Library of Congress's Blog, page 43

The Birth Certificate for “America”

Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 map used the term “America” for the first time in describing the New World.

–– This piece was co-written by Mike Klein, a reference specialist in the Geography and Map Division.

Few articles on the Library’s website in general, and this blog in particular, have stirred as much debate and discussion as a July 4, 2016, post titled, “”

The piece reports basic history: The name “America” originated with the famous 1507 map by Martin Waldseemüller, who named the newly-discovered lands for the sea-faring voyages of Amerigo Vespuccui a few years earlier. The German cartographer suggested the land be named “ab Americo Inventore…quasi Americi terram sive Americam,”  translated as, “from Amerigo the discoverer…as if it were the land of Americus or America.”

With this map (the Library holds the sole surviving copy), Waldseemüller added the Western Hemisphere to the conception of the world, asserting the existence of a separate continent in the west, surrounded by water and lying apart from Asia. It was also the first time the word “America” had been applied to it.  The map is one of many featured in the current issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, “Mapping our Place in the World.”

In “Cosmographiae introductio,” Waldseemuller wrote of his map: “Today these parts of the earth have been explored more extensively than a fourth part of the world, as will be explained in what follow, and that has been discovered by Amerigo Vespucci [. . . .] I can see no reason why anyone would object to calling this fourth part Amerige, the land of Amerigo, or America, after the man of great ability who discovered it.”

Obviously, the name “America” predates “the United States of America,” which was founded in 1776, and Waldseemüller was clearly referring to what we now call South America. But for five years now, that 2016 post has bounced around the internet’s chat rooms, taking on a life of its own, as readers from around the world have debated the origin of  “America” and its modern usage as shorthand for the United States. It is so popular that is has racked up 100,000 more views than the second-most popular story on this blog.

Amerigo Vespucci, 1902 etching by Jacques Reich. Prints and Photographs Division.

The map also portrays several of the Caribbean Islands and a small arch of land that we now recognize as North America. It shows the Pacific Ocean, although neither Magellan nor Balboa had yet reached it. As the Library’s interactive guide to the map notes, the cartographic sources that Waldseemüller used for his depiction of the New World remain a mystery, although he mentions some unknown Portuguese charts in “Cosmographie.”

The map was part of an era of world-shaking discoveries. Just 36 years later, Copernicus revolutionized our perception of Earth’s place in the universe, establishing that the sun, not the Earth, was the center of the solar system.

The revolutionary advances of Copernicus and Waldseemüller shifted the understanding of the Earth during the Renaissance, when European artists and scientists combined inspiration drawn from classical sources with information derived from Spanish and Portuguese voyages to put forth a more humanistic form of geography and self-awareness.

Waldseemüller knew the map would be shocking to many and seemed to anticipate the controversy that it would entail.

“This one request we have to make,” he wrote, “that those who are inexperienced and unacquainted with cosmography shall not condemn all this before they have learned that it will surely be clearer to them later on, when they have come to understand it.”

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Grab the Mic: Jason Reynolds June Newsletter

You know what’s weird? Washing clothes. It’s like some kind of strange sorcery I can’t quite get a grip on. This isn’t to say I don’t do laundry. I do. Often. Doing it right now, as a matter of fact. Which is why I’m so fascinated by the whole experience. I mean, can you explain to me how putting dirty clothes in a machine, adding some soap and then pushing a button, which causes the internal chamber of this machine to fill with water and then just … move around for 20 minutes, cleans clothes? I mean, if I cover myself in soap, and get caught in the rain and then just jump up and down for a few minutes, will I come out cleaner? I don’t think so. So, how does the washing machine work? How? How?

The answer is, who knows? But I’ve been thinking about it anyway and wondering if life works that way, maybe not when it comes to cleaning our skin, but maybe when it comes to refreshing our minds and our hearts. Renewing our perspectives. What if we have been in some kind of strange washing machine for the last 15 months, filled with water, bumping us back and forth, rocking us, spinning us, jerking us around? And maybe the soap, the cleaning agent, has been, somehow, our teachers, our parents, our friends. Maybe we’ve been cleaning agents for other people, someone’s Tide Pod, which is also interesting to think about because the cleaning agent is in the storm of the machine just like the clothes. It has to be in it in order to help. It has to be able to understand the weight of the water and the unpredictability of the process. And after all the wishy-washy, and that violent spin at the end (which happens to be my favorite part … a Ferris wheel of FURY!), what if we’re made better? Fresher. What if there are things we’ve been able to finally release from our fibers. Stains we’ve finally been able to let go of?

I don’t know. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about as I put another load in. Something I’ll be thinking about all summer, as the world slowly reopens. Will life fit differently on us. Will we wear it with more pride, more confidence, more gratitude?

Something I’ve been thinking about. Or … I mean … maybe I just want to go swimming. Could also be that.

Have a good summer, everyone, and I’ll check in with you in fall!

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The White House Scientist and the Ancient Jewish Book

Vice President Kamala Harris swears in Eric Lander as Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lori Lander holds the 1492 Perkei Avot for her husband. (Official White House Photo by Cameron Smith)

Once upon a time – May 8, 1492, to be precise – a Jewish printer in Naples made the first printed text of the Mishnah, the collection of Jewish laws, ethics and traditions that had been kept orally for centuries. In the post-Gutenberg world of early printing, this was a rare and important part of Hebrew “incunabula,” as books printed before 1501 are known.

Centuries passed.

