Library of Congress's Blog, page 59

Dav Pilkey At Home — Plus Baby Frogs!

Dav Pilkey is back with another pair of short drawing tutorials and cheerful messages. It’s sort of the brand for the author and illustrator of “Dog Man” and “Captain Underpants” fame, and we’re delighted to have him drop by on Fridays for awhile.

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You can’t go wrong with baby frogs, and as adorable as they are, they’re pretty easy to draw, too. At least, so my kids tell me. (Mine keep turning out a little more wobbly than this.) Dav has plenty of other drawing lessons, which you can find on our Engage page. Grab a marker and jump right in!

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The Veterans History Project: Remembering V-E Day

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Gladyce “Pepper” Nypan, posing shortly after boot camp. Gladyce Nypan Collection, Veterans History Project, AFC2001/001/10236.

This is a guest post by Megan Harris, a senior reference specialist for the Library’s Veterans History Project, part of the American Folklife Center.

When the war ended, Gladyce “Pepper” Pederson Nypan cried, her tears dripping down into her dinner of mashed potatoes and gravy.

Benjamin Cooper wrote a love letter to his wife. Alfred Newman watched his comrades fire off live ammunition, so intense was their celebrating. Jerome Yellin was still high in the sky over Japan, completing his 19th mission as a fighter pilot with the 78th Fighter Squadron. It wasn’t until he landed that he heard the news of the enemy’s surrender.

When the war ended, George Sakato was recovering from combat injuries in a military hospital in England, and Robert Augur had recently returned from the Philippines to marry his hometown sweetheart. When the war ended, George Pearcy’s parents had just found out that their son had died as a prisoner of war seven months earlier, and was never coming home.

All of these stories and more are part of VHP’s newest installment of our online exhibit, Experiencing War, which commemorates the 75th anniversary of the end of World War II. Drawing on 15 individual narratives from the Veterans History Project, the exhibit explores the wartime experiences of just a sample of the 16 million Americans who spent the war in uniform, and the lasting effects of service that endured far beyond the victories in Europe (V-E Day) and Japan (V-J Day) in May and September 1945.

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Contemporary of Benjamin Cooper, November 23, 2010. Benjamin Cooper Collection, Veterans History Project, AFC2001/001/29737.

“War’s end” might conjure up images of jubilant crowds in Times Square, with nurses being kissed by sailors, and the other joyful celebrations around the globe which took place on V-E and V-J Day. But the personal stories included in the online exhibit complicate this perspective, revealing a deeper, more nuanced view of the end of the war and what it meant for those who served.

For example, those tears shed by Pepper Nypan? Those were tears of sorrow, not joy. She cried as she journeyed home after mustering out, realizing that her time in the Marine Corps had come to an end and she might never again see the women with whom she had served and developed incredibly close bonds. Benjamin Cooper’s romantic letter to his wife contained words of love, but also descriptions of what he had seen when his unit liberated Dachau, sights that would continue to haunt him for decades. George Sakato recovered from his wounds, but because of his ethnicity, his heroism in combat went unrecognized for over 50 years. He finally received the Medal of Honor in 2000. Though George Pearcy did not survive the war, his POW diary did, thanks to Robert Augur’s efforts (for the full story of Pearcy and Augur’s friendship and diaries, check out these three blog posts from 2016).

Seventy-five years after the end of World War II, we look back at these stories to understand how deeply and dramatically the war changed everything—from the landscape of American society to global politics, and, perhaps most importantly, the course of individual lives. For more stories of the end of the war, check out these previous web features, commemorating the 65th and 70th anniversaries.

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Something Fishy…

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From “The Fishes of North America,” 1898. Illustration by John Petrie. Rare Books/Special Collections. 

This is a guest post by Andrew Gaudio, a reference librarian in the Researcher & Reference Services Division. 

Human beings have been fishing for a very long time, but the actual study of fish did not begin until the middle of the 16th century. Things were not exactly precise.

