Library of Congress's Blog, page 45

Jim Lee and DC Comics: A Heroic Conversation for Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month

 

DC Chief Creative Officer and Publisher Jim Lee joins illustrator Bernard Chang and writers Sarah Kuhn and Minh Lê for a conversation moderated by Gene Luen Yang, former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

This is a guest post by Deziree Arnaiz, a program specialist in Literary Initiatives. It first appeared on the From the Catbird’s Seat blog.

“In my real life, I did not think I was a main character for a very long time because I just never saw that—I never saw Asian Americans centered in the kinds of stories I enjoyed, or a lot of times as creators,” says writer Sarah Kuhn. “Jim Lee was one of the few Asian American creators that I was like, wow, that’s someone doing that who is like me.”

In honor of Asian-Pacific American Heritage Month, DC Chief Creative Officer and Publisher Jim Lee is featured in a moderated interview celebrating his life and work that takes us behind the scenes of creating and publishing comics. He will be in conversation with illustrator Bernard Chang (“Generations Forged”) and writers Sarah Kuhn (“Shadow of the Batgirl”) and Minh Lê (“Green Lantern: Legacy”). Former National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Gene Luen Yang (“Superman Smashes the Klan”) will moderate the discussion. All of the panelists participated in the creation of DC’s first-ever anthology of Asian American superheroes, “DC Festival of Heroes.”

The event premieres tonight at 7 p.m. EST on the Library’s Facebook page and its YouTube site (with captions). The event will be available for viewing afterward on the Library’s website. During the video premiere on Facebook, all the panelists (save Lee)  will be available in the chat to  answer questions.

Their inspiring conversation explores Lee’s childhood and entry into the comics industry, as well as topics including fandom, artistic curiosity, how being an outsider can hone your observation skills, the importance of taking risks to pursue your passion and how meaningful storytelling can be.

When  Lê asks Lee about his unique role as caretaker of a multiverse, Lee responds, “There’s that heavy responsibility … that you’re curating, or sort of safeguarding, these characters that have been around for 80 plus years at this point, right? They are beloved. They are fixtures of pop culture. They are iconic. They are all over the world.” He continues, “But at the same time, we recognize that over the years we’ve had to change them and update their mythology to keep them fresh and contemporary … How do we do that? What do we update? How do we update? I think that’s the balance we have to find.”

In his quest to update characters and create contemporary stories,  Lee has pursued diversity among characters and creators. “I think we owe it to our fans to continue to diversify, and make sure that our universe really reflects the diversity that we see in our readership all around the world,” Lee says. “And that doesn’t mean just sort of coming up with characters from this country and kind of checking the box. I think it’s deeper than that. It’s about finding … authentic voices from the countries themselves … It’s about diversifying our creative community as well.”

This event is a “Great American Publishers” segment of the “Behind the Book” series. These interviews focus on leading gatekeepers in publishing who bring great works to fruition—from the germ of an idea to the production of a physical book. Lee is one of the heroes of the publishing world who champion talent, create an overall vision for a house, and bring us the kind of publications critics will laud and readers will relish for decades, even centuries, to come. “Behind the Book: Great American Publishers” celebrates the crucial role publishers play and takes you inside America’s legendary publishing houses as top professionals discuss their careers with their most successful authors.

We hope you’ll tune in on Thursday for this very special program.

George Willeman, at Home with (Old, Highly Flammable) Movies

George Willeman in the film vaults Photo: Shawn Miller.

It’s Public Service Recognition Week, so we caught up with George Willeman, leader of the nitrate film vaults at the Packard Campus of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. Willeman, a 37-year veteran of the Library’s film preservation team, has played a key role in finding, preserving and restoring some of nation’s classic early films. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

So what are you doing right now, as we speak?

Scanning some of Jerry Lewis’ Christmas cards from one his scrapbooks.

Wait, are you serious?

Absolutely. We have Lewis’ archives and he kept everything. Here’s a Christmas card from Alan Ladd. Here’s one with a crest on the front from “Lady Janet and Sir Anthony.” That’s Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, from when they were married. They were big friends with Lewis and they lived very close by. Lots of home movies with them, too.

Are Lewis’ home movies as family friendly as his in-theater movies?

A gentleman never tells.

Fair enough. What does a “nitrate film vault leader” do on a daily basis?

