Library of Congress's Blog, page 60

Papers of Three Presidents Digitized; Now Online

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

The presidencies of Andrew Johnson, Chester Alan Arthur, and William McKinley all began or ended with the trauma of a presidential assassination. The papers of each president, however, offer different types and levels of documentation as to how each man faced the challenges of his respective administration, and the style in which each chose to govern. Researchers can now explore these collections for themselves, as the papers of presidents Andrew Johnson, Chester Alan Arthur and William McKinley are available online through the Library of Congress.

[image error]

Andrew Johnson, circa 1860. Prints and Photographs Division.

Vice President Andrew Johnson (1808-1875) of Tennessee succeeded to the presidency following the assassination of Abraham Lincoln in April 1865. With the end of the Civil War in sight, Lincoln’s death on April 15 plunged the country into further turmoil. The task of guiding the nation through the uncharted waters of Reconstruction fell to Johnson. Long affiliated with the Democratic Party, Johnson had been added to a unionist presidential ticket with Lincoln, a Republican. But the ideological and political differences between Johnson and members of the Republican Party quickly came to the fore as they debated the conditions under which the former Confederate states and former Confederates themselves could rejoin the union, as well as the rights and protections accorded to African Americans after emancipation. The thorny issues of Reconstruction dominated Johnson’s administration.

[image error]

Chester Arthur, 1882. Prints and Photographs Division.

His disputes with Congress ultimately led to Johnson’s impeachment in 1868. Johnson’s perspectives on and activities during Reconstruction are particularly well represented in his papers, especially in the series containing correspondence, messages, executive documents, and amnesty records. Although the bulk of the collection dates from 1865 to 1869, Johnson’s papers also document his political career in Tennessee, his service as the state’s military governor  (1862-1865) and his business affairs, including his tailor shop. The online presentation includes a brief timeline of Johnson’s life, related resources for further exploration, a slide show of featured content, and a history of the collection.

Chester Alan Arthur (1829-1886) also had become vice president as part of a presidential ticket that combined divergent views of government, as Arthur and President James A. Garfield represented opposite wings within the Republican Party in the election of 1880. Their differences on political patronage, however, prompted the mentally-disturbed office seeker Charles J. Guiteau to assassinate Garfield to install the more patronage-friendly Arthur as president. Garfield lingered for 80 days before dying on Sept. 19, 1881, which allowed Arthur time to contemplate his response to the presidential responsibilities he never sought.

While most Americans presumed he would follow the path of political cronyism he displayed as collector of the New York Customs House, he surprised his detractors by serving out his term with admirable competence. Although Arthur ordered that most of his personal papers be burned shortly before his death in 1886, the Chester Alan Arthur Papers offer correspondence, financial papers, scrapbooks, papers relating to the 1880 presidential election, Arthur’s presidency, his service as collector of customs for the Port of New York and his work with the New York Republican State Committee. Also of note is a series of 23 letters written to Arthur between 1881 and 1883 by Julia Sand, a reclusive New York woman with an intense interest in politics who appointed herself as Arthur’s conscience. She offered him advice, criticism and praise. Arthur once visited Sand’s home, suggesting that not only did he read her letters, but that he also valued her opinion

The online presentation includes a timeline of Arthur’s life, bibliographic resources, collection highlights, and a history of the collection.

[image error]

William McKinley, May 4, 1900. Prints and Photographs Division.

Unlike Andrew Johnson and Chester Arthur, William McKinley (1843-1901) gained the presidential chair through election in his own right in 1896. Although McKinley’s political career included service in the U.S. House of Representatives and as governor of Ohio, his papers at the Library date primarily from his time as president. They are especially strong on the presidential elections of 1896 and 1900, the gold standard, tariffs, progressivism, the Spanish-American War (1898), the Philippine-American War (1899-1902), and territorial expansion. Since McKinley preferred to communicate in person, rather than in writing, much of the correspondence in the collection consists of letters he received, and are reflective of conversations he had and issues brought to his attention by associates and the public. Letterpress copybooks capture communications sent on McKinley’s behalf by secretaries John Addison Porter and George B. Cortelyou. But McKinley’s own voice can be found in his speeches and messages, while scrapbooks and other papers preserve a record of his administration. Despite warnings from friends who worried for his safety in unsettled times internationally, McKinley was shot on September 6, 1901, by anarchist Leon Czolgosz at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley’s papers include documentation of the days until his death on September 14, when Theodore Roosevelt became the 26th president The online presentation of the McKinley Papers also offers a timeline of McKinley’s life, resources for further exploration, featured items from the collection, and a history of the McKinley Papers.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Your Favorite Library Turns 220!