At the time, the definition of a fish was any animal that lived in water. Dolphins, whales, and even hippopotami were all considered fish. We can agree this was a little too broad. (For the record, a fish is a limbless cold-blooded vertebrate with gills and fins living in water.)

Enter the hero of our story, French zoologist Pierre Belon. In 1551, he published “L’historie naturelle des estranges poissons marins,” or, “The Natural History of Strange Marine Fish.” The publisher was one R. Chaudiere of Paris (no further information survives). It ran about 110 pages, had 10 woodcut images of fish as well as a picture of a sea serpent, hippopotamus and a dolphin.

Where’s the hero stuff, you ask?

Right in front of you! This was the first book ever printed to contain an image of a fish!  Johannes Gutenberg had set off the revolution in Western publishing (using movable metal type) in Germany in 1455, but more than a century later, this was the first tome to picture a fish. (The things you learn at the Library!) This makes Belon’s work one of the foundational works of ichthyology, the scientific study of fish.

Second – and this is important — Belon backed into his spot in history. He was actually writing about dolphins (which are mammals). The only reason fish are pictured at all is to make sure readers could tell the difference between certain species of fish and dolphins.

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From “L’historie naturelle des estranges poissons marins,”  Paris, 1551. 

For example, the image above is a woodcut of a tuna. Here’s Belon’s description: “Seemingly the tuna, being a very large fish, having some likeness with the dolphin, has given rise to the occasion –  by many who may not recognize it – to suspect it for a dolphin. But in the end to remove this error, I wanted to provide its image, and moreover adding nothing of its description, for I do not claim to put anything in writing in this book, which does not suit the exterior and interior anatomy of the dolphin.”

So, while Belon was there first, we need a pretty big asterisk by his achievement.

By the 1700s, the modern definition of fish had emerged. Ever since, books about fish have looked more like current science. One of the first detailed studies of fish is the 22 volume “Histoire naturelle des poissons,”  or “Natural History of Fish,” by French ichthyologists Achille Valenciennes and Georges Cuvier. Their book was so massive that it was published over the course of 20 years, from 1828 to 1849.  It described over 2,000 species of fish, classified them into different families and groups, then gave them scientific names in Latin. Many of these names are still in use. A copy of this massive work is held in our general collections. Alas, it is not yet digitized, so it isn’t available online.

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Title page of “The Fishes of North America,” by William Harris. 1898.

Of course, no discussion of fish would be complete without the late 19th century series, “The Fishes of North America,” by William Harris.  It was published as a monthly subscription from 1891 to 1898, targeted at anglers who had an interest in the details of the fish they were most likely to catch.

Each section – called a fascicle — contained two lithographs of Petrie’s paintings. At left is an image of the title page of the first fascicle. At the top of this story is Petrie’s image of a yellow perch.

These are just a handful of the rare and unique items we have on ichthyology in our vast collections. You can check them out in our online catalog.

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Stone/Blackwell Marriage: To Love And Honor, But Not “Obey”

This is a guest blog by Elizabeth A. Novara, a historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division. The wedding described here can be found in the Blackwell Family Papers .

On May 1, 1855, Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell were joined together in marriage. The well-publicized wedding ceremony, 165 years ago this month, was unusual for the time.

For one, Stone insisted on retaining her birth name, a decision that was shocking in a period where women’s legal identities were subsumed under those of their husbands. Two, the couple protested married women’s subordinate status in society by removing the word “obey” from their marriage vows. They also published a formal protest pamphlet arguing for equality in marriage.

The original pamphlet is featured in the Library’s “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote” exhibition in the section “Love and Protest in a Suffrage Marriage.” Also included in the exhibition is one of the letters that Blackwell and Stone exchanged as they planned their vows.

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Lucy Stone with daughter Alice Stone Blackwell, ca 1857. Prints and Photographs Division.

