Library of Congress's Blog, page 68

The Constitution, Annotated: The Constitution Explained in Plain English

This is a guest post from our friends in the Congressional Research Service.

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Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Jeffrey Rosen of the National Constitution Center at the Constitution Annotated Symposium, celebrating its 100th anniversary. Photo: Jerry Almonte, 2014

To celebrate this year’s Constitution Day, the Library is launching the Constitution Annotated, a website that provides online access to a massive Senate document that has served for more than a century as the official record of the U.S. Constitution.

Previously, the Constitution Annotated—full name, “Constitution of the United States of America: Analysis and Interpretation”—has primarily existed as a 3,000-page hardbound volume provided to Congressional members. It explains in layman’s terms the Constitution’s origins, how the nation’s most important law was crafted and ratified, and how every provision in the Constitution has been interpreted. It has also been available on congress.gov.

But the new website, with advanced search tools, makes this important resource more accessible to an online audience. The Constitution Annotated is prepared by attorneys at the American Law Division of the Library’s Congressional Research Service. It conforms to the CRS standard of objective, authoritative and nonpartisan analysis.

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Constitution Annotated volumes, from 1938 to 2012. Earlier iterations date back to the 19th century.

“To be successful, collections must be used. That’s why I’m excited about the Constitution Annotated getting a new website. It’s a great example of what we mean when we say we’re putting our users first,” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “We’ve taken some of the most comprehensive analysis of our Constitution—the laws that make America what it is—and we’re making them easier for everyone to use.”

The website is the latest step in the volume’s evolution. Congressional manuals in the 19th century included the earliest version of the Constitution Annotated—an indexed Constitution, the provisions of which were later annotated with lists of judicial decisions. When these lists became unwieldy, subsequent editions provided analysis of judicial interpretations of the Constitution, resulting in the volume’s current 3,000-page length.

The website brings the Constitution Annotated into the 21st century with Boolean search capabilities, case law links, browse navigation and related resources. Reflecting that the Constitution Annotated is not only a historical record but also an analysis of current constitutional understandings, the new website enables CRS attorneys to apprise Congress and the public of legal developments quickly.

By making the document fully searchable and readily accessible online, the new website allows the public to study the Constitution easily, providing a key resource for legal scholars, lawyers, journalists, high school teachers, and anyone interested in the foundational law of the nation. The website will also be an important educational resource for students.

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Neil Patrick Harris Wows the Library

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Rare Book and Special Collections Division Chief Mark Dimunation presents Neil Patrick Harris with a scrapbook of facsimiles of Houdini collection items during Harris’ Sept. 11 presentation. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Neil Patrick Harris kicked off the Library’s “National Book Festival Presents” series in grand fashion this week, filling the Coolidge Auditorium AND the Great Hall with an overflow crowd to hear about his children’s book series, “The Magic Misfits.”

Beforehand, the actor, producer and magician got a special look at the Library’s collection of the papers of Harry Houdini, the magician who dazzled early 20th-century audiences. In the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, reference assistant Amanda Zimmerman showed him several things, including a photograph of Houdini on a ship in 1913. On the back, Houdini wrote, “Last look at Mother from boat, 1913.” It really was his last glimpse of his beloved mother, Cecilia. She died while Houdini was touring Europe that year. After that, Houdini began his research into spiritualism and seances, debunking any number of frauds.

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Amanda Zimmerman, reference assistant in the Rare Books Division, shows Harris one of Houdini’s letters. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Next up in the Library’s series is Joy Harjo, the new U.S. Poet Laureate, on Sept. 19. Future stars include Dav Pilkey, creator of the children’s series “Captain Underpants” and “Dog Man”; thriller writer Brad Meltzer; Haitian-American novelist Edwidge Danticat; and Alexander McCall Smith, the creator of the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series.

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Harris talks to the overflow crowd in the Library’s Great Hall, Sept. 11. Photo: Shawn Miller.

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Crime Novelist Laura Lippman: Empathy, Not Violence, Makes a Great Story

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Author photo: Lesley Unruh

Laura Lippman is the bestselling author of novels such as “What the Dead Know,” “Every Secret Thing” and, most recently, “The Lady in the Lake.” She wrote this essay for the Library of Congress Magazine’s issue on crime.

