepened and matured my acquaintance with the violins.  The three that stood out for me, in chronological order, were the “Brookings” Amati (1654), the “Betts” Stradivarius (1704) and the “Kreisler” Guarneri del Gesù (circa 1730).

In playing them, I found that the Betts required a totally different approach from the others — faster and lighter bow strokes — and coaxing. I could not press or dig into it; otherwise, it would choke. There was no such issue with the Kreisler — I could press more, and it would respond by bringing forth even more of the beautiful, complex tone that was readily available in reserves; there was also an immediacy of sound. But the Brookings was my favorite. While it didn’t have quite the reserves of the Kreisler, it had more than the Betts; it also had a strikingly beautiful, rich, contralto voice.

The Brookings is named after Robert Somers Brookings, founder of what is now the Brookings Institution. He is said to have bought this violin on the advice of the virtuoso Joseph Joachim, a friend of Brahms. In 1938, Brookings’ widow presented the violin to the Library.

Describe one of your award-winning violins.

A violin of mine inspired by the Brookings Amati won double-distinction awards at the 2014 Violin Society of America Competition. Out of 246 violins entered that year, only three won awards in both categories of tone and workmanship. In creating the instrument, I made use of CT scans of the Brookings that were made through a project with the Smithsonian Institution.

Where are your instruments being played?

My instruments are being played by professionals in the New York Philharmonic, Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, Lyra Baroque Orchestra and other ensembles. They are also being played by students at top music conservatories.

How has it been to do research at the Library?

Bob and Carol Lynn have been a great pleasure to work with! I hope to arrange more visits in the future to further study the Library’s violins — there is always more to learn.

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Marie Tharp: Mapping the Ocean Floor

Heinrich Berann’s 1977 painting of the Heezen-Tharp “World Ocean Floor” map, a landmark in cartography. Geography and Map Division.

Mike Klein wrote a short piece for the Library of Congress Magazine’s July/August issue on the Heezen-Tharp map, pictured above. That article has been expanded here.

Marie Tharp was well-suited to the task of interpreting the texture and rhythm of the Earth’s surface, including the ocean floor — a space almost entirely unknown to humans, even after they began sailing the seas. A scientist, she had a background in mathematics, music, petroleum geology and cartography.

But she was a professional woman in the American mid-century in a field overwhelmingly dominated by men. She played a major role in one of cartography’s greatest achievements, mapping the sea floor for the first time in history, documenting a vast mountain range in the Atlantic Ocean. The maps she and her longtime collaborator, Bruce Heezen created then verified the theory of continental drift — the idea that the Earth’s continents shifted across the ocean bed due to the movement of tectonic plates. Continental drift is now fundamental to understanding how our planet came to be.

“It was a once-in-a-lifetime—a once-in-the-history-of-the-world—opportunity for anyone, but especially for a woman in the 1940s,” she wrote in a 1999 essay.

Tharp donated the papers of their research to the Library in 1995, then helped Library staff arrange the tens of thousands of items for future researchers. It is by far the largest manuscript/research collection in the Geography and Map Division, comprising maps, journals, research papers, letters, correspondence and geologic and cartographic data. It culminates in the depiction of the map in the painting above, the Heezen-Tharp “World Ocean Floor” map. It is still in use today and documents the 40,000-mile undersea mountain ranges that are critical to understanding how and why the Earth’s continents came to be where they are.

This collection is part of a larger archival project that documents some of the pioneering geographers of the 20th century, include Roger Tomlinson, one of the primary developers of the Geographical Information System (GIS), and John P. Snyder, who worked on the mathematics that enables mapping from space.

“Tharp’s work certainly provided evidence and weight to the theory of plate tectonics, but her work is really about seafloor spreading, which occurs at the mid-ocean ridges that she was the first to map,” says Paulette Hasier, chief of the division.

Marie Tharp with James Billington, former Librarian of Congress. Photo: Rachel Evans.

Tharp’s role as a top-tier female scientist who largely worked behind the scenes might prompt comparisons to the women at NASA’s space program in the 1960s, as featured in the book and film, “Hidden Figures.” But Hasier says the better comparison would be to the “Harvard Computers,” female scientists who worked at the Harvard Observatory in the early 20th century. Astronomers such as Annie Jump Cannon, Williamina Fleming and Florence Cushman helped develop and codify a classification system for some 300,000 stars, thus rendering the universe more of a known entity.

“Tharp, like these women, had a talent for visualizing data, something we take for granted today but required real geometric intuition before the widespread use of computers,” Hasier said.

Before Heezen and Tharp’s work, maps of the world showed three-fourths of it — the oceans — to be a flat blue surface. Sailors knew of reefs, channels and sand bars, of course, but not much else of what lay further below. Geologists had only a vague idea of the depths, but it was largely presumed to be flat and featureless.

“I think our maps contributed to a revolution in geological thinking, which in some ways compares to the Copernican revolution,” she wrote in an essay included in “Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University: Twelve Perspectives on the First Fifty Years 1949 – 1999.” “Scientists and the general public got their first relatively realistic image of a vast part of the planet that they could never see.”

In many ways, she had been working her entire life to make such discoveries.

