Library of Congress's Blog, page 66

“The Exquisite Corpse” Turns 10!

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Ten years ago, the Library of Congress’s read.gov website embarked on an adventure in collaboration with the National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance.

The project was called “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure,” and over the course of 27 weekly episodes, many of the nation’s top writers and illustrators for young people  contributed words and pictures to this madcap story written and illustrated in sequential format. It was the like the Exquisite Corpse game devised by Surrealist artists, in which one artist would draw of part of person and then another artist would add to it, and then another artist …

More than 400,000 readers around the world eagerly awaited the posting of a new episode. The success of the online version resulted in a print version being published by Candlewick and an audio version from Brilliance Audio. You can also listen to an audio version from the National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled, a free service provided by the Library of Congress.

To maximize the reading, writing and artistic opportunities of the story, the NCBLA has created an updated comprehensive Education Resource Center, available free to all adults who live and work with young people. These online materials include direct links to the story game on Read.gov, as well as supplemental articles to inspire progressive storytelling and games, complementary reading lists and classroom activities. The NCBLA is grateful to its colleagues at the Butler Children’s Literature Center at Dominican University for their work in developing many of these education materials. Additional writing exercises are available on the website of our literacy partner Reading Rockets.

The authors and illustrators who contributed to “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure” are M.T. Anderson, Natalie Babbitt, Calef Brown, Susan Cooper, Kate DiCamillo, Timothy Basil Ering, Jack Gantos, Nikki Grimes, Shannon Hale, Steven Kellogg, Gregory Maguire, Megan McDonald, Patricia and Fredrick McKissack, Linda Sue Park, Katherine Paterson, James Ransome, Jon Scieszka, Lemony Snicket, and Chris Van Dusen.

The National Children’s Book and Literacy Alliance is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization founded by award-winning young people’s authors and illustrators. Acting as an independent creative agent or in partnership with interested parties, the NCBLA develops original projects, programs and educational outreach that advocate for and educate about literacy, literature, libraries, the arts and humanities.

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Some of the “Corpse” contributers, pictured here at the 2011 National Book Festival (left to right): Jack Gantos, NCBLA Executive Director Mary Brigid Barrett, Fredrick McKissack, Patricia McKissack, Calef Brown, Katherine Paterson, Gregory Maguire, Susan Cooper and Chris Van Dusen.

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Inquiring Minds: Family Surprised to Discover Civil War Veteran’s Ordeal on LOC Blog

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Peggy Lundeen Johnson

Peggy Lundeen Johnson is the great-great-granddaughter of Samuel J. Gibson. He fought for the Union during the Civil War and was incarcerated in the Confederate military prison in Andersonville, Georgia, in 1864. While there, he kept a daily log of his experience. Johnson was unaware of the diary until she encountered it on the Library’s blog . In this post, she reflects on what the discovery has meant to her and her family.

To coincide with publication of this interview, and in honor of Veterans Day, the Library is inviting the public to transcribe Gibson’s diary through By the People, the Library’s crowdsourced transcription project. Try your hand at transcribing the diary, another Civil War collection or one of the many other original manuscripts included in the project. Help us make these important documents more accessible!   

How did you find out about Gibson’s diary?

I was visiting Illinois last summer and had dinner one evening with my cousin and his wife. He said that he had a book about Andersonville and in it was a quote from Samuel Gibson’s diary. Up until that moment, I had no idea that there was a diary. When I got home to Southern California, where I live, I typed in Samuel Gibson’s name on the Library of Congress site and found the diary and a letter from Samuel to his wife, Rachel. I also found the blog post about the diary and commented on my reaction to reading it, explaining that Samuel was my great-great-grandfather.

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Samuel Gibson’s diary

What did you know beforehand about Gibson’s life?

What little I know about Samuel’s life, I learned from doing a little genealogy over the last few years and reading his wife, Rachel’s, obituary from 1916. It wasn’t until I was an adult that I learned of Samuel’s service and that he had been a prisoner at Andersonville. I know that Samuel was a teacher and had some college education before enlisting in the Army in 1861. For some reason, my mother’s family never talked about it — Samuel is my great-great-grandfather on my mother’s side of the family. Mother did mention one time that Samuel and his family were buried in the Galva, Illinois, cemetery, so I found their grave sites one time when I was visiting her. I was raised in Galva, the same town where Samuel and Rachel lived after he was discharged from the Army.

