Library of Congress's Blog, page 42

Japan in U.S. Children’s Books: “A New World”

“Japan and American Children’s Books,” by Sybille Jagusch. Published by the Library and Rutgers University Press.

As children, books are one of our first ways of experiencing the wider world. They’re often our first exposure to new and different people, places and cultures. They’re written by adults, though, so in a looking-through-the-other-end-of-the-telescope way, they also tell us a lot about the older generation that writes, illustrates and publishes them.

That’s the brilliant manner in which Sybille Jagusch, chief of the Library’s Children’s Literature Center, views the relationship between Japan and the United States in her new book, “Japan and American Children’s Books.” It’s published by Rutgers University Press in association with the Library.

The gorgeously illustrated, 385-page book is a window into both cultures as they have evolved over the past two centuries, but its focus is on the stories and illustrations that Americans have chosen to show their children about Japan. It’s not always a pretty picture, with stereotypes, caricatures and exoticism dominating the early years, but it has also resulted in beautiful stories, pictures and narratives that will last for generations.

“My intent was not to evaluate how correctly an American writer would portray American and Japanese cultures,” Jagusch said in a recent interview. “It’s to give the reader an overall picture of Japanese culture as it was portrayed by Americans. Those books today are very up to date. That was not the case in the early days, in the 19th century, because children’s books were not as highly regarded as they are today.”

Lady Murasaki Shikibu and Sei Shonagon in “Japanese Portraits,” by Dorothy and Thomas Hoobler, illustrated by Victoria Bruck, p. 13.  Raintree SteckVaughn, 1994.  Courtesy of Victoria Bruck Vebell.

Jagusch was appointed chief of the Children’s Literature Center in 1983. Over the ensuing years, she’s expanded the Library’s collections of rare and remarkable children’s literature, organized exhibitions and symposia and brought together an international book community. The Library now holds more than 600,000 children’s books, periodicals, maps and other items.

She became fascinated with Japan shortly after taking the helm of the Literature Center. Tayo Shima, a children’s book editor, walked into her office as a volunteer. The pair struck up a friendship and put together exhibitions and books on Japanese and American children’s books.

The papers from their first conference were published as “Window on Japan: Japanese Children’s Books and Television Today.” A  companion volume, “Japanese Children’s Books at the Library of Congress: A Bibliography of Books from the Postwar Years, 1946-1985,” was also published.

Jagusch soon began traveling to Japan, touring the country, developing friendships and becoming a collector of Japanese children’s books.

This book, two decades in the making, walks readers through the history of Japan’s appearance in U.S. children’s books. As Jagusch points out, the U.S. published very few children’s books and magazines in the 18th and early 19th centuries, a time when Japan was also almost entirely closed to outsiders.

But in 1853, a gunboat trip by U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry to Edo (Tokyo) Bay resulted in a treaty that opened the nation to international trade and culture. Americans immediately saw it as a land of the exotic and told their children the same. Merry’s Museum and Parley’s Magazine, one of the few children’s magazines of the era, made a short mention of the place several years after Perry’s visit: “So wholly unknown, so strange, so curious, Japan seems like a new world, and her inhabitants like a new race of beings. It will be a long time before we shall become fully acquainted with them.”

“Young Americans in Japan; or, The Adventures of the Jewett Family and Their Friend Oto Nambo,” by Edward Greey. Boston: Lee and Shepard, 1882.

This approach would continue for decades, Jagusch writes. Algernon Mitford, a British diplomat and linguist, sought to correct some of most egregious errors. His research into traditional folklore, collected into “Tales of Old Japan” in 1871, included what are believed to be the first Japanese fairy tales printed in a Western language.

“These are the first tales which are put into a Japanese child’s hands; and it is with these, and such as these, that the Japanese mother hushes her little ones to sleep,” he wrote. “[t]those which I give here are the only ones which I could find in print; and if I asked the Japanese to tell me others, they only thought I was laughing at them, and changed the subject.”

The collection included magical stories in which people and animals shape-shift. There’s “The Accomplished and Lucky Tea Kettle,” which miraculously transforms itself into a badger; and “The Story of the Old Man Who Made Withered Trees to Blossom,” which begins with the man’s dog finding a pot of gold.

“The Japanese Twins,” written and illustrated by Lucy Fitch Perkins. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912.

Americans seemed to cling to the idea of Japan as a realm of the mysterious until the eve of World War II. The horrors of war – the brutality of the Pacific Theater, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the internment of Japanese-Americans – were seldom reflected in children’s books of the mid-century. But, afterwards, a new realism about Japan began to appear in American children’s books, led in no small part by Japanese-American storytellers and artists who help bridge the cultural gaps. Writers such as Taro Yashima and Yoshiko Uchida created authentic and serious works, not fearing to touch subjects like the war years and the immigrant experience.

“The shift away from the exotic towards the familiar and down-to-earth is obvious, and mirrors in turn the level of increased familiarity between the two cultures,” writes J. Thomas Rimer, professor emeritus in the Department of East Asian Languages & Literatures at the University of Pittsburgh, in the book’s introduction.

As a native German, Jagusch said she found an affinity between the two cultures and became comfortable with the idea of herself as a traveler between two worlds.

“These children’s books with their special point of view and purpose reveal the evolving relationship between Japan and America,” she writes in the book’s introductory note. “They also provide a glimpse of a traveler between these two places.”

“The Bracelet,” by Yoshiko Uchida, illustrated by Joanna Yardley. 1993. Courtesy of Joanna Yardley.

“Japan and American Children’s Books” is available in hardcover ($120.00), softcover ($49.95) and e-book ($49.95) formats from booksellers worldwide. Softcovers are available for purchase from the Library of Congress shop .

