Library of Congress's Blog, page 62
March 19, 2020
Parents! Smart Fun for Kids
Student learning to use a sextant at a Los Angeles high school, 1942. Photo: Alfred T. Palmer. Prints and Photographs Division.
The Library has millions of resources online – including some of history’s most important manuscripts, photographs, maps, recordings and films – to help teachers, parents and students learn about the world around us.
These include general exhibits you can dip into, such as “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words,” “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight For The Vote,” and “Mapping a Growing Nation: From Independence to Statehood.”
We’ll be highlighting more of these during the coming weeks, so check back often.
Meanwhile! Parents, to start us off, here are some great ideas from the Library’s Center for Learning, Literacy and Engagement staff for everyone at the house.
All ages:
Record a family story.
Download the StoryCorps app to record family histories. It’s great for building an oral history of your household. StoryCorps will walk you through the process, including suggested questions and interview tips. StoryCorps recordings are archived at the Library’s American Folklife Center.
Create an “exquisite corpse” story or poem. Jon Scieszka, the 2008-09 National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, started the Library’s own “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure” and had an all-star cast of fellow authors (Kate Dicamillo, Katherine Paterson, Lemony Snicket, etc.) fill in the 27 chapters. Here’s how to play: Players construct a story by stringing together disconnected sentences or phrases. It creates a “Frankenstein’s monster” type of tale, hence the “corpse” moniker. It can be as silly or serious as the players make it. First, find a photograph in the Library’s online catalog or use one of these suggested images from photographer Gordon Parks. (If you’d rather, select a family photo.) Gather players in a circle to examine the photograph. One person starts by writing a line or sentence about the image. They pass the paper to the person to their right. In turn, that person writes a second line of text — but before passing the paper, they hide all the preceding sentences, so that no player sees anything but the preceding sentence. Continue this until each person has written three lines. Then, voila! Read the entire creation aloud.
Elementary & Middle:
Read aloud a classic children’s book.
Find digitized copies of rare children’s books in the Library’s collections. You’ll find everything from Mother Goose stories to “Baseball ABCs.” Pick your favorite and read aloud!
Read and write in braille.
Want to learn how to read with your fingers? Introduce your kids to the basics of braille with the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled (NLS). NLS is free for people with temporary or permanent visual impairment that prevents them from reading or holding a page. The NLS is part of the Library and can teach you how to get started.
Write a letter to Rosa Parks.
Read about Rosa Parks’ life in her own words in our online exhibition. Then, have children create a card or letter, imagining they are sending it to Mrs. Parks, using kids’ letters like these as inspiration. Mrs. Parks loved children and met with them often. What would you say to the mother of the civil rights movement?
Be a Kid Citizen!
Explore Congress and civic engagement through primary sources with this interactive website from Kid Citizen, a Library of Congress partner organization.
Explore Everyday Mysteries.
Why do onions make you cry? How does a stone skip across water? Select a mystery every day from our Science, Technology and Business Division and find out! It’s fun research.
High School
Get a leg up on your research projects with advice from Library experts. Use our LibGuides to find resources on topics ranging from film and music to veterinary science and much more. It’s a near-endless list of information and can take you as deep into a subject as you’d like to go.
Find poetic inspiration from our Poetry and Literature Center.
Former U.S.Poet Laureate Billy Collins selected a poem for each day of the school year.
Former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith’s daily poetry podcast is called “The Slowdown.” In just five minutes, she presents a poem, breaks it down into engaging segments and explains how it works.
Our experimental digital team has created online projects that allow you to explore the Library by colors, play photo roulette, transcribe and tag documents from the collection and more. Try one then tell us what you think. Email comments to LC-labs@loc.gov.
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March 16, 2020
Japanese Pilot’s Map of Pearl Harbor Attack Now at Library
Mitsuo Fuchida had one of the more interesting lives of the 20th century. He led the Japanese strike force in the attack on Pearl Harbor, briefed the Emperor on its success and was critically injured in the Battle of Midway. After the war, he converted to Christianity and became an evangelist in the United States. His after-action sketch of the Pearl Harbor attack is now in the Library’s collections. Ryan Moore, a cartographic collection specialist now detailed to the History and Military Science Section, contributed to this report.
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Photo by a Japanese pilot coming in behind a fellow bomber during the Pearl Harbor attack. Prints and Photographs Division.
Just before 8 a.m. on Dec. 7, 1941, Mitsuo Fuchida, leader of the Japanese strike force in the attack on Pearl Harbor, radioed his force: “To-ra! To-ra! To-ra!” It was the signal that they had achieved complete surprise.
During the next two hours, during two waves of attacks, he circled above as his fliers killed more than 2,400 Americans, sank four battleships and ignited war between the two nations.
On Dec. 26, he was back in Tokyo, walking into a small room in the imperial palace. At one end was an elevated platform, about two feet high. A court official walked through, wafting incense. Then Emperor Hirohito entered, wearing the uniform of a “naval generalissimo,” sat down on the elevated platform and listened to a briefing from the men who carried out the attack.
Mitsuo Fuchida’s battle report of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Geography and Maps Division.
The heart of Fuchida’s presentation was his rectangular, hand-drawn map of the harbor and the ships that had been struck. It was mostly accurate, detailed and highly classified. He used a photo enlargement of it to make it easier to see during the presentation.