The New World was explored. Copernicus proved the Earth was not the center of the universe. Shakespeare came and went. Nations rose and fell. Plagues, wars and famines swept across continents.

And still, part of that 1492 Mishnah survived, in particular a 13-page fragment of the “Pirkei Avot,” or “Chapters of the Fathers,” a short, oft-quoted tract that sums up Jewish ethics and moral advice, often in easy-to-remember adages.

At some point, the fragment made its way across the Atlantic to the United States, bound in a bland Victorian-era-looking volume with a nondescript brown cover. It probably arrived in the Library in 1912, lost in a sea of about 10,000 volumes donated by Jacob H. Shiff, the railway magnate and Jewish philanthropist.

Another century passed.

And then this week, that 529-year-old book made a starring appearance under the hand of Eric Lander, a man who helped map the human genome, when he was sworn in by Vice President Kamala Harris as the director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. Lander, 64, who is Jewish, used the book as the sacred text upon which he swore his oath to uphold the values of a nation that was not even a notion when the book was printed.

“I just had this sense that books tell stories and the place to go was the Library of Congress,” Lander said, explaining how his search for a historic copy of the Mishnah led him to the Library’s Hebraic section.

Lander zeroed in on chapter 2, verse 16 of “Pirkei Avot,” which speaks to the value of Tikkun Olam, or the endless task of repairing the world: “It is not incumbent upon you to finish the task, but neither are you free to absolve yourself from it.”

That espouses, Lander says, his family’s deepest values.

“We are (all) part of a continuous chain of people who are devoted to repairing the world,” he said. “That’s what keeps the world, you know, livable and good. And we make it better in this way.”

It’s a nice story, but the book had survived half a millennium only to nearly be lost to the ages. Had it not been for Ann Brener, the specialist in the Hebraic Section, neither Lander nor anyone else would have known the book still existed. And here the story becomes one of how the work of libraries preserve world cultures, from lifetime to lifetime, from century to century.

Brener found the book a decade ago, while sorting through about 40,000 rabbinic texts in the Library’s collections, nearly all from the 19th and early 20th centuries. They were fine copies but not particularly striking. But as soon as she touched the paper of this copy, she knew this book was far older. It was rag paper — “strong, thick, a bit fibrous to the touch.” This was a gem.

It was a major find – there are only about 160 copies of Hebrew incunabula known to still exist; the Library has 37 of them.

In her entry describing the work, she listed these among the “crown jewels” of the Hebraic Section at the African and Middle Eastern Division. She wrote: “These Hebrew ‘cradle books’ or incunabula, as they are more generally known, offer a truly representative view of early Hebrew printing, with works ranging from rabbinical commentaries and responses to poetry, belles-lettres, and Arabic philosophy. They come from the presses of some of the best-known Hebrew printers of late fifteenth-century Europe and span the three major centers of Hebrew printing during the first crucial decades of its existence: Spain, Portugal, and Italy.”

The place and year of the book’s printing – Naples, Italy, in 1492 – carried even more cultural context. The kings of Naples and of Spain were cousins, each named Ferdinand. But while the Spanish king instituted the Spanish inquisition, driving Jews from the region, the king in Naples offered Jews refuge.

To Lander, this made the book as meaningful as the words printed on its pages.

“The book itself told the story of a world in which some places were tolerant and some places were intolerant. It spoke about refugees and in a whole new dimension that merely downloading a PDF with the words would not.”

Still, even though Brener had found, identified and described the book in a Library document called a finding aid, the book wasn’t listed in Library’s online catalog, meaning it was invisible to anyone who looked for it via a computer search. (The Library has so many millions of items that getting them all online is an ongoing, massive task.)

To get the book listed online required the efforts of David Reser, a metadata librarian. In 2019, Eugene Flanagan, Chief of the Library’s General and International Collections Directorate, directed Guadalupe Rojas, an intern from the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities program, to transfer information about these ancient Hebrew texts onto a searchable spreadsheet. From there, Reser was able to upload the basic record of the book into the Library’s online catalog, even though the book itself is not yet catalogued.

It was, Brener said, “incredible magic” to get a book that had been lost to world view for five centuries to suddenly being available to anyone who typed in a few words on a computer.

And so it was from this daisy chain of events that a Harvard and MIT biologist and geneticist was able to go online to the largest library in world history and find a 13-page book from another age that spoke directly to him. Lander was so moved that he invited Brener to the swearing-in ceremony, bringing the 1492 “Pirkei Avot” with her. Lander’s wife, Lori, held it for him to place his hand upon while Harris administered the oath. It was really quite a moment.

“Although I chose a Jewish text, because it is my tradition and deeply meaningful to me,” he said, “it is also quite universal.”

Mark Twain Tonight! (1860s Edition)

Mark Twain, 1907. Prints and Photographs Division.

Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, wrote this  piece on how the young Samuel Clemens perfected his wildly popular speaking tours. 

A fledgling reporter in 1866, Mark Twain traveled to Hawaii, then called the Sandwich Islands, as a correspondent for the Sacramento Union.  Over the five-month tour, he filed 25 vivid reports of his travels to various California newspapers and the stories captured an audience. Upon his return, he launched a speaking tour throughout California.

Initially, Twain was a hesitant and somewhat awkward presenter. His early take on the subject established his comical recounting of the values and the vices of the islanders.  He closed his early programs with an apology for subjecting the audience to his talk, explaining that he needed the money.  One early critic noted that his “method as a lecturer was distinctly unique and novel. His slow, deliberate drawl, the anxious and perturbed expression of his visage, the apparently painful effort with which he framed his sentences …  All this was original, it was Mark Twain.”

