Library of Congress's Blog, page 5

The Librarian as Hero: Ainsworth Spofford

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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A Precious Bible Blessed By Pope Francis at the Library

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Keeping Your Powder Dry

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It was built that way. For good reason.

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

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

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

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

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

Yet, no books perished that could not be replaced.

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

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

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

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

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

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College Records Add New Depth to Women’s Genealogy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She did not live to see the day.

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

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

—Candice Buchanan.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

—Wanda Whitney

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Take a “Fast Car” to the 2025 National Recording Registry

Elton John’s monumental album “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road,” Chicago’s debut “Chicago Transit Authority,” the original cast recording of Broadway’s “Hamilton,” Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” Microsoft’s reboot chime and the soundtrack to the Minecraft video game phenomenon headline the 2025 class of the National Recording Registry.

The annual list of 25 recordings named as treasures worthy of preservation for all time based on their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage was announced by Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden.

The 2025 class of inductees also includes Tracy Chapman’s self-titled debut album, which featured her timeless hit, “Fast Car.” There’s also Celine Dion’s 1997 single “My Heart Will Go On” from the blockbuster film “Titanic,” Roy Rogers and Dale Evans’ classic “Happy Trails,” Miles Davis’ jazz fusion album “Bitches Brew,” Charley Pride’s groundbreaking “Kiss an Angel Good Mornin,’” Vicente Fernandez’s enduring ranchera song “El Rey,” Freddy Fender’s breakthrough song “Before the Next Teardrop Falls” and the Steve Miller Band’s “Fly Like an Eagle.”

“These are the sounds of America – our wide-ranging history and culture,” Hayden said. “The National Recording Registry is our evolving nation’s playlist,” Hayden said.

More than 2,600 nominations were made by the public this year for recordings to consider for the registry. “Chicago Transit Authority” finished No. 1 in the public nominations this year. Other selected recordings in the top 10 of public nominations include “Happy Trails,” “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” and “My Life.”

The recordings selected for the registry this year bring the number of titles on the registry to 675, a fraction of the national library’s vast recorded sound collection of nearly 4 million items.

Elton John, the 2024 winner of the Library’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song with his songwriting partner Bernie Taupin, reflected on their 1973 album “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road.”

“Nobody really knows what a hit record is,” John told the Library.” I’m not a formula writer. I didn’t think ‘Bennie and the Jets’ was a hit. I didn’t think ‘Don’t Let the Sun Go Down on Me’ was a hit. And that’s what makes writing so special. You do not know what you’re coming up with and how special it might become.”

The Steve Miller Band blew up the charts in 1976 with the album “Fly Like an Eagle.”

Steve Miller’s “Fly Like an Eagle” sounded like a natural hit when it blew up pop charts in 1976, but it was three years in the making.

“When it came time to actually record it, I did something very unusual,” he said in an interview. “I used three different bands, three different sessions to record it.”

Mary J. Blige recalled her 1994 soulful hip-hop album “My Life.”

“My favorite lyric from the ‘My Life’ album is ‘Life can be only what you make of it,’” she said.

Mary J. Blige’s 1994 album “My Life” joins the NRR this year.

The latest selections named to the registry span from 1913 to 2015. Ten of this year’s selections are from the 1970s. The earliest recording on the list is the long-beloved Hawaiian song “Aloha ‘Oe,” recorded in 1913 by the Hawaiian Quintette. The original Broadway recording of “Hamilton” by Lin-Manuel Miranda and the cast from 2015 becomes the newest recording to join the registry.

The 2025 selections span the sounds of folk, jazz, country, pop, comedy, sports, Latin, dance, R&B, tech, choral and musical theater. The recording from Minecraft is only the second video game soundtrack to join the registry, following the theme from Super Mario Brothers, selected in 2023.