Crime novels are often called whodunits but in 20-plus years of writing them, I’ve always been more concerned with who has died, and why, not who killed them. I heartily dislike books that rely on a high body count to keep readers’ interest. One body, one murder, is tragic enough.

Because I was a reporter for 20 years, I understand the human impulse to distance ourselves from tragic events. Say, for example, that a crime has occurred in your own neighborhood, a carjacking or a robbery. Whether you encounter the information through the news or social media, you immediately want to know more. Time of day? Exact location? Did the victim resist?

We ask these questions — and we all ask these questions — in hopes that we can distance ourselves from the crime. We are looking for the information that convinces us we don’t have to worry that such a fate will befall us. That’s not only human, it’s probably key to survival, to functioning, at least in cities such as mine where the crime problem is chronic. Just this week, my neighbors circulated video of three teenagers accused of a vicious assault. The woman they attacked walked the streets I walked, at the same time of day. How can I possibly rationalize that I am safe? And yet I do.

A work of fiction, on the other hand, can allow the reader to risk identifying with victims and their families. Because the story is not true, there’s no need for a risk-assessment. And because the reader isn’t worrying about how he or she could be affected by a crime, the crime novel creates space for readers to have empathy for victims.

Doesn’t everyone have empathy for victims? I don’t think so. Sympathy, sure. Sympathy is easy. But empathy, true empathy, requires imagining how another person feels. It’s the essential lesson of “To Kill a Mockingbird”; Atticus Finch is constantly exhorting his children to try to see the world from someone else’s perspective.

That novel’s penultimate scene takes place on the porch of the neighborhood weirdo, the reclusive Boo Radley. For years, Atticus’ children have made fun of him, trafficked in gossip about him. But in the end, Boo saves them, quite literally. Scout, who tells the story, stands on Boo’s porch and sees the world as he saw it. “He was real nice,” she tells her father. “Most people are, Scout, when you finally see them,” Atticus says.

Atticus has a higher opinion of human nature than I do, but I agree with him on empathy. I find it in short supply in the world at large, so I think it’s especially important that it be emphasized in our darkest stories. The best crime fiction gives everyone a chance to stand on Boo Radley’s porch and see the world from his perspective.

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Free Car Pics!

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“Spindle,” a sculpture by Dustin Shuler, towered over a parking lot in Berwyn, Ill., from 1989 to 2008. Photo: Carol M. Highsmith. Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints and Photographs Division.

Cars cars cars and CARS.

It’s the latest installment of our Free to Use and Reuse photo sets, and this month we’re featuring some of the Library’s copyright-free automobile images that you can download and use any way you’d like.

We lead off with the much-missed Berwyn Car Spindle, which stood 50 feet high (and just as proud) in Berwyn, Ill., from 1989 to 2008. Eight cars on a spindle in the middle of America — is this not peak Pop Art? We were always shocked that sculptor Dustin Shuler came up with this, instead of film director David Lynch. It was, alas, not so popular with the resident population, and we are sad to say, photographs and memories are all that remain.

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The 1938 Maserati 8.C.T.F., aka the Boyle Special. Photo: Historic American Engineering Record. Prints and Photographs Division.

Second, we want this car. It is officially the 1938 “Maserati 8.C.T.F. chassis no. 3032,” informally known as the Boyle Special. It is part of the Historic American Engineering Record, in no small part because it dominated the Indianapolis 500 in its day and looked fabulous doing it. Top speed? 180 mph. In 1938.

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“Auto Accident,” 1922. National Photo Company. Prints and Photographs Division.

Lastly, we’ll close with this black-and-white beauty of a 1922 car wreck in Washington, D.C. It’s just such a perfect metaphor for traffic in the city, then and now. Nearly one hundred years later, we get a little misty eyed just looking at it.

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Crowdsourcing Challenge: The Man Who Recorded the World

This is a guest post by Todd Harvey and Melanie Zeck of the American Folklife Center. 