My official job, as it’s written down, is to manage the nitrate vaults at the Packard Campus and take care of our collections. Films were made with cellulous nitrate up through the 1950s. It’s highly flammable, so we all have to be trained to handle hazardous material. That adds another level of stress — you have to do it right, or there could be an accident or we could be heavily fined.

And here I thought you guys just watched old movies all day.

Well, it can be pretty exciting. My training in college was filmmaking. Sometimes we complete or reconstruct old films, parts of which are damaged or missing. “Ramona” is a 1928 silent film with Doloros del Rio, but the only known remaining copies, for whatever reason, had foreign title cards, in German or Czech. We had to put new ones into English. The problem was that the direct translations didn’t work. But over in the Copyright collections – in another part of the Library, on the Capitol Hill campus — we found an old contest that had almost all of the original title cards in English. We also went to the original novel and matched a section in that to the scene in the movie and recreated the title card that way. That reconstructed version is now on a streaming service and you can see it there anytime you like.

Willeman inspects the film reel for the 1910 “Frankenstein” short film made by Edison Studios at his office. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Does the LOC have a financial stake in that?

No, because we can’t make money on these things as a government agency. But we get a screen credit and it’s nice for the Library.

Which leads me to: How does the work you do pay off for the country’s taxpayers?

Film is one of our great tools for education, entertainment and enlightenment. Our collection dates back to pretty much Day One of film — we have material from the early 1890s —  so while we do have some of the popular stuff, the things I’m really excited about are these little films of people farming and going to work and factories and ships and immigrants getting off the boats at Ellis Island. Without those, we have nothing to tell the story of how things looked and moved at the turn of the 20th century. One of my favorite sayings is George Santayana’s, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” So I kind of see as my job is to help prevent that, to make sure that people know who we were, what we looked like, how we dressed, how we walked, how we ate, that kind of thing. A lot of that work is going up on the Internet where it’s available to anyone, anywhere.

You’ve had a number of “wow” moments in your career. One that stands out?

 Once, when I just a vault collection attendant in college, I was going through a collection of cans of nitrate films from the Thomas Edison Laboratories in New Jersey. Several of the cans said, “Great Train Robbery.” Well, “The Great Train Robbery” is a very important film and a lot of people will tell you it is the beginning of the film business. The cans listed what I was looking at as a “dupe negative.” At that point in my career, I didn’t know a lot about how film elements worked, but it didn’t look like a duplicate to me. So I called up our lab and they sent down an expert named James Cozart. We each looked at the film again and then at each other – this wasn’t a duplicate, it was the original camera negative of the film from 1903. To this day, I still take tour groups down the hall to show them that reel. It’s always fun to see the reaction. The neat thing is that it’s still usable. It hasn’t deteriorated, it’s just gotten old.

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Librarian Carla Hayden: Public Service Recognition Week

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The first full week of May is Public Service Recognition Week, which is designated by the U.S. Office of Personnel Management to honor the folks who work in the business of federal, state, county and local governments.

This includes your friendly neighborhood library employees as well as those at your favorite national Library. More than 3,200 people work at the Library of Congress, the largest library in world history, which contains more than 171.6 million items and counting. Library facilities include the main Library buildings, the U.S. Copyright Office and the Congressional Research Service on the Capitol Hill campus; the Packard National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia; six satellite offices around the world; and several state-of-the-art storage facilities.

Our staff includes world-class experts and scholars in a vast number of fields  — U.S. and world history, literature, book-binding, films, folklore, maps, manuscripts, printing, photography, maps — and the art and science of keeping all of those available to the public while also preserving them for centuries to come. Sure, we have great librarians, but also chemists, film preservationists, and, in the case of the papers of Alexander Hamilton, scientists who used hyperspectral imaging to uncover long-hidden lines of text.

As Carla Hayden, the Librarian, points out in the video above, the Library is one of the primary keepers of the American narrative, a storehouse, conservatory, library and museum of American and world history. Though our doors have been closed to the public and most employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, the Library staff never missed a day, as the staff shifted to telework almost overnight.

That’s important, because our work never stops. More than 802,000 people asked reference librarians questions in fiscal 2020, from members of Congress to researchers to students. (Just use our Ask a Librarian service!) Technicians took in, stored and processed thousands of items that come into the Library daily. The Copyright Office kept up with copyright registrations (more than 400,00 per year), a cornerstone of intellectual property rights. Conservationists and preservations, working in everything from manuscripts to maps, from films to recordings, found new ways to work safely.