That initial tour was so extraordinarily profitable that it established a new career for him.

Twain repackaged the lecture three years later for a tour of the Northeast. The talk was called, “Our Fellow Savages of the Sandwich Islands.” (As one would imagine, this is a talk infused with Twain’s comic sensibility as well as a decidedly 19th-century notion of social/political correctness. His comic lines are the ones that endure.)

He would eventually give this talk in various locales more than 100 times. “I shall tell the truth as nearly as I can,” he always liked to say, “and quite as nearly as any newspaperman can.”

A flyer advertising Twain’s speaking tour. He made up the insulting reviews, including the cannibalistic review from the Sandwich Islands. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

His cultural observations ranged from fairly serious tales of the islands’ volcanoes to a more relaxed view of the social life and customs of the residents.  “They have some curious customs there; among others, if a man makes a bad joke they kill him. I can’t speak from experience on that point, because I never lectured there. I suppose if I had I should not be lecturing here.”

And a moment he used to great effect – his disavowal of the contemporary existence of cannibalism on the islands — “In other cities I usually illustrate cannibalism on the stage,” he admitted, “but being a stranger here I don’t feel at liberty to ask favors, but still, if anyone in the audience would lend me an infant, I will go on with the show.”

The talk was a huge success, so much so that in February 1873 he delivered his lecture on the Sandwich Islands at Steinway Hall for the benefit of the Mercantile Library Association. Steinway Hall was the same venue in which Twain heard Dicken’s American lectures while in New York as a special correspondent for the San Francisco Alta California newspaper in January 1868.

The New York Times reviewer noted that Twain “kept the audience convulsed with laughter…. His attitudes, gestures, and looks, even his very silence were provocative of mirth.”  In this handbill announcing his New York lecture, Twain supplied the poster’s fictional editorial comments: “The most stupid lecture we ever heard;” “Twain is the homeliest man living;” “His lecture is a tissue of lies;” and, finally, a positive quote from the mythical Sandwich Islands Daily Express, offering up a cannibalistic appreciation of his performance!

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Now Online! Presidential Papers – Love and Heartbreak, War and Politics

Woodrow Wilson, a man in love. Prints and Photographs Division. 

This story first appeared in the Library of Congress Magazine.

When President Woodrow Wilson’s name comes up, romance isn’t typically the first thing that comes to mind.

Yet, late on May 7, 1915, the recently widowed president penned these words to Edith Bolling Galt, days after confessing his love for her: “I know you can give me more, if you will but think only of your own heart and me, and shut the circumstances of the world out.”

That day, the circumstances of the world were weighing heavily on Wilson’s mind. Earlier, a German U-boat had torpedoed the British-owned luxury liner RMS Lusitania, killing 1,195 people, including 128 Americans. Wilson spent his afternoon and evening receiving updates about the horrific attack that threatened U.S. neutrality in a war that had already engulfed Europe and would eventually draw in the United States.

Researchers using Wilson’s papers at the Library may be surprised to encounter the private — and passionate — Wilson behind the formal and somewhat aloof public figure they recall from history books or World War I-era film footage.

“I must do everything I can for your happiness and mine,” Wilson continued. “I am pleading for my life.”

President Wilson, with his wife, Edith Bolling Galt. Photo: Harris & Ewing. Prints and Photographs Division.

Wilson’s plea apparently was persuasive: He and Galt, a wealthy Washington, D.C., widow, married before the year was out.

The Library’s collections of presidential papers hold some of the most important manuscript treasures in the nation, but they also shed light on the daily lives of the leaders and the inner circle of family, staff and confidants who helped mitigate the isolation every president feels.

Those collections are more accessible than ever before: All 23 sets of presidential papers held by the Library — a total of more than 3.3 million images — now are available and searchable online, an accomplishment more than two decades in the making.

“Arguably, no other body of material in the Manuscript Division is of greater significance for the study of American history than the presidential collections,” said Janice E. Ruth, the division’s chief. “They cover the entire sweep of American history from the nation’s founding through the first decade after World War I, including periods of prosperity and depression, war and peace, unity of purpose and political and civil strife.”

Those vast papers include documents fundamental to U.S. history: George Washington’s commission as commander in chief of the American army and his first inaugural address; Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence; the two earliest known copies of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address; the handwritten manuscript memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant; and Wilson’s shorthand draft of his famous 1918 Fourteen Points speech envisioning post-World War I peace.

They also reveal the personal side of these great figures.

There’s a small paperbound book recording Washington’s expenses in 1793–94 and receipts from Chester A. Arthur’s household (including for immense quantities of alcohol and cigars, likely purchased for entertaining). There are love letters from Grant to his wife Julia Dent Grant; James A. Garfield’s final diary entry, the day before his assassination in 1881; and details of the aftermath of the death of Maj. Archie Butt, an aide to Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft who died in the sinking of the Titanic in 1912.

A bereft Taft told mourners at a memorial service for Butt that, because a president’s circle is so circumscribed, “those appointed to live with him come much closer than anyone else.”

The Library’s collection of presidential papers begins with George Washington and ends with Calvin Coolidge. The National Archives and Records Administration, founded in 1934, administers a system of geographically dispersed presidential libraries that house and manage the records of presidents from Herbert Hoover onward.