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Researcher Story: Nelson Johnson’s “Boardwalk Empire” and “Darrow’s Nightmare”

Nelson Johnson used the Library’s collection of Clarence Darrow’s papers to inform his latest novel, “Darrow’s Nightmare.” His earlier books include “Boardwalk Empire,” which was adapted into a hit HBO series. Johnson retired in 2018 from his position as a New Jersey state superior court judge.

You were a lawyer for decades, then a judge. Tell us about your legal career.

I grew up in a small town in southern New Jersey — and remain there 72 years later. I’m a graduate of St. John’s University and Villanova Law School.

I’ve had a very uncomplicated life. When I was 5, my grandfather said to me, “Nelson you talk so much, you should be a lawyer.” When I asked what lawyers did, he replied, “They help people when they are in trouble.” That sounded like a good thing, and as I learned more about what lawyers did, my course was charted. No uncertainty, no anxiety, no choices — becoming an attorney was all that interested me. When I was 12 or 13, my mother introduced me to “Darrow for the Defense” by Irving Stone, and Clarence Darrow became one of my heroes.

When and why did you start writing nonfiction?

I’ve been writing letters, essays and opinion pieces since my freshman year of college. In the early 1980s, I was hired to represent the Atlantic City Planning Board. I found myself in the middle of a land rush —developers were crawling all over city hall, and I was concerned about their heavy-handed influence. I also couldn’t wrap my brain around was the dysfunctionality of the place. So, I headed to the Atlantic City Free Public Library to learn more. There, I found two librarians who fed me books.

The result was “Boardwalk Empire,” which tells the story of Atlantic City’s history from the arrival of the railroad in 1854 up to the present-day era of casino gambling.  

How do you select topics?

I research and write with an eye toward making sense of things on a topic no one has written about. I think that’s what all four of my books have done, namely, make sense of people, places and events that are either not understood at all, or misunderstood by commentators who got it wrong.

Besides “Boardwalk Empire” and my new book on Darrow, I’ve written about the indispensable role of African Americans in the creation of Atlantic City. And my book “Battleground New Jersey” discusses the “political dirt” that preceded New Jersey’s 1947 Constitution and creation of a genuinely independent court system.

“Darrow’s Nightmare” by Nelson Johnson.

What drew you to Darrow as a subject?

I had read Stone’s book years earlier and knew of Darrow’s problems in Los Angeles. Clarence — over wife Ruby’s advice — agreed to represent the McNamara Brothers, labor activists accused of bombing the antiunion Los Angeles Times. He learned quickly that they were guilty and negotiated a plea bargain. Not long afterward, Darrow was charged with attempting to bribe jurors who had been selected for the trial — even though it never occurred. The people of power in Los Angeles wanted to silence Darrow.

But for Earl Rogers, his extraordinarily talented defense attorney, we might never have known of Darrow. He was acquitted and went on to famously defend John Scopes in the “Scopes monkey trial” and to save Leopold and Loeb from the death penalty.

Over the years, I read many books on Darrow and was never satisfied with how his troubles in L.A. were handled by other historians.

How did Darrow’s papers inform your account?

I can’t express my excitement upon finding all of Ruby Darrow’s letters to Irving Stone in the Clarence Darrow papers at the Library. Ruby wrote to Stone and collaborated in the writing of what she hoped would be an important work in establishing Darrow as the most important lawyer in American history. In some ways, he was.

Ruby’s letters are a treasure. Frequently, I used something Ruby told Stone or a story she recounted as a thread to pull things together. Those letters are true gems, so very valuable in my research.

What was a favorite discovery?

My favorite experience was the first time I read Ruby’s letter to Stone about a surgery and hospital stay of Clarence’s in L.A. following a 1908–09 trial in Idaho, two years before his troubles in L.A. Ruby had been a reporter before marrying Clarence, and she knew how to tell a good story.

Can you comment on the importance of archival collections such as the Library’s to your work?

Primary resources are critical to my research and writing. My legal background compels me to search for documents that will support the burden of proof referred to in the law as “clear and convincing” evidence. If I can’t support a conclusion based on that standard, then I either don’t make use of those facts, or I will let the reader know that what someone said, did or suffered may or may not have occurred.

What are you working on now?

My current research is proceeding in two very different directions. I may write about 15 months in the life of Earl Rogers when he represented another lawyer and that lawyer’s client on corruption charges in San Francisco around 1908. If my research yields what I’m hoping, then I will be heading west to the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley. If it doesn’t, I’m going to write a book on an aspect of slavery and its role in American history, in which case I’ll be returning to the Library.

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Medgar Evers: A Hero in Life and Death

Medgar Evers, 1963. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Jennifer Davis, a collection specialist in the Law Library’s Collection Services Division.

Medgar Wiley Evers, civil rights activist, voting rights activist and organizer, was born 96 years ago this month in tiny Decatur, Mississippi. He would go on to become one of the nation’s most significant 20th-century voices in the causes of civil rights and social justice before being assassinated at the age of 37.

His life story can be sketched out in any number of holdings at the Library, perhaps most notably in the collections of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, as he was the organization’s first field secretary in Mississippi, widely regarded at the time as the most violently racist state in the nation.

Decatur in 1925 was a town of a few hundred people in east-central section of the state. His father was a farmer and his mother a homemaker. At the time, Blacks made up about one-third of the local population but were a majority of the state population, at about 55 percent. Still, almost no Blacks could vote and none held political office. They were subject to Jim Crow segregation, lynching and state-supported violence.

When he was a teen, a friend of his father’s was lynched by a white mob for the alleged offense of insulting a white woman. On his way to school each day, Evers had to walk by the tree where the man, Willie Tingle, was hanged.

During World War II, he joined the Army and was sent to Europe to fight in France and Germany. He left the service in 1946 with the rank of sergeant.