What was your reaction upon reading the diary? 

It was very emotional reading the diary for the first time. I was struck by how strong a man he was in the face of such adversity. He kept his mind sharp by doing algebra and writing down his observations each day. He had great compassion for his fellow soldiers and did what he could to relieve some of their suffering, even while he was suffering. His reference to President Lincoln being elected to his second term was very interesting to me. He told of the horrors at Andersonville and the cruelty of the soldiers holding them captive. I’m very proud of Samuel Gibson.

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Andersonville Prison, Aug. 17, 1864.

Do you know what happened to Gibson after his release from prison? 

After he was released, Samuel, Rachel and their daughter, Ella, left their home in Pennsylvania and moved to a farm near Galva, where I believe Rachel had family. They went on to have three more daughters, two of whom died young, and they are buried in Galva — they are the family members whose graves I found. Samuel was ill much of the rest of his life due to disease he had contracted at Andersonville. He lived only 14 more years and died at age 45 in 1879. Rachel lived to be 80 years old and died in 1916. Her obituary says she reread all of Samuel’s letters to her in the last few months of her life. As far as I know, only one letter has been preserved, and that is the one at the Library of Congress.

What is the value of the diary to your family? 

The diary adds another layer to our family’s history. I have children and grandchildren, and I am encouraging all of them to take the time to read the diary from cover to cover. They need to see and hear what a patriot their ancestor was and how strong he stood in adversity. I don’t know how the Library obtained the diary and letter to Rachel, but I am so glad that they are being preserved so that future generations can read them. I’m very proud to be Samuel Gibson’s great-great-granddaughter, and I will continue to tell his story.

The Gandhara Buddha Scroll: A Delicate Treasure

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Preservationists at work on the Gandhara scroll.

The ancient scroll arrived at the Library of Congress in a decidedly unassuming way: encased in a Parker Pen box. Inside lay one of the oldest Buddhist manuscripts known to the world, radiocarbon dated to between the first century B.C to the first century A.D.

For years, the scroll resided in the Library’s climate-controlled “top treasures” vault, rarely viewed because of its fragility. This year, the Library redigitized the piece and placed it online, offering scholars and Buddhist communities worldwide access to a little-known part of Buddhist history.

The scroll originates from Gandhara, an early Buddhist center located in what is now the northern border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. A group of materials buried high in the arid mountains was unearthed there in the 1990s, and the Library acquired this birch-bark scroll from the collection in 2003. It is the oldest holding in the Library’s Asian Division.

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The pen box that held the scroll during shipping.

“This is a rare, unique item because it is very old, No. 1, and, No. 2, it does bring us, historically speaking, relatively close to the lifetime of the Buddha,” said Jonathan Loar, the division’s South Asia specialist. “It’s also one of the oldest among the couple hundred other Gandharan manuscripts known to scholars, so even within its own unique collection it stands out.”

The scroll tells the story of buddhas who came before and after Siddhartha Gautama — the sage who reached enlightenment under a Bodhi tree in eastern India in the sixth or fifth century B.C. and who became known as the Buddha. The narrative is in the first person: A scribe recounts the direct teaching of the Buddha regarding his divine lineage.

The scroll presented the Library a serious conservation challenge, even for its expert staff. “It was the most fragile thing I’ve ever worked on,” said Holly Krueger, who recently retired as head of paper conservation. “It was completely unique, unlike anything I’ve ever encountered.”

To assist with the delicate work of unrolling the scroll, the Library obtained the assistance of the British Library and its chief conservator, Mark Barnard, which had successfully unrolled some 30 related scrolls. To prepare, Krueger practiced unrolling a dessicated cigar — the closest material Barnard had found to the Gandhara scrolls, though not nearly as fragile. Her team crafted special tools, including bamboo implements and glass weights to keep the scroll down. Then, for three days in advance, it was gently humidified.

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Piecing the scroll together.

Krueger and Barnard worked in an area of the conservation lab with the fewest air currents — the slightest movement could cause pieces to dislodge. The process took four hours of painstaking, but ultimately successful, work. Afterward, the scroll was encapsulated between two pieces of glass, and their edges sealed. Individual fragments were placed between separate pieces of glass, and the scroll was then imaged. Earlier this year, the Conservation Division redigitized the scroll and its fragments using advanced ultraviolet and infrared imaging.