“This year’s National Recording Registry list is an honor roll of superb American popular music from the wide-ranging repertoire of our great nation, from Hawaii to Nashville, from iconic jazz tracks to smash Broadway musicals, from Latin superstars to global pop sensations – a parade of indelible recordings spanning more than a century,” said Robbin Ahrold, chair of the National Recording Preservation Board.

The NRPB was created by Congress the National Recording Preservation Act of 2000; the registry list began in 2002.

NPR’s “1A” will feature selections in the series “The Sounds of America” about this year’s list, including interviews with Hayden and several featured artists in the weeks ahead.

The complete 2025 list:

“Aloha ‘Oe” – Hawaiian Quintette (1913) (single)“Sweet Georgia Brown” – Brother Bones & His Shadows (1949) (single)“Happy Trails” – Roy Rogers and Dale Evans (1952) (single)Radio Broadcast of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series – Chuck Thompson (1960)Harry Urata Field Recordings (1960-1980)“Hello Dummy!”– Don Rickles (1968) (album)“Chicago Transit Authority” – Chicago (1969) (album)“Bitches Brew” – Miles Davis (1970) (album)“Kiss An Angel Good Mornin’” – Charley Pride (1971) (single)“I Am Woman” – Helen Reddy (1972) (single)“El Rey” – Vicente Fernandez (1973) (single)“Goodbye Yellow Brick Road” – Elton John (1973) (album)“Before the Next Teardrop Falls” – Freddy Fender (1975) (single)“I’ve Got the Music in Me” – Thelma Houston & Pressure Cooker (1975) (album)“The Kӧln Concert” – Keith Jarrett (1975) (album)“Fly Like an Eagle” – Steve Miller Band (1976) (album)Nimrod Workman Collection (1973-1994)“Tracy Chapman” – Tracy Chapman (1988) (album)“My Life” – Mary J. Blige (1994) (album)Microsoft Windows Reboot Chime – Brian Eno (1995)“My Heart Will Go On” – Celine Dion (1997) (single)“Our American Journey” – Chanticleer (2002) (album)“Back to Black” – Amy Winehouse (2006) (album)“Minecraft: Volume Alpha” – Daniel Rosenfeld (2011) (album)“Hamilton” – Original Broadway Cast Album (2015) (album)

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Catching up with … Eileen J. Manchester

Eileen J. Manchester is manager of the Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative in the Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives office.

Tell us about your background.

I grew up in Charlotte, North Carolina, and attended the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. I studied English, French and German, which was my way of cobbling together a bachelor’s degree in comparative literature, even though my university didn’t offer it as a major.

I was always drawn to language and literature because, from my own experiences, I know that language shapes the way we view and make meaning of the world.

I was very lucky to have pivotal research experiences early in my academic career, using the archives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the British Library to uncover the story of a 16th-century French poet whose daughters published her work after her death.

Inspired by my mom’s second career in higher education, I simultaneously sought experiences in teaching. I tutored at my local library, interned at the Freedom School Partners literacy program in Charlotte and traveled to South Africa to learn more about its education system.

I then continued my studies of early modern women writers at the University of Oxford with the support of the Ertegun Graduate Fellowship in the Humanities.

At Oxford, I worked in local schools and libraries as a tutor and gained experience on various public humanities projects. As much as I loved historical research and analysis, I always knew I wanted to work in a role where I would be enabling other people’s learning as well.

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

While in graduate school, I had the privilege of connecting with two mentors (relationships lasting to this day!) who worked at the Library and opened my eyes to a career path in education and cultural heritage.

I was fortunate to land a position as a junior fellow in summer 2018. After the fellowship, I worked full time as a high school English teacher in Washington, D.C., then returned to the Library in the summer of 2019.

After five years as an innovation specialist in the Office of the Chief Information Officer, I joined the Professional Learning and Outreach Initiatives office in the Center for Learning, Literacy and Engagement. I manage the Lewis-Houghton Civics and Democracy Initiative, which is a new addition to the Library’s longstanding Teaching with Primary Sources Program.