When he returned home, he attended Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University), where he and his older brother Charles participated in civil rights activism. He met his future wife there, fellow classmate Myrlie Beasley, and married her in 1951, graduating from Alcorn in 1952.

Statue of Medgar Evers at Alcorn State University. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Prints & Photographs Division.  

Although he took a job working as an insurance agent in the all-Black town of Mound Bayou in the Delta, he continued his activism and his interest in furthering civil rights for African Americans. While still working at his insurance job, he became president of the Regional Council of Negro Leadership. In that role, he started a civil rights campaign using bumper stickers, “Don’t Buy Gas Where You Can’t Use the Restroom.”

In 1954, after the U.S. Supreme Court struck down segregation, he was the first Black person to apply to the University of Mississippi Law School, but was denied admittance because of his race. Thurgood Marshall, the future Supreme Court justice, served as his attorney.

Later that year, as a result of Evers’ activism, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People hired him as the first field secretary in Mississippi. He led investigations into nine killings of Blacks, the lynching of Emmett Till, and the wrongful conviction of Clyde Kennard. He established new NAACP chapters, particularly youth councils, organized voting registration drives, participated in boycotts, investigated and gathered evidence of “racially motivated incidents,” and promoted school desegregation. He was repeatedly sent death threats. He taught his children to crawl on the floor of their house — below the windows — and to shelter in the tub if they sensed a menacing person outside. This would prove to be well-founded advice.

In 1962, he worked on the successful bid to get James Meredith admitted to the University of Mississippi. Thousands of angry whites rioted, resulting in more than 25,000 federal troops being called into restore order. Two people were killed and more than 300 injured. The episode became a major moment in the civil rights movement.

By this point, Evers was a marked man to white supremacists. A firebomb was thrown in the family’s carport in early 1963. Myrlie Evers put out the fire with a garden hose.

Then, on June 11, 1963, Evers was at a mass meeting in Jackson, the state capital, with fellow activists. His wife and children stayed home a few miles away listening to the president’s speech on civil rights, asking Congress to create and pass civil rights legislatioṇ. Just after midnight, Evers returned home. After exiting his car, he was shot in the back with rifle fire. The gunman had been hiding in bushes across the street. When he fell, Evers was clutching a handful of T-shirts that read, “Jim Crow Must Go.”

Home of Medgar and Myrlie Evers, the day after his assassination. Photo: UPI. Prints and Photographs Division.

As a combat veteran, Evers was buried with full military honors at Arlington National Cemetery; over 3,000 people attended his funeral. Both his widow and his brother went on to long careers as notable civil rights advocates.

The assassin, Byron De La Beckwith, an avowed white supremacist, pleaded not guilty at trial in the 1960s. Then-governor Ross Barnett, himself a proud segregationist, came to the courtroom to shake Beckwith’s hand in front of the jury. Two juries, both all-white, deadlocked. But three decades later, after new evidence surfaced in stories by journalist Jerry Mitchell, a jury of blacks and whites convicted Beckwith of the shooting. He was sentenced to life in prison and died there in 2001.

Evers became more famous nationally in death than in life. His assassination, and the president’s speech, spurred action on civil rights legislation. One year later, fittingly on his birthday, the Civil Rights Act of 1964 was signed into law. In 1970, the City University of New York named their new Brooklyn campus Medgar Evers College. In 2010, the U.S. Navy named an ammunition ship in his honor. And in 2017, President Barack Obama designated the couple’s home in Jackson, Mississippi, as a National Historic Landmark.

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Joy Williams Wins 2021 Prize for American Fiction

Joy Williams, wearing her trademark prescription sunglasses, accepts the 2021 Prize for American Fiction from Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. Photo: Rob Casper.

This post was co-written by Brett Zongker, chief of media relations. 

Novelist, short-story and non-fiction author Joy Williams, known for works such as “State of Grace” and “The Quick and the Dead,” is the winner of the 2021 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, Librarian Carla Hayden announced today.

The award, made annually for a lifetime of outstanding work, will be presented during this year’s National Book Festival in September.

“This is a wonderful award and one that inspires much humility,” said Williams, who now resides primarily in Arizona, but who also is known for her cross-country road trips. “The American story is wild, uncapturable and discomfiting, and our fiction — our literature — is poised to challenge and deeply change us as it becomes ever more inclusive and ecocentric.”

One of the Library’s most prestigious awards, the Prize for American Fiction honors an American author whose work is distinguished not only for its mastery of the art but also for its originality of thought and imagination. Last year’s winner was Colson Whitehead. Previous awardees have included Toni Morrison, Philip Roth, Don DeLillo and Louise Erdrich.

“I am pleased and honored to confer this prize on Joy Williams, in celebration of her almost half-century of extraordinary work,” Hayden said. “Her work reveals the strange and unsettling grace just beneath the surface of our lives. In a story, a moment, a single sentence, it can force us to reimagine how we see ourselves, how we understand each other — and how we relate to the natural world.”

Hayden selected Williams as this year’s winner based on nominations from more than 60 distinguished literary figures, including former winners of the prize, acclaimed authors and literary critics from around the world. Williams is the author of four short story collections, two works of nonfiction and five novels, including the upcoming “Harrow.”

“Harrow,” by Joy Williams, will be published in September.

“The fiction of Joy Williams reminds me how lucky I am to be an American writer,” said Don DeLillo, winner of the 2013 prize. “She writes strong, steady and ever-unexpected narratives, word by word, sentence by sentence. This is the American language and she is an expert practitioner.”

Williams’ many honors include the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected a member of the Academy in 2008, and she has been a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

“We are American writers, absorbing the American experience,” she once said at a literary conference, as quoted by the Paris Review in 2014. “We must absorb its heat, the recklessness and ruthlessness, the grotesqueries and cruelties. We must reflect the sprawl and smallness of America, its greedy optimism and dangerous sentimentality. And we must write with a pen—in Mark Twain’s phrase—warmed up in hell. We might have something then, worthy, necessary; a real literature instead of the Botox escapist lit told in the shiny prolix comedic style that has come to define us.”