[image error]

The Jefferson Building. Photo: Shawn Miller.

This piece was co-written by my communications office colleague Brett Zongker.

The Library got its start on April 24, 1800, with a modest $5,000 appropriation. John Adams was the president. The capital was in Philadelphia. The first batch of books, 740 volumes and three maps, had to be ordered from London. The national population was 5.3 million. There was no Library building.

What a difference a couple of centuries — and twenty years — can make.

[image error]

Interior, the Jefferson Building. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Your favorite national Library is celebrating its 220th birthday this week, now as the largest library in world history. It’s a remarkable achievement. But the COVID-19 pandemic has muted much of public life across the nation in these strange weeks, and life here is no different. All library buildings are closed. But our online and digital resources are as available to the world as ever, so we thought we’d offer our readers a ton of things to do.

Great things are scheduled all week. There are plenty of things for kids at our Engage! page, from drawings by “Dog Man” creator Dav Pilkey to videos from Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. The National Book Festival Presents series is in full swing, most recently featuring a conversation mapping pandemics (old and new) with the Library’s John Hessler, curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection and a specialist in computational geography and  geographic information science.

The Archive of Recorded Poetry and Literature just added 50 recordings to the online collection for National Poetry Month, including Gwendolyn Brooks’ reading her iconic 1961 poem, “We Real Cool.”

But the most exciting thing may be an opportunity for music-makers and music-lovers everywhere: A chance to play with Citizen DJ, a groundbreaking project that inspires hip-hop music-making from home and opens new doors into the Library’s extensive audio collections.

Citizen DJ is an open-source web-browser application created by Brian Foo, Library of Congress 2020 Innovator in Residence, working in partnership with LC Labs. Using some of the Library’s free-to-use audio and moving image collections, Citizen DJ lets users select samples to create their own beats and sound mixes. It’s a great way for musicians, students and researchers to make discoveries in the Library’s vast collections.

While the project is scheduled to officially launch this summer, Foo believes early public testing will help make a better final product. There’s a premiere and virtual masterclass this afternoon.

“My goal is to develop a simple way to discover and use public-domain audio and video material for music making so that generations of artists and producers can use it to maximize their creativity,” Foo said. “That’s what Citizen DJ is all about – an easy-to-use tool that unlocks the amazing treasures in the Library.”

The sound collections in Citizen DJ were curated by Library staff. They’re copyright free and can be used however users wish. While some of the sounds are more than 100 years old and others come from the past decade, all of them are unique, compelling and in many cases hold deep historical and cultural relevance. The clips come from musical performances, theater productions, interviews, speeches, oral histories and ambient sound recordings. Foo is working with the staff to add more samples.

“It’s my hope that digital projects like Citizen DJ can offer musicians ample new creative material at no cost and can continue to engage and inspire all Americans from home,” Foo said.  He added that as the world navigates the COVID-19 pandemic, “it’s fitting to remember that music is something that has the power to bring all people together, even when we physically need to be apart.”

The  Citizen DJ demo takes about 15 minutes to complete. User testing is open until May 15. To stay up-to-date on Citizen DJ when it goes live, subscribe to the LC Labs Letter.

[image error]

The Jefferson Building under construction, April 19, 1893. Photo: Levin C. Handy. Prints and Photographs Division.

It’s probably not the sort of thing John Adams imagined happening at the Library in the spring of 1800. But as Samuel Morse famously asked in his first telegraph message (which also resides at the Library): “What hath God wrought?”

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Mapping Pandemics at the Library

[image error]

Sewer engineer’s map of Washington, D.C., 1894. Highlights show fatal cases of zymotic (infectious) diseases. Geography and Maps Division.