Born in Ypsilanti, Michigan, in 1920, Tharp grew up moving to place to place, as her father was a soil surveyor for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The family moved seasonally to follow his work, a peripatetic life in which she attended more than two dozen schools by the time she graduated high school. It left her, she later said, with a residual awareness of land, soil and the way the Earth is shaped.

Her father’s mantra: “When you find your life’s work, make sure it is something you can do, and most important, something you like to do.” At Ohio University, she didn’t find much she liked that women were allowed to do. The outbreak of World War II provided a break in the patriarchal system, as men were called away to war. In their absence, women took on many roles in the workplace they had not before. At the University of Michigan’s geology department, the staff began to allow female students. In 1943, Tharp was one of 10 young women who enrolled.

This led to unfulfilling work in the petroleum industry, which led to an unfulfilling math degree from the University of Tulsa, which led to an unfulfilling proposed job the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which, finally, led to a job at Columbia University’s Lamont Geological Observatory (now the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory). There, she soon met Bruce Heezen, another bright young star, with whom she would work for the next quarter century. The partnership was necessary, as women were not allowed on sea-faring research ships at the time. For years, while he gathered data at sea, she developed the data on maps back at the lab.

They began compiling thousands of files of data about the ocean floor (mostly sonar readings from U.S. Navy ships). The sonar soundings were rough, incomplete, and taken at different international measuring standards. Still, she began to map out data that showed a huge north-to-south mountain range underneath the Atlantic Ocean, bordered by a rift valley.

When she showed it to Heezen, he dismissed it as “girl talk” and scoffed that it looked “too much like continental drift,” then considered an outlandish theory.

“But I thought the rift valley was real and kept looking for it in all the data I could get,” she wrote. “If there were such a thing as continental drift, it seemed logical that something like a mid-ocean rift valley might be involved. The valley would form where new material came up from deep inside the Earth, splitting the mid-ocean ridge in two and pushing the sides apart.”

By the 1970s, as their work progressed, after they had charted the locations of tens of thousands of undersea earthquakes, and as their findings were collaborated by other scientists from around the world, the Mid-Atlantic Ridge became an obvious part of an undersea mountain range that stretched around the world.

The pair produced maps of individual oceans in partnership with National Geographic that culminated in the iconic worldwide panorama above in 1977, painted by Austrian artist Heinrich Berann. Ironically, Heezen died of a heart attack on a research cruise just a few months before the map’s publication.

She summed it all up this way:

“I worked in the background for most of my career as a scientist, but I have absolutely no resentments. I thought I was lucky to have a job that was so interesting. Establishing the rift valley and the mid-ocean ridge that went all the way around the world for 40,000 miles—that was something important. You could only do that once. You can’t find anything bigger than that, at least on this planet.”

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Maya Blue and the Vessels of the Diving Gods

This guest post is by John Hessler, curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology & History of the Early Americas. It is part of a series, Excavating Archaeology.

The ceramics created by ancient Maya potters make for some of the most vibrantly colored objects that survive in the archaeological record of the Americas. Through the centuries, a great deal of the coloration on many of the surviving examples has eroded, its brilliance lost to the ravages of time. Occasionally however, there are rare survivals that give us an indication of just how colorful was the Pre-Columbian Maya world.

In the Kislak Collection, there are two extraordinary vessels from Quintana Roo, Mexico, which date from the 13th to 15th centuries. These two small ceramic pots, each measuring only a little over four inches tall, are made from red ceramic and display a vivid spectrum of colors.

Diving god vessel from Quintana Roo. Jay I. Kislak Collection. Author photo.

Both of these pots are painted in the style of Mixteca-Puebla forms found in central Mexico and around the area of Oaxaca. The subjects of the vessels are diving figures, so called because they are pictured as plummeting headfirst from the sky. Each vase is painted with angular lines running across their faces, a mark usually associated with a postclassic version of the Maya maize god. Both vessels show the figures holding offerings.

Three-dimensional model of one of the diving god vessels from Quintana Roo. Jay I. Kislak Collection. GIF by author.

The angled lines on the face, along with other symbolic colorations, reveal that these pieces are cultural hybrids, with the late variant of the Maya maize god, known as “Bolon Mayel,” merging with features of the Central Mexican version “Centeotl,” and the god of flowers and plants, “Xochipilli.”

Madrid Codex,  showing a diving god. Jay I. Kislak Collection.

The diving god appears in many forms and in many places in Maya art — stone carvings, wall paintings and in one of the four surviving Maya books, the Madrid Codex. It’s pictured above. The diving god is upside down at the top of the blue section.

The painting on the two vases is also special.

The Maya made their pottery by hand, without a potter’s wheel, a process that involved many steps. The first, of course, was selecting and preparing the clay. Then the potter might fold into the mix different additives, known as tempers, such as ground limestone or volcanic ash.

Scanning electron microscope image of the Maya ceramic matrix showing the additives and temper in the clay. Preservation Testing and Research Division.

Before firing in a kiln, the surface would typically be covered in slips, which are mixtures of minerals and pigments. They are applied to give the vessels their color, shine and brilliance. In the the diving god pieces above, there was no slip applied. They were painted after they came out of the firing kiln.

Magnified section of the painted surface. LED microscope photo by author. 

One of the colors is an important innovation. The bold and distinct blue paint, which we see on the ear-spools, is called Maya blue. The pigment is a composite of ingredients, primarily a mix of blue indigo dyes derived from the leaves of Indigofera suffruticosa plants (the same dye in your blue jeans). It is combined with palygorskite, a natural clay that is important to the longevity of the color.