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Page 18 of Alan Lomax’s “composition book” containing notes from June 22 through July 30, 1942. 

Muddy Waters – 29. (Head of the house) Farms 16 acres.

Been knowing Son House since ’29. Learned how to

play with bottle neck from him by watching him for

about a year – followed after where he playing at –

He can tune his guitar in three ways –

Nachel – Spanish – E minor

The American Folklife Center needs your help!

The text above was transcribed from the notebook of Alan Lomax who, as a Library of Congress fieldworker, documented his first encounter with McKinley “Muddy Waters” Morganfield of Stovall, Miss. During this meeting, Lomax and his associate, John W. Work III (of Fisk University), recorded the famous bluesman. Nearly eight decades later, the tape stands stand as a bedrock example of Mississippi blues. But only recently have Lomax’s accompanying field notes and journals become widely available online.

So the AFC is launching “The Man Who Recorded the World: On the Road with Alan Lomax,” a crowdsourcing project on By the People, to enlist help from everyone who’d like to take part. The project features more than 10,000 pages of fieldwork created by Lomax and others during his 30-year career. Lomax recorded thousands of tradition-bearing musicians across the United States, Europe and the Caribbean. All of these papers are currently online as part of the digital Alan Lomax collection. Many of the recordings are online through the Library of Congress, through our partner, the Association for Cultural Equity, or at other websites such as Lomax 1934 (Louisiana recordings), Delta State University (Mississippi recordings), and The Alan Lomax Kentucky Recordings.

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Alan Lomax and Raphael Hurtault listening to playback. La Plaine, Dominica. June 1962. 

Lomax had a knack for finding the best performers in a given location and coaxing from them epic stories and songs that have remained a part of today’s aural landscape. In the related manuscript material, readers learn about events ranging from the first recordings of Waters to the travails of life on the road, from details of Galician singing style to music-making in 1950s London. The field notebooks provide a unique window into Lomax’s travels, some of which were undertaken in his capacity as a Library staff member. They serve as both a chronological record of professional activities and as his personal journals, thereby revealing interesting information about genres, performers, and locations. By the People also includes song and interview transcriptions that Lomax and his colleagues utilized in publication and for research. Additionally, written correspondence was a necessary aspect of fieldwork for Lomax, whether with the Library or with performers and contacts at his destinations. As a whole, these different types of materials are invaluable for the study of the Lomax family and their collaborators, such as the writer Zora Neale Hurston, and for an understanding of 20th-century American folk music.

“The Man Who Recorded the World: On the Road with Alan Lomax” will present these vital documents in three phases relating to Lomax’s travels and geography. They are:

Phase 1: United States and Circum-Caribbean (1933–1962)

Phase 2: Britain, Ireland, and Northern Europe (1950s)

Phase 3: Spain and Italy (1950s)

The first phase will include nearly 6,400 pages from Lomax’s United States and Circum-Caribbean fieldwork. Although much of the work focuses on the African Diaspora, some trips document immigrant groups from Europe. These include materials in Finnish, French, and Gaelic.

Here are a few examples:

Haiti, 1936–1937

From December 1936 through April 1937, Alan and Elizabeth Lomax recorded the songs and religious ceremonies of Haiti, while occasionally bumping into Hurston and other ethnographers. The notebooks compiled by Lomax are filled with vivid descriptions of expressive culture on that island nation and include long narratives about Vodou practices.

Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, 1938

In 1938, the Library dispatched Lomax to conduct a folklife survey of the Great Lakes region. He traveled in a 1935 Plymouth sedan, toting a Presto instantaneous disc recorder and a movie camera. By the time he returned three months later, Lomax had driven thousands of miles on barely paved roads. He had a cache of 250 discs, eight reels of film and countless field documents. These attest to the region’s ethnic diversity (including notes written by a Finnish speaker in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula), expressive traditions, and occupational folklife.