The scroll today is considered one of the world’s best-preserved examples of a Gandharan scroll. It lacks a title, a beginning and an end but retains about 75 to 80 percent of the original text — much better, experts say, than the average Gandharan scroll.

In the scholarly and Buddhist communities, Loar said, the availability of Gandharan scrolls for study sheds new light on the earliest Buddhist literature and “deepens and diversifies what we currently know about the religion’s formative history.”

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The scroll, unrolled and preserved.

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The (Cursed?) Original Book of Witchcraft

 

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And so it begins…the title page of Reginald Scot’s 1584 edition of “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

This article was co-researched and co-written by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins, who also had the brilliant idea for the piece.

An ancient tome delving into the dark arts of witchcraft and magic…a book of doom…yet it lives…at the Library of Congress.

You’re forgiven if you think we’re talking about H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional book of magic, “Necronomicon,” the basis for the plot device in “The Evil Dead” films, or something Harry Potter might have found in the Dark Arts class at Hogwarts.

But, as the darkness of Halloween descends, we’re not kidding. A first edition of “The Discouerie of Witchcraft,” Reginald Scot’s 1584 shocker that outraged King James I, survives at your favorite national library in the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room. (The Library has a copy of the original edition, as well as a 1651 edition.)

It is believed to be the first book published on witchcraft in English and extremely influential on the practice of stage magic. Shakespeare likely researched it for the witches scene in “Macbeth.” It was consulted and plagiarized by stage magicians for hundreds of years. Today, you can peruse its dark secrets online. How could your wicked little fingers resist? Scot promises to reveal “lewde dealings of witches and witchmongers”! The “pestilent practices of Pythonists”!  The “vertue and power of natural magike”!

Also, juggling.

It is one of the  foundational examples of grimoire, a textbook on magic, groundbreaking for its time and nearly encyclopedic in its information. Scot’s research included consulting dozens of previous thinkers on various topics such as occult, science and magic, including Agrippa von Nettesheim’s “De Occulta Philosophia,” in 1531 and John Dee’s “Monas Hieroglyphica” in 1564. The result is a most impressive compendium.

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The heavens, as used in witchcraft. “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” P. 283. Rare Book & Special Collections.

But Scot wasn’t lurking about in a hooded cape, looking for eyes of newts and toes of frogs to bewitch mortals. A skeptic, he wrote to make it plain that “witches” were not evil, but instead were resourceful and capable women who practiced the art of folk healing as well as sleight of hand. Their apparently miraculous feats were in no way wicked. He wrote, “At this day it is indifferent to say in the English tongue, ‘she is a witch’ or ‘she is a wise woman.’ ”

Born in 1538 in Kent under the rule of Henry VIII, Scot was landed gentry. He was educated and a member of Parliament. He admired, and may have joined, the Family of Love, a small sect comprised of elites who dismissed major Christian religions in favor of arriving at spiritual enlightenment through love for all. By publishing “Witchcraft,” he meant to expose it as superstition, hoping to better England by forwarding knowledge. Since most people who were accused – and often hanged – for it were impoverished women on the margins of society, he hoped to garner social empathy for them and other scapegoats.

He also hoped to dispel the common belief in magic tricks performed on stage before gasping audiences. To do this, he researched and explained how magicians carried out their illusions. Beheadings? See the diagrams!

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Detail from “To cut off ones head, and to laie it in a a platter, which the jugglers call the decollation of John Baptist.” P. 282, “The Discoverie of Witchcraft,” Rare Book & Special Collections Division.

How to appear to “thrust a bodkin (needle) into your head” and survive? See page 280!

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Detail on how to use a false bodkin. P. 280, “The Discoverie of Witchcraft.” Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

This noble effort, as the kids say, went left.