Stone had originally decided never to marry, as she did not want to submit to a husband’s demands and legal rights. But Blackwell’s persistence and his dedication to equal rights principles changed her mind. Their protest pamphlet underscored the legal restrictions married women endured at the time: A wife was not entitled to her own person, guardianship of children, ownership of real estate or her own wages, nor could she inherit property in most circumstances. The beginning of the protest illustrates how strongly they felt about these injustices:

“While acknowledging our mutual affection by publicly assuming the relationship of husband and wife, yet in justice to ourselves and a great principle, we deem it our duty to declare that this act on our part implies no sanction of, nor promise of voluntary obedience to such of the present laws of marriage as refuse to recognize the wife as an independent rational being, while they confer upon the husband an injurious and unnatural superiority, investing him with legal powers which no honorable man would exercise, and which no man should possess.”

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Henry Browne Blackwell, ca 1850s, Prints and Photographs Division.

Meanwhile, in the 1840s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton and other women’s rights supporters in various states had successfully fought for the passage of the Married Women’s Property Acts, which allowed wives to control their own property. Still, these acts did not completely rectify married women’s status in society. Nor did they go unchallenged.

Stanton, who had organized the first women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls, wrote to Stone upon hearing about her decision to retain her name. Stanton declared, “Nothing has been done in the Woman’s Rights movement for some time that so rejoiced my heart as the announcement by you of a woman’s right to her name. To take a name is one of the first steps in freedom, and one of the first demands in a republican government.”

Stone’s contributions to the suffrage movement are often overshadowed by figures such as Stanton and Susan B. Anthony, but Stone was just as important to the movement. Stone’s correspondence demonstrates her activism as well as her connections with anti-slavery activists and equal-rights advocates. As a student at Oberlin College in 1847, Stone already knew she would fight for abolition and women’s rights. In a handwritten copy of a letter to her mother, she wrote, “I expect to plead not for the slave only, but for suffering humanity everywhere. Especially do I mean to labor for the elevation of my sex.” She did. Stone became a famous orator, holding audiences spellbound with her anti-slavery and women’s rights speeches.

In 1869, when the suffrage movement split over supporting the 15th Amendment, which granted voting rights to African American men but not to women of any race, Stone and Blackwell agreed to place their wishes on hold. They hoped women’s suffrage would be granted soon after the 15th Amendment was passed. It wasn’t.

Still, Stone and her husband continued to support equal rights for women and founded the American Woman Suffrage Association (AWSA) in 1869. Stanton and Anthony formed a rival organization, the National Woman Suffrage Association (NWSA). To rally support for the cause of voting rights for women, Stone and Blackwell began publishing The Woman’s Journal in 1870. It would far outlast Anthony’s rival journal, The Revolution, which ceased publication in 1872.

When the women’s suffrage movement reconciled in the 1890s and formed the National American Woman’s Suffrage Association (NAWSA), Alice Stone Blackwell (Stone and Blackwell’s only daughter) played a significant role. She became the editor of The Woman’s Journal, which was the primary national journal for the suffrage movement until it ceased publication in 1931. She also published a biography of her mother in 1930.

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The couple late in life, gathered for a family photo, ca 1880 to 1890. Back row, l-r: Dr. Emily Blackwell, Ainsworth Spofford, Alice Stone Blackwell, Lucy Stone; (front row, l-r): Henry Browne Blackwell, Florence Spofford, Sarah (Partridge) Spofford.

While Lucy Stone did not take the Blackwell name, she did become part of an extraordinary family, full of women and men interested in improving their world. You can discover more about them by transcribing some of their correspondence, diaries and other historical documents online. In addition to the newly released digital collections, both the Blackwell Family Papers and the NAWSA Records are available for crowdsourced transcription via the Library’s By the People project.