She is best known for her short stories, but all of her work is populated by offbeat characters, often middle-class and on their way down, related in grim and darkly comic narratives. Her essays, particularly about the environment, are fierce and uncompromising.

Born in Massachusetts in 1944, she grew up partly in Maine, the child of a minister, and was a self-described indifferent student in high school. She went to college in Ohio, then went to the prestigious Iowa Writers Workshop. Her first short story was published when she was 22. Her first husband worked at newspapers in Florida, and she quickly became attached to the place.

Joy Williams. Photo: Courtesy of Knopf.

Here’s a hint to her personality, from that Paris Review interview:

“We rented a trailer in the middle of tangled woods on the St. Marks River. Didn’t know a soul, husband away all day. I wrote ‘State of Grace’ there [her first novel]. Excellent, practically morbid conditions for the writing of a first novel. We returned to Siesta Key, and I got a job working for the Navy at the Mote Marine Laboratory, researching shark attacks.”

Her career has since garnered the admiration of fellow writers, critics and fans of literary fiction, though she’s never been a big name on bestseller lists. Her second marriage, for 35 years, was to L. Rust Hills, the influential fiction editor at Esquire Magazine, ending only at his death in 2008. The couple had one child, Caitlin.

Williams lived in the Florida Keys for years, once writing a guidebook to the region, before moving to Arizona. She’s taught creative writing at universities from Florida to Wyoming.

She will appear at the 2021 National Book Festival, set for Sept. 17-26. The festival, with the theme “Open a Book, Open the World,” encourages attendees to create their own festival experiences through multiple formats over 10 days.

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Drag Queens! Copyright Your Work!

Female impersonators from the “An Evening With La Cage,” the Las Vegas show that ran for 23 years, closing in 2009. Photo: Carol Highsmith.

This is a guest post by Holland Gormley, a public affairs specialist in the  U.S. Copyright Office. It was first published on the Copyright: Creativity at Work blog.

June is Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ+) Pride Month, which is celebrated each year to honor the 1969 Stonewall Uprising in Manhattan. It’s an opportunity to recognize and celebrate the impact that this community has had on our nation’s culture and history.

One example is the art of drag performance, one of the many creative contributions to come out of the queer community. The history of drag within the copyright record runs deep, and many aspects of it are protected by copyright.

The origins of drag performances can be traced back to 1869 when Harlem’s Hamilton Lodge began hosting secret “drag balls,” which served as a safe place for the queer community to congregate without fear. These went on for decades.

In his 1940 autobiography, “The Big Sea,” Langston Hughes described Hamilton Lodge as “a queerly assorted throng on the dance floor” where men dressed as women and women dressed as men. Although the balls catered primarily to the queer community, straight artists and writers were also attracted to the celebratory atmosphere. Charles Henri Ford and Parker Tyler, coauthors of 193e’s “The Young and Evil,” described the scene as “a […] celestial flavor and cerulean coloring no angelic painter or nectarish poet has ever conceived . . . lit up like high mass.”

Several decades later, documentaries registered for copyright protection, such as “The Queen” in 1968 and “Paris Is Burning” in 1990, explored the origins of vogueing, a precursor to modern drag. Contemporary TV series like “POSE” and “RuPaul’s Drag Race” have helped bring further awareness to the art form and draw it into more mainstream culture. It is worth underscoring how prolifically creative today’s drag queens can be. For example, “Drag Race’ contestant Brian Firkus, better known as Trixie Mattel, has recorded three albums and coauthored a book with fellow queen Katya Zamolodchikova, also known as Brian Joseph McCook.

The art of drag itself also incorporates many forms of work protected by copyright. Performers of drag can register original comedy and stand-up sketches, songs, and, possibly, certain types of choreographic works for copyright protection using a performing arts application. Videos can be registered as motion pictures, and photographs are also covered by copyright. Drag performers should consider copyright laws that apply to music used while performing choreography or during lip-synching. Some public venues will have a license that covers this use, but check to be sure.

What’s not registerable for copyright when it comes to drag? Many performers choose stage names that include clever plays on words. Although we LOVE puns at the Copyright Office, names, titles, and short phrases are not protected by copyright. The Office cannot register individual words or brief combinations of words, even if the word or short phrase is novel, distinctive, or lends itself to a play on words.

Regardless of the medium, the work inspired by and created as part of drag performance is an important part of LGBTQ+ culture. Representation of the queer community in the copyright record matters. Protecting original work through copyright helps it become a part of our diverse national record. During 2021 Pride Month, the Copyright Office celebrates the creative works of LGBTQ+ creators and performers past, present, and future. Our nation is stronger and more vibrant for it!

You can learn how to register your work for copyright protection anytime.

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Pride Night Online! Coming June 28

Megan Metcalf with some of the Library’s LGBTQ collections. 2019. Photo: Shawn Miller.

This is a guest post by Megan Metcalf, the Women’s Gender and LGBTQIA+ studies librarian and collection specialist.

The Library is celebrating LGBTQ+ Pride month with a slate of programs to help readers understand and find LGBTQIA+ collections from across the Library. (LGBTQIA+ is an acronym used in the Library’s collection policy statement to signify lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex and asexual.) One of the key resources for you to explore our collections is our Research Guide on the subject.

To get a great understanding of that and other resources, join us for Pride Night Online, June 28 at 6 p.m. I will explore the breadth and diversity of LGBTQIA+ collections and services at the Library. I’ll provide a brief overview of what’s available in each reading room and research center and offer a detailed introduction into the rare and unique holdings in the Library’s general and international collections.