The staff from multiple departments that put together the National Book Festival, one of our favorite events, transitioned to hosting the festival online last fall. We’re also actively documenting and curating COVID-19’s impact on the nation. Our crowdsourcing project for transcribing historical papers, By the People, never missed a step.

We’ll be featuring just a few of the people in the month to come. We love seeing you all online, but are also looking forward to seeing many of you in person again, once it’s safe to do so. The Library just isn’t the same without you.

The Library’s Main Reading Room. Photo: Shawn Miller

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Jason Reynolds: Grab the Mic Newsletter, May Edition

This is a guest post by Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. His most recent piece ran in April.

A question I get all the time—like, all the time—is, “Jason, are you ever worried people won’t like your books?”

And before I tell you my reply, I first want to tell you a story.

The day before my first novel, “When I Was The Greatest,” was to be released, I went to lunch at a restaurant across from my house. I was a ball of nerves, so much so that I couldn’t even eat what I’d ordered. The owner of the restaurant, Craig, came from the kitchen to where I was sitting.

“J, what’s wrong?” he asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“That ain’t what your face is saying. Your face is saying something’s definitely going on,” he said.

So I told him the truth, that I was nervous. Actually, nervous is an understatement. I was freaking out.

“What if people read my book and … hate it?” I took a sip of water, but could barely swallow it. The mere thought of failure, or even criticism, had seemed to close my throat.

Craig took a seat, folded his hands on the table.

“Let me tell you something,” he said. “If someone were to come to me, someone special, and ask me to make them a perfect meal, do you know what I’d do?”

I shook my head.

“I’d go to the butcher and have him cut me a perfect steak, something with the right amount of marble. Something tender. Then I would go to the best garden I could find and get the perfect vegetables to go with that steak, maybe carrots, maybe asparagus, some mushrooms and onions. Then I’d come back to the restaurant and I’d marinate the steak for a few days to make sure all the flavors soak into the meat. Then I’d roast the veggies so that they’d have a slight char and all the natural flavors are activated. Then I’d cook the steak to the perfect temperature, and maybe to round out the meal I’d add a baked potato.” He paused here. “You still with me?”

“I’m with you,” I said, wondering where all this was going.

“Okay, so after I got everything cooked perfectly, I’d plate it all … perfectly. Make it real pretty. And I’d the set the table perfectly, too. Even add a candle and a tablecloth. Sparkling water. Wine. Everything … perfect. And if my customer — my special customer — cut into that perfect steak, took a bite and didn’t like it, well … I would assume that’s just because he was in the mood for fish.” Craig smirked. “But not because I didn’t cook a perfect steak.”

“But how would you even know the steak is perfect?” I asked.

“If the steak is what you intended it to be, it’s a perfect steak.” Craig pushed back from the table, got up and returned to the kitchen of his restaurant without saying another word.

What he was trying to explain to me is that when it comes to people not liking the thing you’ve made, or maybe even the person you are, it doesn’t always have to do with you, and really it often has to do with what they wanted. What their expectations were. And we have no control over that. If I’m a good artist, but my father wanted me to be a good athlete, but I’m not, that doesn’t mean my art is bad. It just means my father preferred points over painting.

So don’t worry about criticism. It usually has nothing to do with you.

Okay, so back to the beginning. What do I say when people ask me, “Jason, are you ever worried people won’t like your books?”

Well, my response is always, “Of course. Terrified!”

Hey, I didn’t say I’ve mastered it all. And the truth is, maybe that’s because it’s hard not to care what young people think about me because I care so much about you. Or maybe I’m still trying to make the perfect steak.

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The Path to Nirvana, from an 18th Century Buddhist Carving

The top of the 31 levels of existence, as seen on the cosmography.  Photo: John Hessler. Geography and Map Division.

This is a guest post by John Hessler, a specialist in the Library’s Geography and Map Division, focusing on computational geography and geographic information science. He’s also the Library’s curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection.

Recently, the Library’s Geography and Map Division acquired a rare 18th-century carving of a Theravãda Buddhist cosmography that originated in Myanmar (formerly known as Burma).

The panel, which is more than 9 feet high when its three parts are fully assembled, shows the many levels that are the temporary resting places for living beings as they make their way to the ultimate goal of nirvana. The carving shows the levels that spiritual entities — humans, animals or gods –  transmigrate. It pictures these way stations as floating palaces. It gives their names, the geography of the cosmos and the life of beings who temporarily reside in each of them.