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Jason Reynolds: Grab the Mic Newsletter

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This is the May newsletter by Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

When I was a kid, bedtime was bad times. Not because I didn’t like pillows and sheets, or my Pound Puppy blanket. Wait, do you know what the Pound Puppies are? Were? Are? No? Okay, well, basically they were these little stuffed dogs, each one with a different set of spots, and different-colored floppy ears. But they all had sad eyes. Not sure why I loved them so much, but as soon as I finish writing this letter, I’m going to call my mother and ask her why she surrounded me with images of abandoned puppies, which you would think would be the reason bedtime was hard for me. But . . . nope. The reason I struggled so much to have a good night after saying goodnight was because I was afraid of the dark.

It’s hard to describe what the dark felt like to me. But I’ll try.

The dark was thick and it seemed to make the skin heavy on my bones.

The dark was empty and suddenly it felt like it could disappear me.

The dark was cold, even in the summer. Even with a blanket tucked under my chin.

The dark was silent. So silent that it made all the invisible things in my room seem loud.

The dark was . . . scary. There’s no other way to say it.

So after I snuck out of my room and crawled into bed with my parents at least a thousand times (who am I kidding . . . five thousand times), my mother decided she would start leaving my bedroom door cracked, figuring a sliver of light is all I’d need to find slumber. But the hallway and kitchen were too loud. My older brother was testing out his stereo speakers, and my mother was on the phone joking around with her sisters, and there was no way I could sleep through all that. So she finally decided to get me a night light. A tiny little plug-in that provided the amount of glow a candle flame creates. Just enough to see my toys on the floor and to ensure they weren’t moving on their own. Until I saw things moving across the wall. Big things. And whenever I would jump up to see what they were, they would attack. And whenever they would attack I would fight back, swinging at the air until frantically snatching the blanket over my head and hoping for morning.

This was an every-night thing.

Until I realized what was moving across the wall, was me. My shadow. And when I tried to fight it, it would fight me. Because it was me. My arms and legs kicking in bed, and the long shadow of those same arms and legs moving across the orange dim of my room.

Once I figured this out—okay, so . . . I have to be honest with you. I didn’t figure this out. Seriously, I had no idea what was going on. I went crying to my older brother, and he told me what was happening. Told me how shadows worked, and then showed me how to make shapes with my hands to make shadow puppets on the walls.

A dog. A rabbit. A bird. All of which were described by my older brother as a “dog monster,” a “rabbit monster” and a “bird monster,” because that’s the kind of big brother he was. But whenever I would climb into bed and make these “monsters” come to life on the walls of my room, they didn’t scare me anymore. Because they were mine. And they were me. I was in control. I made them so I could talk to them, tell them how I felt, tell them to protect me from any moving toys while I slept, especially since the Pound Puppies apparently weren’t going to do it.

Eventually my mother took the night light out of my room. Back to darkness. And at first, I would put my hands in the air and bend them into the shapes of animals. And even though I could no longer see them on the wall, I believed them to be there. And I still do.

I still know it’s me who creates my fear, and me who creates the protectors that save me from it. The only difference is, 25 years later, those shadow puppets have left the wall and now live on the page.

For more information about Jason Reynolds, visit: loc.gov/engage.

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Dav Pilkey: How to Draw Piggy and Barky McTreeFace

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Hi everyone, we’re delighted children’s book author and illustrator Dav Pilkey has another couple of quick drawing lessons. These characters — Piggy and Barky McTreeFace, both from his “Dog Man” series — are slightly more complicated than Petey, Big Jim or Flippy.

Still, it’s fun and something everyone in the family can try. It requires only something to draw with and something to draw on. Plus a tiny bit of patience. Nobody says your first try is your best try. (Or, at least, that’s what I keep telling myself, in hopes of getting better at these things!)

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Preservation Week: From Captain America to Thomas Jefferson

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Middle and high school students conduct hands-on testing with multispectral photographic analysis with preservation science staff. 2018 photo by Shawn Miller.

