Library of Congress's Blog, page 55

Jason Reynolds: Grab the Mic August Newsletter

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You know what no one teaches you how to do? Pose for photos. I know, some of you are like, “We’ve been being told to smile for pictures from the moment we’re born.” And yes, that’s true. But the whole “smile” or “say cheese” thing only takes the top of your forehead to the bottom of your chin into consideration. But what do you do with your hands? What about your shoulders? Should they be rolled back, and if so, will that make you look like a puffy-chested chickenhawk? By the way, there’s nothing wrong with looking like a puffy-chested chickenhawk if that’s what you are. But what if you’re not? And what about knees? Should they be bent, or not? I’ve heard if you lock your knees you’ll pass out, but I’ve been trying since I was six and it’s never happened. Not saying it can’t, or won’t, but let’s just say I’ve been waiting to turn a photo shoot into a monumental moment for 30 long years. (Kids, don’t try this at home, or outside, or anywhere, no matter what your older sibling says.)

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One of Jason Reynolds’  NAYPL pictures. Photo: Shawn Miller.

The point I’m trying to make is … I don’t like taking photos. That’s all. I find it to be pretty stressful. To me, looking at a photo of myself is like hearing my own voice, strange and ultimately disappointing. Because, in the same way my voice never sounds the same recorded as it does in my head, my eyes, nose and mouth never look as cool in photos as I think they do on my face.

Which brings us to my ambassador photos. Ahem.

By now, you’ve seen them. The tweed blazer, the navy trousers—the professor’s uniform. The chambray shirt to at least make it “cool” professor. That silly smile that looks like I’m saying, Exactly! for no reason at all. The whole, you know, ambassador thing. I’ll admit, it’s not horrible. But, honestly, I don’t recognize myself. It’s like looking at my middle school teachers’ hope of what I’d become, but not at all who I am. I’m a black T-shirt, black jeans kind of guy. A pair of cool sneakers. A necklace or two around my neck. Simple and comfortable, with a tiny touch of flash. Maybe smiling, maybe not.

So, I called my buddy, Dayo, who’s a photographer, and asked if he’d take some new photos of me. Ones that represented who I am. I went to his studio (masked up) in a linen T-shirt that wrinkled in the car (ugh), a pair of jeans and my ambassador medal. Dayo set up a light as bright as the sun (as hot, too!) then pulled out his camera, stood at least six feet back, and got to clicking.

Click, flash! Click, flash! Do your thing. Click, flash. Find your comfort. Click, flash! What does an ambassador look like? Dayo asked, between…click, flash!

After a half an hour, we were done.

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Jason Reynolds, more comfortable version.  Photo: Adedeyo Kosokoto.

A week later, he sent me the photos and when I looked at them, it was so surprising to see myself. As myself. In myself. And in that moment I realized why posed photos have always felt strange to me. Perhaps, posing for pictures feels weird because I don’t live a posed life. Sometimes I want to smile. Sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I feel like slouching and slumping. Other times I feel like a puffy-chested chickenhawk. And I know I’m not the only one who feels this way. Who feels like a photo can’t capture a person who’s not … captured. Does that make sense? It does in my head, but you know how your voice never sounds the same when you … never mind.

Either way—and this is the point—when you see me in a photograph, I hope you see me as I see myself. See me as I am. My mother’s son. My daddy’s boy. My brothers’ brother, the middle child. A homeboy to my homies. A knucklehead to my neighbors. A regular guy, in T-shirt and jeans, who just happens to be the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

And when I see you, I’ll see you as more than the subject of a click and a flash. More than a lump of clay, standing awkwardly waiting on someone to tell you to smile. Someone to tell you to be perfect for a picture. Someone to tell you to deny yourself for a memory that won’t even be an authentic memory because of the denial. That’s right, when I see you, I’ll see you as you are.

And if you don’t know what to do with your hands, well, hopefully you’ll feel comfortable enough to put them in mine.

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Counting Down with #19Suffrage Stories: 100th Anniversary of the 19th Amendment

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Tune in on Instagram and Twitter to learn 19 stories you may not know from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian and National Archives. Every weekday from August 3 through Women’s Equality Day, August 26, we’re counting down from 19 to 1 with a new story each day on our Instagram and Twitter feeds.

Women fought long and hard for the vote—before and after the passage of the 19th Amendment, which declares the right to vote “shall not be denied … on account of sex.” Diverse communities and organizations blazed the trail for equal voting rights across the nation. For many women, especially women of color, the fight didn’t end when the 19th Amendment went into effect on August 26, 1920. Yet the stories of these suffragists have often been overlooked.