Indigofera suffruticosa leaves from Mexico. Smithsonian Institution, Museum of Natural History, Botanical Collections.

The stability of Maya blue, and the reason it does not fade on ancient ceramics (like it does in your jeans) is because the palygorskite particles in the paint form a kind of lattice, mixing with and trapping the indigo molecules. This structure makes the paint amazingly resistant to natural bio-corrosion, resulting in the survival of the beautiful blue color we still see on the vessels today.

A diving god vessel with Maya blue paint on the ear-spool. Jay I. Kislak Collection. Author photo.

Maya blue, and many of the other colors found painted across ancient Mesoamerica, are striking in their brilliance and composition, and are a testimony to the artists who experimented with the wide variety of plants, minerals, and binders needed to create these colors. Nearly indescribable to us today, and whose original names have, in many cases, been lost to history, these paints are clearly examples of what the 19th century art critic John Ruskin meant when he said, “It is the best possible sign of a color when nobody who sees it knows what to call it.”

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Glen Campbell, Jimmy Webb and “Wichita Lineman”

Glen Campbell’s 1968 recording of “Wichita Lineman by Jimmy Webb, was inducted into the National Recording Registry.

The Library’s National Recording Registry includes 1968’s “Wichita Lineman,” written by Jimmy Webb and first recorded by Glen Campbell. Kent Hartman, whose 2013 book “The Wrecking Crew” detailed the  L.A. music scene that produced Campbell, wrote this essay for the Now See Hear! blog, drawing on his research. This version has been slightly adapted. 

Glen Campbell had bigger hits during his illustrious career, but no song of his has stood the test of time or packed more of an emotional wallop than “Wichita Lineman.” It became Campbell’s oft-cited favorite out of the hundreds of songs he released during his Country Music Hall of Fame career. Yet only a serendipitous series of events allowed this platinum record to become what is now considered an American classic.

In the early spring of 1968, while sitting behind a funky green piano, high in the Hollywood Hills inside an old mansion that used to be the Philippine Embassy, the songwriter Jimmy Webb heard his telephone ring. As the author of the recent Grammy-winning single “Up, Up and Away” by the 5th Dimension, the red-hot Webb had been sequestering himself in an effort to write some new material.

The progress was slow — Webb was a perfectionist —and Campbell’s call came as a welcome distraction. Recent friends, the two had shared an almost immediate connection upon meeting. As both men later recalled in separate interviews with me, the call went something like this:

“Jimmy — hey, it’s Glen Campbell.”

“Glen, good to hear from you, man! What’s goin’ on?”

“Well, my producer, Al DeLory, and I are over here at Capitol cutting a new album and we’re short on material. We need something really strong. Do you think you could write us another ‘By the Time I Get to Phoenix’?”

Both an unexpected and heavy request, it gave Webb pause.

Campbell was referring to the crossover country smash that Webb had penned and given to him the prior year. It had provided Campbell with the first meaningful chart success of his career. Yet he wanted more; needed more. He was in his mid-thirties, and pop stars don’t have forever. Campbell knew that it took a Top 10 single to become headlining act, something he had dreamed of since his days playing the clubs in Albuquerque a decade before. And he was determined to make that leap.

Writing a hit song is hard enough, let alone one made-to-order. But Webb liked a challenge. And he knew that with Campbell’s career on the rise, there might be some good publishing money in the deal.

“Okay,” Webb said after some thought. “Let me see what I can do.”

He had a policy against copying a previous hit — even if it was his own — but he nonetheless thought that once again employing a geographical reference in the title might be a good start.

Sometime earlier, Webb had been driving through a flat and remote area of Oklahoma, his native state, absorbing the almost surreal nature of its isolation and seemingly endless horizons. He passed by a utility worker perched high on a telephone pole. The curious image of the anonymous, lone figure toiling in the heat in the middle of nowhere stuck in Webb’s mind. What might be the circumstances of this solitary man’s life? What were his thoughts?

Turning back to his piano after the phone call with Campbell, Webb spent the next couple of hours sketching out a song about the mysterious individual he had encountered on that lonely stretch of highway, then asked Campbell and DeLory to swing by the house that evening to take a listen.

“It’s not finished yet,” Webb warned as they sat down. “There’s no third verse.”

As Webb began playing and singing the basics of his new tune, Campbell flipped. He knew it was a hit. A story of desolation and longing, it spoke to the human condition, the universal need for love. The imagery about the singing in the wires and searching in the sun for overloads was out of this world.

“What’s it called?” Campbell asked.

“ ‘Wichita Lineman,’ ” Webb said.

***

Wondrous things can happen in a recording studio when inspiration becomes contagious.

Inside the subterranean confines of Capitol A, Campbell and DeLory walked musicians through the charts for the song. Something kept bothering the bassist, Carol Kaye. She and Campbell had played together as part of the Wrecking Crew, a group of secretly-used, top-notch Hollywood-based session musicians who played on dozens of Top 40 hits. They were good friends.

Looking over the chord sheets, Kaye saw that the tune lacked an identifiable opening lick. She had noticed the same deficit about the original version of Sonny and Cher’s “The Beat Goes On.” She had added a nine-note opening bass riff, then repeated it over and over, turning what at first had been a rather mundane rhythm track into a certifiable earworm.