Today, Fuchida’s original Pearl Harbor map — a one-of-a-kind artifact from a critical moment in world history, made by the person who carried it out — finally rests in the Library’s Geography and Map Division. Its official title is “Estimated Damage Report Against Surface Ships on the Air Attack of Pearl Harbor.” It was purchased from the Miami-Dade Public Library in 2018, ending an odyssey of more than three quarters of a century in which the map was primarily kept in the private collection of Gordon W. Prange, chief historian of U.S. Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur.
“This was made in almost real time,” says Paulette Hasier, chief of the G&M Division, leaning over the map on a recent afternoon, pointing out details. Fuchida put the map together after consulting with dozens of other pilots and military staff during the voyage back to Japan. “Fuchida crafted this cartographic piece himself, but he didn’t do it without a lot of help from others.”
The map is in good shape on slightly yellowed paper, measures 31 by 24 inches, and is stored in a large conservation box. When the cover is pulled off, the map beneath is a surprising jolt of color.
It depicts an aerial view of the harbor and is labeled 軍極秘 (Top Secret) in red in the upper right corner. Using Tokyo time, Fuchida dated it 8 December 1941 and titled it in traditional Japanese calligraphy.
He carefully drew 60 ships in green, blue and yellow watercolors. He did not generally include the names of ships but instead provided their type and size. Fuchida indicated the level of damage with categories such as minor, moderate, serious and sunk. He noted the types of torpedoes and bombs used. He told the Emperor he thought it was about 80 percent correct, which, given that the pilots were making visual assessments at high speed while under fire, was impressive. His one major error was astonishing: the failure to note the sinking of the USS Arizona, by far the most lethal strike of the day. The Arizona wreckage was obscured by such thick black smoke that it could not be seen clearly from the air.
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For comparison: A Navy map of the ships at Pearl Harbor just prior to the attack. Photo: Associated Press. Prints and Photographs Division.
The red arrows depicting torpedoes are still bright, as are the red “X” markings that denote a bomb strike. The orange of billowing fires is still clear. The desperate maneuvers of the battleship USS Nevada to attempt to escape the harbor are marked by a series of elliptical dashes.
Beneath the ink are pencil marks, showing his original outlines.
“It’s not your standard military map in black and white,” Hasier said. “Obviously, this was made for a presentation. There’s a bit of showmanship.”
The map’s authenticity isn’t questioned, largely thanks to Fuchida. He was one of the few pilots who attacked Pearl Harbor to survive the war – Naval History magazine estimated in 2016 that fewer than 10 percent of Fuchida’s squadron lived to see the end of the conflict. Fuchida himself was badly injured in the Battle of Midway and was hospitalized for nearly a year. After the war, he converted to Christianity, renounced Japan’s aggression, and often toured the United States as an evangelist. Sometime in 1946, Fuchida gave the map to Prange. The historian kept it for the rest of his life, as he wrote definitive accounts of war battles, including “At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor.” His notes became the background for the 1970 film, “Tora! Tora! Tora!”
Fuchida died in 1976; Prange in 1980.
After Prange’s death, scholars Donald Goldstein and Katherine Dillon edited many of Prange’s unpublished manuscripts and encountered Fuchida’s map. The Library almost acquired the map in 1994, as a gift from Goldstein’s publisher, but the opportunity passed, for reasons that are now not clear.
The map was sold at auction in 1994 to the Malcolm Forbes Collection, which sold it to the Jay I. Kislak Foundation in 2013. Kislak donated it to the Miami-Dade Library and, in 2018, that institution sold it to the LOC.
It now rests as a permanent marker of the “date that will live in infamy,” in President Franklin Roosevelt’s iconic words, in America’s national library.
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March 11, 2020
Writing African Americans into the Story
Jesse Holland. Photo by Shawn Miller
Jesse Holland wears a lot of different hats: he’s an award-winning political journalist, he’s a television host, he’s a professor and he’s a comics aficionado — he wrote the first novel about the Black Panther for Marvel in 2018.
African American history is yet another of his passions — in particular documenting long-overlooked contributions of African Americans to U.S. life. In 2016, he wrote “The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slavery Inside the White House,” a companion to his 2007 bestseller, “Black Men Built the Capitol: Discovering African American History in and Around Washington, D.C.”
This year, he’s researching a new book about African American history as a distinguished visiting scholar at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center. Here, he answers a few questions about his research — and about his surprising personal connection to the Library’s Rosa Parks Collection.
What is the topic of your new book?
I’m writing about the life and death of Freedman’s Village, a lost African American city that sat on the grounds of Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia, and was populated by freed slaves, black abolitionists and members of the United States Colored Troops during and after the Civil War.
What inspired you to pursue this story?
I started working on my first book, “Black Men Built the Capitol,” in 2005. In addition to writing about the untold black history of Washington, D.C., I wanted to expand into nearby Virginia and Maryland. I discovered the Freedman’s Village story while researching the African American roots of Arlington National Cemetery. I wasn’t able to devote many pages to the story in the “Black Men Built the Capitol” because of its focus, but the story stayed with me.
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Adults and children read books in front of barracks at Freedman’s Village in the early 1860s.
Which collections are you using at the Library?