Finding trans and gender nonconforming histories through historical newspapers from Chronicling America.

Using local history and genealogical resources to trace LGBTQIA+ people.

Exploring the first LGBTQIA+ magazines published in the U.S., including the Mattachine Review (1955–66), ONE Magazine (1953–69) and The Ladder (1956–72).

Locating historical resources on LGBTQIA+ activism and organizing.

Understanding LGBTQIA+ digital collections, including the LGBTQIA+ studies web archive.

Learning LGBTQIA+ research tips and tricks, including how to find and request materials.

The event is free, but we suggest you register beforehand.

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The Great Buchanan Inheritance Hoax

President James Buchanan’s name was used to lend credibility to the hoax. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan, a reference librarian in the local history and genealogy section of the Main Reading Room. Her most recent piece was a guide to finding female suffragists in family histories.

Ninety years ago, as the Great Depression drained hopes and finances across the country, a Texas grocer named Lorenzo D. Buchanan stepped forward with one of the great hoaxes of 20th-century American pop-culture life, a genealogical fabrication that continues to resonate today.

Lorenzo, who ran a modest store in Houston, told reporters a whopper: The $850 million estate of one of his ancestors was ready to be distributed among eligible heirs who could prove kinship.

This ancestor, he said, was William Buchanan, who had left the bequest tied up in recently expired, 99-year land leases across the country, which included prime Manhattan real estate. William was said to be a cousin of former President James Buchanan, which lent the story credibility.

Genealogical pandemonium ensued.

Americans went bananas. Everyone named Buchanan, or related to someone named Buchanan, or who thought they might possibly have a distant cousin twice removed was suddenly researching Buchanan history. Others just made up connections and hoped nobody noticed.

It went on for five incredible years, even after Lorenzo and his lawyer said the story was completely fabricated, even after judges and economists said the estate didn’t exist, even after genealogical experts at the Library said there were no family ties to claim. Then it resurfaced from generation to generation, as the aging children of parents who had been taken in by the scam came across old paperwork in attics, family Bibles, scrapbooks that showed…they could inherit millions!

I know this because my family was caught up in the hysteria, too.

I came across my family’s claim as a teen in my small Pennsylvania town. It didn’t come with a warning label. There was just paperwork, waiting to be notarized, that showed we were eligible heirs. It was incorrect and had been assembled by an apparently unscrupulous agent, but it certainly looked official.

That happened all over the U.S. when the hoax was at its height and people were desperate for any sort of financial hope.

James Buchanan of Indianapolis thought he was heir to the multi-million dollar estate. Indianapolis Times, June 2, 1931. Chronicling America.

Newspapers across the country were filled with sensational stories about a local family who was anticipating their enormous inheritance any day now.

The Library was inundated with Buchanan genealogical requests. Overwhelmed librarians prepared a standardized memorandum, in which they explained that the most reliable records in our collections did not support a relationship to the fabled William Buchanan. Nor could they be sure that such a person had even existed.

At the same time, New York state surrogate judges, who presided over wills and estates, faced an onslaught of inquiries from people insisting to see a probate file of which the court had no record. The judges implored the state’s governor (and soon-to-be presidential candidate), Franklin D. Roosevelt, to intervene.

It should have ended then. Lorenzo, who had grown weary of the hoax, said that he had “ceased all operations in connection with the supposed estate.” Newspaper articles show that he even signed an agreement with the U.S. Postal Inspector to return — unopened — the thousands of letters people were sending him.

And yet, the hoax just gained steam. Mysterious “agents” suddenly appeared, saying they could help aspiring heirs file claims. In New York state, fees ranged from $15 to $250 — about $280 to $4,700 in 2021 dollars.

The issue came to a final showdown in a civil suit against Lorenzo Buchanan in 1936. It was thrown out of court, with his attorney mocking plaintiffs for having believed his client’s tall tale. Buchanan cited poor health, never appeared in court and never explained why he had concocted the hoax. He likely made some money off the episode, but it wasn’t the type of scam, or Ponzi scheme, from which he would have pocketed much.

More than 300 people in Lincoln County, Tennessee, claimed to be descendants of the fictional William Buchanan.  The Frontier, Holt County, Nebraska. August 20, 1931. Chronicling America.

Why had so many people believed in something that was so easily proven false?

Part of it is natural, as any genealogist can tell you. There is an inherent curiosity that can make us wonder if we are related to people who share our name. No scam is required to draw potential descendants towards branches of the family tree that ascend to celebrity ancestors such as heroes, leaders, founding fathers or nobility. The problem with many of these trees is that they are intended to connect living generations to a particular ancestor rather than to an accurate ancestor.

The Buchanan estate not only combined name recognition with celebrity, it also offered a mirage of financial relief during a period of extreme economic hardship. Buchanan family trees, many of them false, began to grow toward the former president. Since he was a bachelor with no known children, Buchanans attached themselves to the President’s siblings or to his father’s siblings, allowing more room for false hopes and fabricated claims.

“The Buchanan Book,” published in 1911, includes a small section devoted to the lines of American Buchanans. During the hoax, people used the book as a guide, but often mistakenly (or fraudulently) inserted one of the included names into their own family tree as a distant relation of the former president. Presto! You had a legitimate-looking family tree that showed you could inherit millions. That was the type of document I came across in my family’s papers so long ago.

I was hardly alone in coming across these kinds of claims. In the 1960s, three decades after the hoax was exposed, Library records show congressmen were still asking the Library for help in tracking down Buchanan claims sent in by constituents.

Today, genealogists are unlikely to believe they can still inherit from the alleged 1930s estate, but they do get misled by the fake family trees handed down to them. It’s easy to see why.

Family heirship claims leave behind documents that have the appearance of authenticity. They may be notarized, published, or written in a beloved grandmother’s hand. Then these family papers are inherited by unsuspecting descendants.