To mark the centennial of the 19th Amendment, the Library of Congress, Smithsonian and National Archives are collaborating to bring these stories to you on social media. From today until August 26, you can follow weekday posts to learn voting-rights history drawn from all three institutions’ collections. You can also use our set of animated social media GIFs and Instagram stickers on your social media posts to mark the centennial.

Follow these accounts on social media to experience #19SuffrageStories:

Library of Congress @LibraryCongress on Instagram and Twitter
Smithsonian on @Smithsonian Instagram and Twitter
National Archives @USNatArchives on Instagram and Twitter

Don’t just learn this history—make it your own and share it with friends. Add our ten new voting-inspired stickers to your Instagram stories. Don a historic suffrage sash in your selfie. Add the words of suffragists Ida B. Wells, Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin and Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee to your posts. To use the stickers, create an Instagram Story, click on the sticker icon, and search for #19SuffrageStories. You can also find GIFs of all the stickers through GIPHY.

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Explore the Stories Behind the Stickers and Share Them on Social Media

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This sticker is an illustrated version of the iconic women’s suffrage sash. Suffragists wore these to rallies, parades and public-speaking opportunities to get out their message. You can use this sticker to virtually wear a sash and show your support for the women who worked to win voting rights.

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Cofounded by Mary Church Terrell, the National Association of Colored Women’s motto can be seen on this banner in the collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. The organization promoted suffrage, education and other causes. “Lifting as we climb” represented a call for African American women to work for the “uplift” and empowerment of others in the African American community through suffrage, education and community service.

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A modern interpretation of signs used by groups to promote civic engagement, this sticker was inspired by a 1956 photograph in the collection of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. The African American women in this photograph were lined up along the Citizenship Education Project’s motorcade route encouraging voting and voter registration. Many African American women could not vote unimpeded until 1965 with the passage of the Voting Rights Act—long after the 19th Amendment went into effect.

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More than 1,000 women joined picket lines outside the White House during 1917 to demand voting rights for women, as shown in this photograph from our collections. They wanted President Woodrow Wilson’s support of an amendment to the Constitution to grant women the vote. Their signs read, “Mr. President, what will you do for Woman Suffrage?” and “How Long Must Women Wait for Liberty?” Though President Wilson often tipped his hat as he rode through the White House gates, police arrested the protestors. Between June and November, 218 protesters from 26 states were arrested and charged with “obstructing sidewalk traffic.”

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A portrait of Ida B. Wells in the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery inspired this sticker. Wells cofounded the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago in 1913 to advocate for women’s rights and to push for the election of African Americans. She also famously refused to march in a segregated section of a suffrage parade that same year in Washington, D.C. As an investigative journalist, she fought for civil rights, traveling the South and gathering records in a decades-long campaign against lynching that made its horrors known nationwide. Her quote, “The way to right wrongs is to turn the light of truth upon them,” comes from her book, “The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader.”

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Marie Louise Bottineau Baldwin championed American Indian rights. She often invoked American Indian women’s power within their communities in interviews with the press. In 1913, she marched with fellow lawyers in the Washington, D.C., suffrage parade. She was also a leader in the Society for American Indians, an organization that advocated for an act to make American Indian U.S. citizens. The Indian Citizenship Act, passed in 1924, helped some American Indian women gain voting rights, years after the passage of the 19th Amendment. When asked if she was a suffragist in 1914, Baldwin laughed. She asked the reporter, “Did you ever know that the Indian women were among the first suffragists, and that they exercised the right of recall?” This portrait is based on Baldwin’s photograph from her personnel file from when she worked for the Federal government. She chose to be photographed in traditional dress, a radical choice for the time. You can learn about Baldwin from the National Archives.

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In the early 1900s, Chinese immigrants could not become naturalized citizens, but Mabel Ping-Hua Lee still advocated for voting rights for American women. Lee began writing and speaking publicly about women’s suffrage when she was a teenager. At age 16, she rode at the head of a 1912 New York suffrage parade. She later led a contingent of Chinese and Chinese American women in a New York City suffrage parade in 1917. Many women of Asian descent were prevented from becoming citizens and voting until the Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed (1943) and the Immigration and Nationality Act was passed (1952). Her quote in this sticker comes from a speech she gave around 1915 arguing for gender equality in China. You can learn more about Lee from the National Archives.

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When you add this “Votes for Women” pin to your selfie, you’re “wearing” a historic suffrage symbol from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “It’s easy to dismiss buttons, stickers, t-shirts and giveaways as things that are silly,” said National Museum of American History curator Lisa Kathleen Graddy, “But they help us find people who think like we do.” See other examples of popular suffrage merch in this video.