Grants awarded under the initiative fund educational projects that use primary sources and approaches related to music and the arts to engage students in learning about history, civics and democracy.

What are some of your standout projects?

I consider every encounter with one of our Lewis-Houghton partners a standout moment, because I always come away with more knowledge about the Library’s primary sources and the many creative ways they can be used for teaching and learning.

One particular highlight took place at the 2024 National Council for the Social Studies conference. Our partners are not only music education and arts integration experts — they are musicians themselves. One of the teams flexed its musical muscles and performed “Do Doodle Oom,” a 1923 song by Fletcher Henderson and His Orchestra.  It was amazing to see the Library’s collections brought to life in this way!

Another standout project was being detailed to the Informal Learning Office as part of the Leadership Development Program.

I had the privilege of working with fabulously talented colleagues to launch “Family Day,” the new monthly Saturday program for families and young audiences. The program just turned one — you can read about it in the Feb. 14 Gazette!

What do you enjoy doing outside of work?

While “enjoy” is a strong word, I am pursuing my Ph.D. in education and human development at George Mason University. I recently advanced into the dissertation phase and am very grateful to continue to grow and develop as a scholar. I also love to read, travel, visit museums, spend time with family and take long walks with my dog and husband.

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

English is not my first language! I was born in Germany and grew up speaking mostly German until we moved to the U.S. when I was five years old. I also learned French in school and am constantly looking for language partners. Please be in touch!

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George Washington and King George III — Exhibit Showcases Common Ties

George Washington and King George III were on opposite sides in the Revolutionary War, with Washington leading the Continental Army to victory over King George’s Britain. Thus, America’s independence in 1783.

What’s seldom taught in classrooms, however — and what has not been previously well understood — is how much the two leaders had in common.

A major new Library exhibition, “The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution,” uses original documents such as letters, diaries, maps, newspapers, cartoons, to shed light on striking likenesses between the two. All of these are on display online, in an exhibit in the Jefferson Building and in a companion book. You’ll see stunning items such as Washington’s copy of the Declaration of Independence, his notes on a draft of the U.S. Constitution as it was being composed by the Constitutional Convention and an abdication speech King George drafted (but never delivered) following Britain’s defeat by American forces.

Visitors explore the new exhibition, “Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution,” at the Library. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The approach allows viewers, both online and in person, to “hear the Georges speaking in their own voices and get to know them on their own terms,”  said Julie Miller, the Manuscript Division’s historian of early America, who curated the exhibit.

The show originated about ten years ago, when the Library partnered with the Royal Archives and several other institutions on the Georgian Papers Programme, a project to digitize George III’s papers. Washington’s papers had been digitized by the Library’s American Memory project in the 1990s. Conversations between historians of the era began to flow.

“It became clear from the start that the Georges were similar in certain surprising ways that I don’t think anyone had ever thought about,” said Miller.

The show brings together Washington’s papers from the Library and George III’s papers from the Royal Collection and the Royal Archives in England. Objects and images from London’s Science Museum, the Maine Historical Society, the Museums at Washington and Lee University, Washington’s Mount Vernon and other repositories are also included.

A close-up of George Washington’s copy of the Declaration of Independence. Manuscript Division.

The exhibit traces the two men’s stories from birth to death, mixing original documents and artifacts with large-scale graphics and decorative elements. It’s also a study in, of all things, documents written in 18th-century cursive.

“Small handwriting is difficult to read,” said John Powell, the exhibit’s director. “It’s helpful to have blow-ups, and we wanted to make the exhibit visually pop as well.”

A three-minute introductory film explores popular conceptions of the Georges — the myth about Washington and the cherry tree, for example, and beliefs about King George’s madness. From there, visitors encounter a more complex story, including that Washington, born in 1732, spent the first half of his life as a model British gentleman and a committed subject of the British Empire. When he was 27, an invoice shows him ordering volumes of goods for his Mount Vernon plantation like a man to the manor born: handkerchiefs, green tea, a large Cheshire cheese and a hogshead (or cask) of “best Porter,”  all from London merchant Robert Cary. This was hardly the lifestyle of a dangerous revolutionary.