One of the reasons these genealogy mistakes are hard to correct is because genealogy is so personal. It’s not just history, it’s our history. We bond to it, especially if it’s a story that has been shared in our families. If we’ve been told that we have a famous ancestor or we come from a certain part of the world, those things get ingrained in our identity. It’s very hard to help people change their minds because it’s not just in their minds, it’s in their hearts.

Fortunately, genealogists can overcome these obstacles by doing their own research. Climb the family tree by beginning with yourself and working backwards one generation at a time. Collect and evaluate records, interview relatives and address conflicts. Be mindful of facts that don’t fit – and be wary of any claims to fame or fortune!

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The Birth of Juneteenth Wasn’t Big News in 1865

Betty Bormer, who was freed by the military order that founded Juneteenth. Fort Worth, Texas. June 26, 1937. Photo: Works Progress Administration. Prints and Photographs Division.

Journalism is often called the first draft of history. As any writer can tell you, first drafts are often messy.

So on this momentous day, the first federal holiday of Juneteenth, let’s look at how 19th-century media covered the birth of what would become the nation’s official holiday marking the end of slavery. That was the June 19, 1865, order by Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger in Galveston, Texas, that abolished slavery in that state, the last Confederate holdout.

Granger did not bury the lead. He established the legal authority to assume military command in the state and named his staff in two brief general orders, or military proclamations. Then he cut to the heart of the matter in “General Orders, No. 3.”

“The people are informed that, in accordance with a proclamation from the Executive of the United States, all slaves are free. This involves an absolute equality of personal rights and rights of property, between former masters and slaves.”

Clear and concise. Not a word wasted. Black people in Texas, the last in America to find out that the Emancipation Proclamation applied to them, were out of bondage. Slavery was dead. A terrible era was over.

Today, we mark that announcement as a very big deal. The nation, founded on the ideal of equality, fought the deadliest war in its history over slavery, yet waited 156 years to officially mark the demise of the institution. There’s a lot to unpack in that, and we, as a nation, continue to do so.

But how did newspapers report it at the time?

By and large, they didn’t. Or just barely.

Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger. Photo: Brady’s National Photographic Portrait Galleries. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Galveston Tri-Weekly News, the Galveston News and the Houston Telegraph all reported Granger’s orders on June 20. These notices would, in the coming weeks, be picked up by other newspapers across the country. “The Slaves Declared Free,” ran a small front-page headline in the New-York Daily Tribune on July 7, prioritizing that declaration above the other four that Granger issued that day.

But by and large, most newspapers that can be found in the Library’s Chronicling America archives and in other databases available on-site show that most newspapers paid scant attention. The slavery order, if mentioned at all, was often just a one-sentence notice, deep in the sea of tiny type that characterized newspapers of the era, a pointillist’s dot in a newspaper mural.

Surprisingly, the only major dispatch from Galveston that week, which focused on the mood of the city, didn’t mention the orders.

“Jatros,” a correspondent for the New-York Daily Tribune, on June 20 filed a first-person account of walking through Galveston. He seemed unaware the order had been issued the previous day. “Galveston is a city of dogs and desolation,” Jatros wrote, in a colorful piece that would take two weeks to be printed in his own paper, then be republished by several others. He noted that “colored” Union troops kept the peace, but still referred to the local black population as “slaves.”

William Moore, who was freed by the military order that founded Juneteenth. Dallas, Texas. Dec. 21, 1937. Photo: Works Progress Administration. Prints and Photographs Division.

Jatros noted that livestock roamed the streets at will, that the city’s low-slung houses were often painted yellow, that the stores were dingy and devoid of merchandise, that the people were “stunted and scraggy” like the local trees. It was, by far and away, the most in-depth report from the place where Juneteenth originated, and yet it did not note that Black people were now free.

On Saturday, July 1, the weekly Dallas Herald printed all of Gordon’s orders but buried the item on the paper’s second page, along with noting that there had been a fine rain recently. On July 8, the Cincinnati Daily Inquirer reported the “all slaves are free” passage in a news round-up under the headline of “Afternoon Telegraph From the South-West.”

While all this might today seem a historical omission, that wasn’t necessarily true at the time.

Almost everyone outside of Texas already knew that slavery was over. Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, freeing enslaved people in the secessionist states, had gone into effect on January 1, 1863. The Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery, had passed the U.S. Congress in January, 1865, and was being ratified by the states. Robert E. Lee, the Confederate military leader, had surrendered his army at Appomattox, Virginia, on April 9, 1865.

By June, Lincoln had been assassinated and the trial for his killers was underway. Debate raged about the fate of former Confederate troops and politicians. The new president, Andrew Johnson, was in the midst of appointing provisional governors to take control of the rebellious states.

In this turbulent, pell-mell of violence and the after-shocks of four years of war, the fact that a little-known military officer read a proclamation reiterating that slavery was indeed over in one far-flung state was not exactly earth-shaking.

“While it is difficult to know precisely why Gen. Granger’s General Orders No. 3 did not receive more press coverage, it coincided with a time when other national news likely took precedence for newspaper editors,” says Michelle Krowl, the Library’s Civil War and Reconstruction specialist.

Besides, whites in Texas did not exactly regard Granger’s orders as good news, as a New York Times piece on July 16 made clear. The paper reported that nine days after Granger’s orders were issued, the mayor of Galveston called a meeting of the city council to address the “altered condition of the colored population, which required new regulations for the protection of the citizens.”

Granger took quick action. The next day, he decreed that “No persons formerly slaves will be permitted to travel on the public thoroughfares without passes or permits from their employers, or to congregate in buildings or in camps at or adjacent to any military post or town.”