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Latina suffragists, including Adelina “Nina” Otero-Warren and Maria de Guadalupe Evangelina Lopez de Lowther, ran bilingual campaigns for the vote. Otero-Warren ensured materials were printed in both English and Spanish for the New Mexico chapter of the Congressional Union (later the National Woman’s Party). Lopez, head of her local College Equal Suffrage League, gave lectures in Spanish to ensure that the messages of the suffrage movement reached the Latino community in Los Angeles. Copies of Spanish-language suffrage materials are incredibly rare. We honor their contributions to the suffrage movement by re-creating pins encouraging Spanish-speakers to vote.

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Use this sticker to tell friends and family to follow along! If you follow all 19 stories, you will learn why gold, white and purple were chosen to represent suffrage.

Make These Suffrage Stories Accessible to All

In addition, all month long you can join our 19th Amendment Wikipedia Edit-a-thon. Make 19 edits to Wikipedia pages throughout the month of August to help expand the coverage of the women’s suffrage movement online. Virtual trainings will be held every Tuesday and Thursday in August from 11:30 a.m.–1 p.m. ET.

This story is cross-posted on the blogs of the  Library of Congress ,  National Archives  and  Smithsonian’s American Women’s History Initiative .

Minerva’s Kaleidoscope: Just for Kids and Families

This is a guest post from Naomi Coquillon, chief of Informal Learning at the Library, whose team has launched a new blog for families, Minerva’s Kaleidoscope. 

Hello, families! Our new blog, Minerva’s Kaleidoscope, is designed just for you. Named for the Roman goddess of wisdom, it’s a source for parents and caregivers to find materials to spark kids’ imaginations and to get updates on programs at the Library. The blog is led by the Informal Learning Office, a new effort whose mission is to connect kids, families and teens to the collections and resources of the Library and to inspire you to use the Library for your own creative purposes.

Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden greets visitors on the expo floor at the National Book Festival, September 1, 2018. Photo by Shawn Miller/Library of Congress.

There’s a lot to discover. For the past ten years, the Young Readers Center has welcomed families to read together in the Jefferson building. There also has been great content featured around the Library that has valuable material for kids and families. Some highlights:

A kids category and a category for the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature on the Library’s main blog
A category for the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature on the Poetry and Literature blog
Highlights from the National Book Festival (NBF) for children and families on the NBF blog
Comics highlights from the Serial and Government Publications blog, Headlines and Heroes
A blog for teachers (and their students)

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Mosaic of Minerva, by Elihu Vedder. Jefferson Building. Photo: Carol Highsmith.

There’s also a variety of intriguing posts on other blogs. The Library also has a newly revitalized webpage of resources for family engagement, a page for kids focused on reading and writing, and a teens page.

The Minerva blog will be a place to draw the best of these resources together. We hope this space will help you to feel more connected to the Library and that you will use the blog as a way to communicate with us, too—this isn’t meant to be a one-way street. Please share ideas and questions in the comments, but note that any comments from children should not share a last name or other specific identifying information and must include parental permission. In addition to activity ideas, we’ll share information on ways to participate in upcoming programs and in planning for the Library’s new learning lab scheduled to open in 2023. We hope that looking through Minerva’s Kaleidoscope will give you a way to see and explore the Library’s vast collections in new and creative ways.

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World War II — Through Patton’s Lens

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George S. Patton in an undated photograph. Prints and Photographs Division.

For centuries, history’s great commanders have documented their wartime experiences in diaries and memoirs, in their own words.

But what if we could see war through their eyes, as if Caesar, Napoleon or Grant had carried a camera and photographed war as he experienced it?

Gen. George S. Patton, the brilliant but troublesome U.S. Army commander of World War II, did just that during his campaigns across North Africa and Europe from 1942 through 1945.

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A troop of Army bridge builders. Photo: George S. Patton. Manuscript Division.

Patton, an amateur photographer who carried an Army-issued Leica camera, took hundreds of photos of the war he saw — ruined villages and fleeing refugees, ordinary soldiers and illustrious commanders, humble camps and his palatial headquarters in Sicily, where, he wrote, the maids all gave him the fascist salute.

Those photos today reside in the Library’s Manuscript Division. Patton died following a car accident in Germany just months after the war ended, and in 1964 his family donated his papers — including his wartime diary and photo albums — to the Library.

The general had mailed the photos home to his wife, Beatrice, to create a record of his wartime experiences — and, he said, to help set the record straight. “I’m going to send you photographs and letters so that some future historian can make a less-untrue history of me,” Patton told her.

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Troops struggle to push a jeep out of deep mud. Photo: George S. Patton. Manuscript Division.

Beatrice wrote captions and placed his photos into albums alongside images of the general taken by others. In the albums, GIs cross a snowfield near Bastogne, German prisoners march toward the rear, soldiers dig a jeep out of bumper-deep mud; Patton wades ashore during the invasion of Sicily, meets with Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower, plays with his pet bull terrier, Willie.