The book was blasted by the religious faithful, according to “The Reception of Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft: Witchcraft, Magic and Radical Religion,” a study by S.F. Davies in the Journal of the History of Ideas, published in 2013. The King of Scotland, James VI, was outraged. Like many of his subjects, he was convinced that witches worked in concert with the devil. He thought a coven of witches was trying to kill him. He published “Daemonologie” in 1597, in part to refute Scot’s work. He also became King James I of England in 1603. There’s a legend that he ordered all copies of Scot’s book burned, but the historical record is silent on the subject. Still, it’s clear James I loathed the book. There was growing concern at the time that women’s use of so-called magic was counter to the aims of the state and church. Thus, James sought to instill fear in female communities and spoke out directly against witches and their perceived occultisms.

“Almost every English author who subsequently wrote on the subject of witchcraft mentioned Scot disparagingly,” Davies writes of the period. Scot died in 1599; the book was not republished during his lifetime. There was an abridged Dutch translation published in 1609, Davies notes, but was not republished in England until 1651, nearly three quarters of a century after its initial publication.

Still, the book survived, “mined as a source on witchcraft and folklore,” and his material on practical magic and sleight of hand “found a large audience,” Davies writes. For Scot’s original aims, that wasn’t good. Rather than debunking stage magic for the masses as he’d hoped, “Discoverie” became a handbook for magicians in Europe and America, well into the 17th and 18th centuries. Famous works such as “Hocus Pocus ” and the “The Juggler’s Oracle“ drew heavily on “Witchcraft,” thus spreading the very mysteries that Scot had hoped to quell. Davies: “[I]t travelled in directions Scot himself may never have imagined.”

Today, 435 years after it was published, the book sits on the shelf, silent, patient, having done the work its author did not want it to do. It’s almost as if…the thing had a hex on it.

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Harry Houdini: (How to Be a) Smooth Criminal

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Harry Houdini, July 7, 1912. The crate will be sealed and lowered into New York Harbor; he’ll escape. Photo: Carl Dietz. Prints and Photographs Division.

This is a guest post by Amanda Zimmerman, a reference assistant in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Since we’re approaching Halloween, we thought we’d drop in on America’s most famous mystic and magician, Harry Houdini. This article was adapted from the Library of Congress Magazine.

One of the most recognizable figures of the 20th century, Harry Houdini — escape artist, debunker of frauds, delver into all things mysterious — spent a surprising amount of time in the company of the police. The Library has his collection in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and it is filled with marvelous things — just ask author, actor and magician Neal Patrick Harris, who visited the collection before his recent appearance here.

One thing that you’lff notice is that the self-proclaimed Handcuff King routinely issued challenges to law enforcement, claiming that no handcuffs or prison cells could hold him — stunts that made Houdini famous around the world and frequently brought him into contact with people on both sides of the law. He spent a lifetime studying the methods of the criminal element to understand how they duped the innocent and unsuspecting.

This insight resulted in law enforcement occasionally asking for Houdini’s help in solving crimes. On at least one occasion, Houdini received an official police pass allowing him to cross any police barriers in an active crime scene or investigation.

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From the Harry Houdini Collection. Rare Books and Special Collections Division.

This unusual level of involvement with police matters allowed Houdini to amass a huge amount of information related to crime, fraud and general wrongdoing. In 1906, he gathered this information and published “The Right Way to Do Wrong: An Expose of Successful Criminals.”

In the preface, Houdini outlines his purpose: “I trust this book will … put you in a position where you will be less liable to fall a victim.” Each chapter explores various classes of criminals, from burglars and cracksmen to “healers” and humbugs, revealing the tricks they use to con their innocent prey. Houdini condemns the behavior of criminals but also claims they have the same “talents” as giants of business and finance — only with their energy and skills applied in the wrong direction.

The books were sold primarily at Houdini’s own performances, and rumors circulated when it was published that criminals snatched up as many copies as they could in an effort to protect their secrets (rumors now supposed to have been started by Houdini himself). Perhaps Houdini truly did hope to use his knowledge to inform and protect the innocent public; perhaps he also saw this as an opportunity to once again display his incomparability as the master of all that mystifies.

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Kluge Center: Dazzling Finds from the Maya

This is a guest post by Giselle Aviles, research assistant in the Kluge Center.

In September, the John W. Kluge Center welcomed Simon Martin, anthropologist and specialist in Maya hieroglyphic writing, as the second Jay I. Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas. He is working on a project called “Articulations of Power Among the Classic Maya.”