I’m using so many different collections, because there are so many great resources here. I’ve been able to find actual photographs and maps of Freedman’s Village in the Prints and Photographs Division, both online and not yet digitized. I’ve been pulling newspaper stories about the people of Freedman’s Village from the Serial and Government Publication Division. And I’ve been going through the papers of government and military employees who worked at Freedman’s Village in the Manuscript Division. There’s so much stuff that I’m always racing the clock to make the best use of my time here at the Library.
What are a few standout items you’ve discovered?
I talk a lot about the story of Freedman’s Village being unknown, but there was quite a bit of publicity around the town when it began and while it existed. I’m slowly going through the papers of D.B. Nichols, who was the Army official in charge of Freedman’s Village at its start. And I’ve also found some interesting things about Sojourner Truth, who spent a couple of years in the town, supposedly to help teach the free slaves how to acclimate to life as free Americans. But apparently, she had to take up arms and defend the town against raiding slave traders. For the rest of it, you’re going to have to read the book in a few years!
Tell us about your connection to the Library’s Rosa Parks Collection.
That’s a great story! I was working as a race and ethnicity reporter for the Associated Press in Washington, D.C., in 2014, having just ended a lengthy stint as a Supreme Court writer. One of my first big stories on the beat was about fights then occurring between the children of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X over their ancestors’ belongings.
While working on the story, an auctioneer from New York City contacted me and offered me a chance to see Rosa Parks’ archived materials in person. They had been taken away from Parks’ home city of Detroit following an extended legal fight between Parks’ heirs and her friends — a dispute similar to the court battle among King’s heirs.
So, I headed up to New York City and met with up videographer Bonny Ghosh. Together, we journeyed to the auction house and spent hours upon hours in a room packed to the gills with Rosa Parks’ things: her Congressional Gold Medal, Presidential Medal of Freedom, dresses, diaries, recipes, correspondence, combs, brushes, magazines, papers, programs and much more.
Afterward, I wrote a story, noting that no high bidder had yet emerged for the archive. An accompanying video, produced by Bonny, went out around the world.
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“Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words” is now on view at the Library of Congress. Photo by Shawn Miller.
I was caught by surprise a few months later when Mike Householder, a Detroit AP reporter, told me something was happening with the Parks archive. I began making calls, and the two of us ended up reporting that a foundation run by Howard G. Buffett had bought the archive and planned to give it to a museum to preserve it for the public’s benefit. Buffet said he heard about the archive’s plight from a televised news story. “I could not imagine having her artifacts sitting in a box in a warehouse somewhere,” Buffett said. “It’s just not right.”
And then of course, Buffett kept his word and donated the material to the Library of Congress.
I was there for the opening on Dec. 4 of the Library’s exhibit, “Rosa Parks: In Her Own Words,” and it was great to see the final resolution of something I started several years ago. Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden was gracious enough to mention my name at the opening.
I would say that this one story was probably one of my greatest achievements as a journalist, knowing that my work started this material on its path to the Library of Congress, where it will be properly preserved and available for Americans from now on.
What is it like to be a resident scholar at the Library?
I absolutely love it in the John W. Kluge Center! I can sit and concentrate on the research for my next couple of books — Yes, I’m already planning past my book on Freedman’s Village and, no, I’m not ready to talk about my next nonfiction project yet! I get to talk with my fellow scholars, a group of really intelligent people, on a daily basis. And the staff of the center are absolutely wonderful people.
The only thing I don’t like about the Kluge Center is that I can’t be here forever. It has changed my life!
March 9, 2020
Bugs in the White House? In Lincoln’s Time, They Swarmed
This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division.
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John G. Nicholay, c. 1860. Prints and Photographs Division.
Presidential secretary John G. Nicolay (1832-1901) devoted much of his adult life to President Abraham Lincoln. He first hired on as Lincoln’s secretary while the great man was still president-elect, and then accepted an appointment as the president’s senior private secretary once Lincoln took office. He held the position throughout the Lincoln administration. In the 1870s, Nicolay began collaborating on a biography of Lincoln with his fellow presidential secretary, John Hay. The Hay-Nicolay partnership produced the ten-volume Abraham Lincoln: A History, published in 1890, as well as other articles and writings. For much of this time, Lincoln’s only surviving son, Robert T. Lincoln, entrusted custodianship of Abraham Lincoln’s papers to Nicolay, who fielded numerous inquiries from the public about the president until his own death in 1901. Nicolay’s long history with the person and legacy of Lincoln is documented in the John G. Nicolay Papers, which are now available online.
In terms of literary accomplishment, Nicolay is often overshadowed by his friend Hay, who later gained a national reputation as a poet, journalist, and secretary of state under presidents William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt. But Nicolay, who edited a newspaper in the 1850s, could also turn a memorable phrase. For example, in a letter Nicolay wrote to his future wife Therena Bates on a warm night in July 1862, Nicolay evocatively described the literal and figurative invasion of his office at the White House, as the bright lights attracted “all bugdom.”
“My usual trouble in this room, (my office) is from what the world is sometimes pleased to call ‘big bugs’—(oftener humbugs),” Nicolay began, “but at this present writing (ten o’clock P.M. Sunday night) the thing is quite reversed, and little bugs are the pest. The gas lights over my desk are burning brightly and the windows of the room are open, and all bugdom outside seems to have organized a storming party to take the gas light, in numbers which seem to exceed the contending hosts at Richmond,” referring to Union General George Brinton McClellan’s recent Peninsular Campaign against Confederate forces outside Richmond, Virginia.