The albums and diary also chronicle Patton’s time in limbo following two infamous incidents during the Sicily campaign in August 1943 — Patton twice slapped soldiers suffering battle fatigue, setting off a public furor and drawing the wrath of Eisenhower and Congress. Awaiting a new assignment, Patton restlessly toured forts in Malta, pyramids in Egypt and battlefields and cemeteries in Sicily.

“A year ago, I commanded an entire corps,” he wrote to Beatrice after visiting the 2nd Armored Division cemetery. “Today, I command barely my self-respect.”

Patton claimed one photo saved his life. The general stopped to photograph artillery in action and, seconds later, a shell landed in the path ahead — just where, Patton said, he would have been if he hadn’t stopped to use his camera.

Patton took the near-miss as a sign that God was saving him for greater achievements, which indeed soon came.

Only a few days later, he was called to England, where he eventually took command of the Third Army for the campaign that followed the Normandy invasion. Patton led Third Army on a rapid, highly successful drive across France, engineered the relief of besieged American troops at the Battle of the Bulge and, by the end of the war, pushed his army deep into Nazi Germany.

He captured it all, in his own words and through the lens of his own camera — today, preserved for posterity in Library collections.

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Soldiers marching across a snow covered field. Photo: George S. Patton. Manuscript Division.

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Einstein Fellow: Amara Alexander

Amara Alexander, a K-5 engineering teacher from Chattanooga, Tenn., is the 2019-20 Albert Einstein Distinguished Educator Fellow at the Library. She wrote this piece for the Library of Congress Magazine.

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Amara Alexander. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Few things help students learn like getting up close to primary sources — the raw materials of history.

Seeing, say, the penciled sketches of experimental telephones that Alexander Graham Bell drew in his lab notebooks nearly 150 years ago helps young people better understand the engineering-design process and lets them see history unfold.

As the 2019-20 Einstein Fellow at the Library of Congress, I have spent the past several months exploring such treasures with a teacher-researcher’s goals in mind.

The need for primary sources — original documents and objects created at the time under study — to facilitate lessons focused on STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) education has guided my investigations.

Primary sources increase student engagement, growth and retention of concepts. The resources I discover during my year here will enhance my classroom instruction and the learning experiences of my students.

The STEM-related historical documents and artifacts in the Library’s many reading rooms and online are captivating.

In the Manuscript Division, I discovered African American inventor Lucean Arthur Headen, who owned his own automobile manufacturing company in the 1920s and produced a car he designed called the Headen Pace Setter. Wow! A moment in time, previously unknown to me, unfolded as a result of my research here and yielded connections between STEM and history. Knowing this story will create additional opportunities for me to expose students to new STEM career paths.

In addition to visiting reading rooms, I’ve searched the Library’s digitized collections to uncover primary sources related to science and engineering practices.

Through the Library’s website, inventions and discoveries from bygone eras leap from Bell’s lab journal pages into the hands of today’s students, inspiring their own creativity and extending their depth of knowledge. Historical documents chronicling the advancement of weather technology transform the history of meteorology from an abstract conversation to a hands-on exploration rich with analysis and questioning.

Taking on the role of a teacher-researcher empowers me to explore new topics, make unique discoveries and share what I’ve learned with fellow educators, colleagues, students and parents. Thanks to my time at the Library of Congress, my community now has access to primary sources and historical expertise that will expand the power of learning and advance knowledge and understanding.

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Can I Copyright This?

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A 1907 volume of copyright applications. Photo: David Rice.

This is a guest post from Nicole Lamberson of the Copyright Office. She explains why copyright law safeguards the great American novel but not a recipe or a selfie taken by a monkey.

Since George Washington signed the first federal copyright law in 1790, copyright has continuously evolved into a system that encompasses everyone. Everyone uses copyright-protected works daily, and everyone is a copyright owner — even if they don’t realize it.

Copyright is a type of intellectual property that protects an original work of authorship as soon as it is fixed in a tangible medium of expression.

So what does that mean?

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The official copyright seal. Photo: David Rice.

To be copyrightable, a work only needs to meet a few minimal standards:

First, a human being must have created the work. Selfies taken by a very talented monkey or paintings by an artistic elephant aren’t eligible. Similarly, a work produced by a machine without any creative input or intervention from a human author doesn’t qualify.

Second, the work must be an independently created, original work of authorship. This means that an author can’t copy someone else’s work and claim it as their own. But if two authors create similar works without ever knowing of the other’s work, copyright protects both.