The teachings of the Guatama Buddha, from which the engravings on the panel ultimately derive, are found in a series of writings that are known as the Pali Canon. These are the earliest written records of Buddhist scriptures, which had previously been handed down in the oral tradition. This large body of texts, written in the ancient Indian language of Pali, is divided into discourses of various lengths. It treats the metaphysics, psychology and cosmology of the Buddhist path toward enlightenment through meditation.

“In the sky, there is no distinction of east and west; people create distinctions out of their own minds and then believe them to be true,” is one of the Buddha’s metaphysical sayings.

The information found on the engraving in the Library’s collections does not derive from a single source, but from a variety of texts in what is called the “Sutta Pitaka,” or Basket Discourse.  Most of the information inscribed on the panel can be traced to the “Majjhima Nikaya, Anguttara Nikaya, Samyutta Nikaya,” which are  the middle length, numerical, and connected discourses of the Buddha, respectively.

I recently translated the panel. It describes, both graphically, as temples, and in writing, the 31 levels of existence. It starts at the top of the panel with “neither-perception-nor-non-perception.”

This is the realm of beings that are formless and without physical or material structure and who have no perception. The engraving continues down through the various levels of “Arupaloka” (world of non-form), through “Rupaloka” (world of form) into “Kãmaloka” (world of desire) finally reaching “Manussa” (the level of human beings). Below that we find the levels occupied by animals and the fiery hells that are undesirable places for rebirth and reincarnation.

In the center of the panel are carvings of temples signifying each of the levels rising from the base of Mount Meru, or the sacred mountain.

Palace at the base of Mount Meru. Photo: John Hessler. Geography and Map Division. 

Here, the engraving turns cartographic. 

The myth of Mount Meru is common to almost all ancient Indian religions and is part of the foundations of Hindu, Jain and Buddhist cosmology. According to all three, it is located in the center of the universe. In Hinduism, it is the realm of the gods.

In this section of the panel, we see the various mountain ranges that surround Mount Meru. These seven “golden” ranges are known as the “Sattaparibhanda.” They are separated by vast oceans.

Moving out from the center of the panel in both directions, they extend great heights and distances:

Yugandhara                    40,000 yojana high and thick

Isadhara                          20,000 yojana high and thick

Karavika                           10,000 yojana high and thick

Sudassana                       5000 yojana high and thick

Nemindhara               2500 yojana high and thick

Vinataka                          1250 yojana high and thick

Asskanna                         625 yojana high and thick

“Yojana” is an ancient Indian scale of measurement. It equals the distance that a cow yoked to a cart can walk in one day, although no one knows how far that actually is. The scale of these distances is not terrestrial, but cosmic. The distance from the center of Mount Meru (itself being 80,000 yojana wide) to the edge of the map is approximately 795,300 miles.

The four continents of Buddhist geography that includes earth, the “Jumbudvipa,” is in a great ocean that lies far off the map. 

Theravãda Buddhism is the oldest and the only surviving form that derives directly from the ancient Hinayaba School. The word Theravãda, in both Pali and in Sanskrit, means “the School of the Elders.” It was established in Sri Lanka in the third century BCE by the Indian Emperor Asoka. Asoka’s edicts survive as some of the oldest written inscriptions relating to Buddhism, carved on boulders, pillars and cave walls, written in the ancient Brahmi script, according to Richard Salomon’s book “Indian Epigraphy.”

Although this may not seem to be a “map” in the classical Western sense, the Geography and Map Division strives to collect a wide range of cartography, cosmography and the mapmaking arts from around the world. This panel, and many others like it from cultures around the world, constantly remind us how difficult it is to actually answer the question: What is a map?

The lower realms representing the existence of animals. Photo: John Hessler. Geography and Map Division.

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Library’s Preservation Team Starts Blog

The following guest post is by Jacob Nadal, Director for Preservation. 

Today we are launching a new blog covering preservation at the Library, Guardians of Memory. You will hear from preservation staff on the things we do to make sure the Library’s collections endure. We will explore the ways people have recorded their knowledge and creativity across the centuries.

The Library of Congress’ mission — “engage, inspire, and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity” – has some obvious hooks for preservation. Everyone will guess that we pay attention to the word “enduring,” but in developing our preservation program and developing the goals for this blog, the word “universal” matters just as much.

The people who care for the national collections come from all across the country and around the world. The Preservation Directorate has over 200 staff. The Library’s preservation efforts include over 100 more staff in the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center and the Digital Services Directorate. Hundreds more staff contribute by caring for the collections from the day we bring them to the Library to the moment we present them to you, whether that’s online, in the exhibition galleries or in the reading rooms.