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Nicolay’s letter to Therena Bates, July 20, 1862, describing the insect invasion of his office. He signed letters to Therena with his middle name, George. Manuscript Division.
“The air is swarming with them,” Nicolay continued, “they are on the ceiling, the walls and the furniture in countless numbers, they are buzzing about the room, and butting their heads against the window panes, they are on my clothes, in my hair, and on the sheet I am writing on. They are all here, the plebian masses, as well as the great and distinguished members of the oldest and largest patrician families—the Millers, the Roaches, the Whites, the Blacks, yea even the wary and diplomatic foreigners from the Musquito Kingdom. They hold a high carnival, or rather a perfect Saturnalia. Intoxicated and maddened and blinded by the bright gas-light, they dance, and rush and fly about in wild gyrations, until they are drawn into the dazzling but fatal heat of the gas-flame when they fall to the floor, burned and maimed and mangled to the death, to be swept out into the dust and rubbish by the servant in the morning.”
Nicolay closed his letter to Therena with an apt comparison to the “big bugs” of politicians and notables who swirled around “the great central sun” at the White House during the day, drawn to the power wielded by Lincoln.
“I would go on with a long moral, and discourse with profound wisdom about its being a not altogether inapt miniature picture of the folly and madness and intoxication and fate too of many big bugs, whom even in this room I witness buzzing and gyrating round the great central sun and light and source of power of the government, were it not for the fear I have that if I should continue you might begin to think that I too have learned to hum, and for the still more pressing need of getting all the bugs out of my clothes and hair, and after that the yet more important duty of seeking bed and sleep to gain rest and vigor for the morrow’s labor. There is no news, so good night!”[image error]
Let’s hope that Nicolay slept tight — and that the bed bugs didn’t bite.
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March 5, 2020
Garth Brooks: Live at the Library
Gershwin Prize winner Garth Brooks and his wife Trisha Yearwood were at the Library for several events this week. Monday night, they talked on stage at the Coolidge Auditorium. Tuesday was dinner with Madison Council members and other VIPs. Wednesday was the taping of the PBS concert special. Here’s Mark Hartsell with the play-by-play of the couple’s on-stage chat with the Librarian.
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Garth Brooks performs during the Gershwin Prize concert, March 4. The show airs March 29 on PBS. Photo: Shawn Miller.
Before he rocked the Gershwin Prize concert at DAR Hall, Garth Brook couldn’t help but put on a show in the Library itself.
Decked out in his trademark cowboy hat and boots, the country music superstar paced the Coolidge Auditorium stage on Monday night and preached love and tolerance. He did an impression of a Doobie Brother singing a song about processed meat. He ate a bag of M&Ms a fan left for him on the stage floor. And, presented with two miniature Gershwin Prize medals, he dropped down on one knee before his wife, proposal style, to pin one on her dress.
Brooks and wife Trisha Yearwood, herself a country star and a celebrity chef, came to the Coolidge to talk with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about love, food, music and the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song — Brooks on Wednesday was honored as the 11th recipient of the Library’s annual prize.
“I’m proud as a country artist,” Brooks said. “We’re getting to fly the country flag this week in D.C. There are a million people that deserve to be in this seat more than I do, but it’s representing the songwriters — that’s what I love. The songwriters are the seeds to everything.”
Together, Brooks and Yearwood are country music’s most overachieving couple.
Brooks ranks as the No. 1-selling solo artist in U.S. history in any genre, with 148 million albums sold. He is the only artist ever to earn seven RIAA Diamond Awards, each signifying an album that sold over 10 million copies — as many as Michael Jackson, Elton John, Madonna, Prince and Elvis combined.
Like her husband, Yearwood is a big-time country star with a slew of platinum albums, hit singles and Grammys. Once a background singer who Brooks helped get a recording contract, Yearwood rose to fame in 1991 with “She’s in Love with the Boy” — the first of 19 top-10 hit singles.
Proving she’s a musician with more than one note, Yearwood also has authored three bestselling cookbooks, held down a recurring role on the TV legal drama “JAG” and for the past eight years hosted “Trisha’s Southern Kitchen,” an Emmy-winning culinary program on the Food Network.
With a tip of his hat, Brooks walked onstage with Yearwood on Monday and, together, they sat with Hayden for about 50 minutes of conversation before a fired-up crowd that included fans who had traveled to D.C. from Texas, Ohio, California and Florida just for the occasion.
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Librarian Carla Hayden talks with Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood at the Coolidge Auditorium, March 2. Photo: Shawn Miller.
Brooks and Yearwood discussed a daughter’s college graduation (“I’m the first Brooks to graduate high school in my teenage years,” he quipped. “This was big for our family”). Yearwood described how, with Brooks’ advice, she stays creative in the kitchen (“Take something you know, throw in tortellini and see what happens”). And Brooks demonstrated a game they play at home — singing songs in other artists’ voices — by imitating Doobie Brother Michael McDonald singing a vintage Oscar Mayer jingle (“My baloney has a first name, it’s O-s-c-a-r”).
Blame it all on his roots, but the young Brooks had to quickly learn that the dress code that mattered in the business of country music was coat and tie, not cowboy hat and boots. He went to Nashville, saw how many lucrative livelihoods depended on the inspiration of others and realized he wasn’t quite ready for music as business. After less than 24 hours, he turned around and went back to Oklahoma.
He eventually came around.