New York City, 1950s

Lomax had a relationship with the great bluesman Huddie “Lead Belly” Ledbetter that began in 1933 when Alan and his father, John A. Lomax Sr., first made recordings together. The Lomaxes attended Ledbetter’s wedding to Martha Promise in Wilton, Conn. In the 1950s, after Ledbetter’s death, Lomax conducted an audio interview with Promise. The transcript provides a unique perspective of their relationship.

West Indies, 1962

In 1962, the pan-Caribbean political movement stirred Lomax, Antoinette Marchand Lomax and Anna Lomax to document the music and dance genres of the West Indies. They found similarities that were detailed in the books “Folk Song Style and Culture” and “Brown Girl in the Ring.” The notebooks compiled during this trip contain careful transcriptions of the creolized French spoken on many of the islands.

The Notebooks Behind Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood”

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Capote, at the Clutter family house. AP Wire Photo. New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.

Truman Capote, one of the great bon vivants of American letters, gave the Library a trove of his early works in 1967, including some of notebooks, manuscripts and drafts of “In Cold Blood.” These come from his reporting of the 1959 murder of the Clutter family in Holcomb, Kansas. Going through these files today, you can see Capote working in the field, building his masterpiece.

Capote has been justly skewered over the years for his claim that the book was completely factual — more on that in a minute — but it’s still a stunning book, more half a century later, as beautifully written as it is emotionally disturbing. Andt time after time, details in the notebooks translate directly into finished prose.

“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plans of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call ‘out there.’ ” That’s his famous opening sentence. The book’s next two sentences refer to the nearby Colorado border and that the local men tend to wear boots and Stetson hats.

This is pulled from three scrawled lines from his first notebook: “Western Kansas and eastern Colorado ought to be one state. The town – remote, what the rest of Kansas calls ‘out there.’ Stetson hats.”

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The notebook entry that gave Capote his famous opening line.

His notebooks reveal a sturdy, Journalism-101 approach that shows his careful, deliberate technique. In one passage, he lists questions about the crime: “Where were Kenyon’s glasses? Bloody footprints? Who shot who?”

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Capote’s initial questions for Alvin Dewey, chief of the investigation.

In another, he makes a sketch of a room in the Clutter’s house, indicating furniture positions. (All of these turn out to be key plot points.) The last morning of teenage Nancy Clutter’s life, she helped a little girl in town bake a cherry pie. Capote’s interview with the little girl’s family is in the notebooks. Over and over again, you can look from notebook to published page and see how it came together.

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Capote’s first notebook of interviews with killer Perry Smith.

Gerald Clarke, whose 1988 “Capote: A Biography,” is still the definitive volume on the man, spent years interviewing Capote, researching at the Library, the New York  City Public Library (which has the most of Capote’s materials) and in other collections. In a recent interview, he spoke about the copious nature of Capote’s research. “I myself have boxes and boxes (of Capote’s files), much of it, such as the letters from the killers, relating to ‘In Cold Blood,’ ” he wrote in an email.

But Capote’s notes also belie the licenses he took that made the book so controversial. He  insisted the book was completely factual and that all of the book’s quotes were “transcribed verbatim” from conversations he had or that were related to him, In reality, he invented at least two scenes, including the poignant end of the book, which recounts a mythical graveyard conversation between one of the murdered girl’s friends and the detective who led the investigation. Further, rereading of the book now, while going through his notes from those days, shows that the long quotes that give the book its disquieting verisimilitude are suspect. They may be true to the sentiments people expressed, or to the general thread of their thoughts, but certainly are not set down “verbatim.” (There is an entire cottage industry built around debunking Capote’s claims of total accuracy, including contradictions from detectives who worked on the case and Clutter family relatives.)

For example, in one notebook, there’s a circled quote about the fear that swept through the tiny town after the slayings: “All we’ve got out here are our friends, there isn’t anything else.” In the notebook, it’s disembodied, tied to no one. But in the book, it appears, word for word, on page 70, buried in a half-page quote from waitress Bess Hartman, at Hartman’s Café, attributing it to a diner she overheard. In the notebook, the rest of her lengthy quote is nowhere to be found.

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“All we’ve got out here are our friends…Detail, from Capote’s first notebook for “In Cold Blood.”