Preservation gives us a special way of looking through the library. The questions we ask while maintaining these works reward us with distinctive answers about the intentions, knowledge, and creativity that they embody. The blog is intended to help you see the collections through our eyes by giving you the literary equivalent of a look over the shoulder of the Library’s preservation staff as they do their work.

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Cicero’s quote in the Jefferson building. Photo: Jake Nadal.

Recently, I took a few minutes to walk up to the northwest corner of the second floor gallery in the Great Hall of the Thomas Jefferson building. I wanted to check in on the panel that gave us the title for this blog:

MEMORY IS THE TREASURER AND GUARDIAN OF ALL THINGS

—Cicero, De Oratore, i., 5

When I had asked the Preservation staff what they wanted to see in a title, the suggestions included the real people who do the work, their know-how and their care. But finding titles is hard, and as I talked it through with some of our writers, we didn’t think we quite had it, and we spent a few days feeling stuck until we saw this line from Cicero.

We liked it — the Librarian often speaks about the Library as the “treasure chest” – and I liked the play of turning the emphasis to the guardians themselves, the individuals who each do their part in caring for the national memory. I felt pretty good about it, myself, but the job of a preservation librarian is basically to worry about things and be perpetually unsure. When I stopped in to take a look this morning, though, and saw the panel was surrounded by scaffolding with conservation work in progress, I decided we had it just right.

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Scaffolding, and our inspiration panel, in the Great Hall. photo: Jake Nadal.

Mystery Photo Contest: Nearing the End!

Cary O’Dell at the Library’s National Recording Registry runs our Mystery Photo Contest. He’s back with a batch of our toughest cold cases.

Regular readers know of our (thankfully shrinking!) collection of mystery photos. With your help over the past few years, we’ve knocked this particular list down from over 800 photographs of unidentified people or groups to fewer than 30. You all have done a fine job. Everyone gets a trophy!

But a few still linger. These are photographs from the entertainment industry that came to us in a huge cache of photos,and they seem so … so … solvable, but still remain unidentified. If you think you might have already seen these, it’s probably because we’ve posted all of them before. But because we don’t give up – and we know you don’t either – we’re giving some of them one final spin. Care to try your luck?

As always, please give us your best guess in the comments. We’ll let you know of any success stories.

This lady with the winsome smile was probably an actress in the silent film era, or maybe in the early talkies. It’s a professional head shot, so she at least got a start in the biz. But she could have been a singer, dancer, model or a regional theater actress who never got very far. Suggestions have included Jeanette Loff, Edwina Booth and Isabel Jewel. Alas, none are correct.

Ah, yes, this one. Everybody thinks they know this one. Except, it turns out, they don’t. It’s something of a record-setter for incorrect guesses, perhaps rivaled only by the “world’s most mysterious woman” photo, which we eventually identified.

This is a punk-ish/New Wave duo for sure. Gotta be the ’80s, right? Maybe the early ’90s? They’ve got that androgyny thing going, as we’re not sure if this is two men, two women or one of each. The vibe is totally musicians with attitude, but for all we know it’s a couple of leads from a TV pilot that never took off.

Here’s the aforementioned list incorrect guesses (we’ve checked with the people named). Take a deep breath: Wendy & Lisa, Joan Jett, Karla Bonoff, T-Rex, Heart, Suicide, The Throbs, The Slits, Scarlet Fantastic, Strawberry Switchblade, Sparks, Tik and Tok, Alannah Myles, The Motels, the New York Dolls, Christian Death, Love and Rockets, the Jacobites, Sisters of Mercy, Haysi Fantayzee, Book of Love, David Johansen, Dogs D’Amore, Dweezil Zappa, Face to Face, The Hangmen, Ian Hunter, Izzy Stradlin,  Kings of the Sun, L.A. Guns, Michael Des Barres, Mickey Thomas, Peaches, Paul Westerberg, Paul Hardcastle,  Richard Hell, Rough Trade, Suicide, Tom Keifer, and, finally, The Waitresses.

PHEW.

Meanwhile, I have inquired of, but not heard back from, the following acts, all of whom readers have suggested: 39 Clocks, Balaam and the Angel, Edn Ozn, Fashion, Faster Pussycat, Lady Wreckless, Main Street Preachers and The Cut.

One free can of hair spray to whoever figures out who these two are!