As a planter, Washington immersed himself in agriculture, as did George III. Both had a deep fascination for new methods of farming, gardening and landscape design developed in 18th-century Britain. The two read many of the same books, including a lavishly illustrated 1754 volume of natural history that is included in the exhibit.

Even after Washington became president, Miller said, “he’s writing home to his farm manager and talking about the trees he wants planted a certain way.”

A 1786 political cartoon satirized King George III and his interest in farming, showing him in the barnyard with Queen Charlotte. Windsor Castle is in the far background. Drawing: S. W. Fores. Prints and Photograps Division.

Across the Atlantic, George III was much the same. A 1786 cartoon shows a casually dressed King George with his spouse, Queen Charlotte, feeding chickens and pigs in a farmyard. “George III liked to dress up in ordinary clothes and go out and see how the pigs were doing,” Miller said.

Both Georges were devoted family men and homebodies, with shared values such as constancy, accountability, restraint and frugality. This led them to act as paternal, benevolent leaders, Miller says, but only up to a point. Neither man had time for abolitionists, and Washington used slave labor to help make him wealthy.

“Neither recognized the idea that people did not in fact own the right to own other people,” Miller said.

A 1761 ad in the Maryland Gazette shows Washington seeking to recover four enslaved men who escaped from Mount Vernon. A 1799 document lists people enslaved on his plantation.

Other historical items include Washington’s commission as commander-in-chief of the Continental Army, a codebook that American spies used during the Revolution to outwit the British (Washington’s numerical code name was 711) and a plan for a failed scheme to kidnap George III’s 16-year-old son, Prince William, while he served in the Royal Navy in New York City during the war.

Opening night fun at “The Two Georges” exhibit. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Also included are a 1782 letter from King George to his prime minister accusing the Americans of “knavery” and a 1789 teacup and saucer inscribed with “Huzza, The King is well.” It celebrates the king’s recovery from a major episode of the still-undefined illness that earned him the moniker “The Mad King.”

At the exhibit’s end, a striking 1820 painting by Samuel William Reynolds shows King George close to death. Unlike images of the younger George, bewigged and fashionably dressed, Reynolds depicts an elderly man with long gray hair and beard gazing into the distance.

“The Two Georges” kicks off the Library’s America 250 celebration, marking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The exhibit will be on view in the Jefferson Building southwest exhibition gallery for the next 12 months; after that, the Science Museum will mount a companion exhibit in London.

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Ned Rorem’s Brilliant and Beautiful Scrapbooks and Diaries

Ned Rorem could never stop thinking. Or writing, composing or socializing.

He kept datebooks, scrapbooks and diaries, the last of which went for thousands of pages over decades. He composed more than 500 art songs, three symphonies, four piano concertos, more than half a dozen operas and on and on. These fill volumes and folders and boxes in the Library’s Music Division, a dizzying testament to one of the great musical lives of the American 20th century.

A bon vivant in Paris and New York for more than half a century, Rorem seemed to know all the high-brow artistic set — Pablo Picasso, Balthus, James Baldwin, Jean Cocteau, Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward. He went on benders with Kenneth Anger, the notorious underground filmmaker. Openly gay when that was a shocking rarity, his published diaries were wildly indiscreet, creating a sensation when they were published six decades ago.

“The mediocrity of this ship’s passengers,” he tartly noted on one trans-Atlantic voyage in 1955, “is beyond belief.”

Ned Rorem in 1992, posing with artwork sketched for him by the artist Jean Cocteau. Photo: Nancy Lee Katz. Prints and Photographs Division.

He won a Pulitzer Prize, Fulbright and Guggenheim fellowships, music commissions from famous foundations and ASCAP’s Lifetime Achievement Award and served as the president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Time magazine once declared him “the world’s best composer of art songs.” In 2004, the French government awarded him the Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters for his “significant contribution to the French cultural inheritance.” His works are still widely performed and recorded.