Capote, a novelist, screenwriter and staff writer at the New Yorker when he went to Kansas, took along one of his best childhood friends, Nelle Harper Lee, (who had just written, but not yet published, “To Kill a Mockingbird”) to help him report. On the inside back page of that first notebook, Capote, like many a roving reporter, kept an on-the-fly tab of his expenses. “Miss Lee, salary – $900” reads one line; another reads, “Advance to Nelle, $250.” It’s not a small sum; today, those sums would be be nearly $10,000, an extravagent sum for a reporter filing notes to a colleague.

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Capote’s expenses, on back page of notebook. Payments to Harper Lee and killers Hickock and Smith are near bottom.

And on the same page, two unsettling lines indicate he also paid the killers, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, far more a couple of bucks for jailhouse cigarettes: “Payment Perry Smith $100 Hickock $100.” That’s no joke, either – that’s $900 each today, and a huge ethical line to cross.

It’s jolting lines like that which make the notebooks to “In Cold Blood” as fascinating a read as the book they support.

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National Book Festival: Pablo Cartaya, in English and Spanish

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Author photo: Leah Wharton.

Pablo Cartaya is an author, actor and educator who knows his way around the kitchen, too. In 2018, he received a Pura Belpré Author Honor for his middle grade novel, “The Epic Fail of Arturo Zamora.” He lives in Miami. 

On your Twitter handle, you describe yourself as an “unapologetic code-switcher on a mission.” What’s the mission? 

My first language was Spanish. I didn’t speak English until kindergarten, when I was told Spanish was not a primary language spoken in the classroom. Over the years, I lost my Spanish. Mostly because English dominated my education and when my abuelos passed, I didn’t have the consistency of my birth language at home. I faltered many times with my own sense of cultural identity. I spoke a little Spanish but certainly wasn’t fluent. And I definitely didn’t read or write it well. After graduate school I realized that in order to feel fully confident in who I was, I needed to relearn Spanish. So I poured my bilingual heritage into my stories, unapologetically and without fear. What came out was a fuller sense of who I was and what I had the right to claim. This mission is more about pride in my bilingualism, my cultural identity, and my own voice. But it’s also a mission to young people and the promise to never let their voices, cultures, or languages be silenced or erased.

[image error]You recently tweeted that you were happy to be writing stories for kids like “my little girl.” Do you think of her as your audience when you’re writing?

I think of her and every kid in this country who has ever been marginalized or felt left out because of who they are, where they’re from, how much money they have or don’t have, or what languages they speak. It’s why I speak in Spanish at every public presentation. I want every single person (kids especially) to know that I’m proud of my cultural identity. I’m proud of my bilingualism. I’m proud of my family and my community, even though it’s been tough at times. Ultimately, I’m writing for them. Listening to them.

You include recipes at the end of “Arturo Zamora,” and thank your father for teaching you how to cook. What’s your best dish?

I polled my wife and kids. Here are the responses. NOTE: I’m insulted that none of them said my paella – which I make with fresh fish, scallops, mussels, and clams, a special imported rice from Spain, and special-ordered saffron which is like the gold of herbs (and as expensive). But whatever, I’m just a humble short-order cook in my house.

WIFE: Ooh, that’s a tough one, babe! Your picadillo is a great crowd pleaser and your fricasé de pollo cannot be left out of the conversation.

SON: Arroz con pollo ‘cause the chicken you make is sooo good. And the rice is mushy and sticky and, and it’s good, papi. Are you making some tonight??

PRE-TEEN DAUGHTER: Carne.

ME: What kind? I’m asking for an interview. Be specific, please.

PRE-TEEN DAUGHTER (rolling eyes to the near back of her skull): Fine. Filet mignon and Roquefort cheese, mashed potatoes and asparagus.

ME: …..

There you have it. I love cooking. My dad taught me that it’s the great connector of people and cultures.

As a bilingual author, do you think in English and Spanish?

I’ve dreamt in Spanish before and it’s lovely. There’s a harmony I feel when the Spanish comes fluidly in my brain. Sometimes I can’t find the right word in English, so I say it in Spanish. Sometimes I can’t say the phrase in Spanish, so I’ll have to switch to English. I used to be embarrassed by this but not anymore.