The Library doesn’t hold the papers of all 29 presidents before Hoover. The papers of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, for example, are at the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Ohio Historical Society holds those of Warren G. Harding. Rutherford B. Hayes’ family retained his papers and opened a library in 1916 at his home in Fremont, Ohio.

But the collections the Library possesses, acquired through donation and purchase, are of such high value that Congress enacted a law in 1957 directing the Library to arrange, index and microfilm the papers for distribution to libraries around the nation, an enormous job that concluded in 1976.

When it became possible to digitize collections in the mid-1990s, microfilm editions of presidential papers were among the first selected for scanning. Between 1998 and 2005, the papers of Washington, Jefferson, James Madison and Lincoln were digitized and put online: What once was available only on clunky microfilm machines became accessible to anyone with an internet connection.

Several years later, work resumed on digitizing the Library’s remaining presidential papers and, eventually, to migrate already-digitized collections to the Library’s updated web platform, which enables easier access, including on mobile devices. Some original documents were rescanned in high resolution at that time, and others — those not captured in the microfilm editions, along with documents subsequently acquired — were added.

“Honest Abe” Lincoln cigar box label, spelled in phonetic Spanish, 1860. Manuscript Division.

In 2017, for example, the Library made a reading copy of Lincoln’s second inaugural address showing his editorial changes available on its website for the first time (it was not included in the microfilm edition), as well as a cigar-box label from his 1860 presidential campaign rendering his “Honest Old Abe” nickname in phonetic Spanish.

During just the past fiscal year alone, about 1.5 million new images were made available online, culminating in the release over the summer of the collections of Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, Coolidge and Taft.

Taft’s papers, consisting of 785,977 images, are the largest among the Library’s presidential papers, perhaps befitting a man who stood around 6 feet tall and weighed well north of 300 pounds. Wilson’s papers are the second biggest (622,211 images), followed by Theodore Roosevelt’s (462,638 images).

The mammoth feat of making all these collections available online involved many hours of labor by staffers and contractors at the Library.

Among the multitude of tasks performed, they scanned documents, provided necessary conservation treatments, performed quality review of images, set up server space, created digital files, indexed records and connected them to digital images, consulted on rights issues, wrote contextual frameworks for individual collections and created web presentations on the Library’s platforms.

“As they say, it takes a village,” Ruth said.

All the work was, however, well worth it.

“Like the original presidential papers and the microfilm copies, the online presidential papers are being used extensively by historians, educators and lifelong learners,” Ruth said.

Charles Calhoun is one such historian. Calhoun has used the Manuscript Division’s collections for 50 years and last year consulted the presidential papers of Garfield, Andrew Johnson, Harrison and Grant online.

The availability of these papers online, he said, is a godsend in an era of shrinking academic research budgets and dwindling travel funds — difficulties compounded by the COVID-19 pandemic and its attendant restrictions.

“The Library’s decision to offer these indispensable resources online represents a tremendous boon to scholarship,” Calhoun said. “It is a service that has rapidly become not merely conducive but vital to the advancement of historical scholarship.”

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My Job: Shannon Gorrell

Shannon Gorrell, Health Services Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

During Public Service Recognition 2021, we’re recognizing some of the unique people who make the Library special. Shannon Gorrell is senior clinical manager in the Health Services Division.

Tell us a little about your background.

I grew up mostly in San Diego but went to high school in Charlotte, North Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill, where I majored in biology and chemistry. I joined the Marine Corps after graduation and served on active duty as an intelligence officer for eight years, including a deployment in support of Operation Iraqi Freedom.

Afterward, I returned to UNC-Chapel Hill and completed a Bachelor of Science in nursing. During that time, I was activated by the Marine Corps and deployed to Afghanistan for Operation Enduring Freedom. Upon graduation in 2007, I moved to Washington, D.C., and worked in the emergency departments of Georgetown University Hospital and Bethesda Naval Hospital.

In 2014, I earned a Master of Science in nursing from George Washington University as a family nurse practitioner and started working for Medical Faculty Associates as an urgent care and primary care nurse practitioner in downtown Washington, D.C.

I was recalled back to active duty again in 2017 and spent three years in the Pentagon developing intelligence strategy and policy for the Marine Corps.

What brought you to the Library, and what is your role?

I was excited to see the senior clinical manager job advertised — I saw it as a great opportunity to combine my leadership, policy and clinical experiences. I started in spring 2020 and supervise the clinical staff and operations of the Health Services Office under the direction of Dr. Sandra Charles, the Library’s chief medical officer.

What have you been focusing on during the pandemic?

Since I was hired in the middle of the Library’s pandemic response, I have been learning the ropes and trying to make sure we keep the Library a safe and healthy place for our employees. I am very proud of the great team we have in the Health Services Division and what we have been able to accomplish.

What do you enjoy doing outside work?

I currently command the Marine Corps Reserve detachment at the Marine Corps Intelligence Activity in Quantico, Virginia. When I am not fulfilling those responsibilities, I enjoy taking advantage of all the great indoor and outdoor activities D.C. has to offer, traveling and hanging out with my 10-year-old miniature Australian shepherd dog, Angie. Also, every year, my father and I raise money for the National Multiple Sclerosis Society by riding 100 miles in a cycling event in North Carolina.

What is something your co-workers may not know about you?

In 2010, I was selected for a congressional fellowship through the Department of Defense. I worked in the office of Sen. Dianne Feinstein on defense and veterans’ issues. It was a great opportunity to learn about Congress and the legislative branch. I was also fortunate to have access to and benefit from the great work that the Congressional Research Service does — it definitely made my job easier and more fulfilling!