John Hessler is a specialist in the Library’s Geography and Map Division, focusing on computational geography and geographic information science. He’s also the Library’s curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection.  As part of our National Book Festival Presents series, he’ll be in conversation with Marie Arana (the Library’s literary director) to discuss the sweep of history from the 1500s smallpox pandemic that decimated the indigenous population of the Americas to the meticulous work that is being done now to map COVID-19.  Please join us to watch this conversation tonight on the Library’s Facebook page.  You can also watch it on our YouTube page.

John wrote this piece as a prologue to tonight’s conversation.

“Everyone knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky.” Albert Camus, “The Plague.”

For the past month I have been involved in mapping the COVID-19 pandemic and searching for geospatial data and cartographic visualizations that will be important additions to the Library’s vast map collections. Future generations will rely on maps to help them understand this historical moment.

The mapping of infectious diseases and viral pathogens is nothing new; it became a scientific endeavor in the late 19th century. The most modern mapping technologies and statistical calculations were used to track viral and bacterial infections such as typhoid, malaria, scarlet fever, diphtheria and measles, which at the time were called zymotic (infectious) diseases. [image error]

These infections were the subject of intense studies and mapping campaigns in large cities such as Washington, D.C. The studies were often carried out block-by-block, in order to determine the spread of pathogens and to plan for medical interventions.

This kind of historic high-scale mapping is important to epidemiologists of today, who study the past patterns of infectious disease transmission in order to understand the kind of pandemic we are now experiencing.

Today, our mapping technologies and fundamental understanding of the genomics of infectious disease are better than they were just a few decades ago. Several new data sources and providers have been organized in the last few years to provide information on the genomics and the spatial and temporal distribution of rapidly transmitted diseases in real time during outbreaks. For example, GISAID, the Global Initiative for Sharing All Influenza Data,  aggregates genomic data from labs around the world during serious disease pandemics. They make that data available online.

That data is being used to map the outbreak of COVID-19. This has been the focus of much of what I have been adding to the Geography and Map Division collections. Combining the genomic data on the complex nucleotide mutations from these labs and then mapping how these mutations move around the globe has been a critical to how governments have responded to the outbreak.

[image error]

Temporal phylogenetic tree of COVID-19. The purple represents the early form of the virus in China. The two red sections represent spread of the virus to North America from China and Europe. Courtesy Next Strai

This genomic data can be mapped to show how various transmission networks developed over the course of the pandemic. Preserving data and maps like this will be central to any future understanding of what is happening today.

[image error]

Map of COVID-19 phylodynamics, Courtesy: Next Strain.

Like the high-scale mapping from the 19th century in our collections, it is important for us to collect geo-spatial data and maps like those mentioned here, and many others, all of which will allow future historians to study not only the spread of viral pathogens like COVID-19, but also help them comprehend how we as a culture used the best technologies available to us to react to this pivotal moment.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

The Evangelical and the Journalist: Billy Sunday & A.B. MacDonald

[image error]

Billy Sunday, in full evangelical form. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. His most recent piece for the blog was about the American Federation of Labor. 

A. B. MacDonald was a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist in the early decades of the 20th century who had a front-row seat to the sermons of Billy Sunday, one of the most electrifying preachers of the day.

MacDonald, based in Kansas City, was an evangelical Christian himself. He spent much of 1917 to 1919 traveling across the country and proselytizing with Sunday, a man MacDonald repeatedly described as a “genius” and “the greatest man I have ever known.”

His diary from Sunday’s Chicago campaign of 1918 is part of the recently acquired A. B. MacDonald Papers in the Library’s Manuscript Division. The diaries are among the collection’s highlights, notably the two documenting his experiences with the Sunday campaigns. The first was 1917 in New York; the second, Chicago in 1918. The latter provides a window into the reverend’s charisma and religious influence, while also serving as a cartography for much of the city’s industrial and religious life. While Sunday spread the good word to massive crowds, MacDonald evangelized to more modest but still significant gatherings in churches and workplaces across the Windy City.

[image error]

Crowds jam New York’s Penn Station to see Billy Sunday arrive. Bain News Service, between 1910 -1920. Prints and Photographs Division.