“There’s a lot of things in this this world where people think if you take care of business that means you’re not an artist,” Brooks said. “I just want to remind people that if you truly care about the music, you will take care of it after it’s created as well. You will make sure that everybody gets a chance to hear it the best that they can because there’s something in those songs.”
The business still is especially tough for young women trying to make it as performers or songwriters, Yearwood said.
As a young artist, she always tried to follow a What Would Reba Do rule — lessons she drew from watching the successful career of singer and actress Reba McEntire. That often boiled down to a simple dictum: Don’t talk about what’s not equal, just work harder.
Now, as a veteran performer, she tries to offer young women a similar example and personal encouragement.
“I have some songwriter friends who are female who are like, ‘I stopped writing songs for women because they’re not getting played on the radio,’ ” she said. “I’m like, ‘You can’t do that. You have to still be an artist. You have to still be creating. You have to still keep pushing.’ ”
Toward the end, Brooks passionately preached about tolerance, love and openness to others’ points of view — a theme of their shows — until even he could take it no more.
“I’ve sat as long as I can,” he said, getting up from the sofa and walking the stage as he spoke.
“Stand up for what you believe in. At the same time, turn these on,” he said, pointing to his ears. “Listen. Digest, then spew if you have to, but don’t try to out-scream each other. … That’s why I think that like-mindedness is good — a common goal, to love one another, to get somewhere. But how we’re going to get there is going to take all of our opinions and all of our efforts. It really is.”
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March 4, 2020
“Dearest Lenny”: Leonard Bernstein’s Love Letters from Japan
A 1970 letter to Bernstein from Kazuko Amano, one of his longtime correspondents from Japan. Used with permission.
For pretty much all her life, Mari Yoshihara has had one foot in the United States and the other in Japan: She was born in New York City, raised in Tokyo. She earned a bachelor’s degree from the University of Tokyo, then an M.A. and a Ph.D. from Brown University. Her career as an academic — she teaches American studies at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa — has followed a similar pattern. She writes in English and Japanese, often focusing on cultural encounters between the U.S. and Asia.
Her latest book, published last fall, is “Dearest Lenny: Letters from Japan and the Making of the World Maestro.” She researched it using the Leonard Bernstein Collection in the Library’s Music Division. Here she answers a few questions about the book and her experience at the Library.
What drew you to Leonard Bernstein?
As a scholar of American studies and a music lover, I was of course familiar with Bernstein’s importance in American music and culture. But I was not particularly interested in writing about Bernstein per se. Rather, I intended to write a comparative study of Cold War cultural policy in the U.S. and Japan, and I wanted to find out about the history and politics of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Because Bernstein was a close family friend of the Kennedys — his piece “Mass” was written for the opening of the Kennedy Center — I was going to look at his involvement in the center’s establishment and operation.
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Bernstein in 1971. Photo by Marion S. Trikosko.
Tell us about the letters in the Bernstein Collection that changed your book project.
At first, I had no idea that the Bernstein Collection is one of the largest archival collections devoted to a single artist anywhere, with more than 1,700 boxes of manuscripts and other materials. I was quickly overwhelmed and started procrastinating by poking into other parts of the collection. I came across two Japanese names in the correspondence I did not recognize. Simply curious to find out who these people were, I requested the letters. When I began reading them, my jaw literally dropped.
One set of correspondence was from Kazuko Amano (born Ueno), who wrote her first fan letter to Bernstein in 1947. She was then an 18-year-old student and had spent the war years in Japan after having been raised in Paris, where she studied piano at Paris Conservatory. To her surprise, Bernstein replied about a year later, and thus began a personal relationship between two very different individuals: a globe-trotting maestro on the way to international stardom and a Japanese woman who would spend much of her adult life as a housewife raising two children in Japan.
The other correspondent was even more dramatic: Kunihiko Hashimoto met Bernstein in summer 1979 on the last day of Bernstein’s tour of Japan with the New York Philharmonic. The two men spent the night together, and Hashimoto saw the maestro off at the airport. Immediately afterward, Hashimoto wrote the first of many — over 350, in fact — love letters to Bernstein. The letters are passionate, tender and sometimes heartbreaking expressions of Hashimoto’s love and the evolving nature of his devotion to the maestro.
Needless to say, I left the Kennedy Center project behind (although I still think it is a worthy research topic) and started a completely new one.
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Mari Yoshihara
What new do the letters reveal about Bernstein?
Amano was first and foremost an extremely loyal fan. In the early years, her letters revealed a mixture of girlish fandom, admiration for a musician she respected, a tinge of romantic yearning and the awareness of the foolishness of harboring such sentiments. But over the years, her love of Bernstein evolved into something much more profound, and her letters express a deep understanding of his music and commitment to art.
The urgency evident in Hashimoto’s early letters is emotionally overwhelming. But over time, Hashimoto’s love also evolved into awe and worship for a great artist and a desire to serve him in any way he could. Hashimoto later was appointed to be the maestro’s business representative in Japan and played a key role in some of Bernstein’s most important projects in the late stage of his life.
What was your experience like researching the collection?
The sheer size of the collection makes it both heaven and hell for researchers. In one word, it is overwhelming.
But once I figured out the broad contours of the book, researching the collection — I took five trips to the Library, each about a week — was quite exciting. I learned things linking these personal relationships to my original interest in the intersections between art and politics, but I also learned a lot about things I did not know I would be interested in.