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How to Research the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre

Tulsa’s Greenwood District after the massacre. Photo: American Red Cross. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Wanda Whitney, Head of History & Genealogy, Researcher and Reference Services.  

This week marks the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre, in which a mob of whites invaded and burned to ashes the thriving African American district of Greenwood, also known as Black Wall Street.

It was, then and now, among the bloodiest outbreaks of racist violence in U.S. history. The official tally of the dead has varied from 36 to nearly 300. White fatalities are documented at 13. Some 35 square blocks of Black-owned homes, businesses, and churches were torched; thousands of Black Tulsans were left homeless – and yet no local, state or federal agency ever pursued prosecutions. The event was so quickly dismissed by local officials that today, a century later, several local organizations are still investigating reports of mass graves.

I became interested in what happened in Tulsa when I watched the 2019 HBO series, “Watchmen,” which opens with a depiction of the massacre. I had heard about the Greenwood massacre before but didn’t know much about its history. Then late last year, a patron contacted our Ask a Librarian service with a question about racial massacres. That spurred me to investigate the Library’s collections to see what I could find out about the Tulsa massacre and similar events that occurred in the United States in the post-World War I era.

The Researcher and Reference Services Division put together a guide to conducting your own research. But first, let’s establish some context and basic facts, as the massacre occurred against the broader canvas of post-World War I racial unrest that bubbled up across the nation.

In 1919, Black soldiers, returning from the battlefields of Europe, expected that their sacrifices and service to the nation would be recognized by whites, that Jim Crow segregation and state-sponsored racism would be eased. That was not so. By and large, white society sought to enforce the segregated status quo that had existed before the war. A series of racist attacks and deadly fights ensued. It was so bloody that it became known as the “Red Summer.”  You can research this era in our research guide, Racial Massacres and the Red Summer of 1919.

In Tulsa, two years later, the situation was much the same on the morning of May 30, Memorial Day, when Dick Rowland, who worked as a shoe shiner, got on an elevator in the Drexel Building in downtown Tulsa. The elevator operator was a white teenager, Sarah Page.

It has never been clear what transpired, but Page said Rowland “attempted to assault” her. Police arrested Rowland the next day, as the Tulsa Tribune ran a short story with the headline: “Nab Negro for Attacking Girl in an Elevator.”

By early evening, an angry group of several hundred white Tulsans assembled outside the county courthouse where Rowland was being held. Some were intent on lynching him and tried to break in. Groups of black men, from 25 to 75 strong, many of them veterans carrying their service revolvers, came to help defend Rowland, but were ordered to leave by police.

Then, around 10 p.m., shots were fired in the crowd. Chaos and mass violence broke out, spreading far from the courthouse. The Black groups were quickly outnumbered and outgunned, in part because local officials provided weapons to white men whom they “deputized.” Black residents retreated into their Greenwood neighborhood, but it was no protection. Thousands of white people rushed into the neighborhood at dawn the next morning, looting, burning and killing. Mount Zion Baptist Church billowed smoke and flames. The Dreamland Theater was destroyed. The neighborhood was reduced to rubble.

It was over by noon.

Black citizens being held at the local fairgrounds. Photo: American Red Cross. Prints and Photographs Division. 

Thousands of the Black survivors were forced into the city’s fairgrounds, released in the coming days only if a white person vouched for them.

Despite this shocking violence, no city, state, or federal criminal prosecution was ever mounted. The narrative was minimized or scarcely mentioned in public discourse and history books for nearly 50 years. As a commission appointed by the Oklahoma legislature reported nearly eight decades later: “There had been a pattern of deliberate distortion of facts regarding the riot and even the destruction of vital documents and a subsequent coverup.”

This was a sobering record to confront. I suspected that finding information about the Tulsa massacre might not be an easy task. While there were differing newspaper reports and oral histories published at the time of the event, there still remained a dearth of official primary sources or official records to bear witness to what happened. And although we now refer to the event as a “racial massacre,” it was called a “race riot” for many years.

The Library has already begun retitling this event as a “massacre” in our catalog descriptions. Please note, however, that we do not change descriptions of any events in our collection items themselves, such as newspaper accounts or other records contemporaneous with the massacre.

So, to begin your research in our collections, use the keywords, “Tulsa race riot” in the search field on our homepage. For photos, you can filter your initial results to the Photos, Prints, Drawings category. Most of the images come from the NAACP records or the American National Red Cross photograph collection.

You can get a block-by-block look at Tulsa and the Greenwood district in that era with our Sanborn Fire Insurance Maps of the city in 1915.

The Greenwood Business District was bordered by Archer Street at bottom, Detroit Avenue at left and railroad tracks at right. Greenwood Avenue is in the middle of the map, going north to south. Almost all of this area was burned. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map. Geography and Maps Division.

Various newspapers, both local and national, reported the event. You can search our Chronicling America collection for articles about the massacre. For helpful search tips, check out our research guide, Tulsa Race Massacre: Topics in Chronicling America.

The Tulsa World, Thursday, June 2, 1921. Chronicling America. 

The public’s renewed interest in the massacre began with publications about it in the 1970s and 1980s and culminated in the 1997 establishment of The Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, mentioned above. This legislative Commission put out a national call for survivors who could give interviews for oral histories. It also worked with historians who gathered information about what happened. Their report, published in 2001, became part of the official history. The Library has a print copy of the report. For additional books in our collection, take a look at the print bibliography in the Racial Massacres research guide. There are many books devoted to the massacre, including “Tulsa 1921,” “The Burning,” and “Death in a Promised Land.”