Not long ago, Steve Rogers was coming unglued. The red-white-and-blue-bedecked superhero who knocks Adolf Hitler off his feet in the No. 1 issue of “Captain America” needed help himself this time.

The Library’s copy of this valuable comic – it can sell for $300,000 or more – had several tears and cracks that required an adhesive. Library conservators had a new product in mind, but they wanted to make sure it would not change or damage the paper.

So they turned to the Preservation Research and Testing Division. Tests conducted in the division’s labs confirmed the treatment could safely keep intact the iconic captain’s adventures, and the Marvel universe was saved once more.

That project comes to mind during Preservation Week, an annual observation by the American Library Association to call attention the billions of items in the care of the nation’s cultural institutions. Many of them are in a perilous state, like the copy of “Captain America” the Library holds, and require delicate care.

This particular week, the Library’s work in scientific literacy has become critical in the face of COVID-19. The Preservation Division’s staff – including six Ph.D. scientists — are participating in a multi-institutional study to determine how libraries and museums can safely resume services. The study, carried out by federal and private partners, will review the scientific literature and conduct tests to address the needs of cultural heritage institutions.

“The division is focused, at a fundamental level, on understanding if we’re doing the work of preservation the best way it possibly can be done,” says Jacob Nadal, the division’s director. “It’s essential that the Library and the international community have this kind of scientific attention focused on new preservation methods and new approaches to treatment.”

Fenella France, chief of the division, has a background in textile science. Others have backgrounds in engineering, chemistry, physics, fine arts, forensics, and musical composition. One of the division’s fellows is a medieval studies scholar turned data scientist.

“Everyone has a slightly different eye for things,” France says.

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Some of the Preservation Division at work on a text. (L-R) Jamie Shetzline, a chemist; Fenella France, division chief; Alex Gillespie (University of Toronto), and Tana Villafana, chemist. Photo: Chris Bolser.

Some of the resulting methods have influenced not only the way conservators treat artifacts, but how people understand them.

France once used multispectral imaging – which can determine the composition of inks and pigments, track changes in documents over time and reveal faded or crossed-out writing — to examine the Library’s draft copy of the Declaration of Independence. She discovered that Thomas Jefferson initially wrote “subjects” in the document, then carefully rewrote “citizens” over it.

“I often call it document archaeology,” she says.

The staff has also rescued sound recordings from disintegrating discs, tested the way collection items respond to public exhibition, developed specialized storage environments and determined the chemical composition of an array of material.

The division traces its birth to a 1970 grant of $70,000 from what is now known as the Council on Library and Information Resources. At the time, the Library was spending more than $500,000 a year to preserve brittle books, manuscripts, newspapers and other items. It couldn’t keep up.

The hope was that the grant would help develop new approaches to handling deteriorating material and developing best practices for remediation. This information would then benefit libraries nationwide.

The effort got a boost when the Library acquired the William J. Barrow collection. A Virginia businessman and a self-trained chemist, Barrow had collected more than 1,000 books dating from 1507 to 1899. He conducted scientific studies on them using destructive techniques. He employed a machine to fold pages until they broke. He cut out pieces and tested their pH level. It all helped lead to a process to de-acidify paper.

The Preservation division continues to test Barrow’s books and maintains a major focus on research to benefit the nation’s libraries. They are now directing a project funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to evaluate the condition of books in research libraries nationwide.

Of course, it’s not all about paper. CDs, DVDs, magnetic tape, fibers and fabrics are now tested with an array of sophisticated technology. Size-exclusion chromatography is used to examine the molecular weight of a paper’s cellulose; if a paper has a lower average molecular weight, it’s more degraded. The test requires only micro-punches of paper, one millimeter in diameter.

Among noninvasive tests, X-ray fluorescence elicits data about chemicals and elements in an artifact. Infrared spectroscopy provides information about organic materials. Fiber optic reflectance spectrometry offers details about pigments.