In Chicago, Sunday spoke to thousands on a regular basis. On March 15, 1918, he preached to 5,000 in the afternoon and 12,000 in the evening. According to MacDonald, Sunday could move even the inebriated. Spotting “two drunken men wheeling around in the jam” searching for seats, MacDonald noted, “several times” the two men wiped “tears from their eyes,” as Sunday proselytized.

At other times, MacDonald suggested that Sunday spoke directly to God.

[image error]

Billy Sunday. Bain News Service, 1915. Prints and Photographs Division.

Once, when it began to rain just before an outdoor speaking engagement, Sunday despaired that it would be impossible for people to hear him over the din of “a mighty downpour.” Sunday then “put his hands to his face, his thumbs upon his cheeks, the open palms of his hands on each side of his mouth, forming a megaphone,” and implored God, “to please let it stop.”

“Strange as it may seem, to some,” MacDonald wrote, “the rain stopped almost instantly and did not begin again until he was through speaking.” Whether or not the rain ended due to Sunday’s lament or, more likely, as a result of meteorological circumstances, MacDonald’s account captures the charismatic attraction of the nation’s leading evangelist.

Burgeoning socialist and labor movements animated the political ferment of the era. Both drew hostility from business leaders, who, in some cases, turned to men of the pulpit to dampen the organizational fervor of workers. Several years earlier, Sunday had taken his message to Philadelphia and other Pennsylvania towns. He had encouraged workers to be “more faithful to their duties.” Labor historian David Montgomery points out that these efforts were “short lived and left no ideological legacy,” but MacDonald and Sunday believed the hearts of workers remained open to Sunday’s interpretation of Christianity.

In this way, for urban and labor historians, MacDonald’s diaries paint a compelling portrait of industrial Chicago. MacDonald spoke to thousands of men and women in their workplaces, including Montgomery Ward, “the big mail order house;” the Kimball Piano Factory; the shops of the Northwestern Railways; the Chicago Screw Company and the Hansell-Elcock Iron Works.

At the Adams Express Company, MacDonald spoke to an audience of 150, mostly men and boys. “The air was blue with tobacco smoke,” he wrote. “They were a rough looking lot of men, but under their coats their hearts were just like mine, and I felt that I spoke to them.” In another, MacDonald proselytized to a room of 400 men standing or sitting on “turning lathes and other machines.”

Sometimes, audiences received his sermons ambivalently. At the aforementioned iron works, a frustrated MacDonald failed to win over his listeners. He wrote, without offering any evidence, that there was not a “Christian” among them. Nor was the journalist above sectarianism. Once, he spoke at a piano and organ factory to a room filled with “girls from 16 to 20 years of age.” Perhaps 90% were Roman Catholics, he wrote, whom the superintendent of the factory said, “didn’t work hard on the job.” MacDonald, despite his journalistic credentials, never questioned the assertion.

MacDonald also traversed the city’s Protestant churches. At the Austin Baptist Church, “the audience was deeply affected. A great many of them were in tears as I concluded.” The audience at the Presbyterian Church in Norwood Park proved more elusive. “The singing was good and I spoke at my best,” he confided in his diary. “As the Methodists say I ‘Had much liberty’ in my address and the audience laughed and cried by turns. But at the end there was not one convert.”

MacDonald’s papers offer numerous other insights from his long career, including his Pulitzer in 1931 of a murderous Texas love triangle; pioneering work on the famous Leo Frank murder trial and subsequent lynching in Georgia; the closing of the Western frontier; the Chautauqua lecture circuit and much more.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Jason Reynolds: Your Hero Writes to You!

In Jason Reynolds’ new video, part of his “Write. Right. Rite.” series for the Library, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature asks you to imagine getting a letter from your very own hero, and what that letter might say. Picture it: a note to you from Beyonce, Lebron James, maybe Stephen King.

Okay, that last one is mine. I wrote to King when I was a teen. This was the early ’80s. Loved his books. Wanted to grow up and be just like him. Lo and behold, he actually wrote me back. Just a postcard, typed, telling me a couple things about how he wrote and wishing me luck.

Four decades later, it’s still framed on my desk. It’s right next to a framed letter from Alice Walker. The author of “The Color Purple” wrote a couple of nice lines about one of my books. I died.