For eyewitness accounts, the Library has oral histories of 3 survivors of the massacre interviewed by Camille O. Cosby for the National Visionary Leadership Project. Other accounts appear in the HistoryMakers database, a subscription database available onsite at the Library. They are fascinating to watch. If you can’t come to the Library, see what your local public library may have on the Tulsa massacre. Other sources of oral interviews, documents, and photos include the Oklahoma Historical Society, Tulsa Historical Society & Museum, and the electronic library, Oklahoma Digital Prairie, among others.

The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre Centennial Commission, created in 2015, continues the work of the Oklahoma Commission to tell the history of Greenwood. Look for events in May and June that coincide with the 100th anniversary of the event.

Finally, one note of irony. Rowland, the original target of the violence, was neither harmed nor charged with any wrongdoing. He left town and the rest of his life could not be traced, the Tulsa World reported last year. “Dick Rowland,” the name he gave to police, may not have even been his real one, the newspaper reported. Page, the teenaged elevator operator, had only recently arrived in the city and left soon thereafter, the paper said, and could not be tracked down, either.

I wish you success with your research into this troubling episode in our history. If you have a more specific research request, or need assistance searching for resources, please use our Ask a Librarian service.

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Roman Totenberg: A Symphony of a Life

Roman Totenberg, 1936, at his U.S. debut. Music Division.

Roman Totenberg was born in Poland in 1911 and died in the United States in 2012, a 101-year odyssey that was more an era than a lifespan.

His papers at the Library tell the story: A child prodigy on the violin who played on Moscow street corners to help his family survive famine after the Bolshevik Revolution, he later fled the Holocaust to become a virtuoso who played in the world’s greatest concert halls, alongside the century’s greatest composers and on hundreds of recordings.

He won major European music prizes, played for the Italian king, toured with legendary pianist Arthur Rubinstein and dined with President Roosevelt by the time he was 25. When he was 70, he was named the Artist Teacher of the Year by the American String Teachers Association. At 85, Boston University, his longtime teaching home, named him as the university’s top professor.

In his last days, former students — many of whom had been toddlers when he was old enough to retire — came to play for the maestro one last time. He beckoned to one after a bedside performance. Barely able to whisper, he said, “The D was flat.”

“He was a tender soul,” said Nina Totenberg, his daughter and NPR’s legal affairs correspondent, in a recent interview, “and a lot of fun.”

The Totenberg family: (clockwise, from upper left) Melanie, Nina, Roman, Jill, Amy. Music Division.

The collection of his papers forms a vibrant testament to the intensity, brilliance and creativity of one of the 20th century’s greatest violinists, given particular relevance during Jewish American Heritage Month.

His cosmopolitan story unfolds in family photographs, postcards, letters (including from Albert Einstein and Leonard Bernstein), handwritten notations on his sheet music, and dozens of his recordings. There are also surprises, such as the sketches, woodcuts and paintings of Ilka Kolsky, a close friend in pre-war Paris.

Amy Totenberg, another daughter and a senior U.S. District Court Judge in the Northern District of Georgia, said that their childhood in the artistic household was “normal, but charged with a great sense of my father’s musical world and adventurous life that swept us up too. Our parents’ loving embrace of life was infectious.”

A promotional poster. Music Division.

Roman Totenberg’s remarkable life began in Lodz, a small city in what is now Poland. But in 1914, during World War I, the family had to flee a German invasion of the territory, moving to Warsaw. His father, Adam, was an engineer and architect, soon moved the family to Moscow to work on railroads and hospital projects.

As it happened, the Totenbergs moved in next door to the concertmaster of the Bolshoi Orchestra. The man took an interest in young Roman, sometimes serving as his babysitter, and was amazed by the boy’s proficiency on the violin. Roman, it became evident, had perfect pitch. After the Bolshevik Revolution, when the nation fell into starvation-level poverty and the borders were closed, he began playing on street corners, bringing home bread, butter and sugar. It was more than his father could provide, he said in later interviews.

Still, when he would march out on stage for larger shows, introduced as “Comrade Totenberg,” the audience laughed, he told interviewer Leon Botstein, president of Bard College.

“They … expected a big person,” he said, “so I was terribly offended and that’s my first memory of performing.”

The days were bleak. The family was so desperate for food that when a lame horse was put down, the whole neighborhood cut it up for food. The Totenberg family got the head. The young boy would always remember his mother knocking out the eyes before cooking it.

The family was finally able to return in May 1921 to Warsaw, capital of a newly independent Poland. Roman became a child star, making his debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic at 11. He moved to Germany while still a teen in order to study and perform. But in 1932, when he was 21, Hitler’s rise and the wave of antisemitism made it impossible to stay. “I saw that it was really coming; the SS beat up some colleagues and friends,” he told Botstein.

He lived and studied in Paris, returning briefly to Warsaw in 1935 after the death of his father, bringing his mother back with him. He was soon touring with Rubinstein (also a native of Lodz) in South America. He made his American debut late that year with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, a performance that drew six encores and an invitation to the White House.

He returned to the U.S. to stay in 1938. With World War II imminent, he got his mother, Stanislawa, on one of the last ships out of Portugal and brought her safely to the U.S.