Here, drawing on her jazz background, where less almost always meant more, Kaye quickly worked out a descending six-note intro for Campbell that she thought might do the trick.

Campbell thought it was perfect. But he also loved the tone of her bass. It was a Danelectro, a six-string, solid-body electric bass guitar made out of Masonite. It was often used in studios on pop recordings to add a higher sound than that of a standard Fender electric bass or an acoustic stand-up bass.

Campbell asked Kaye if he could borrow the guitar to play a solo to fill the space for the third verse that Webb had never finished. An unconventional but brilliant choice, the deep, resonant passage scored a direct hit, giving the song just the right quavering, tremolo-fueled melancholic interlude.

Webb chipped in with some inspiration of his own. Showing off his vintage Gulbransen church organ to Campbell one afternoon at his house, Webb mentioned that the keyboard’s unique bubbling sound evoked what he imagined to be the noise of signals passing through the telephone wires. As his lyrics said, “I hear you singing in the wire/I can hear you through the whine.”

Campbell was so taken with the idea that he had a company immediately come over and dismantle the monstrous organ and then reassemble it in the studio. Webb himself played just three notes on it, over and over, during the song’s fade. It proved to be the final piece to a masterfully executed production puzzle.

With Campbell’s plaintive vocals adding just the right touch of wistfulness and heartache, “Wichita Lineman” did indeed become the Top 10 hit he had so desperately sought. There would be no more anonymous guitar playing on everybody else’s records for this country boy. No more wondering whether he really had what it took to break out, to headline his own shows.

While “Wichita Lineman” rocketed to No. 3 on the national pop charts (and No. 1 on country charts), it became Campbell’s springboard to more success, including his own television show that ran for four seasons. As Campbell remarked to the British Broadcasting Corporation many years later, mentioning one of the song’s lines: “‘I want you for all time,’ I always say that to my wife, because it cheers her up.” There can be no greater poetic coda than that.

Kent Hartman is the bestselling author of “The Wrecking Crew,” along with “Goodnight, L.A.” and the forthcoming “A Cool Dark Place.”  [Essay copyright: Kent Hartman]

Jade Snow Wong: The Legacy of “Fifth Chinese Daughter”

 

Jade Snow Wong, in a 1965 San Francisco Examiner article. Asian Division. Photo of original: Shawn Miller.

Jade Snow Wong published “Fifth Chinese Daughter” in 1950, and it has been part of American literature ever since. The memoir of a young Chinese American woman coming of age in San Francisco’s Chinatown, torn between her family traditions and her American ambitions, it has lived several lives in the intervening three-quarters of a century.

“I wrote with the purpose of creating better understanding of the Chinese culture on the part of Americans,” she wrote later, a sentiment she would use throughout her life.

Lauded by critics, it became a bestseller in an era when the Chinese Exclusion Act had only recently been lifted.  It was a feel-good story about a determined young Chinese woman (Wong was 28 when the book was published) who said that America was a land of opportunity, if only you worked hard for your dreams. Racial slights and discrimination scarcely exist in the book and are quickly and cheerfully overcome. The Chinese Exclusion Act is not mentioned at all.

It presented such a positive view of Chinese immigrant life, in fact, that in 1953, the State Department sent Wong and her book on a four-month tour across Asia, touting American ideals against the growing spread of communism in the region.

By the late 1960s and 1970s, times had changed. A new generation of young Asian Americans dismissed the book as naïve, too accommodating of white readers’ stereotypes, too willing to spout the U.S. government’s narrative at the expense of their lived reality. She was using her individual success story in disregard of prevailing anti-Asian discrimination, they said.

U.S. and international editions of “Fifth Chinese Daughter.” Asian Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

As it has fallen further into the past, the book has settled into the national narrative as a lasting portrait of Chinese American life at the midcentury – stilted, sometimes perceptive, sometimes shading the truth in favor of an up-by-the-bootstraps narrative.

“It has a very high place as part of the historical record,” says Leslie Bow, a professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who wrote the introduction to the book’s 2019 Classics of Asian American Literature Edition. “Part of that history is having these documents (in the Library’s collection) that tell a bit more of an ambiguous story; the history that was, as opposed to the history that you want it to be.”

Wong was, by any account, ambitious and multitalented. In her adult life, she and her husband, Woodrow, ran a successful travel agency and import-export business, and yet she is perhaps best known today as a ceramic artist whose works have been shown by the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco.

Her family donated her papers and dozens of her ceramic pieces to the Library in 2009, three years after her death. The collection is now part of the Asian American Pacific Islander Collection in the Asian Division. (It has not been digitized and is available only at the Library.)

Her son, Mark Ong, talked about her dual nature in a 2020 interview with the Asian Art Museum. He said it was a “living process, how she could be a Chinese woman, how she could be a successful artist, how she could be a businesswoman, a wife, a mother, a civic leader as well.”