Reynolds’ personal icon is the poet and playwright Langston Hughes. He knows how magical these letters can be. To kick-start your imagination, he asks you to imagine getting one of those.

Here he is:

{mediaObjectId:'A382B1F4450500F6E0538C93F11600F6',playerSize:'mediumWide'}

Fun, no? Want more? We have all of Jayson’s videos for you to watch, anytime.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

My Job: Victoria Van Hyning

[image error]Victoria Van Hyning is a senior innovation specialist and a community manager for the Library’s By the People crowdsourcing project. Her academic studies focused on medieval and Renaissance English literature and the fate of British nuns after the Reformation. Her book on this research, “Convent Autobiography: Early Modern English Nuns in Exile” was recently published by Oxford University Press. Intrigued, we asked how this background led to her work at the Library.

In college, you read “A Revelation of Love” by Julian of Norwich, a 14th century ascetic who wrote about the religious visions she had while seriously ill. It’s one of the oldest known works by a woman in the English language, if not the oldest. What about it spoke to you?

I was fascinated that Julian lived most of her life in solitude as an anchoress—paradoxically withdrawing from the world to make it a better place by trying to understand her visions. She portrays a maternal God, who loves humanity despite sin. This interested me as someone who grew up attending a fairly relaxed Quaker meeting where sin was not emphasized. Her famous phrase, “al shall be wele, and al shall be wele, and all manner thing shal be wele,” has appealed to readers for nearly six centuries.

In college, I spent a year studying at Oxford, learning about Julian with a world-class expert. It was a life-changing experience. I went back to Oxford for a master’s, which led to a Ph.D. at the University of Sheffield. I focused on the Catholic nuns and monks who read Julian’s texts after the Reformation and saved them from obscurity by copying them out by hand.

The English nuns you write about went into exile after the Reformation in the 16th century, when it became more or less illegal to practice Catholicism in England. Where did they go? What did they do?

Some women returned to their families, perhaps practicing a quasi-monastic life at home, while others joined Flemish, French, Italian, Spanish or other convents abroad. Only one English community—the Bridgettines — managed to resist closure.

Over time, though, many English women wanted to create English or Irish convents. Between 1598 and the French Revolution, 26 convents were established, including one in Maryland. (A descendant community of Carmelite nuns is still in Towson.) These new communities were of a variety of orders—Benedictine, Augustinian, Carmelite. The Augustinians I write about were fairly international, multilingual and musical. Travelers would make a point of stopping at their convents during their jaunts across Europe.

In some ways, convents walled off these women from the rest of the world, but in other ways, they allowed them an intellectual and theological freedom they probably wouldn’t have had on the outside. Given this, what did they write about?

[image error]

Convent illustration from the English Convent of Nazareth, Bruges. Created in the 20th century but in a medieval style. Photo: Victoria Van Hyning.

Nuns still had a lot of contact with clergy and outsiders. They could read, write, compose music and teach. They could write translations, spiritual advice manuals, original prayers, devotional poetry, one or two personal letters per year and so on. Senior nuns typically took responsibility for writing the chronicles, which were important historical documents about the community as a whole. Those who wrote anonymously—and most did—could safely write about themselves in great detail without seeming immodest. I argue in the book that anonymity was liberating.

The term “17th century convent” conveys images of stern conversations, spare rooms, stone floors, contemplative prayer. Is that wrong?

There was sanctity and seriousness, but there was joy and laughter, too. And sarcasm. And pragmatism. Many of these women were smart — capable of wringing funds from reluctant or distracted donors, capable of fending off clerics and government officials. This comes through in their chronicles, letters, and other literature.

They also held jubilees to mark special occasions or anniversaries. One prioress-chronicler describes the Bruges convent’s centenary, for which there were special masses and prayers, an original play by the convent novices and school kids. The nuns also provided bread and beer to their neighbors and the city’s poor, and were delighted – and maybe a little freaked out — when their neighbors set off blank canons from the top of the convent walls and held a raucous street party on the other side.

[image error]How did your research for the book lead you into crowdsourcing?