Oh, yeah. This guy. We’ve been all over the country trying to peg him. The various wall hangings have given us clues that range from New York to Nebraska, but we’re still at nada. The lapel pin and one of the certificates one the wall indicate he’s a member of the Masons, that’s about the only solid lead we’ve gotten. That looks like a contract that he’s pretending to look over. Our cache of stills included several people who worked behind the camera or in the front office of the entertainment industry. We’re guessing he’s one of those.

How can this group remain unknown? This band (we assume) never caught on with the masses, I guess.  But they must have played a few gigs someplace. Does anyone know who they are collectively or individually?  Bear in mind that they might not hail from the U.S.

This earnest-looking gentleman appears to been photographed at a news event of some kind, given the angle of the shot and the fact that he’s not posed. It’s in black and white, but it’s clearly in the modern era. We know he’s NOT the founder of Wendy’s, Dave Thomas (as many people have guessed). He is also neither Henry Kissinger nor William Rehnquist, two other guesses that have come down the pike. An entertainment lawyer announcing a merger? Your guess is as good as, and probably better than, ours.

The man with the camera remains a mystery to us. It’s a staged photo — nice lighting! — but that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s a famous photographer, cinematographer or director. It could have been part of his publicity kit. He appears young, so maybe he didn’t stay in the business that long. Hard to pin down the era, too, though the watch would be a clue.

Okay, so if the man above was likely behind the camera, it seems equally likely this lady was in front of it. Surely a performer of some type, and the pose suggests the opera or theater. The bouffant suggests a time period between World War II through the early ’70s. But again, a tough one. She might have been a regional performer. This glamour shot might have been for a project that never got off the ground. She’s one of the mystery photos that hasn’t drawn many suggestions.

There were several shots in our original batch of photos that showed this young woman showing off her various looks, as one would include in a portfolio.  That said, we don’t know if that portfolio ever resulted in any work. We know she is NOT Ashley Judd or “Alf” actress Andrea Elson (although that is a very good guess), but that’s about it.

Let us know your best guesses in the comments, we’ll run down any fresh leads and report back. Good luck!

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African American Genealogy: Searching for Yesterday

The author’s family, 1922, in Clarke County, Miss. 

This is a guest post by Ahmed Johnson, a reference librarian in  Researcher and Reference Services. 

When people ask me what sparked my interest in genealogy, I like to tell them about one of my favorite images.

This black and white photo (above), faded and distorted with age, was taken in Clarke County, Mississippi in 1922. Lying along the Alabama border about halfway down the state, it was rural then and is rural now. The picture shows several people in my family, the Peters. Sitting on the porch is my 101-year old grandmother then at the age of two, surrounded by my great-great grandparents, great-great-great grandfather, other relatives and a preacher. They were all posing in their Sunday best on the front porch of the family home.

This picture fascinated me as a six-year old kid, so I asked my grandmother several questions about it. I wanted to know why her house looked like a log cabin and who all the people were. It provided all the curiosity and inspiration needed to begin my genealogical journey.

Even today, the easiest way to learn information about your family is to ask questions. Interview the oldest living relative in your family. Record their answers on your cell phone. Ask them about anything you’re curious to know. You never know what’s important because records get scarcer the further you go back, especially those relating to African Americans. Names, dates, and locations of key events are a good way to get started.

Based on the information you already know and what you collected from your interviews, consider gathering additional information from where they lived. Look in the family home to find photos and other memorabilia. Maybe the family kept a bible where important dates and events were documented. Try searching the local county courthouse, state archives, church records, historical societies, and genealogical societies in the locality where they lived.

But beware! Researching African American genealogy is quite challenging. It is a lifelong journey – not a quick trip. When beginning, start with yourself and work backwards, using vital records, censuses and land ownership. We all have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great-grandparents, and the number keeps growing exponentially the further back you go.

This is the difficult part. In 1860, nearly 4 million enslaved individuals lived in the United States but they didn’t appear on federal census records. Therefore, you have to search for other records to help you locate family names and push your family history back further. Let’s look at some of the resources you can use to research African American genealogy.

The Library offers an array of online records that you can search for things like marriage records, cemetery records, tax records, city directories and more. On our premises, the Library offers more extensive resources– including free access to a subscription-based genealogy site, along with nearly 70,000 self-published family histories and over 100,000 local histories.  You can search these books using our online catalog.

You can also visit your local library to find out what search tools are available there. You can review a selected list of African American family histories and related sources on our website.