For instance, the business records of Bernstein’s management company, Amberson Enterprises, offer much insight into the sheer scope of Bernstein’s work and the changing nature of the American and global music industry in the second half of the 20th century.
Can you comment on the value generally of the Library’s collections for researchers?
It goes without saying that the volume and range of the collections and the expertise of the librarians and archivists who know them inside out are immensely valuable to researchers. I have found Library staff to be extremely helpful, not only while I am physically at the Library but also when sending inquiries by email.
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A 1949 spring festival postcard Kazuko Amano, then Kazuko Ueno, sent to Bernstein. Used with permission.
March 2, 2020
A President and a King, George Washington and King George III, in a Dangerous Year
This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division.
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A print of busts of King George III (left) and George Washington (right), circa 1780–1820.
For both George Washington and King George III of England, the summer of 1788 began a year shaped by illness and worry. Even though the sources of their troubles differed, each George had reason to look anxiously across the Atlantic.
That summer, George III began what would be his first prolonged bout of madness. It is uncertain what he had, but the letters, reports and diaries of the doctors and courtiers who surrounded him describe his symptoms. These included stomach pains, rashes, lameness, blurry vision, sleeplessness and discolored urine. His psychological symptoms were even more frightening: He chattered rapidly, incessantly, delusionally, even obscenely.
Through the fall, the king’s condition fluctuated. By November, he was unfit to rule, and Parliament began to debate a bill that would have allowed the Prince of Wales, who was allied with his father’s political opponents, to rule as regent. Parliament, like the king’s household, was in turmoil.
That same summer, the United States ratified its Constitution. By the fall, as the king was falling deeper into illness, George Washington learned that his contemporaries expected him to agree to become the first president of the United States. Washington expressed his dismay in letters to his friends.
To Benjamin Lincoln, who had been one of his generals, he wrote that if he was “constrained to accept, I call Heaven to witness, that this very act would be the greatest sacrafice of my personal feelings & wishes that ever I have been called upon to make.” To Henry Knox, who would be his secretary of war, Washington wrote that he felt like “a culprit who is going to the place of his execution: so unwilling am I, in the evening of a life nearly consumed in public cares, to quite a peaceful abode for an Ocean of difficulties.”
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A view of a triumphal arch erected on Gray’s Ferry Bridge outside Philadelphia to receive the soon-to-be-inaugurated George Washington.
As Washington prepared to become president, he learned about the king’s madness from his European correspondents. One of these, Gouverneur Morris, had been a delegate to the Constitutional Convention and was now in Paris. He reported that the king had Washington on his mind.
“By the Bye,” Morris wrote, “in the melancholy Situation to which the poor King of England has been reduced there were, I am told, in Relation to you some whimsical Circumstances.” In one of these, “the Defender of the faith, in one of his Capricios, conceived himself to be no less a Personage than George Washington at the Head of the american Army. This shews that you have done Something or other which sticks most terribly in his Stomach.”
Was this true? Or was it gossip that Morris picked up in a country on the verge of revolution, where people were happy to spread stories about the frailties of kings? These stories do not appear in the writings of people around George III. Yet, Charlotte Papendiek, wife and daughter of courtiers, confirmed in her diary that the loss of the American colonies was still on the king’s mind five years after the end of the war.
She recounted that on being told that Lord North, who had been prime minister during the American Revolution, had been to see him, the king said, “[H]e, poor fellow, has lost his sight, and I my mind. Yet we meant well to the Americans; just to punish them with a few bloody noses, and then make bows for the mutual happiness of the two countries. … We lost America. Tell him not to call again; I shall never see him.”
In February 1789, the king began to recover. On April 23, a service of thanksgiving was held at St. Paul’s Cathedral in London. One week later, on April 30, 1789, Washington was inaugurated in New York. In his inaugural address Washington said in public what he had been saying all year in private: “Among the vicissitudes incident to life,” he told his hearers, “no event could have filled me with greater anxieties” than learning he had been elected president.
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The Federal Gazette, a Philadelphia newspaper, reported on a single page on May 2, 1789, news of both King George’s recovery (above) and George Washington’s inauguration (below).
[image error]As president of the Constitutional Convention, Washington had already had a hand in shaping the office of president of the United States. Now, as he filled the seat, he and the new government were responsible for starting the federal machinery. Together, they shaped the presidency in reaction to the monarchy while at the same time, as former British subjects, it persisted in their minds as a model.
While Congress debated whether Washington should be called “His Elective Majesty” or “His Highness the President of the United States of America,” Washington wondered how to divide his power and authority as president from his status as a private person. He wrote vice-president John Adams, treasury secretary Alexander Hamilton and others for advice.
Adams reminded Washington that the presidency “by its legal Authority, defined by the Constitution, has no equal in the World, excepting those only which are held by crowned Heads,” and that it would be hard for the new nation to uphold its dignity and authority in the world without at least some “Splendor and Majisty.”
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“Huzzah, the king is well” reads the motto on this tea set created to celebrate King George’s recovery. Royal Collection Trust.
Hamilton suggested a weekly levee, or reception. The Washingtons settled on two per week. Abigail Adams, who attended the levees of both king and president, wrote that the president’s “grace dignity & ease” left the “Royal George far behind him.” Despite the ease he projected, however, Washington worried that his behavior might be taken for “an ostentatious imitation, or mimickry of Royalty.”