Best phrase in Spanish that doesn’t exactly translate into English?

Can I pick two?

“Te voy a sonar como un piano!” The literal translation is, “I’m going to ring you like a piano!” Which doesn’t really make any sense when referring to a forthcoming punishment, but don’t tell your abuelita that. The chancla is like a heat-seeking missile. It will find you.

And:

“Tu eres mi corazon de melon.” The literal translation here is, “You are my heart of a melon.” Wha?? But it’s a term of endearment, and when you hear that followed by the affectionate sounds of a grandparent or parent welcoming you into a hug, you instantly feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

You acted on “Will and Grace” back in 2000. How did that come about?

I auditioned and was cast as “Fernando,” Jack’s on-and-off again love for the Season Two finale. It was great fun and the cast was generous with a kid who had gotten his first break. I’m especially grateful to the actress Deb Messing, who gave me the brilliant suggestion of going back to college (I had dropped out) and study something that wasn’t acting. I recall her saying that it would make me a better actor. Little did I know that a few months later, a casting director would suggest I change my name because I didn’t look Latino enough. I took Deb’s advice and ultimately used my English degree to write stories about people like me – people often caught in-between two cultures and two narratives and often feeling like a stranger in both.

Finally: We show up on your doorstep in Miami. Your favorite restaurant you’d take us to, and why?

Come inside! I’ll make you a delicious drink and feed you till your belly is full. And then we can go to Little Havana (right around the corner from where my mom lived when she first arrived from Cuba) and we’ll all go dancing at Ball & Chain and eat ice cream at Azucar later. Then, in the morning, we’ll get fancy and go to LT Steak & Seafood at the Betsy Hotel in South Beach and eat popovers and have Florida-fresh avocado toast with poached eggs and locally brewed Panther Coffee while overlooking the ocean and the great city I now call mi casa.

Cartaya will be speaking at 3:55 p.m. on the Children’s Green Stage, which is for kids 10 and older. Cartaya will be signing books from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m.

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My Job: Patrick Egan, Searching Irish Traditional Music

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Concertina player Mae Mulcahy, Butte, Montana, 1979. Montana Folklife Survey collection, American Folklife Center.

Patrick Egan (Pádraig Mac Aodhgáin)  is a researcher and musician from Ireland, currently on a Fulbright Tech Impact scholarship at the Library. He recently submitted his PhD in digital humanities with ethnomusicology at University College Cork. Patrick’s interests  have focused on ways to creatively use descriptive data from archival collections. He’ll present his project “Connections in Sound”  on Aug. 29, at noon in room 119 of the Jefferson Building. There’ll be live music!

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Patrick Egan, at the AFC. Photo: Steve Winnick.

You play Irish music but you make your living by researching it. Where did you grow up, and how did you get started? 

I grew up in the foothills of the Wicklow mountains. I started playing Irish traditional music at seven years of age on the penny whistle, but my parents soon introduced me to the concertina, an instrument that has gained popularity in Ireland over the past 30 years. It also helped that there were Irish music sessiúns (jams) and concerts at my parents’ pub, Egans, every Saturday night. There, I developed an interest in music and the Irish language. It wasn’t my first language, but there are traces of it in our dialect of English. It was often spoken by some of my neighbors who came from an Irish speaking area in the west of Ireland called Connemara. I think the music and these neighbors influenced me a lot, and this interest later turned into research.

What’s the simplest definition of Irish traditional music? In 1855, a version of the melody that we now know as “Danny Boy” was published in “The Ancient Music of Ireland,” y the American sense of history, it’s been around a very long time.

“The Companion to Irish Traditional Music” states that tradition is known as “a body of melody, song and dance and associated activities that stylistically comes from the period before recorded music and radio.” Which essentially says that Irish music, song and dance is part of an oral culture, one that is predominantly shared person to person, and is not dependent on written or recorded sound.

Okay, but in the modern era, what makes a piece of Irish music “traditional”? If The Pogues, say, recorded a punk version of “Raglan Road” in the ‘80s, would that be “traditional”? 