“Daughter”  was one of the first portrayals of Chinese life in the United States, following the works of the Eaton sisters a couple of generations earlier. (Winnifred and Edith Eaton, children of a British father and Chinese mother, wrote novels and non-fiction in the U.S. and Canada in the first two decades of the 20th century, each gaining acclaim.) Wong painted a clear, concise picture of growing up in San Francisco in the 1920s and 1930s. She wrote about herself in the third person, as if she was describing someone else:

“Until she was five years old, Jade Snow’s world was almost wholly Chinese, for her world was her family, the Wongs. Life was secure but formal, sober but quietly happy and the few problems she had were entirely concerned with what was proper or improper in the behavior of a little Chinese girl.”

Jade Snow Wong in her pottery workshop. Asian Division. Photo of original: Shawn Miller.

This balancing act of Chinese home and American life still resonates with young Asian readers, says Bow, herself the child of Chinese American parents.

But over time, cracks in the narrative and its underlying philosophy appeared. It became regarded as a tourist-level snapshot of Chinese American life for white readers who wanted to dip a toe into the cultural pond, but not deal with the harsher realities of poverty, racism and discrimination.

For example, her father, who ran a small sewing company that turned out overalls (the family lived on a floor of the factory) had been in the country for decades, but was only able to become a naturalized American citizen after she had graduated from college due to blatantly racist immigration laws.

Further, Jade Snow was indeed her father’s fifth daughter, but her mother’s first. Her father’s first wife had died, and the second had assumed her identity, a fact omitted in the book. This impersonation was a common way for Chinese immigrants to evade the severe restrictions placed on them by the U.S. –  a country she was nonetheless touting as a land of freedom.

And lastly, as her yearbook, passport and other documents show, she went by her American name of Constance, or Connie, throughout her life, even at home. But, in the book, she writes as if people instead called she and her siblings by their Chinese names. Critics came to scoff that this was blatant pandering to white readers’ taste for the exotic.

Still, the book has endured for its clearly written prose, for its evocation of a time and place,  and for its appealing story of a determined young Chinese woman who found her way to success in American life.

“Chinatown in San Francisco teems with haunting memories, for it is wrapped in the atmosphere, customs and manners of a land across the sea,” she wrote at the beginning of the book. “The same Pacific Ocean laves the shores of both worlds, a tangible link between old and new, past and present, Orient and Occident.”

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America on the Road: The Family Vacation by Car

Alaska postcard in the 1950 travel journal of sociologist Rilma Oxley Buckman. Manuscript Division.

This is a guest post by Joshua Levy, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

In 1960, John Steinbeck set out on a months-long road trip to reacquaint himself with his country. He returned not with clear answers but with his head a “barrel of worms.” The America he saw was too intertwined with how he felt in the moment, and with his own Americanness, to permit an objective account of the journey. “External reality,” he wrote, “has a way of being not so external after all.”

Pandemics aren’t the only reason Americans have found sanctuary in our homes, or the only anxious times we’ve itched to escape them. The American road trip was first popularized during the auto camping craze of the 1920s, with its devotion to freedom and communing with nature, but it was democratized after World War II. The golden age of the American family vacation came during the very height of the Cold War. It was a time when, according to historian Susan Rugh, the family car became a “home on the road… a cocoon of domestic space” in which families could feel safe to explore their country.

The trips 2oth-century Americans took, to national parks and resorts and historic sites, generated a wealth of travelogues and other sources that often communicate far more about the traveler than the road taken. They can help us understand our own moment as well. Earlier this year, just 29 percent of Americans felt comfortable taking a commercial flight, but 84 percent were comfortable using their own vehicles for a road trip. During the pandemic, tourism suffered but road trips surged. Driving into the great outdoors again felt like a safe escape.

The Manuscript Division is full of road trip stories, not because it maintains specific road trip collections but because automobile travel has been so central to modern American life. Items in the division range from administrative records mapping out early guidebooks, to breathless journals recounting shared adventures, to testimonials of discrimination faced at roadside gas stations, restaurants and hotels. Together, they tell the story not of one America, but of many.

Researchers can find in the papers of the Works Progress Administration the records of the American Guide Series, a Depression-era project to create richly textured guidebooks of all of America’s states and major cities and some of its highways and waterways. The series generated 378 books and pamphlets altogether, and employed subsequently celebrated authors like Richard Wright, Eudora Welty and Zora Neale Hurston.

Poster for “A Guide to the Golden State,” WPA American Guide series for California. Prints and Photographs Division.

The books were needed. Railroads, one of the 19th century’s great symbols of modernity, had run along immovable tracks following set timetables. Rich and poor travelers alike were essentially reduced to pieces of baggage. Early automobiles promised a pathfinding freedom, but motorists found America’s intercity roadways disjointed and virtually unmarked. Colossal early touring guides like the Automobile Blue Book prescribed tedious turn-by-turn directions through the maze, but offered little insight into local communities.

The WPA guides blended an attention to local history, culture and commerce with a literary sensibility. The project’s ambition still startles. An early prospectus promised to advance efforts to “preserve national literacy and historic shrines, to exploit scenic wonders and to develop natural advantages such as mines and quarries.” Steinbeck later called the guides “the most comprehensive account of the United States ever got together.” Staffers, sometimes road-tripping to fact check their work, labored to create a nuanced, encyclopedic account of what mattered about America — one mapped out in routes Americans could drive for themselves.