The summer after his inauguration, it was Washington’s turn to be ill. A tumor on his thigh, accompanied by a fever, lasted for weeks. Washington’s illness, though serious, did not compare to George III’s, which returned in 1810 and made him incapable for the last decade of his life. Nor did Washington’s two terms as president of a new nation make him an equal in power to George III, who ruled an empire for 60 years.
But for a year between 1788 and 1789, when Washington rose to lead the colonies that George III had lost, they were equal as human beings — each anxious, vulnerable and aware of his own weaknesses and his rival’s strengths.
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February 26, 2020
“Truth is mighty and will prevail”– Ida B. Wells
We started Black History Month with the great Rosa Parks from Alabama and we’re winding it up today with the great Ida B. Wells from Mississippi. This is a guest post from Malea Walker, a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division, who first posted in on the Headlines and Heroes Blog. Wells’ motto, “Truth is mighty and will prevail,” is still reflected in the work of investigative journalists today, including, of course, the Ida B. Wells Society for Investigative Reporting.
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Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Photo: Sallie E. Garrity. National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.
In a time of extreme racism and yellow journalism, documenting and speaking the truth about lynchings in the South was a rare and dangerous act. But that did not stop journalist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. When one of her friends was lynched in Memphis in 1892, she decided she could not let the defamation and murder of African American men stand any longer.
For months, Wells — she married in 1895, after she had begun her activism and publishing career, and added her husband’s surname to hers then — traveled throughout the South investigating lynchings. She used eyewitness interviews, testimony from families, and looked through records. The New York Times in its recent obituary for Wells noted, “She pioneered reporting techniques that remain central tenets of modern journalism.”
What she found was that the stereotype of black men being lynched for raping white women was almost always false. Disputes usually started over completely unrelated things, as it had with her friend Thomas Moss, killed over a dispute that began with children playing marbles. She boldly reported her findings in an editorial in the newspaper that she co-owned and edited, The Memphis Free Press and Headlight. That editorial, however, caused a riot in Memphis and she was forced to leave her home to save her life. The office of the newspaper was destroyed.
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“Driven from Home.” The Washington Bee (Washington, DC), June 11, 1892.
This did not stop Wells from continuing to speak out and write about lynching in the South, however. Instead she made it her mission to continue reporting on her findings, and to bring facts forward to combat the racist lies that covered up the violence that she found. As The Appeal (Saint Paul, MN) wrote months later, by leaving Memphis and going to New York, she began to reach thousands more people. “Free Speech,” they noted, “is not so easily suppressed as The Free Speech.”
Wells continued to face danger and opposition as she began telling her story across the country. An article from the Memphis Commercial as republished in The Columbia Herald, below, shows the depth of loathing that she faced. The language in the article (in the second column) is unpleasant to read — the author refers to Wells as a “wench” who writes “obscene filth” — but it is being presented here as a historical example of what Wells faced.
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“A Colored Corday.” The Columbia Herald (Columbia, TN), December 23, 1892.
Wells continued her reporting, though, writing for The New York Age, the Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean, The Conservator, and many other newspapers. She published the pamphlet “Southern Horrors” later in 1892, working off of what she had written for the Age and providing additional details. She then traveled across Europe, gaining support there for her anti-lynching mission. Her success in Europe emboldened her efforts once she returned to the United States and continued lecturing and writing.
In early 1895 she published her book, “A Red Record.” Again using her investigative reporting, “Record” was longer than “Southern Horrors” and included updated statistics, specific details, and photographs of cases of lynching across the South.
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“A Red Record.” Ida B. Wells (Chicago, 1895).
Wells continued to be an activist throughout her career. She started a number of clubs and organizations including the Ida B. Wells Women’s Club and Alpha Suffrage Club, the first suffrage club for black women. She helped in the founding of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). In 1930 she even ran for a seat in the Illinois State Senate. She never stopped speaking the truth that she saw—the truth that she found through facts and figures. Her papers are at the University of Chicago. She died March 21, 1931.
February 24, 2020
Free to Use and Reuse: Movie Magic
The Grand Riviera’s opening week, 1925. Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: Jack Boucher. Prints and Photographs Division.
The Grand Riviera Theatre opened on Grand River Boulevard in Detroit in 1925, an intoxicating, million-dollar movie palace designed to resemble the wealthiest of Italian Renaissance courtyards. It was gorgeous. It was crazy. You couldn’t believe it.
Three stories, 3,000 seats and an 80-foot octagonal tower above the ticket window. The theater’s namesake sign was a vertical wonder, spelling out RIVIERA, one letter below the next, in lights that shone for blocks. Just inside, the lobby was a rotunda that soared forty, fifty feet straight up, a rounded chamber of multi-paned windows, a chandelier hanging from a painted ceiling. The floor was marble. The wood was mahogany. There was a smoking room for gentlemen. Ladies could repair to a well-appointed parlor.
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The Riviera’s lobby, 1970. Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: Allen Stross. Prints and Photographs Division.
You can see the Riviera in all its long-lost splendor, and dozens of other unique movie theaters, in this month’s set of Free to Use and Reuse prints and photographs from the Library’s collections of copyright-free material. There’s the neon-lit Tower Theater, a Sacramento landmark. Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in Los Angeles. The Ritz Theatre in Greenville, Alabama, an Art Deco building opened in 1935 and now devoted to the performing arts.