We’ve created a resource guide, highlighting information about Martin, the Kislak Chair position, and the Jay I. Kislak collection, which contains incredible treasures from the early Americas. It is an especially exciting time to launch this resource guide as we honor National Hispanic Heritage Month.

The resource guide will help you learn more about the Kislak Chair and The John W. Kluge Center. In the future, we will be publishing more resources on other scholars!

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Codex-style vase with sixty hieroglyphs, Guatemalan lowlands. Maya, Late Classic period, A.D. 700-900, Red and black on cream ceramic. Jay I. Kislak Collection, Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress

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Rare Film: Washington Senators Win the 1924 World Series

The Washington Nationals and the Houston Astros will play Game One of the World Series tonight in Houston. Check out this rare footage, found in a garage, of the Washington Senators winning the 1924 World Series over the New York Giants in a Game Seven that went 12 innings!

This film is now part of the Library’s collections. Remember, the Library of Congress is the Nation’s Library, but blog authors do have opinions. Go Nats! Stay in the fight! Here’s hoping for a great Series.

How “The Postman Always Rings Twice” Got Its “Sort of Crazy” Name

This story is adapted from an upcoming issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

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The first page of Cain’s “Bar-B-Q” manuscript, with its famous opening line. Manuscript Division.

In the early fall of 1933, first-time novelist James M. Cain and his publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, had a problem. Cain, 41, a hard-drinking journalist from Baltimore trying to hang on in Hollywood, had written a crackerjack crime novel about a California drifter and his married lover.

It was short, mean and scandalously sexy. It had a brilliant opening: “They threw me off the hay truck about noon.”

The problem: The title, “Bar-B-Q,” was a limp noodle.

“Dear Mr. Cain,” Knopf wrote in a three-line letter on Aug. 22, shortly after acquiring the 30,000-word novel for $500, “BAR-B-Q is not a good title and I think we must devise something better.”

The ensuing struggle to find a title – which would become one of the most famous in 20th-century American literature – is one of many captivating episodes in Cain’s papers, which reside in the Manuscript Division. Correspondence with film stars such as Joan Crawford, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck – all of whom starred in film adaptations of his books – and journalism legends, such as H.L. Mencken and Walter Lippmann, fill dozens of boxes.

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Cain and Lana Turner, who starred in the film version of “Postman.” 1944. Photo: Gus Gale. Prints and Photographs Division.

But, in 1933, Cain was going nowhere fast. He’d gotten canned from his last screenwriting gig and was scraping by on freelance magazine features. He and his second wife (there would be a total of four) were living in a little house in Burbank, at $45 per month. Knopf wanted to get the book out in January of 1934, and Cain needed the money. So he churned out a flurry of new titles. How about “Black Puma”? “The Devil’s Checkbook”? “Western Story”?

Pffft, said Knopf. He didn’t like any of them. As September turned to October, and the first galleys still had “Bar-B-Q” on them, Knopf began to get anxious. “We really must christen the book soon,” he wrote. He came up his own title – “For Love or Money” – and pushed Cain to take it. “It’s good,” he wrote on Oct. 6, underlining “good” four times.

Pffft, Cain scoffed back. Sounds like a musical.

He was a large, burly man, and nobody ever accused him of being demure. Back home, his father had been an English professor and president of Washington College on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. His mother had been an opera singer. Cain himself was a lover of opera, smart company and fine food. He spoke impeccable English. He had briefly worked, just prior to coming to Hollywood, as managing editor of the New Yorker, under co-founder Harold Ross. But he had a love for roughnecks and the little guys in life, an affection he had honed as a writer at the Baltimore Sun, where he was buddies with Mencken. He was such close friends with Lippmann – today considered the father of modern journalism – that Lippmann had, in fact, negotiated the sale of “Bar-B-Q” to Knopf for him.

“There is only one rule I know on a title,” Cain would later blare. “It must sound like the author and not like some sure-fire product of the title factory.”

Besides, he often chatted with a friend and playwright named Vincent Lawrence. The two liked to discuss story structure, so much so that Lawrence had helped him come up with the plot outline for this first novel. In one gab session, Lawrence mentioned that when he was stuck at his house, nervously awaiting correspondence from producers, that he’d noticed that the postman, when he finally arrived, always rang…twice.