The war years were pure anguish. His papers show the efforts he put into trying to get family, friends and relatives away from the Nazi death camps. His sister, Janina Ferster, her husband and child were trapped in Warsaw. He was able to get money to them, his papers attest, but he could not find a way to help them escape.

The Nazi regime sent the family to the Warsaw Ghetto, where Jews were held in an atmosphere of “fear, menace and terror,” his niece, Elizabeth, then a young child, later remembered at the 2016 Righteous Among Nations Awards ceremony.

Totenberg’s brother-in-law, Mieczyslaw, died in the ghetto on July 11, 1941, likely of typhoid fever. It was nearly a year before Ferster managed to send Totenberg a Red Cross postcard. Limited to telegram-like shorthand, using her husband’s nickname, the entire note reads:

“We are healthy. Mietek died 7/XI/41. The package I received. Send them more often. From here a few families left on the principle of exchange — What can you do for me. They were foreign citizens. Remember us.”

Janina Ferster’s letter from the Warsaw Ghetto.

He did. And his name was so revered in Poland that when a local musician learned that his sister was trapped in the ghetto, he helped create false papers t o get her and her daughter out. Ferster and Elizabeth survived the rest of the war in Warsaw, moving from place to place, always a step ahead of the gestapo. After the war, Elizabeth lived with the Totenbergs, eventually settling in the United States.

Despite the agony and loss associated with the Holocaust and the war, Totenberg went on to establish a brilliant career as a performer and teacher, winning major prizes for both and becoming an international star. He worked with composers such as Bernstein, Samuel Barber, Igor Stravinsky and Aaron Copland.

He performed with most of the world’s major orchestras and appeared on hundreds of recordings. He bought the Ames Stradivarius violin and performed with it for decades, until it was stolen from his office in 1980. It was recovered after his death — a young musician had taken it — and returned to the family by the FBI.

His wife, Melanie, was also his secretary, part-time promoter and served as an extra set of ears at recording sessions. They raised three daughters, all of whom went on to successful careers (Jill Totenberg is the chief executive officer of a corporate communications firm in New York). The household was lively, but he demanded manners at the dinner table. He worked and performed into his 90s — even  jumping on a grandchild’s bicycle at that age to show her how to ride it – and taught until the day he died.

“He was so engaged in all that he did and the world at large,” Amy Totenberg said. “He was a man of endless talent, love, brilliance, charm, and humanity.”

Totenberg, with his beloved Stradivarius violin, in 1947. Family photo. Music Division.

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Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month: The Rock Springs Massacre

Chinese miners in Tuolumne County, California, 1866. Photo: Lawrence & Houseworth. Prints and Photographs Division.

The fight began in a coal mine on the morning of Sept. 2, 1885, in Rock Springs, a rough-hewn village in the Wyoming Territory that lay along the Union Pacific Railroad.

White and Chinese miners, already at odds about wages, argued about who was going to work a rich vein of coal. A Chinese worker was killed in the ensuing fight, setting off the Rock Springs Massacre. That afternoon, a mob of at least 100 white men and women carrying rifles, shotguns, pistols, axes and knives surrounded and then rampaged through the Chinese neighborhood, killing 28, wounding dozens more, burning some 70 wooden houses to the ground and expelling all 500 or so Chinese residents.

“…nothing but heaps of smoking ruins marks the spot where China Town once stood,” the Las Vegas Gazette reported two days later. The newspaper noted that there were no Chinese in Rock Springs “except the dead and wounded.” Twenty-two white men were arrested, but none were prosecuted. The U.S. government eventually paid the Chinese government $147,000 in damages.

The Rock Springs Massacre is not a moment that rings out in the national narrative, as much of the violence directed at Asian immigrants in the 19th century is not widely remembered. But the rampage was the culmination of years of white workers’ resentment of Chinese laborers in the West and one of the deadliest. As Jean Pfaelzer writes in “Driven Out: The Forgotten War Against Chinese Americans,” there were dozens of such incidents: “…thousands of Chinese people who were violently herded onto railroad cars, steamers or logging rafts, marched out of town or killed” across the region in the second half of the 19th century.

As Asian/Pacific American Heritage Month comes to a close, the Library’s collections show that understanding our complete national story means understanding that Asians in the frontier territories were frequent targets of white violence, despite their invaluable work on railroads, in mines and other industries. The Old West was burnished into a gauzy myth by Hollywood cowboy movies and country songs in the early 20th century, but the reality was far less romantic and much more brutal.

Illustration of Rock Springs Massacre in Harper’s Weekly, Sept. 26, 1885. Artist: Thur de Thulstrup. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Library’s collections document the issue, including Chinese immigration to the U.S. and the resulting waves of bigotry. There are Research Guides to building of the Transcontinental Railroad, which depended heavily on Chinese workers; the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882; the Rock Springs attack; and years of newspaper and magazine articles in Chronicling America.

But there is more to flesh out the narrative. Maps and photographs of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads show settlements exploded across the region in the years after the nation was united by rail and the passage of the Homestead Act. And there’s a Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of Rock Springs that shows what the town – population, 2,900 — looked like, street by street, in 1890.

This 1883 map shows how towns in Wyoming sprung up along the Union Pacific Railroad. Rock Springs is the fifth stop before the railroad forks. Rand McNally and Company. Geography and Map Division.

Together, they piece together the story.

The California Gold Rush in the late 1840s drew some 25,000 Chinese workers, almost all men, to the state by 1851. Others followed. But the riches were largely an illusion, and the men, now stranded without the wealth they’d hoped to accrue and send back home, began to work in a number of hard-labor trades, often accepting lower wages than whites. This led to anger, resentment and attacks from whites.