In less than 10 days after obtaining “absolute equality,” Black Texans were ordered – by the federal government, their supposed liberators – to get permission from their former owners to so much as walk down the street. It was a harbinger of the false promises of Reconstruction.

Still, for the one group of people who did regard Granger’s order as a revelation — Black Texans — the news was earth-shaking. They staged celebrations on the first anniversary of Granger’s order and, by 1872, a group had pooled resources to buy what is now known as Emancipation Park in Houston for their observation of what became known as Juneteenth.

It seems plain that is the spirt which today, a century and a half later, marks this as a federal holiday. Juneteenth is not a holiday simply because of Granger’s order. It exists because black Texans celebrated it for years, decades, more than a century, in the teeth of Jim Crow segregation and racist violence, in the unyielding belief that the United States might someday become a land of the free.

Anderson and Minerva Edwards, who were freed by the military order that founded Juneteenth. Marshall, Texas, Aug. 3, 1937. Photo: Works Progress Administration. Prints and Photographs Division. 

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Free to Use and Reuse: The Photographs of Bernard Gotfryd

CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite reporting on the 1980 presidential election. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd. Prints and Photographs Division. 

The photographs of Bernard Gotfryd, now free for anyone to use from the Library’s collections, are a remarkable resource of late 20th-century American pop-culture and political life, as he was a Newsweek staff photographer based in New York for three decades.

In his work, you’ll find film stars such as Dustin Hoffman on the set of “Midnight Cowboy,” novelists, painters, singers and songwriters, politicians at podiums and any number of passionate people at street protests. Gotfryd, who died in 2016 at the age of 92, left the bulk of his photographs to the Library and designated that his copyright should expire at his death.

Gotfryd was a Holocaust survivor. The Germans overran his Polish hometown of Radom days after World War II started. Late in life, he wrote and spoke eloquently about the horrors of those years, touching thousands of listeners and readers. His 1990 book of autobiographical sketches, “Anton the Dove Fancier and Other Tales of the Holocaust,” was written after Newsweek assigned him to photograph fellow Holocaust survivors at a White House ceremony, then sent him back to Poland for the first time since the war to cover a trip by Pope John Paul II, a fellow Pole, to their home country.

”It was a very emotional time, and the memories flooded my mind more than ever,” he told The New York Times in a 1990 article, ”And I remembered my mother, the day she was being deported to the death camp, begging me to stay alive so that one day I could tell the world what the Nazis were doing. When I returned from Poland, I knew that day had come.”

Both his parents and grandmother were killed by the Nazis, as were the vast majority of the 33,000 Jews in Radom. Gotfryd worked as a teenage photo-lab apprentice in the Radom Ghetto for four terrifying years. People were shot, hanged, tortured, dragged off to death camps. He saw pictures of all these, as Nazi officers brought pictures of atrocities to his lab to be developed. He leaked copies of those to Alexandra, a young woman in the Polish Resistance, where they were widely circulated. She was killed in the Warsaw Uprising; he was caught and sent to Majdanek, a forced-labor and concentration camp, and then to a succession of five others before being liberated by American troops in May 1945.

“People entered the showers, but never came back,” he told students at St. John’s University in 2007. “I imagined that this is what hell looked liked.”

He was just 21 when he immigrated to the United States, joined the Army as a combat photographer, and eventually settled in the New York borough of Queens. He married Gina, a fellow death-camp survivor whom he met in New York. They had children and he settled into a job at Newsweek.

After he left the magazine 30 years later, he wrote “Anton” and other books about the Holocaust. He published a collection of his photographs, “Intimate Eye: Portraits by Bernard Gotfryd,” in 2006.

Dustin Hoffman on the set of “Midnight Cowboy.” 1968. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd. Prints and Photographs Division.

Much of his professional photography is now at the Library, with scans of 8,803 color slides now online. Due to his generosity, they may be used by anyone, free of all copyright restrictions. More than 11,000 of his black-and-white photographs are available through contact sheets and prints that can be viewed by visiting the Prints & Photographs Reading Room. (Other parts of his papers are held by the New-York Historical Society Library & Museum and the Hoover Institution.)

Gotfryd was a working photojournalist often limited by time and availability with his subjects, resulting in a clear and straightforward style, devoid of pretense, almost always using natural light. One can see the practicality of how he learned his craft. This captures his famous subjects without the artifice of elaborate photo shoots. They look like regular people.

His photograph of Walter Cronkite on the set of CBS News reporting the 1980 election (above), is an excellent matching of photographer and subject – both men practiced their craft in an unadorned manner that belied the technique behind it. There’s the U.S. map looming behind Cronkite, framing the national story against the smaller man narrating it. Today, it’s a postcard from another time; an era when people trusted network television anchors, when cable television was still just a novelty, when the internet and cell phones did not exist. There was Walter Cronkite telling you that was the way it was on this particular day and that was it.

Night falls on Manhattan. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd, 1983. Prints and Photographs Division.

Another image to which time has lent a pathos – his lovely twilight photograph of the Gotham skyline, the Twin Towers serene and majestic in the dusk, the shadows already deep across the canyons of downtown.

But I think my favorite of the lot is a simple picture of children he took on that decisive trip to Poland. It was June 1983, nearly four decades since he’d left the horrors of that place, and we know from the books that followed how deeply this trip affected him. Most of the pictures are journalistic images of the pope, the huge processions that greeted him and so on.

Polish kids waiting for Pope John Paul II in Katowice, Poland, 1983. Photo: Bernard Gotfryd. Prints and Photographs Division.

But here, he stops and turns his camera to the side. These are five girls, in traditional dress, perhaps for part of one parade or another, waiting along with two adults (chaperones?) for Pope John Paul II. Four are chatting and giggling. One is yawning. You can feel the sense of belonging, of nostalgia, that makes a man of nearly 60 turn his camera this way and see the humor, the fondness in it.