If slavery was in your family’s past, records of slave owners are another source of information.  Plantation records provide valuable details about the lives of enslaved people, including genealogical information about their families and everyday activities on the plantation. Many of these records are microfilmed at the Library and other repositories across the country.  Other sources include ProQuest History Vault, which is a subscription database available at the Library and may be available at other libraries across the country.

Additional records relating to former slaves are located via the Freedmen’s Bureau and Freedmen’s Bank records, which cover the years 1865–1874. The Freedmen’s Bureau was created to assist newly emancipated people, and the Bank was one of the first banks used by African Americans. Its records offer a gateway to slavery because free African Americans had to list their last “owner” on the bank account application. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) houses the originals. Others are digitized and available on subscription databases at the Library and still others on freely accessible databases.

Like bank records, military records are quite valuable when conducting genealogical research. These records provide information about individuals who served in the armed forces or were eligible to serve. Over 186,000 African Americans served as part of the United States Colored Troops (USCT) in the Civil War. Some of the records are available via subscription databases at the Library. As with Freedmen’s Bank records, the physical records are available at the National Archives.

Newspapers provide a wealth of information about the people who lived in a specific community. Genealogists use newspapers to locate obituaries and other significant information about their ancestors. These include social events, land ownership and the birth of children. The Library has one of the most comprehensive collections of newspapers for the entire country. Some newspapers are digitized and searchable via Chronicling America. In addition, African American newspapers databases are available at the Library or other large libraries in your area.

Once you have completed your research, you can archive your compiled family history at the Library. Oral histories are archived at the Library through StoryCorps. This is one of the largest oral history projects of its kind and preserved at the American Folklife Center. Personal accounts of American war veterans are preserved in the Veterans History Project.

We hope that’s enough to get you started. As always, you can ask a reference librarian for help through our Ask a Librarian service. Good luck!

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Season Two of “America Works” Podcast Launched

This guest post by John Fenn, head of research and programs at the American Folklife Center, originally appeared on the center’s “Folklife Today” blog.

The Library’s American Folklife Center continues to bring voices of workers throughout the country to listeners with the second season of our “America Works” podcast. Each 10-minute episode of “America Works” introduces listeners to an individual worker whose first-person narrative adds to the wealth of our shared national experience. The first episode is now available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and at loc.gov/podcasts. Subsequent episodes will be released each Thursday through June 3, 2021.

Sarah Fortin works a net loft in New Bedford, MA. Photo by Phil Mello. Working the waterfront, New Bedford, Massachusetts, Archie Green Fellows Project, 2016-2017 AFC 2016/036: 03906. Library of Congress.

This season of “America Works” reflects the occupational and regional diversity that characterize the entirety of the Occupational Folklife Project’s collection. In the season’s first episode, listeners are introduced to Sarah Fortin, a fish net maker in New Bedford, Massachusetts, one of the country’s most important fishing ports. Among other things, Fortin discusses gaining the necessary skillset for her trade and the challenges she faced as a young woman in a largely male-dominated work environment:

There’s been a bit of a struggle here and there with some of the old-timers because they don’t, they’re just not used to seeing a woman that knows as much about the twine and stuff. I’ll get that little, like, ‘Damn, you’re really going for a girl. Like, look at you!’ You know? Stuff like that, but it’s all positive.

Kim Spicer working a job at the Mondrian Hotel in New York City. Illuminating history: union electricians in New York City, Archie Green Fellows Project, 2016-2017 AFC 2016/035: 03721. Library of Congress.

Other featured workers of the season include Kim Spicer, an electrician and journey wire-woman, and a proud member of The International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW), Local #3, in Queens, New York. Jennifer Sgro is a nurse practitioner who provides treatment to residents of Chicago for the nonprofit The Night Ministry’s outreach bus, which travels to different low-income neighborhoods every evening. Mike Peabody of Montpelier, Vermont, is a garbage man who also leads the New England community’s recycling program.

These eight new episodes join those from the first season of “America Works,” which launched in August 2020. The first season is available on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher and at loc.gov/podcasts.

In addition to producing the podcast, AFC staff have also been active in recent months adding collection materials to the Occupational Folklife Project site. There are now nineteen individual project collections available, including full interviews, transcripts or logs, and photographs or video (when available). Explore these newly uploaded collections (direct links in collection titles)!