Third, a work must possess a minimum degree of creativity to successfully claim copyright. A basic or routine expression lacking a creative spark, such as a telephone directory with names and numbers listed alphabetically, is not enough for copyright — no matter how much effort it took to compile.

And fourth, the work must be fixed in a tangible medium of expression, meaning it has been captured in a sufficiently permanent medium that can be perceived, reproduced or communicated for more than a short time. If an individual walks around singing a spontaneously created song but then doesn’t write it down or record it, copyright can’t protect it.

With few requirements, it would seem that most creative works qualify for copyright protection; however, the law excludes quite a few types.

What isn’t protected by copyright?

Ideas. Having an idea for the next great American novel isn’t enough. It has to be written down first. Copyright will protect specific fixed content, but not the idea itself. Likewise, concepts, principles, discoveries and inventions are not copyrightable on their own.

Recipes. A family recipe may yield a unique take on a delicious dish, but copyright won’t protect it. Copyright law specifically excludes procedures, processes, systems, methods and facts. This means a mere listing of ingredients or simple instructions for making a dish won’t be protected. However, any written description of the dish or the process, along with any photos or illustrations, might be.

Familiar symbols and designs. Familiar shapes, symbols and designs cannot be protected because they do not contain a sufficient amount of creativity. A company’s logo may fall into this category, as do blank forms, layouts and formats, and typefaces.

Names, titles and slogans. A new business may create a fun, short slogan to describe its services, but copyright law won’t protect it. This is because words and short phrases do not contain a sufficient amount of authorship or creativity.

Remember, copyright is just one form of intellectual property law. Trademark and patent law might protect what copyright can’t.

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Remembering John Lewis: The Power of ‘Good Trouble’

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U.S. Rep. John Lewis speaks at the opening ceremony for the new “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words” exhibition, December 4, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller

Few people that you meet truly rouse the best in you. They are walking heroes, living historymakers. Their words and deeds have a thunderous impact on your soul. Congressman John Robert Lewis was such a person for me.  I join the world in mourning the passing of this civil rights legend.

The son of a sharecropper growing up in rural Alabama, he said as a little boy he was in constant fear because of signs that said “no colored boys, no colored girls.” His parents and grandparents used to tell him “don’t get in trouble.” Nevertheless, as a young man he was inspired to activism by the Montgomery Bus Boycott that started when Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat.

This past December, the Library of Congress opened an extensive exhibition, “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words,” where the congressman spoke. “Rosa Parks inspired us to get in trouble. And I’ve been getting in trouble ever since,” said Lewis. “She inspired us to find a way, to get in the way, to get what I call good trouble, necessary trouble.” Over the years, he was able to meet and work with Rosa Parks who taught him about the philosophy and discipline of non-violence. “She kept on saying to each one of us, you too can do something,” he said. “And for people if you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, do something. We cannot afford to be quiet.” (Watch the full video below.)

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John Lewis, leader of SNCC, rises to speak at the March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963. Photo by Bob Adelman

During the exhibition opening, John Lewis told how he was inspired by Rosa Parks to write to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. He was given a round trip bus ticket to Montgomery to meet with Dr. King and upon meeting him was nicknamed, “The Boy from Troy.”

He risked his life countless times by organizing voter registration drives, sit-ins at lunch counters and was beaten and arrested for challenging the injustice of Jim Crow segregation in the South. While still a young man, John Lewis was already a nationally recognized leader and was named one of the Big Six leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. He was also the chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and his papers and interviews from this time are held at the Library of Congress. At the age of 23, he was a keynote speaker at the historic March on Washington in 1963.

In March 7, 1965, John Lewis led more than 600 peaceful protestors across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma to demonstrate the need for voting rights in the state of Alabama. They were greeted by brutal attacks by Alabama State Troopers that became known as “Bloody Sunday.” This photo from the Library of Library collection is still one of the most powerful images from that day.

Despite numerous arrests and physical injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. He was elected to the Atlanta City Council and then the representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District. He stuck to Rosa Parks’ advice to never be quiet and to continue getting into “good trouble.”

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SNCC leader John Lewis cringes as state trooper swings his club at Lewis’ head during attempted march on the state capitol at Montgomery, March 7, 1965. UPI Telephoto

Despite numerous arrests and physical injuries, John Lewis remained a devoted advocate of the philosophy of nonviolence. He was elected to the Atlanta City Council and then the representative of Georgia’s Fifth Congressional District. He stuck to Rosa Parks’ advice to never be quiet and to continue getting into “good trouble.”

The congressman was a frequent guest at the Library of Congress. His generous spirit touched everyone he met in the halls of the Library – whether it was reading his graphic novel “March” or speaking at public events – his gentle temperament kept you at ease. His graphic novel allowed him to continue to connect with a new generation of young readers in the hope of inspiring them the way Rosa Parks had inspired him.