Bingo! said Cain. What a title! “The Postman Always Rings Twice.” He excitedly wrote Knopf on Oct. 2.

Knopf was not amused. This debut author was telling him – the founder of one of New York’s most prestigious publishing houses – to scrap his title for something this bizarre? “I don’t think THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE anything like as good a title as FOR LOVE OR MONEY and I hope you will agree. For one thing, it’s awfully long.”

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Cain did not, in fact, agree.  This was remarkable, particularly considering his dire economic and professional circumstances. Things were so tight, biographer Roy Hoopes later noted, that Cain had borrowed $1,000 from Lawrence just to stay afloat – the 2019 equivalent of $20,000. For two solid weeks, with publication deadlines crashing down on them, he stuck to his title. Knopf –no doubt to his own later great relief – backed off.

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“Turn about is fair play,” Knopf wrote on Oct. 23. “Since you were good enough to drop a title (‘Bar-B-Q’) at our suggestion, we will abandon FOR LOVE OR MONEY at your request. Let us accept the one you seem to like best, THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE. It’s a sort of crazy title but I like it…I think we’ll be happy with it.”

Yes, yes, they most certainly were. “Postman” was an immediate sensation, selling millions of copies and establishing Cain, along with Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as one of the founders of American noir and hardboiled crime fiction. Cain sold the movie rights to MGM for $25,000, nearly $500,000 today. Along with “Double Indemnity” and “Mildred Pierce,” it made Cain a lasting name. A decent sort, Cain dedicated “Postman” to Lawrence, and never failed to credit him, as the years passed and his fame grew, as the person who was the key to his success.

Still, readers were mystified – there is no postman in the book. Nobody rings anything. What the heck does it mean?

In later interviews and letters, like one to reader Clara T. King on May 21, 1936, Cain claimed this identifying double ring by letter carriers was an old British or Irish tradition and that it doubled as a metaphor for the delayed justice meted out to Frank and Cora, the killers, with “postman” standing in for “justice.”

“They had to answer the second ring,” he wrote.

It was hooey, but it was Hollywood. It worked.

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“Ad Astra” and Former Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith

This guest post, explaining the connnection between former U.S. Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith and the latest Brad Pitt film, “Ad Astra,” is by Guy Lamolinara, communications officer for the Center for the Book. 

If you have seen the space film “Ad Astra” — Latin for “to the stars” — you likely marveled at its extraordinary special effects. As any fan of effects-laden films knows, these feats of grand spectacle require hundreds, if not thousands, of technical wizards to pull them off. You almost forget that what you are seeing could not happen in reality but only in a film studio.

Thus, if you are one of those people like me who stays to watch all a film’s credits, you know that Ad Astra’s credit stream seems to go on almost endlessly. My wife and I were sitting there in the IMAX theater, eyes nearly glazed over by the monotony of seeing so many unfamiliar names. Until one near the very end somehow jarred us into taking notice: Tracy K. Smith.

The director, James Gray, had thanked the former U.S. poet laureate. Smith served in the position for two years, from 2017 to 2019. I asked my wife, “Is it really that Tracy K. Smith?” Then she reminded me that Smith’s father had worked on the Hubble Space Telescope. And then I remembered that Smith had written the Pulitzer-winning poetry collection “Life on Mars.”

I was fortunate to travel with Smith during her “American Conversations“ tour of rural America. We were driving in the car and started talking about musical artists we like. Smith mentioned that she loves David Bowie (as do I). Knowing that “Life on Mars” shares a title with one of Bowie’s early songs, I asked her what the song meant to her. She said she thought he was writing about a “girl with the mousy hair” who is so turned off by the craziness of life on Earth that she is asking, “Is there life on Mars?” She is looking for a place where she can escape.

Alissa Williamson, writing for “Vox” about “My God, It’s Full of Stars,” one of the poems in the “Life on Mars,” suggests what may have inspired Gray:

“Smith invokes a variety of myths and stories, from the legend of the lost city of Atlantis to ‘2001: A Space Odyssey.’ It concludes with the perfect description of how history, humanity and space interact in an ultimate search for meaning.”

Here’s an excerpt, reprinted with Smith’s permission:

My father spent whole seasons

Bowing before the oracle-eye, hungry for what it would find.