The Green Book: Documenting African American Entrepreneurs: In 2018, independent scholar and documentarian Candacy Taylor received an Archie Green Fellowship to document contemporary business owners and employees who work for more than a dozen still-active businesses that were listed in The Green Book, a historically significant travel guide published between 1937 and 1967. The Green Book listed businesses—e.g., restaurants, hotels, barbershops, taverns, drug stores, and garages—that welcomed African American customers. Only 3% of the 9,500 businesses listed in The Green Book are still in operation and Taylor traveled across the United States to interview their current owners and employees. The interviews explore the histories of these ongoing establishments, their strategies for staying in business, and the business’s current relationships with their changing communities. In addition to checking out this collection, listen to a recent episode of AFC’s Folklife Today podcast that featured a conversation with Candacy Taylor about her work with Green Book businesses.

Personal Home Health Care Aides in Michigan: In 2017, Clare Luz, a gerontologist at Michigan State University’s College of Human Medicine, conducted fieldwork on the occupational folklore of “Personal Home Health Care Aides in Michigan.” Working with fellow MSU faculty members, including the epidemiologist Khalid Ibrahim as well as folklorist Marsha MacDowell and her colleagues at the MSU Museum and Michigan Traditional Arts Program, Dr. Luz documented occupational histories of 28 dedicated personal home health care aides (PCAs) in central Michigan, whose occupational histories, on-the-job experiences, and significant contributions to their communities have been historically marginalized and under-documented.

Fresh Produce Workers in Arizona: In 2015, folklorist Nicholas Hartmann and the Southwest Folklife Alliance in Tucson, Arizona, interviewed workers involved with the sale, distribution, and transportation of fresh produce that enter the American food supply through the city of Nogales on the United States-Mexico border. For generations, Nogales has been a major commercial hub for the marketing and distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables grown in the southwestern United States, Mexico, and Latin America. Hartman interviewed a wide variety of workers—from produce brokers to truck drivers to customs inspectors to multi-generational business owners—involved in the Nogales’ century-old fresh produce industry. The 22 in-depth oral history interviews in this collection also examine how social, economic, and technical changes are impacting life and work along the Arizona-Sonora borderland.

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Russell Lee’s Look at America

“Secondhand Tires for Sale,” a photograph by Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division.

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

Russell Lee’s photographs are mainstays in popular culture, though you may not be able to match his name to his work.

Stephen Colbert featured Lee’s iconic shot of a young Black man drinking from a water cooler marked “colored” on one of his “Late Show” monologues about racial injustice. Millions of “Cheers” viewers saw his photo of cheerful patrons in a Depression-era Minnesota saloon in the opening credits. Microsoft offered his 1939 photo of a Texas couple as a screensaver in its Windows 98 operating system. Here at the Library, we featured his photo of a homesteading couple as the cover photograph of a book and exhibition, “Bound for Glory: America in Color, 1939-1943.”

But while Lee’s work is widely known, his story has remained more elusive. A new  biography, published by Liveright in association with the Library, establishes Lee as one of the most influential documentary photographers in American history.

In “Russell Lee: A Photographer’s Life and Legacy,” historian and archivist Mary Jane Appel examines the paradoxes of Lee’s dual status as an independently wealthy man and the most prolific photographer of the Great Depression. It’s the second book the Library has helped to publish on his work; “The Photographs of Russell Lee,” a paperback, was published in 2008 with an introduction by historian and author Nicholas Lemann.

Russell Lee, ca 1942.  Prints and Photographs Division.

Of the 63,000 prints in the Library’s Farm Security Administration (FSA) Collection, which pictures American life between 1935 and 1942, Lee created 19,000 — more than twice the amount of any other FSA photographer. He was the longest tenured and most widely traveled of all the photographers on the legendary FSA team — which included Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans. Living out of his car, Lee photographed life in 29 states between 1936 and 1942.

The more than 100 photos included in the biography demonstrate Lee’s talent for capturing images emblematic of early 20th century concerns, including the ecological catastrophes of dust storms and floods, the population shift from rural to urban areas, discrimination against racial and ethnic groups and life on the home front during World War II.

This first comprehensive biography of Lee reveals a man both compelling and complex, a wealthy white man whose focus on society’s ills, particularly those that targeted the poor and people of color, resulted in a body of work that continues to be recognized for its resonance and relevance.

You can buy the book at any retailer. Hardcovers are available for purchase from the Library  Shop at library-of-congress-shop.myshopify.com/.

One of Lee’s most famous photographs. Oklahoma City, 1939. Prints and Photographs Division.

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