Still, it could not have felt like his place in the world any longer. There were about three million Jews in Poland before World War II; about 85 percent were killed during the Holocaust. Survivors were  subject to occasional pogroms, causing more to flee. After a nationwide anti-Semitic government crackdown in 1968, some 13,000 Jews left the country in the next few years, roughly half of the nation’s already decimated Jewish population.

By the time of Gotfryd’s visit, there were only about 10,000 Jews in the nation.  How it must have felt, this sense of alienation amid the nostalgia of home. It’s the kind of thing he wrote about until the end of his life, and captured in this deceptively simple image.

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Reading Rooms Reopen!

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden greets researcher Jay Driskell following the opening of the reading room. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Reading rooms around the Library are reopening to researchers for the first time in more than 14 months, including four this week, as the Library begins to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Performing Arts, Recorded Sound, Prints and Photographs and Moving Image reading rooms are opening this week, joining other rooms that opened on June 1.  It’s not quite yet business as usual — appointments are required, and sessions are from  9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. and 1 to 4 p.m. — but researchers were in the building as soon as doors opened.

They came in the dozens — both familiar faces and newcomers — to engage with an assortment of collections. One photographed Sanborn fire insurance maps; another examined Colonial-era legal documents; and yet another scrolled through microfilmed newspaper issues for stories documenting historical U.S. railroads. Library staff members were delighted.

“I missed being with the collections and excitement of the reading room,” said Lara Szypszak, a Manuscript Division reference librarian, whose division opened June 1. “There’s something about it that is impossible to replicate in the virtual world.”

The reading rooms of the Law Library, the Geography and Map, and Serial and Government Publications divisions also opened at the start of the month. The reopening is the first step in the Library’s plan to gradually resume on-site public services as the COVID-19 pandemic diminishes. Reading rooms, along with all other Library facilities, closed to the public on March 12, 2020, to reduce the spread of the COVID-19.

To visit one of the four newly opened reading rooms, researchers have to complete a reference interview and make an appointment at least 24 hours in advance, either by telephone or through Ask-a-Librarian. Two appointment times are offered: 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. or 1 to 4 p.m. During these times, only a limited number of researchers can be present to allow for social distancing. The Library has also installed plexiglass shields to protect staff and researchers from infection, and everyone in reading rooms must wear masks and follow the Library’s health and safety protocols.

None of these measures dampened enthusiasm among researchers. “We had people calling and writing in droves in the two weeks leading up to reopening,” Szypszak said. On June 1, 30 researchers visited the four reopened reading rooms. By the end of the first week, 97 had.

Historian and author Jay Driskell took a 9:30 a.m. appointment on June 1. He is the chief consulting historian for the Civil Rights and Restorative Justice Project at Northeastern University, and he came to consult the NAACP papers in the Manuscript Reading Room. He has used the papers extensively in the past to locate and document more than 1,000 cases of racial homicide in the South between 1930 and 1970.

Driskell first visited the Library about a decade ago to research his book, “Schooling Jim Crow: The Fight for Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and the Roots of Black Protest Politics.” Since then, he has used multiple collections, both for his own research and writing and for his clients.

During the pandemic, he put the archival portion of his research on hold, although he continued to use the Library’s collections online for clients. The Prints and Photographs Division online collections “proved invaluable” for this purpose, he said, although “there’s only so much you can do with electronic sources.”

He explained: “There’s … something about the materiality of documents, about holding [them] in your hands that tells you something about the past you can’t get from an online database.”

Of the experience of returning to the Manuscript Reading Room, he said, “It really was fantastic to see everyone. … Even though I don’t work for the Library, I still view everyone here as my co-workers.”

Johanna Bockman, a sociologist at George Mason University, was equally effusive. “I’m a biased person” when it comes to the Library, she said, noting that she publishes a blog titled “The Library of Congress Is Great.”

She visited the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room on June 1 to research microfilmed issues of the historical Washington Afro-American newspaper for a book she is writing about gentrification of Washington, D.C. “It’s wonderful” to be back, she said. “People are so helpful.”

Writer John O’Conor was in Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room the same day. He came to consult microfilmed newspapers published in New York, Philadelphia and Chicago between the 1880s and early 1900s for information about railroads. He’s been visiting the Library for 20 years and, like the others, was glad to return. “People remember me, I remember them,” he said.

For some researchers last week, it was their first visit. Benjamin Haller, a classics professor at Virginia Wesleyan University, is writing about the influence of Homer’s “The Odyssey” on Ralph Ellison’s work, and he came to the Manuscript Division to view the manuscript of Ellison’s “Invisible Man” and the author’s correspondence with scholars.

“It’s a huge honor to be able to come,” Haller said. “This is my initiation.”

Bruce Linskens is an analyst for the law firm Baker McKenzie. He visited the Law Library’s reading room to look at British Colonial appeal papers for an international case he is working on. He found both the manuscripts and librarian Nathan Dorn, “who pulled documents out beyond our initial request,” very helpful. “I hope I have another project that I can come back,” Linskens said.

Reference librarians had a similarly upbeat attitude about the reopening. “It went very smoothly,” Julie Stoner, a reference librarian in the Geography and Map Division. “Our patrons were happy to be back, and there was a feeling of celebration … as well as a sense of finally returning to normal.”

Librarian Gary Johnson said Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room staff tried provide the best service possible to patrons while the reading room was closed — he has been coming to the Library twice a week since July 2020 to respond to reference inquiries that required use of on-site resources. “But there are certain types of work that researchers can only do for themselves, so it is really satisfying to see that work begin again,” Johnson said.

Elizabeth Osborne of the Law Library said she is likewise pleased to facilitate access to collections, adding that she “missed the serendipitous interactions with … researchers and colleagues, which only occur when we are all together in the same room.”

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