Yet not all Americans traveled those routes with the same ease. The records of the NAACP, held by the Manuscript Division, contain hundreds of testimonials speaking to the uncertainties and humiliations Jim Crow-era African Americans faced when they ventured from home. For these motorists, the automobile’s promise of freedom coexisted with segregated buses and trains and a range of limitations on their mobility. Black drivers experienced the open road, according to historian Cotten Seiler, as “both democratic social space and racial minefield.” Automobiles seemed to offer a real escape from Jim Crow, but one that always lay just beyond the horizon.

As a result, excursions often turned sour. One letter, submitted in 1947 by a high school science teacher, details an afternoon road trip to a state park near Albany, “for the purpose of sightseeing and enjoying the natural beauty of the State of New York.” When a hotel bartender within the park twice refused service to the teacher and a Jewish colleague, he insisted the hotel be “made to pay” for his “humiliation and damage to my pride.” Similar testimonials, of injustices on buses and trains and at roadside stops, illustrate the road trip’s unfulfilled promise for African American travelers. But they also suggest the allure of commanding one’s own vehicle and of sidestepping more communal forms of transit.

Travelogues in collections of personal papers offer another dimension still, documenting both cosmopolitan tourism and nostalgic returns home. A travel journal in the papers of sociologist Rilma Oxley Buckman describes a footloose road trip from Indiana to Alaska, taken in 1950 with a Purdue colleague in a late model Nash. The “lady campers” had met in Yokohama just after the war, both working with the U.S. military. Adventuring their way north, they socialized and took snapshots. They noted the “Huckleberry Finn riverscapes” of Illinois and Alaskan roads “wobbly as a wagon trail.” But their lives in Asia repeatedly intervene, from birds that resembled Korean magpies to the Japan-like hot springs of the Canadian Rockies and then to worrying radio reports about the start of the Korean War.

Page from A.B. McDonald scrapbook, with father and daughter drinking from a roadside spring. Manuscript Division.

A scrapbook made by journalist A.B. MacDonald recounts a road trip with his daughter Mary in 1938, just four years before he died. From Kansas City to his boyhood home in New Brunswick, father and daughter visit the old “homestead,” drink at a roadside spring where the family once watered their horses and catch up with boyhood friends. Captions are written two years later in a shaky hand, from MacDonald’s sickbed. By that time, Mary had tragically passed away. Above his recollections of an old schoolmate’s home, whose bed of nasturtiums both had admired as a “perfect blanket of gold and crimson,” two flowers just received by mail are pressed into the paper. There, MacDonald writes, “Later — I did put two of the flowers on Mary’s grave, and there they remained for several weeks. She knew, of course she did.”

And there are more. The Library’s manuscript collections show suffragists embracing the automobile as a vehicle for women’s liberation and activists like Sara Bard Field staging cross-country journeys to gain publicity for the cause. They show Carlos Montezuma, cofounder of the Society of American Indians, defending the rights of indigenous Americans to purchase automobiles without government permission and to travel as they please. We even find political satirist Art Buchwald in a comically overloaded Chrysler Imperial, on a 1958 road trip from Paris to Moscow in order to test whether such a drive can be made “without being arrested.”

Road trips appear in unexpected places, and they can be revealing in unexpected ways. And in a nation knitted together with highways, cars long ago became Americans’ liberating, frustrating, memory-making homes on the road.

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Library’s Junior Fellows: Online Interns Get the Job Done

Tania María Ríos Marrero, one of the 2021 Library Junior Fellows, with her digital research project.

This is a guest post by Leah Knobel, a public affairs specialist in the Office of Communications.

For 30 years now, the Library’s Junior Fellows program has provided undergraduate and graduate students with experiences in everything the world’s largest library has to offer. This year’s 10-week program was held virtually for the second year in a row, due to COVID-19 precautions. The junior fellows logged on daily, launched their individual research projects, participated in weekly professional development sessions and worked with Library staff.

In an online presentation, this year’s class of 42 fellows shares glimpses of their work. Their projects include a data-driven approach to communication and outreach for the Copyright Office; a digitization effort to improve access to a collection of posters amassed from across sub-Saharan Africa; an exploration into the history of arithmetic; a digital Story Map of Caribbean women poets from the PALABRA archive; and contributions to the Congressional Research Service’s ongoing Supreme Court Justice Project.

“The Junior Fellows program, like most everything in our world, faced unprecedented challenges with the onset of the pandemic,” said Kimberly Powell, chief of talent recruitment and outreach in the Library’s Human Capital Directorate. “During this second virtual year, we expanded on lessons learned and stakeholder feedback to prioritize changes and processes to prepare for and expand display day.”

Interns were equipped with a virtual Library workstation, with access to Skype for Business and Zoom accounts when they started in May. Then they set to work.

Shlomit Menashe, a rising senior studying information science at the University of Maryland, College Park, spent her summer working to increase the discoverability of 1,200 uncatalogued Hebrew prayer books. During her work, she came across a Hebrew prayer book printed in Constantinople, or present-day Istanbul, in 1823. As Menashe’s own family emigrated from Turkey, her interest was piqued.

For her project, she decided to learn more about events at the end of the 15th century that brought Jews to the Ottoman Empire, which in turn became a center of Hebrew printing.

“Working on my project for display day was especially meaningful in that it provided me an opportunity to connect with and learn more about my family’s Sephardic heritage,” Menashe said. “My grandfather even has a haggadah, a prayer book traditionally read on the first two nights of the Jewish holiday of Passover, which was passed down from his grandfather who used it while living in Izmir, Turkey.”