In November, John Lewis celebrated the AIDS Memorial Quilt collection arriving at the Library of Congress. His message of peaceful resolve, perseverance and care still rings loud. “In the height of the civil rights movement, we spoke of love,” Lewis said. “On one occasion Dr. King said to some of us, just love everybody. Love them who fail to love you, just love. Just love a little hell out of everybody.”

The world mourns. But we also celebrate a great warrior and fighter of injustice. Let us remember his story and listen to the words he passionately shared for more than a half a century. Congressman John Robert Lewis embodies the best in all of us. Let his legacy and spirit live on. I offer my prayers and condolences to his family and to the grateful people of his district in Georgia.

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U.S. Rep. John Lewis speaks during a ceremony announcing the Library of Congress as the new home of the AIDS Memorial Quilt Archive, Nov. 20, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller

“Hamilton” — About Alexander and Eliza’s Last Goodbye

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Alexander Hamilton. Painting: John Trumbull. Prints and Photographs Division.

Okay, technically, there is a major PLOT SPOILER BELOW if you haven’t seen the play or watched the filmed version of  “Hamilton” on Disney+, so this is your chance to leave RIGHT NOW.

(Pauses.)

That was your public service announcement that Alexander Hamilton was shot to death by Aaron Burr, then the Vice President, 216 years ago this past weekend. The fatal shot was fired about 7 a.m. on July 11, 1804, in Weehawken, N.J. It was a Wednesday, sunny and a little breezy.

The Library has a huge collection of Hamilton’s papers, more than 12,000 items, including dozens of letters and writings that made their way directly or indirectly into the musical. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden live-Tweeted the show last night, showcasing many of the Library’s holdings. The papers show that Hamilton’s life was much different than the play.

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Elizabeth Hamilton, nee Elizabeth Schuyler. Prints and Photographs Division.

The quick version: Broadway musicals aren’t documentaries. The actual first secretary of the Treasury was opposed to slavery but not as vehemently as he is on stage; he and Burr moved in many of the same circles but their careers were not as intertwined as the play has it; and he was much more of an elitist than the hero of common man, as playwright and actor Lin-Manuel Miranda portrays him.

Still, much of the play really is based on history, particularly the 2004 Ron Chernow biography “Alexander Hamilton,” which, in turn, draws in part on Library documents.  This brings us to one of the most heartbreaking scenes in the play, in which Alexander says goodbye to his beloved wife Eliza for the last time.

Although Eliza destroyed nearly all of their letters before she died (perhaps the inspiration for the “I’m erasing myself from the narrative,” line she says in the play), some letters do survive. These show that there was romantic passion throughout their 24-year marriage, which produced eight children. Although he infamously had an extramarital affair with Maria Reynolds — thus, “The Reynolds Pamphlet,” in 1797 — the couple conceived two children after that and remained devoted partners, hosting parties together even in the last week of his life. Their youngest child was just two when he was killed.

Hamilton, of course, did not tell Eliza or hardly anyone else of the impending duel with Burr, as was the custom. Burr and Hamilton had been social acquaintances, if not quite friends, for more than two decades. They had very different political views and had often clashed in that arena. After Hamilton had scuttled some of Burr’s political opportunities, he also made disparaging remarks about Burr’s character in the spring of 1804. This eventually made its way into the papers.  Burr demanded an apology or retraction, which Hamilton peevishly declined to do. (They really did sign their letters to one another “Your obedient servant.”)

Burr then challenged him to a duel, a formal event that had, like any other social function, a required etiquette. (Thus in the play, the “10 Dual Commandments.”) As the date of the duel approached, Hamilton wrote Eliza two letters that were to be given to her only if “I shall first have terminated my earthly career.” The first of these was dated July 4; the second, at 10 p.m. on July 10, the night before the duel.

In the first, Hamilton writes that he had to show up for the duel because his honor compelled him to do so: “If it had been possible for me to have avoided the interview, my love for you and my precious children would have been alone a decisive motive. But it was not possible, without sacrifices which would have rendered me unworthy of your esteem.”

In the second, according to the transcription at the National Archives, he says that his Christian faith required him to throw away his shot and make no attempt to harm Burr. “The Scrup(les of a Christian have deter)mined me to expose my own li(fe to any) extent rather than subject my s(elf to the) guilt of taking the life of (another.)” Should he die, he urged her to “remember that you are a Christian. God’s Will be done! The will of a merciful God must be good.”

The next morning in Weehawken, on a small ledge just above the river and at the base of a high bluff, Hamilton fired a shot several feet to the right and a dozen feet above Burr, hitting a tree limb, according to Chernow’s account. Burr shot Hamilton in the abdomen.