During my Ph.D., I did research in monastic archives all over England, France, and Belgium. Several monastic communities allowed me to photograph hundreds of their manuscripts and books, which greatly aided me and an informal network of convents, scholars and genealogists to transcribe and share those documents. This archival work led me to think volunteers could help with transcriptions.

I then got involved in crowdsourcing with a group called Zooniverse in the Department of Astrophysics at Oxford. I expanded their humanities program, helped develop news transcription methods and led the development of a Renaissance manuscript transcription project called “Shakespeare’s World” with the Folger Shakespeare Library and Oxford English Dictionary. From 2016 to 2018, I led the project “Transforming Libraries and Archives Through Crowdsourcing.” Much though I loved Zooniverse and the work I did there, when this job at the Library came up I couldn’t resist!

So what’s your work like here at the Library.

As the community manager for collections and data, I work with the By the People team, curators and educators to identify and present collections in ways that appeal to volunteers, while also generating high quality transcription data. We started out as a pilot project in October 2018 and graduated to being a permanent project in early 2020.

Our team has designed and launched 15 collections-based campaigns in a year and a half. These feature the papers of Rosa Parks; letters sent to President Lincoln; the papers of suffrage leaders Mary Church Terrell and Susan B. Anthony; and the field notebooks of ethno-musicologist Alan Lomax, among others. Volunteers have transcribed over 113,000 pages so far, which is a testament to their enthusiasm!

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Dav Pilkey: “Love inspires us to become better people.”

We’re back with our Friday check-in with author and illustrator Dav Pilkey, the bestselling children’s writer behind the wildly popular series “Dog Man” and “Captain Underpants.”

Like a lot of authors that publish for that age range, there’s a mix of vulnerability and heart that informs his work. Cartoon strips such as “Peanuts” or “Calvin and Hobbes” (among many others) had that same underpinning of intelligence and kindness; there was a sense of both the wonders and insecurities of childhood that lurked behind the pratfalls and pranks that played for laughs.

In this short montage, Pilkey explains the origins of Petey, one of primary characters in “Dog Man.” As you might expect, he didn’t wander far from home for his inspiration.

{mediaObjectId:'A35B3D9EBD8A000EE0538C93F116000E',playerSize:'mediumWide'}

In previous episodes, he’s shown us how to draw the characters Flippy and Big Jim. He’ll be back next week, so be sure to visit with us again.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

 

By the People: Meet the Blackwells

[image error]

Blackwell family portrait, circa 1848. Manuscript Division. 

Don’t let byline fool you; the wonderful staff at By the People wrote a goo d chunk of this piece about their latest crowdsourcing campaign. It’s fascinating stuff.

The trailblazing history of the Blackwell family, tireless campaigners for the rights of women and the abolition of slavery, forms the newest crowdsourcing campaign by the Library’s By the People team — which includes you!

By the People, for the unfamiliar, is our platform in which volunteers can transcribe the letters, writings, diaries and artifacts of eminent people in our collections. It’s like looking into the personal lives of some of the most consequential people in American history and writing out the events of their lives, be they prosaic or historic. These transcriptions are checked, verified and then take their place in the digitized, searchable works of the world’s largest library.

Cool, right?

The Blackwell Family papers consist of more than 29,000 items between 1759-1960, with the majority of material dating from 1845 to 1890. Blackwell family members include Lucy Stone (1818-1893); her husband, Henry Browne Blackwell (1825-1909); and their daughter, Alice Stone Blackwell (1857-1950), all of whom were prominent in the women’s rights and women’s suffrage movements. Dr. Elizabeth Blackwell (1821-1910), the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States and her adopted daughter, Kitty Barry Blackwell (1848-1936), feature prominently in the papers. Other Blackwell family members are also represented within the collection, including Dr. Emily Blackwell, another pioneering female doctor, and Antoinette Louisa Brown Blackwell, the first woman ordained as a minister in the Congregational Church.

[image error]

Lucy Stone, circa 1850. Manuscript Division.

In 1890, second-generation suffragist Alice Stone Blackwell helped to broker a merger of the two major national women’s suffrage organizations, one of which was founded by her parents, Lucy Stone and Henry Browne Blackwell. The two organizations put aside their differences to become the National American Woman Suffrage Association (NAWSA). Alice took up the family business of suffrage becoming the recording secretary for NAWSA and eventually the editor of NAWSA’s weekly newspaper, the Woman’s Journal, which her parents began in 1870.