Joe Kolodrubetz will begin the final year of his J.D. at the George Washington Law School this fall. During his summer fellowship in the Law Library, Kolodrubetz created metadata for the library’s foreign legal gazettes collections. A legal gazette is an official source of law published by a foreign government to announce the decisions of courts, legislatures and executives in that country.

Kolodrubetz cites the few days he spent working with Cypriot gazettes as the highlight of his summer. His knowledge of ancient Greek was directly transferable to the Greek of the Mediterranean island.

“It was still a bureaucratic text,” Kolodrubetz joked, “but I enjoyed utilizing my Hellenic knowledge!”

Tania María Ríos Marrero is set to complete a master’s degree in library and information science at the University of Washington’s iSchool in spring 2022. While interning in the Science, Technology and Business Division, Ríos Marrero built a Story Map contextualizing a selection of Farm Security Administration photographs taken in Puerto Rico in the mid-20th century. The project draws connections between aspects of land use, food production and social movement in Puerto Rico at the edges of the industrial and modern era.

“I’m grateful to have had the opportunity to interact with the photographs in a … tangible way,” said Ríos Marrero. “I hope that this Story Map is just the beginning of my personal research and engagement with this collection.”

The Junior Fellows program is made possible by a gift from Nancy Glanville Jewell, the late James Madison Council member, through the Glanville Family Foundation; the Knowledge Navigators Trust Fund; and by an investment from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Olympic Gold: Harrison Dillard and Military Athletes

Harrison Dillard, bottom, wins the Olympic gold medal in a photo finish. Photo: Alamy Stock photo. Also in Prints and Photographs Division.

This post draws from an article by Megan Harris, a reference specialist in the Veterans History Project, in the Library of Congress Magazine. It’s been expanded here.

London, summer 1948. All eyes are on the first Olympic Games held since 1936. After years of war, countries from around the world meet not on the battlefield, but on the track, in the swimming pool, inside the boxing ring.

At Wembley Stadium, six sprinters crouch on the track for the finals of the 100-meter dash. The gun sounds and in 10.3 seconds it’s over. The race is so close that a photograph is used to declare the winner.

The image is striking. Six of the world’s fastest men, caught seemingly in mid-flight — none of their feet are touching the ground — are frozen in a furious burst of speed. They seem to be out-running their own shadows. It’s appears to be as much a ballet as it is a sprint.

But the photo makes it clear: William Harrison Dillard, at the bottom of the image, won the gold and takes the honorary title of  the “fastest man alive.” His arms and hands are flung out and up, palms open, his right leg bent backwards at the knee, the toes of that foot pointing straight toward the heavens.

Fellow American Barney Ewell — who initially celebrated with arms raised, thinking he had won — took the silver. Panama’s Lloyd LaBeach edged the U.K.’s Alastair McCorquodale for the bronze.

Dillard’s feat was all the more stirring because, three years earlier, he had not been sprinting at a university or track club, but dodging mortar fire in Italy as part of the U.S. Army’s 92nd Infantry Division, a segregated unit known as the Buffalo Soldiers.

“I was extremely proud” of being a Buffalo Soldier, he said in a 2008 interview with the Library’s Veterans History Project.

As the 2021 Olympics get set to begin, it’s worth remembering that Dillard — along with Charley Paddock and Mal Whitfield — were among the armed services’ greatest Olympic champions in a long list of military and athletic greatness. The Department of Defense lists 19 members of the armed services participating in this Olympics.

Paddock, who served in the U.S. Army Field Artillery in World War I, won two golds and two silvers in the 1920 and 1924 Olympics. (You might remember him as the cocky American in “Chariots of Fire.”) He returned to the service during World War II and was killed in a 1943 military plane crash in Alaska. Whitfield, a member of the Tuskegee Airmen, and Dillard won a combined nine medals at the 1948 and 1952 Olympics, seven of them gold. Four of the golds belonged to Dillard; five of the total belonged to Whitfield. All three are in the U.S. Olympics & Paralympics Hall of Fame.

Dillard’s Olympics got off to a disastrous start. He failed to quality for the finals in his signature event, the hurdles, even though he was the world record-holder at the time (he hit several hurdles). He barely qualified for the 100 meters final and thus had to run in the far outside lane.

But perhaps most striking was that he had attended the same high school in Cleveland, Ohio, as Jesse Owens. Owens won four gold medals in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin, humiliating German leader Adolph Hitler and his ideal of Aryan supremacy. Dillard, about a decade younger than Owens, had been 9 when he had watched Owens, then a high school senior, run at East Technical High back home. He idolized Owens, vowing to grow up to be just like him.

Since the Olympics were cancelled due to World War II in 1940 and 1944, the 1948 Olympics were the first held since Owens had accomplished his feat. And so it was that the East Tech guys were, in consecutive Olympics, both dubbed the fastest men on the planet.

Harrison Dillard, at his home in Shaker Heights, Ohio, 2008. Photo: Veterans History Project.

Born in Cleveland, Dillard graduated from East Technical, then went to Baldwin-Wallace College (now Baldwin Wallace University) on a track scholarship. During his sophomore year, he was drafted and later assigned to the 92nd.