In the American Folklife Center there are a number of recordings like this which transcend genres and defy classification, which is quite fun, actually. For example, in some collections there are tunes and songs that could be strictly “traditional.” I am interested in both, but for my current research project I have been using an online resource for cross-referencing called www.irishtune.info. This site lists thousands of tracks of Irish traditional music and is a very useful tool for my research.

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Harmonica player Pat Ford  with his children and family, Shasta Valley, California, Sept. 3, 1939. W.P.A. California Folk Music Project collection, American Folklife Center. 

The Library has more than a century of Irish music. At the Library, you’re looking to amass a digital database – the “items dataset” of the performers, instruments and stories used in those songs – so that they can be searched and cross-referenced. What do you hope that will tell us?

My research explores a large number of collections in the AFC using digital tools, so I am exploring what it means to use the latest technology to capture  this data. It’s like taking the subject headings of “Irish American” away and experimenting with what happens when we allow collections to be explored by item level. This can reveal all sorts of information about the collections – what metadata (data about data) that we can use (or not) and how compatible collections can be with digital processing. Sometimes there is not enough data in these recordings or their accompanying notes to link them to other recordings, and sometimes the digital tool places limitations on the data because of the way that the digital technology is structured. My research explores these issues. Ultimately, this allows me to make more informed interpretations about both the material that resides in these collections and also the widespread impact of using digital tools.

You mention songs being “lost” in the collections, as when there’s a concert recording but not all the songs that are played are listed. Can you describe some of the finds you’ve made?

The concert and festival recordings that we discovered from the 1970s and 1980s have become an important part of the project. There are over 2,000 instances of tunes, songs, dances and stories from these festivals, which were organized at the peak of the folk revival. And because the songs are not listed, we discovered multiple versions of tunes, some rare songs and fascinating stories about the tunes that have never been described in the archive. For example, there is a concert performance of one of Ireland’s most famous artists, Christy Moore, from 1984. His set list  was fascinating and it gives a snapshot of a key moment in his solo career. Other great finds have been artists such as Liz Carroll, John Vesey and Johnny McGreevy – these were all captured in the late 1970s to early 1980s. They make for priceless listening for Irish and Irish-American audiences in particular.

Lastly, your favorite songs  in the Library’s collections.

There are so many great recordings, but some of my favorites:

* “The Monaghan Jig,” also known as “Scotch Mary,” by Patsy Touhey, recorded c. 1902-1904, from The Francis O’Neill Cylinders. The renowned “uileann” piper (Irish bagpipes) Patsy Touhey, showing tremendous skill. This track is part of a collection of some of the first Irish traditional music recordings made on wax cylinder.

* “Bold Jack Donohue” (also known as “The Wild Colonial Boy”) by Pat Ford, recorded in 1938, as part of the W.P.A. California Folk Music, at a time when there were few recordings of Irish music in the region.

* This interview with tunes by Gary Stanton with concertina player Mae Mulcahy, from 1979 in the Montana Folklife Survey.

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National Book Festival: It’s Just About That Time…

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Captain Underpants, the minimally clad superhero, greets fans on the Expo floor at the 2018 National Book Festival. Photo: David Rice.

The Library’s National Book Festival is almost upon us — it’s Saturday, Aug. 31 — and we wanted to remind you of how much fun awaits. I mean, like in this shot from last year, can you really say you’ve lived until you’ve posed for a happy snap with Captain Underpants?

Or, just hung out at the Children’s Purple Stage for most of the day?

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Visitors at the Children’s Purple stage listen to a presentation at the 2018 NBF. Photo: Claire Gardiner.

Didn’t think so. We’re looking forward to seeing you at this year’s festival!

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National Book Festival: Louis Bayard and “Courting Mr. Lincoln”

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Author photo: Tim Coburn.

A number of your novels take place in the Victorian era. What is about that time period that you find fascinating?