He was born in Indiana in 1923, got his master’s degree at The Juilliard School in New York and was soon off to Paris, the talented boy wonder. He lived there for nearly a decade.

Here he is in that city, writing in his diary on Halloween of 1956, with ominous strains of the Cold War beating down on Europe: “Winter is terribly here. And another war seems well on its way, war like a searchlight wail of mammoths straining the sky. All around in Africa and Hungary is this positive and bleeding unrest. I’m scared.”

Here’s a page from one of his scrapbooks, in which he was forever getting guests to write, scrawl and sketch. It’s a casual snapshot of Baldwin, the famed novelist and activist, who scribbled on July 8, 1958: “for Ned, In the hope that we work together, soon, & long.” He signed it, “Jimmy B.”

Novelist and essayist James Baldwin, one of Rorem’s many famous friends, inscribed a page in one of Rorem’s scrapbooks. Music Division.

Rorem, who died at age 99 in 2022, had been slowly donating his papers to the Library over the years. They are dazzling, in-depth and insightful. The scrapbooks are both portfolio-sized and in small notebooks, all of them filled with drawings, signatures, witty one-liners from famous friends.

Most of his entries are just a paragraph or two; a few go for several pages. They were so neatly and compulsively kept that you can open a datebook to a specific day, where you’ll see jottings of phone numbers and addresses and appointments, then open the corresponding diary to see what he penned on that day, then compare that passage to the finished manuscript page. Over and over again, his longhand diary entries are almost the same as the published piece. His diary entries are dated, but he cut the specific dates from the finished book, leaving them with more of an impressionistic, and less of a journalistic, feel.

Rorem’s datebook for Oct. 3, 1956, and his diary entry for the same day. Music Division.

The overall impression? Even now, one is brought up short by his mix of intimacy, intelligence and celebrity. You can imagine how this played out when his first two diaries were published in the 1960s.

“The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem,” adapted from his journals from 1951-55, wrote the New York Times in its obituary of the man, “mentioned hundreds of the famous and the obscure while serving up a pastiche of explicit reports on his sex life, pieces of music criticism and charming anecdotes.”

“Name-dropping is one thing,” the article said. “With the gossipy Mr. Rorem, it could reach the level of carpet-bombing.”

“Worldly, intelligent, and highly indiscreet,” The New Yorker opined.

He recounts spending an evening with an aging Alice B. Toklas in her famed apartment on rue Christine, more than a decade after the death of her life partner, Gertude Stein, both icons of the American expatriate community in Paris. He wrote this passage out in longhand but cut it from the published version: “And she is old, old, small and old as a unicorn or a raven flying through the sad old-fashioned smoke of other autumns, deaf, with Virgil’s style and accent, quick as a whip.”

A colorful 1956 sketch in one of Rorem’s many scrapbooks. Music Division.

Flipping through the pages, there are often random one-liners or phrases he seems to be trying out. “I’m in love again for the first time.” A bit of dialogue: “The phone: ‘But how will I recognize you?’ ‘I’m beautiful.’ ”

Just when you think it’s all chaff and gossip, there is a plainspoken passage from the artist alone with his work, struggling.

“What a disheartening mess it always is: the first days’ fumbling at a long work. A song or something in one sitting is almost done before begun. But the opera on Petronius that I’ve been plotting for months is now rather started so I don’t know where I am; it’s more than just music, theater. … Slowly, as days pass, if we are routine, a form appears and finally (as with wars in history) we recoil and see it all as a whole. There it is, finished; now will it work?”

Late in life, he paused to consider it all, this relentless minute cataloguing, this constant self-examination. In “Lies: A Diary, 1986-1999,” he wrote on Jan. 15, 1996: “Why keep a journal? To stop time. To make a point about the pointlessness of it all. To have company. To be remembered. For there is much to be recalled, with no one to do the recalling.”