By 1944, he was in combat in Italy. For six months, the 92nd slowly advanced, liberating towns as they went. In his VHP interview, Dillard recalled mortar fire, minefields, the bravery of his comrades. He also remembered Italian civilians, their villages destroyed, begging U.S. servicemen for food.

With the end of the war, Dillard’s focus turned from survival to running. He would go on to being one of the greatest sprinters and hurdlers of his generation.

“I grew up physically in the service…but more than that it teaches you self-reliance and discipline,” he said in his VHP interview. “Military discipline is second to none.”

While stationed in Europe during the occupation, he won four gold medals at the G.I. Olympics. Gen. George Patton, whose papers are at the Library, had placed fifth in the pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics, was there. A reporter about the fiery general about Dillard’s performance. “He’s the best (expletive) athlete I’ve ever seen,” Patton responded.

He was the best athlete a lot of people ever saw. At the London Games, he won gold medals in 100-meter dash and the 4×100 relay. Four years later, at the Helsinki Games, he won the 110-meter hurdles and another relay — making him a four-time Olympic gold medalist, just like his idol, Owens. He’s the only man to win Olympic gold medals in the 100-meter dash and the 110-meter hurdles.

He returned to his hometown and spent the rest of his life there, well-known but not an icon. He spent most of his career  as a manager in the business department of the Cleveland Board of Education, eventually retiring as department head in 1993. Fame never followed him very far, and he certainly never followed it.

When a reporter from The Undefeated visited him in 2016 for a story before the summer games in Rio de Janeiro, his Olympic medals were stored in a closet and there were no glory-days pictures or memorabilia on display. He was 93 years old. He didn’t consider himself a hero, but still saw Owens as one.

“He performed his athletic feat in circumstances where they were important, by throwing the lie of Aryan supremacy right in Hitler’s face and in his house,” he told The Undefeated. For himself, he said, his athletic achievements didn’t carry the same symbolism, and, at the end of the day, he didn’t think running fast was all that important in the scheme of things.

He died in 2019. He was 96.

Grit and resilience are among the qualities that make Olympic athletes great — many overcome formidable challenges just to reach the games. It’s even more difficult to survive the rigors of military service and combat to arrive at the medals podium.

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It’s Magic! Ye Olde Hocus Pocus

Illustration from “Hocus pocus junior : the anatomie of legerdemain.” Rare Books and Special Collections Division. 

This is a guest post by Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

Looking for a few good party tricks?  Perhaps pulling a card from your sleeve, or a smooth shell game, or even a captivating decapitation?

Harry Houdini had the book for you.

Page from “Hocus pocus junior: the anatomie of legerdemain.” Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

In 1927, at the bequest of Houdini, the Library received his personal collection of 4,000 volumes.  In addition to documenting Houdini’s personal campaign against Spiritualism, the collection contains what you would imagine – magic books, playbills and many volumes of pamphlets on such topics as card tricks, mediums, hypnotism and handcuff escape methods. Before Houdini turned his attention to feats of escape, he rose to fame as a master of the sleight of hand. His collection carefully documents the history of that art form.

The earliest known English language work on magic, or legerdemain (as sleight of hand was then known) appeared anonymously in 1635 under the title “Hocus Pocus Junior: The Anatomie of Legerdemain.”  A popular handbook of magic tricks, “Hocus Pocus” was the first illustrated book in English entirely about conjuring, and likely the first magic book written by an actual magician. UPDATE: An alert reader asks about “The Discouerie of Witchcraft,” published in 1584. That was the first book published on witchcraft, which was held as a thing apart from card tricks, slight of hand and stage tricks that constituted “magic.”

The author of “Hocus Pocus” is thought to have been William Vincent, who had a license to perform magic in England in 1619 and went by the stage name Hocus Pocus. His repertoire included dagger-swallowing and rope-dancing, as well as standard tricks of legerdemain.  In addition to describing how to carry out ordinary tricks using cups and balls, the book includes a decapitation trick  — “How to seeme to cut off a mans head, its is called the decollation of John Baptist.” (John the Baptist, one of the apostles of Christ, had been beheaded, an execution that loomed large in the stern Christianity of the era.)

Startling as it sounds, it’s not that complicated — the trick involves two people who greatly resemble one another (twins are ideal) and a cloth-draped table with two concealed holes in it. One person lies on their stomach on the table, their head over one hole concealed hole. The other is hidden beneath the table’s opposite end, perched beneath the second concealed hole.

During some eye-catching stage business — maybe an abracadabra wave of the wand, a puff of smoke, a twirl of the cape and perhaps a blow from a slightly misdirected ax — the first person plunges their head through the table into the first concealed hole, their neck doused with bloody-looking stuff. The second person pops their head up from the second concealed hole, also with bloody-looking stuff about the neck.

Presto! The head appears on the table, far apart from the neck, as if beheaded.

“The head may fetch a gaspe or two, and it will be better,” the author notes, then advises: “Let no body bee present while you doe this, neither when you have given entrance, permit any to be medling, nor let them tarry long.”

In other words, the stitching shows on close inspection; keep the crowd moving.

Magic aficionados will recognize this technique as the same one used in the “saw the magician’s assistant in half” trick that has been wowing audiences for ages.

Houdini, no doubt, appreciated the stagecraft and the trick’s long history.

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