Well, start with the fact that everyone’s dead, so they can’t sue you. But I think one of the things that draws us to the 19thcentury is that it’s far enough away to feel exotic but close enough to be approachable. We can still recognize ourselves in those people, even as we see all the ways in which our lives have diverged from theirs. The further back you go – and I’ve gone as far back as Tudor England – the harder it is to bridge that gap. I recently abandoned a novel about New England Puritans in part because I found it so hard to view the world the way they did. Of course, plenty of writers have been able to do that, so maybe it just comes down to predilection. Who are the folks you want to spend time with?

Theodore Roosevelt, Edgar Allan Poe, Abraham Lincoln, Eugene Vidocq — you’ve used a number of real people in your books. Who would have been the most fun at dinner?

That’s a toughie. I think we can eliminate Poe up front because he’d come in seething over some personal or professional slight, and he’d spend the whole night stewing and drinking. Vidocq would have great stories about his criminal past, but do you really want the world’s greatest detective studying you from across the table? Also, I’d be worried he’d walk off with the china. Teddy, of course, would blow in like a gale, and you’d never have to worry about the conversation faltering, because he’d be the conversation. Which might be exhausting after a couple of hours. So I’m going to set a place for Lincoln, who was famously very funny in the courtroom. I think he’d start out quiet, and by dessert, you’d be howling. And he wouldn’t be drinking, so you’d have a good amount of wine left by evening’s end.

When writing those real-life characters into your stories, how much research do you do use in keeping them consistent with their actual personalities? Is there a personal list of do’s and don’ts?

No list, at least not an absolute list. It seems to me that, if the story involves actual people, you have to, at some level, honor their actuality, their factuality. You can’t turn Lincoln into a twinkling leprechaun, or at least that would be hard. So I do a fair amount of research – maybe two or three months up front and then more as the story progresses. But in the end, my allegiance is to the story, so if that requires me to embroider and speculate and re-order chronology and occasionally have folks do things they didn’t historically do, then I won’t hesitate. I want it to work as fiction, not as dissertation.

[image error]The Lincolns, and their relationship, are well known to most readers. Joshua Speed, the third main character in “Lincoln,” is not. Did that cause any issues in writing, like, “Wait, I’ve got to build up his personality more because he’s not as well known as the other two?”

See, I don’t think that many people know about the young Mary Todd or about the Lincoln marriage’s origins. At least I didn’t know much. So, in effect, I felt like I was discovering or rediscovering three relatively unknown people and then giving them all their proper due. One of them just happens to be Abraham Lincoln.

Dialogue – how do you approximate how people would have spoken 150 years ago, without it getting cluttered with Victorian-era speech?

The objective, I guess, is to create a hybrid between past and present. (David Mitchell once likened it to antiquing.) Sometimes it can be as mechanical as sprinkling a 19th century idiom into an otherwise normal sentence, but I find, if I’ve read enough in the period, my ear starts doing it for me, and I don’t have to sweat it too much. And then I’m lucky to have good copyeditors who can catch anachronisms or words that don’t sound quite right.

Your books often have several plot twists and reversals. Do you plan those out before you start? Or do they tend to pop up organically as you go?

Well, I always know my ending, so if the plot twist happens there, I will have it mapped in advance. Other than that, I don’t do a lot of outlining because I do believe in letting a story, even a mystery or thriller, emerge organically. Which is to say overcome whatever not-very-bright idea I’ve been entertaining for it and become what it was supposed to be all along.

Actually, one of the big challenges with writing “Courting Mr. Lincoln” was that there are no plot twists. The reader knows from the historical record exactly what’s going to happen, and since nobody is in mortal peril (as they are in some of my other books) I had to generate suspense in different ways. Indeed, one of the gratifying responses I’ve had from some readers is that they were sincerely worried that Mary and Lincoln wouldn’t make it to the altar. I take that to mean they were immersed in the book’s fictional present, and if that’s the case, I figure I’ve done my job. I can go home now.

Bayard will be appearing on the Fiction Stage at 11 a.m. on a panel with fellow novelist Roxana Robinson. It will be moderated by Tina Jordan, an editor and columnist at the New York Times. He will be signing books from 12:30 to 1:30 p.m.

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