These endeavors, Nadal says, underline “how preservation science supports the scholarly purpose of the Library, by enabling fundamental knowledge of materials to inform the way people interpret those materials.”

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Mystery Photo Contest — Recognize These Faces?

Cary O’Dell at the Library’s National Recording Registry is the maestro of our ever-popular Mystery Photo Contest. He’s back with another round, featuring some of Hollywood’s not-so-famous faces. 

At the Library, we don’t give up!

We have had some successes with our ever-popular Mystery Photo Contest and we’re back for more.  Regular readers might recall that we recently identified faces that had stumped us for years: actresses Esther Anderson and Cynthia Lynn.

The hiding-in-plain-sight factor can drive you nuts. Both actresses had long careers. Anderson, a Jamaican model, actress and filmmaker, was hardly an unknown. She once starred opposite Sidney Poitier in “A Warm December” in 1973. She filmed Bob Marley and the Wailers’ first rehearsal and years later made an award-winning documentary about it. In 2007, the BBC dubbed her the “Caribbean’s first lady of film and music.”

Lynn, meanwhile, had played recurring or guest spots on television shows during the ’60s and ’70s, most notably on “Hogan’s Heroes” in its first season. And still, it took us four years to identify her in a publicity still.

So, once again, we are asking for your help.

To review: The following photos were found within a much larger collection of film, TV and music stills.  So far, all the photos we have been able to identify have been related to one of those fields, so we assume these do, too.

Several of these, faithful readers will recognize, are repeats from earlier panels, because we haven’t found the magic key yet. We’re displaying them in a larger format this time around in hopes that might prompt a stray memory.

As always, we’ll investigate any reasonable guesses.

MANY THANKS! AND STAY WELL!

1.)

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1.) Well now. A singing group? Acrobats? Something else all together?

 

2.)

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#2. We thought that this pinup was Kitten Natividad. The actress, now 73, says it’s not her.  

3.)

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3.) We don’t know who these men are alone or together. (Bear in mind that they might be behind-the-scenes talent.)

4.)

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4.) Please note that this is NOT Karen Valentine, NOT Judy Strangis, and NOT British star Suzy Mandel.  (We’ve already checked with them all.)

5.)

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5.) A young Thomas Jane has been a popular guess for this gent but, according to his manager, it is NOT him.  Any guesses?

6.)

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6.) This might be from a film or documentary. Recognize this woman or the mural behind her?

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Gwendolyn Brooks: “We Real Cool,” Two Ways

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“We Real Cool,” Gwendolyn Brooks. Broadside Press, poster printed 1966. Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This is a guest post by Anne Holmes, digital content manager in the Poetry and Literature Center. It’s part of our 220th birthday celebrations, which continue all week. 

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When Consultant in Poetry Richard Eberhart invited Gwendolyn Brooks to record her work at the Library in 1961, Brooks was already a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet. “Annie Allen” won that award in 1950, making her the first African American to win the Pulitzer in any category. She had just published her third poetry collection, “The Bean Eaters.”

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Gwendolyn Brooks in 1945, when her first poetry collection was published. Photo: Associated Press. Prints and Photographs Division. 

In the Library’s recording laboratory, then on the ground floor of the Jefferson Building, Brooks read a selection of her poems, beginning with work from “A Street in Bronzeville” (1945) and moving on to “Annie Allen.” When she got to “The Bean Eaters,” she read a few other pieces before launching into “We Real Cool,” at 22:48. It goes by in a blip. It had not yet become iconic.

That recording is one of the newest digitized additions to the Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature. Each April — National Poetry Month — the Library adds 50 newly digitized recordings to the online collection (you can read about this year’s release on our poetry and literature blog, From the Catbird Seat). The archive, dating back to 1943, contains nearly 2,000 recordings of poets, writers and performers. Some recordings are at Library events; others are in the recording lab. Until 2015, when we began digitizing the collection, most of these were accessible only by requesting the magnetic tape reels in person.