One of the many editions of Rorem’s Paris diaries, which created a sensation when published in the 1960s. Music Division.

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Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children

—This is a guest post by Olivia Dorsey, an innovation specialist in the office of the Chief Information Officer. It also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Entering the living quarters of a late 18th-century plantation house, the last thing you might expect to see is a rainbow of colors, dancing in the breeze. Figures frozen in a moment of play trail tissue paper along worn, dusty floorboards. Through a veil of vibrant colors and textures, a portrait appears: A Black girl stares ahead, her hand gently perched on the back of a chair.

The piece, titled “Complex,” was one of many on view as part of artist Maya Freelon’s immersive exhibition “Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in the United States” at Historic Stagville in Durham, North Carolina.

The Bennehan-Cameron family enslaved more than 900 people at Stagville, once one of the largest plantations in the state, at at its peak in 1864.

Today, the state-run site maintains several original buildings, including a barn, the quarters where enslaved families lived and the Bennehan house. The exhibition, which showcased Freelon’s signature tissue-paper sculptures, drew upon Library materials and other archival images to honor and reimagine the lives of enslaved Black children.

Freelon’s pieces were located throughout the Bennehan house and inside a large timber-framed barn on the property. Portraits of children in the home hold special meaning for Freelon, who wanted to uplift them “in an actual home they weren’t even allowed in.” One tissue-paper sculpture contained printed names of the more than 200 Black children who lived at Stagville.

As a 2024 Library of Congress Connecting Communities Digital Initiative artist/scholar in residence, Freelon researched Library collections seeking 19th-century images of Black children that represented “innocence, beauty, light and love amidst a terrible situation.”

Her search often was difficult. Images of Black children in joyous moments during this period are rare, pushing Freelon to expand her search criteria. Occasionally, she would make a discovery in the Prints and Photographs Division, like a 1900 photo of a young Black girl smiling while holding flowers.

This photo, taken around 1900, inspired artist Maya Freelon in her work, seen below. Photographer unidentified; possibly by Rudolf Eickemeyer, Jr. Prints and Photographs Division.

The exhibition opening’s theme was “play,” evoking the innocence of children held in bondage. Attendees, including descendants of people once enslaved on the plantation, participated in childhood games such as “Down by the River” and “Miss Mary Mack.”

The opening event was a collaborative offering. Nnenna Freelon, the artist’s mother and a well-known jazz singer, sang nursery rhymes and invited attendees to accompany her with instruments. In the barn, Allie Martin, an ethnomusicologist at Dartmouth College and Freelon’s fellow 2024 CCDI artist/scholar in residence, presented a motion-activated soundscape. By entering the building, attendees could play different noises, from Martin’s vocals to wind from the cemetery where Martin’s grandmother is buried, transforming the barn into an instrument.

Freelon’s work centers Black children navigating unimaginable circumstances during enslavement. Her artwork recognizes them, memorializes their experiences and highlights their innate joy.

Maya Freelon’s “Beautiful Flower,” inspired by the photo above. Prints and Photographs Division.

“Whippersnappers” was part of the North Carolina Division of State Historic Sites Art on the Land initiative, which seeks to build connections to sites of memory through artistic collaborations, installations and gatherings.

“‘Whippersnappers’ brings these images out of the silence of the archive into a contemporary moment where the viewer can imagine more just futures,” said Johnica Rivers, NCHS curator at large.

Projects like Freelon’s, which ran through January 2025, honor the experiences of Black communities while showcasing Library materials to new audiences.

Since 2022, the Mellon-funded CCDI has supported individuals and institutions in exploring the Library’s digital collections and highlighting the perspectives of Black, Indigenous, Hispanic/Latino, Asian American and other communities of color.

“Maya Freelon’s powerful offering to our youngest ancestors,” NCHS Director Michelle Lanier says, activated “a posture of healing through reclaiming and reframing memory.”

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