But it was ornate movie palaces that were the rage in the 1920s when the Riviera was built. It was designed by architect John Eberson, who built dozens of similar theaters in the Roaring Twenties. His signature developments were huge “atmospheric” auditoriums, designed to look like a garden or courtyard or somesuch.
Detroit’s entry would be no exception, for the city then! The energy! It was home to the booming automobile industry – Ford, Cadillac, Chrysler, Packard – and growing like mad. Maybe 265,000 people in 1900; 1.56 million people in 1930. It was the fourth largest metropolis in the nation. The Riviera, set in the 9200 block of Grand River Boulevard, one of the city’s main arteries, was more than six miles from downtown and yet the district pulsed with life.
People came in droves, walking from nearby houses, bringing the kids, the whole thing an adventure. Once inside, just past the lobby, patrons walked into the auditorium. It was a vast, open space, the floor sloping to the front. Far overhead, tiny lights twinkled, star-like, in an arched ceiling that melted into darkness. The walls were lined with statuary and bas relief sculpture. Seats were plush. Ushers wore military-style uniforms. It was so mobbed that an 1,800-seat annex was built in 1927.
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The Riviera’s auditorium, above and below, 1925. Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: Jack Boucher. Prints and Photographs Division.
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But as the decades rolled past and pages dropped from the calendar, times and fortunes changed. The auto industry started to collapse in the 1950s. The city’s white population began fleeing for the suburbs in the 1960s. Detroit went from being a symbol of American muscle to a symbol of American rust and ruin.
By October of 1970, the Riviera was fading. In the photo below, the marquee is missing several letters. Three films are on offer, but two are retreads. The draw was “The Executioner,” a spy thriller starring George Peppard. Filling out the bill was “Machine Gun McCain,” with John Cassavetes and future Bond girl Britt Ekland, from 1969; and “Salt & Pepper,” a racy comedy with Sammy Davis Jr. and Peter Lawford, that was two years old.
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The Riviera in 1970. Historic American Buildings Survey. Photo: Allen Stross. Prints and Photographs Division.
A few years later, the place was turned into an arena for rowdy rock concerts. The Who played there. The Kinks. Fun, sure, but the magic was gone. By the 1990s, when the city’s population had dropped below one million – roughly the size it had been in 1920 – the Riviera was an abandoned wreck in a city full of them. It was demolished in 1996.
Today, the site is a local office of the Social Security Administration, a bland, one-story brick building. An empty lot is across the street, as is a beauty supply store, an abandoned building and a liquor store. The downtown skyline now looks so far away that it seems another place entirely.
But, so many years ago, it had been a fine time, the evenings at the Riviera on the wide boulevard, the vertical sign flickering on in the falling darkness, the promise of a crowd, the buzzing conversations, the men in hats, the ladies in dresses, a night in Detroit that you’d remember for years.
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February 19, 2020
Garth Brooks and Trisha Yearwood: On Stage at the Library March 2
Garth Brooks, the 2020 recipient of the Gershwin Prize for Popular Song.
Garth Brooks has friends in library places – sorry, couldn’t help it – and one of them will be in the Coolidge auditorium on March 2, as the Grammy Award-winning singer and songwriter will be talking about his life and career ahead of receiving the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize for Popular Song later in the week.
Brooks will be joined by his wife, fellow country music icon Trisha Yearwood, in an on-stage conversation with Librarian Carla Hayden at 7 p.m. The power couple will discuss their international success, their careers as music industry change makers and their humanitarian efforts. The conversation is being presented as part of the Library’s initiative to Explore America’s Changemakers.
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Country music icon Trisha Yearwood will be in conversation with Brooks, her husband, and Librarian Carla Hayden.
Tickets are available starting at 10 a.m. Thursday, Feb. 20 (that’s tomorrow). They’re free, as long as they last, so you’ll want to book your reservations. If you can’t be there in person, no worries: The event will be live-streamed on the Library’s YouTube channel.
The awards ceremony and concert will be taped in D.C. on March 4, then broadcast on PBS stations at 9 p.m. ET on Sunday, March 29. The show will also be available on the PBS website and video app. It will be broadcast at a later date to U.S. Department of Defense locations around the world via the American Forces Network.
Brooks, 58, was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and began his music career in college. Songs such as “Friends in Low Places,” “If Tomorrow Never Comes” and “The Dance,” catapulted him to the top of all-time record sales, and his energetic, freewheeling concerts made him one of the world’s most popular touring acts. He and Yearwood met in Nashville early on, toured together and later married. She has sold more than 15 million albums and now hosts her own cooking show.
Brooks’ music has received every accolade in the recording industry. He has been named the CMA Entertainer of the Year a record-setting six times. He is the first artist to receive seven Diamond Awards for albums certified by the RIAA at more than 10 million album sales each. He remains the No. 1-selling solo artist in U.S. history, certified by the RIAA with more than 148 million album sales. He has been inducted into the International Songwriters Hall of Fame in New York, the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame, the Country Music Hall of Fame and, most recently, the Musicians Hall of Fame. His tour with Yearwood sold more than 6.3 million tickets, making it the biggest North American tour in history and the biggest American tour in the world.
He’s also the youngest artist to receive the Gershwin Prize. Past recipients include Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Paul Simon and Billy Joel. Last year’s recipients were Gloria and Emilio Estefan.
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