In the 60 years since “We Real Cool” debuted, we’ve learned that Brooks wrote the poem after walking by a pool hall full of boys in her Chicago neighborhood. Instead of asking herself why they weren’t in school, she imagined how the boys felt about themselves. She said that the “we” marking the end of each line in the 24-word poem is meant to be recited softly and swiftly, as if the boys shooting pool at the Golden Shovel are questioning their place in the world.

How lucky we are to hear Brooks read it so soon after its genesis. We are just as lucky to hear her recite the poem again 24 years later—this time before a packed crowed at the Coolidge Auditorium. More than 300 people had to be turned away from her appearance on September 30, 1985, as the newly appointed Consultant in Poetry, as the auditorium was already filled.

Twenty minutes into her reading, she knew what the crowd most wanted to hear.

“At this point I better recite ‘We Real Cool’ before I forget,” she says at 20:14. “I know some of you are sick and tired of this poem, because if you see my name, you see it. It’s been published in a good many school textbooks, but it has also been banned here and there—chiefly because, I understand, the word ‘jazz’ has been considered a sexual reference. That was not my intention, though I have no objection if it helps anybody—but I was thinking of music when I used the word ‘jazz.’ “

The crowd erupts in laughter and applause. It might have been the highlight of the reading, but we’ll let you be the judge.

Meanwhile, we wish you a very happy National Poetry Month.

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Jason Reynolds: Pick a Picture. Now Tell A Story.

Jason Reynolds is back with his Tuesday “Write. Right. Rite.” video, and the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature has a terrific creativity challenge.

We’ll let the man himself explain.

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Can the Library help with that? Are you kidding?

The Library’s Prints and Photographs Online Catalog is a near endless resource of prints, photographs, drawings and artwork. I typed “Jacob Lawrence,”  the influential American painter he mentions, into the search box. Here’s one of the first things that came up:

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Jacob Lawrence, July 31, 1941. Photo: Carl Van Vechten. Prints and Photographs Division.

The man himself, as photographed by Carl Van Vechten on July 31, 1941. It was a Thursday.

So, to take up Reynolds’ writing challenge, let’s think about that.

What did the world look like then? What might have been on his mind that day? Why might he have crossed his arms — usually perceived as a defensive, closed-off gesture — in this photograph?

A few things leap to mind.

There was war in Europe, but not yet in the United States; few people outside Hawaii would have ever uttered the words “Pearl Harbor.” There was no television. When people said, “the airwaves,” they meant “the radio.”  “Citizen Kane,” now routinely regarded as the best American movie ever made, had been released earlier that summer but hadn’t drawn big crowds.

Most particular to African Americans, vicious Jim Crow segregation dominated the South (and other parts of the country). Lawrence was, the day this picture was taken, wrapping up his epic “Migration Series,” 60 panels that depicted the Great Migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North. That migration was one of the defining movements of American life, and the paintings were some of the most important of his career. (They are held today in The Phillips Collection in D.C. and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.)

Lawrence knew this history because it was his own story. He was born in 1917 in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the child of parents who had made the trek north. After a turbulent childhood, he settled in Harlem as a teenager. The artists and writers of the Harlem Renaissance had a huge influence on his career.

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Carl Van Vechten., July 1, 1939. Photo: Mark Lutz. Prints and Photographs Division.

Which brings us to the photographer. Van Vechten was white, born in Iowa in 1880 and moved to New York as a young man. He launched a influential career as a writer, photographer and a supporter of the arts. The Harlem Renaissance also had a huge influence on his career, as he championed black writers and artists. But he also wrote a very controversial novel that included the N- word in the title. It had not endeared him to many black artists.

The day this picture was taken, Van Vechten was 61. Lawrence was 23.

So, take it from the top. What do we think Jacob Lawrence might be thinking, looking at this photographer  looking at him on the last day of July in 1941, at the instant the aperture opened and closed, with his own career a promising but unknown world?

 

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