His face lit-up whenever anyone asked, and his arms would rise

As if he were weightless, perfectly at ease in the never-ending

Night of space. On the ground, we tied postcards to balloons

For peace. Prince Charles married Lady Di. Rock Hudson died.

We learned new words for things. The decade changed.

The first few pictures came back blurred, and I felt ashamed

For all the cheerful engineers, my father and his tribe. The second time,

The optics jibed. We saw to the edge of all there is—

So brutal and alive it seemed to comprehend us back.

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Free to Use and Reuse: Genealogy

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“Six Generations,” R.W. Harrison, Selma, Alabama. 1893. Prints and Photographs Division.

It’s time once again to dip into our Free to Use and Reuse sets of pictures, culled from the Library’s millions of copyright-free photographs, prints, maps and so on. This month, we’re featuring things that relate to ever-popular genealogy searches, as people look to uncover the secrets of their past by identifying their ancestors and the lives they led. The Library is great for this, offering ways to identify your ancestors, and then help document how and where they lived.

First up is this remarkable photograph of five women and a toddler, taken in Selma, Alabama, in 1893, in the studios of R.W. Harrison. It’s titled “Six Generations,” but there are no names or other identifying information. This prompts a number of questions. Namely, what is the order of birth, and is this all one family? Let’s presume the latter is true. Certainly in that era, when photographs were formal occasions, a family portrait was more likely than not; and, besides, the women certainly appear to be related.

As to order of birth: The toddler is the youngest; it’s reasonable to think that the matriarch is the seated woman in the middle, just to the left of the child. I’d venture that second oldest is the woman seated on the right, in the patterned dress, followed by the woman seated at the far left, in the white dress. In turn, her daughter would be standing, in the black dress at right. The child’s mother, then, would be in the white dress, center. In sum, that’s everyone from the baby of the family to her great-great-great grandmother!

If we assume 20 years between each generation, that would make the eldest somewhere around 100, but it’s certainly possible she could be in her late 80s. Now, putting a historical filter over the image: In 1893, the Civil War was just 28 years in the past. That almost certainly means the oldest four women in the picture were born into slavery, with the eldest born no later than the administration of Thomas Jefferson.

If the toddler remains in Selma (not at all assured, given that the Great Migration began drawing African Americans to northern cities when she will be a teenager), she will be in her mid 60s when Rosa Parks electrifies the nation by refusing to give up her seat on a city bus to a white man in Montgomery, setting off the bus boycott that launched the civil rights movement. A decade later, when she is in her mid 70s, the Selma-to-Montgomery Marches will jolt her hometown into history and will lead to the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Of such photographs, books are written.

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Topographical map of Atlantic County, New Jersey, 1872. Beers, Comstock & Cline, New York. Geography and Map Division.

Perhaps your roots are in Atlantic City, New Jersey, or thereabouts? This 1872 topographical map of Atlantic County is detailed down to the block, with property owners names listed in most places. Atlantic City had a population of 1,043. Not only would this show you where your ancestor lived, it would let you know who lived next door and down the street.

And, finally, an urbane photo from D.C. in 1907. It’s titled “Mr. Chow and Family in Auto,” and pictures a family out for what looks to be a Sunday drive — one child is seated next to Mr. Chow, another in the back with two women. The picture was donated — and possibly taken by— one Barnett McFee Clindist. It is included in a set of 21 small prints that “Includes portraits of government officials and socialites; photo montage of President Wilson and his family… group portrait of automobile manufacturers in automobiles at the White House … montage portrait of the U.S. Supreme Court justices” according the cataloguing data.

It would seem, then, that Mr. Chow is a socialite of some note, possibly, given the political nature of other photos in the set, a diplomat. He’s wearing a spiffy bowler, the car top is down and the dirt road is dry, so it looks like a fine day for a jaunt. Perhaps this is Rock Creek Park? Has one of the children asked, “Are we there yet?” Was that a thing, then? The automobile was such a newfangled invention that the destination may have been immaterial; the point of the afternoon was just the grand experience of your dad puttering you about in his grand motorcar. You could wave to the lesser mortals as you passed. That would likely do just fine.

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“Mr. Chow and His Family in Auto.” 1907. Washington, D.C.  Donated by Barnett McFee Clinedinst. Prints and Photographs Divison.

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