In 1850 and 1862, California passed laws that charged Chinese miners and workers an extra tax. Also in 1862, Congress passed a law prohibiting Americans from bringing any more Chinese workers to the country, using a slur for Chinese workers in the official title. Conviction meant the ship’s forfeiture for the owner, and up to a year in prison and a $2,000 fine for anyone involved.

That didn’t mean the U.S. didn’t need the Chinese laborers’ work, though.

When Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, also in 1862, it set into play the logistics for building the Transcontinental Railroad. Much of the dangerous work soon fell to thousands of Chinese workers. They labored on mountainsides, in gullies and ravines, with explosives and steel. Hundreds died. “On the Central Pacific Railroad alone, more than 10,000 Chinese workers blasted tunnels, built roadbeds, and laid hundreds of miles of track, often in freezing cold or searing heat,” the Library’s essay on the subject notes.

After the Golden Spike was driven in Promontory Summit, Utah, in 1869, Chinese workers were no longer so necessary to the national cause. They turned to working in mines and resentments grew. This culminated in the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prevented Chinese citizens from immigrating to the U.S. for an initial 10 years, but stayed in effect until 1943.

Such was the anti-Chinese mood in September of 1885 in Rock Springs.

The town, a collection of wood-frame businesses and houses, was centered around the mine and the railroad. A few hundred Chinese workers bunked together, mostly in houses provided by Union Pacific. White miners, organized by the Knights of Labor, wanted to strike for higher wages. The railroad was happy to use Chinese laborers but pay them less. The Chinese miners, in a far more vulnerable position than their white counterparts, had little interest in striking.

So, when the fight started in mine No. 6 that morning, white miners saw it as an opportunity to get rid of the group that was undercutting their demands. The mob assembled quickly, newspaper accounts reported. They surrounded the small Chinese district, giving the men an hour to get out, but descended on them beforehand, newspapers reported, setting fire to houses as they went. The Chinese fled, “without offering resistance,” but were shot at as they ran for hills about a mile outside of town. Others, who tried to hide in their houses, burned to death.

The attack made national news and was almost universally condemned. Some Chinese workers were brought back to the mine by the railroad company – mostly against their will – but the community dwindled. By 1890, Union Pacific designated only one building in Rock Springs to house Chinese workers, down from 50 at the time of the massacre, according to the Sanborn map.

Sanborn Fire Insurance Map of workers’ housing in Rock Springs, Wyoming, 1890. Chinese quarters at bottom right. Geography and Map Division.

Today, a small museum in nearby Evanston documents the history of the Chinese miners in the region, but most had departed the region by the 1930s. The U.S. Census Report for 2019 shows that only 1.1 percent of Wyoming’s population is Asian (of any national background). In Rock Springs, the Asian population is 0.6 percent, or about 260 people.

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My Job: Maurice Carter

Maurice Carter.

Maurice Carter is a head of the receiving and warehousing unit in the Logistics Services Division of Integrated Support Services. He’s kept the Library’s shipping docks open during the COVID pandemic. 

Tell us a little about your background.

I was born in a small town called Lottsburg, Virginia, and attended Northumberland High School. Before coming to the Library in 1992, I worked for a freight company called Roadway Express. A relative was working at the Library, and he always talked about how great it was to work here. So, I applied for a warehouse position and got the job.

Describe a typical day.

A typical day begins with a safety briefing for staff. After that, my team lead and I review FAME — the Library’s integrated facility-management system — to see what jobs we are going to complete for the day. Staff enter requests into FAME for tasks such as removing excess computers or furniture, replacing carpets and delivering recycling and moving bins. We also help with relocating staff; moving copyright materials to off-site storage; and transporting books, newspapers and supplies from the loading dock to the Jefferson and Adams building and different divisions.

Our loading dock and transport staff carry out all duties on the dock, such as preparing recycle material for pickup by an outside vendor.

Some of the requests we receive require staff to use materials-handling equipment to transport materials or read blueprints — for carpet installation and relocation of staff, for example. Staff also use special equipment to remove furniture and computers and send them to our Cabin Branch facility for storage or disposal.

Once we decide on what jobs need to be done, we distribute work to different staff members for completion.

How has your work changed during the pandemic?

I worked in the Madison Building with a small crew from early on in the pandemic to keep the loading dock open, starting during the period of maximum telework.

Otherwise, work in my division has slowed down somewhat, as fewer FAME requests are being put into the system now. Many staff from other divisions are teleworking, so there are not a whole lot of people on-site to put in FAME requests.

  What accomplishments are you most proud of?

I have several accomplishments that I am proud of from my 28 years of work at the Library. But my proudest is helping to transport the 1507 Waldseemüller world map from the Madison Building’s loading dock to the Jefferson Building for display in the Great Hall. This transport included using seven U.S. Capitol Hill Police officers for escort and a 22-foot truck. Then, we had to have five staff members walk the map up the flight of stairs in the front of the Jefferson Building. Once we got the map upstairs, we had to uncrate it and place it in a display case in the Great Hall, where it now resides.

What do you enjoy doing outside work?

I like being with family, watching my kids play basketball and riding my Harley Davidson motorcycle.

What is something your co-workers may not know about you?

In 2002, I sang the national anthem at Madison Square Garden in New York City for the National Invitation Tournament. Over 20,000 people were present to see this championship basketball game.

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