The ball crashed through a rib, went through his liver and stuck in his spine. Hamilton gasped, “I am a dead man” and collapsed. He lapsed in and out of consciousness while being rowed back across the Hudson River to New York. He was taken to a friend’s mansion, his family rushing to his side. He was partially paralyzed by then. At one point, Eliza lined up all of their children at the foot of his bed so that he could see them one last time, Chernow writes. He died the day after the shooting.

So we can imagine Eliza’s state of grief when she opened these letters, her husband either dying or dead. The most famous excerpt is the closing line from the July 4 letter: “Adieu best of wives and best of Women. Embrace all my darling Children for me. Ever yours, A.H.”

Miranda dramatized that last line. In the scene, it is the dead of the night, a few hours before the duel. Eliza awakens to find Alexander writing. She asks him to come back to bed, but he explains he has a meeting at dawn. “Hey,” he says fondly, as she turns to go back to bed, “best of wives and best of women.”

In the play (although not in history), it is the last thing he says to her.

He wasn’t yet 50.

Miranda, writing in “Hamilton: The Revolution,” a coffee-table book that reprints the play’s lyrics alongside his footnotes, says of that heartbreaking moment: “I wept the whole time I wrote this scene.”

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Closing lines of Hamilton’s farewell letter to his wife, before being killed in a duel with Aaron Burr. “Adieu best of wives and best of Women.” Manuscript Division.

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Jason Reynolds: Grab the Mic Newsletter

[image error]How do you write a newsletter when you don’t have much news? That’s what I’m thinking about right now as I type this to you. I almost started it, “Dear Reader, I don’t have much to say,” but that felt a bit dramatic. Instead, I decided to frame it around the fact that this is a nearly newsless newsletter. And by newsless, I mean, I don’t have anything new to report. At least not much. That’s where the word “news” comes from. It’s a 15th- take on the pluralizing of the word new. As in, current. So, what’s new(s)?

Well, for me, yesterday I had a couch delivered to my house. The movers came around 10 a.m. and took about 30 minutes hoisting this massive thing up the concrete stairs in front of my building, one step after the next, and then another 30 minutes trying to figure out how to maneuver it through the front door without damaging the piece of furniture or scratching my walls with its legs.

I didn’t help. I tried to, but they wouldn’t let me. They moved tables and rugs and attempted to turn the couch one way, then another, then back out the front door, flipped the couch over, then tried again, tilting it down, sliding it, leaning it, pushing it.

“Don’t worry,” one of the guys told me. He was the leader of the movers, and in the midst of what seemed like a brutal experience in suffocating heat, he somehow mustered the nerve to smile.

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Photo: Jason Reynolds.

“I can help.”

“No, we got it.”

“But what about if we take it around back? Might be easier.”

“No.” He turned to me, sweat bibbing the front of his T-shirt. “This is nothing new.”

Ten minutes later, they were fluffing the pillows of my new couch. It was in. And it immediately changed the face  of my living room.

I should say, the couch is pink. A bright pink. Almost fuchsia. The kind of pink that lifts a space, washes it in upbeat. In joy. And that’s the reason I got it. The hunter-green slab I’d had before was cool, but kind of a downer. Seemed like it belonged in a darker space, and right now, dark ain’t what I need. But this couch? Well, let’s just say it’s brighter than I remember it being when I ordered it months before the lockdown. That’s for sure.

“It’s beautiful,” the leader of the movers said. I think he could tell I wasn’t quite settled on it, so he repeated, “Beautiful.”

He told me to enjoy my new couch, we pretended to shake hands, and he and the other movers were gone.

I sat on the couch for a while. Then slumped down until I was eventually stretched out on it, and stayed there longer than expected. I got up to do a Zoom thing, then went right back. I slipped in and out of sleep and watched something on TV that I can’t remember now, which is kind of weird. And before going to bed, I looked at it—this giant tongue in the middle of my house—shook my head, turned the light out and could still see it.

This morning, as I climbed the stairs ascending into the living room, guess what? The couch … was still pink. But the room felt more morning than the morning before. Like there was already sun in the house before I opened the shutters. And on top of that, after sitting on it, begrudgingly, and reading the newspaper (even more begrudgingly), I can confirm it’s the most comfortable couch I’ve ever sat on. So even though it’s doing exactly what I wanted, and giving me precisely what I asked for, I still—still—have to get used to it.

New is strange, ain’t it? Almost always.

But old is . . . old. That’s why you’ve never wondered what I’m going to say in my oldsletter, which, by the way, would be a letter about all the things in history which led to . . . why a green couch is a little too dark to keep in my house right now.