That’s just some of the history you can dig into. It’s a postcard into our own world in another time.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

The History Channel at the Library

{mediaObjectId:'E70D96A4F8870174E0438C93F0280174',playerSize:'mediumWide'}

Want to see what was in President Abraham Lincoln’s pockets when he was assassinated? The “Wanted” poster for his assassin, John Wilkes Booth? A perfect copy of the Gutenberg Bible, the first book published by metal type (in 1454), thereby revolutionizing human communication?

Well, you can! The Library and the History Channel teamed up several years ago to produce a collection of more than two dozen short, entertaining videos that showcased some of the Library’s greatest, most unusual and startling treasures. All of the above and many others are featured in the series. We’ll be highlighting them in the weeks to come.

[image error]

President Lincoln’s glasses. They were in his pocket the night of his assassination.

Maybe the best news is that this isn’t a huge time commitment — each video is only a couple of minutes long. Each is explained on camera by a curator and there’s a short essay in the link that explains the contents of each. You can watch one at a time if you like, but that’s like trying to each just one chocolate chip cookie when you’ve got a box full of them. (Good luck with that!) It’s also a smart, fun introduction to the world’s largest Library.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send cool stories straight to your inbox.

Jason Reynolds, National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, Presents New GRAB THE MIC Newsletter

This newsletter is the first in a series of guest blogs from Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. 

I’ve been quiet, trying to find the words to offer myself, my family and, of course, you. But the truth is, my words and my thoughts aren’t any more important than yours or anyone else’s—we’ve all got them—and many of us have shared them on our various platforms. This sharing sometimes brings on more anxiety, and other times washes us with hope. And both of these feelings birthed by all these shared thoughts are honest. So, some honesty: The tricky part about my title as ambassador is that it doesn’t come with answers. It doesn’t come with medical education, and there’s nothing inscribed on the back of the ambassador medal that tells me anything that leads us closer to the end of this strange time. But what I’d like to believe is that there are things we all have that can help us cope, help us hold each other up and press on in the face of a peculiar uncertainty.

Things like, I don’t know … cake.

Or better yet, ice cream. But not just any ice cream: ice cream that could change flavors right in the middle of eating it, because sometimes chocolate is good for a spoonful, but not a whole scoop. I know this seems like a silly thing to say right now, but the only thing that’s helping me through all this is my silliness. Not just the clunky jokes rattling around my brain, but the silliness that allows me to stretch out—to think beyond the walls of my home, or the length of my block. The silliness that’s actually not silliness at all, just imagination cloaked in jokes. Yes, imagination—the only thing I’ve ever been able to count on, even though my imagination can’t always count on me. Because these are the moments in which I, unfortunately, convince myself to push imagination away. To force it back behind the wall of fear. And though fear and concern are both very real, they are no more real than imagination, right? I mean, why should they get to have all the fun?

Imagination is what has given us food and shelter. Imagination has given us clothes and education. Imagination has given us social media and video games. It’s given us music. And definitely literature. It’s even given us hand sanitizer, which is basically the same as … well, literature. It’s sometimes a little strange, and a little stinky, but becomes an amazing habit because you know rubbing it in (there’s no washing it off!) kills germs—the invisible germs that have attached themselves to us as we move through life. Literature kills germs! Maybe there is some kind of medical education that comes with this whole ambassadorship thing after all.

(Note: Literature doesn’t kill actual germs. But see how I imagined that? I’m like an imagination machine!)

The point is, as April continues to unfold, which—let us not forget— is National Poetry Month,

let’s try as hard as we can to let our imaginations out of their cages so they can storm the gates of anxiety. Let’s make words that make worlds. Poems that feed us something sweet—or at least something honest. Or maybe something sweet and honest and sour and honest and funny and honest and scary and honest, like ice cream that changes flavors right in the middle of eating it.

Sound good? Sure sounds good to me.

Before you go, check out my new video series.

{mediaObjectId:'A2BE3108480D0040E0538C93F1160040',playerSize:'mediumWide'}

Sincerely,

Jason