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Free to Use and Reuse: Wedding Pictures

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John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier on their wedding day. Photo: Toni Frissell. Prints and Photographs Division.

Who doesn’t love a good wedding picture?

Bride and groom, happy but stressed, the day rushing past, friends and family (the former you choose, no such luck for the latter), high and low drama, and all those overdressed people wondering if there’s an open bar at the reception. Ah.

Your favorite national library has lots of wedding pictures from around the planet, part of our near-endless collection of Free to Use and Reuse sets of copyright-free images. These are yours for the taking and cover just about everything — cities, movie theaters, travel posters, genealogy, discovery and exploration and so on. This includes weddings.

To start off our sampler, let’s drop in on one of the most famous unions in the American 20th century — John K. Kennedy and Jacqueline Bouvier on Sept. 12, 1953. Kennedy was 36, a Senator from Massachusetts and son of a ruthless power-broker of a father. Bouvier, 24, had grown up wealthy, both in East Hampton and then, when her mother remarried, on the 300-acre Hammersmith Farm in Newport, Rhode Island.

The wedding drew 750 well-heeled members of the rich, famous and politically connected. The reception, at Hammersmith farm, drew more than 1,000. Bouvier’s dress was designed by Ann Lowe, a Black designer. It and all the bridesmaids dresses were destroyed by water from a burst pipe 10 days before the ceremony. A heroic effort by Lowe to remake the dresses averted social disaster (although, famously, Bouvier still didn’t like it.)

In the photo, the bride and groom are facing one another near a split-rail fence at the farm in an open field that, were it not for the wealth involved, one might call a pasture. He’s looking at the camera, knees bent, casual and at ease. She’s looking at him, standing straight and apparently tense. This might be attributed, if nothing else, to the massive bridal veil she’s having to keep in place. The photo, in black and white, lends to the idea that it took place in another time.

Such was the beginning of what many Americans would come to call Camelot, the fairy-tale version of the young president, his gorgeous wife and their handsome children in the White House. It was, of course, such a brief time.

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Wedding of Crown Prince Yoshihito and Princess Kujo Sadako. Print by Torajiro Kasai. Prints and Photographs Division.

Speaking of royal weddings, the Japanese have been holding them for a very long time. Above we see a union that, like the Kennedy nuptials, had resonance throughout the 20th century. This was the auspicious wedding of Crown Prince Yoshihito and Princess Kujo Sadako on May 10, 1900, which bridged two eras of Japan’s long history.

First, in the background is the father of the prince, Meiji, the 122nd Emperor of Japan, along with other members of the imperial family. Meiji was a major transitional figure, helping lead Japan from two centuries of isolated feudalism into becoming a world power. His son — the groom — would take over after his death in 1912.

But most important for our purposes here is the fact that one year after this wedding took place, the crown prince and princess had a son. His name was Hirohito. He became emperor upon his father’s death in 1926 and led Japan when it invaded China and then into World War II. (The pilot who led the raid on Pearl Harbor reported the result of the raid to Hirohito personally; the map he used for the briefing is now in the Library.) Hirohito served as emperor in a greatly changed Japan until 1989, becoming the longest imperial ruler in the nation’s history, serving 63 years.

All of that was set into motion, in its way, by this wedding.

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An unknown Bedouin bride. Photographer: American Colony Photo Department. Prints and Photographs Division.

In our final photo, we go from the extremely famous to the completely anonymous. We know little about this arresting image: not the Bedouin woman’s name, husband-to-be, exact location or even the date, other than “approximately 1900 to 1920.”

We do know that it’s from the G. Eric and Edith Matson Photograph Collection, a set of 22,000 glass and film photographs and negatives taken in what was then called Palestine (present day Israel and the West Bank) from 1898 to 1946. They were created by the American Colony Photo Department and its successor firm, the Matson Photo Service. The picture is part of a “Bedouin wedding series” but the caption on the negative just reads, “The bride.” That’s it. The Bedouins roamed the region as nomads, so there are any number of places the photograph might have been taken over the course of two decades.

Still, in many ways this photograph is the most expressive of the three. Those eyes. Those hands. This woman, unlike the two above, was not born into a life of physical ease; you only need look at sinewy strength in her hands and the rough fingernails to understand that she knows work. She is fully present, gazing at the camera as if it is the only thing in the world. Though she is clearly posed, there is nothing pretend or artificial about her gaze. She is there.

So, let’s look again. She is gazing into the future as clearly as she is the lens itself. There is a warmth in the depth of those eyes. There is a the trace of a smile in those lips, an expression that could just as easily pull back into a peal of laughter as anything else. One is left, at the end, hoping the coming years were as kind to her as history could allow.

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