Library of Congress's Blog, page 69

National Book Festival: Philippa Gregory and the Love of History

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Philippa Gregory. Photo from: Simon and Schuster.

Philippa Gregory is the author of 39 books, most of them works of historical fiction. Many of them have been international bestsellers and several have been turned into films. She lives in Yorkshire where, she happily notes on her website, she keeps horses, hens and ducks.  She graduated from the University of Sussex with a degree in History, and received a doctorate in 18th century literature from the University of Edinburgh, where she is now a regent. Her most recent novel is “Tidelands.”

Your doctoral dissertation was on 18th century novels, and you read roughly 200 novels from that period in your research. If you hadn’t done that, do you think you’d have been able to write the novels that you have?

My Ph.D. was undoubtedly the perfect author’s apprenticeship. Not only did I read 200 novels, I analysed them all, which meant I learned about structure, characterization and tempo. But more importantly, I learned about the craft of novel writing at the very time novels were being invented. My studies also taught me the discipline of reading and study – and I was lucky to have some remarkable tutors along the way.

You once mentioned that, back in the old days, you went around the U.K. to libraries to read rare books that you needed. The internet has made much of that obsolete, but do you still rely on libraries for your research? 

I’m a member of The London Library and I still use local libraries and local records during my research – local historians very often have the best research notes. But I do love what the internet has done for research.  To be able to look things up and read sections from books and journals within a few moments is wonderful.

[image error]Do you have bright lines of fictionalizing real people’s lives that you won’t cross? Policy, in other words? That you might create scenes, but not alter the historical record, etc.?

The first rule I apply when writing a historical novel is that it has to work as a novel, as well as be absolutely based on the history. The broad narrative of the history imposes the story of the novel, all I can choose is when to start and stop. The only time I invent an occasion in the life of an historical character is when we simply don’t know what they were doing – and then I choose the most likely explanation.

How do you get your characters’ speech patterns? 

 Many years ago, I made a conscious decision to use modern speech to make my novels easier to read. I want readers to feel as though they were there, and that they know these people like old friends, and I don’t want them slowed up by an unfamiliar language. I am careful with the accuracy of phrases, so I’d never say “her touch was electric” or refer to things that had not yet been invented or discovered.

Michael Connelly, the crime writer, once told me that the hardest thing about writing for him was “the getting and keeping of momentum.” What are the most difficult things for you? Plotting? Endings? The time in between books?

For me, the researching and the writing is the easy part, but the long process of editing, publishing and promoting does not come naturally to me.

Having one’s book (“The Other Boleyn Girl”) filmed with a cast of Natalie Portman, Eric Bana, Scarlett Johansson, Kristin Scott Thomas and Mark Rylance sounds like a dream come true. Was it?

When I write and love a book, sometimes working on it for years – the book is always going to be my favorite medium. When I have to open it up to allow a huge team of writers, actors, directors and producers to work on it too, it’s always a disturbing process. But, TV and film can also do things that the books can’t, for instance, the beauty of the landscapes and the clothes have more impact on screen than they do on the page, and the performances of great actors can be transformational for a character. I love also how when I see something on screen it’s like the first time – I too can get caught up in the magic of the story.

Most irritating thing(s) you see in historical fiction? What can make you drop a book on the spot?

I rarely read historical fiction but if I do, I’m always disappointed with novels that start at birth and end at death. As a writer of fiction, we get to choose when to start and end the story. 

And lastly: What are you working on now?

“Tidelands” is the first book in a series, so I am already working on book two. The novels will trace one family’s rise from harsh poverty, through the opportunities of the 18th century, to their prosperity in Victorian times. If I can, I might even take the story on to modern times, reflecting my deep interest in the lives of ordinary people in extraordinary times. At the same time, I am writing non-fiction, a history book, on women’s history and already I am finding that my thoughts about one are informing the other.

Gregory will be on the Genre Fiction Stage at 4 p.m., in conversation with fellow author Margaret George and moderator Petra Mayer of National Public Radio.

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Radio Girl and Her De Luxe Revue

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Vaughn de Leath, 1939. Jim Walsh Collection, Recorded Sound Reference Center.

Taylor McClaskie is one of the Music Division’s summer 2019 interns. She is a Ph.D. candidate in musicology at Case Western Reserve University. Here, she writes about the early days of radio and one of its near-forgotten stars.

Among the hundreds of songs that have crossed my desk this summer as I help process and catalogue unpublished popular music, I’ve seen lots of great items. Pieces by jazz pianist James P. Johnson, Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, blues singer Hattie Burleson,  A. P. Carter of the Carter Family, Frank Zappa, Jimi Hendrix, and Carole King. It just keeps going.

But perhaps one of the most exciting items was deposited for copyright nearly a century ago by a long forgotten star: Radio Girl.

The singer’s stage name was Vaughn de Leath. The deposit came in the form of a substantial stack of paper held together with a bit of string. Scribbled on the make-shift cover page, a thick piece of blank staff paper smudged with ink, I saw the title “De Luxe Revue.” Deposited with the Library on Nov. 6, 1919, this packet of paper holds the score and stage direction for a revue written by de Leath.

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The version of “Ukulele Lady” de Leath made famous. UCLA Music Library’s Archive of Popular American Music

Vaughn de Leath (1894-1943), born Leonore Vonderleith, was a performer, entertainer, and songwriter. She was one of the first women to sing on radio and was appropriately nicknamed “The Original Radio Girl.” Some even suggest that she performed in the laboratory of inventor Lee De Forest, the self-described “Father of Radio.” During the 1920s and 1930s, de Leath serenaded audiences through their radios in New York and New Jersey. Though she had a wide vocal range, de Leath avoided her soprano register during broadcast for fear that the high pitches would shatter the delicate transmitters of early radio. Instead, she relied on the low alto end of her voice and helped develop the style we now know as crooning.

She made “Ukulele Lady” a hit in 1925; her recording was used in the 1999 film “The Cider House Rules,” and everyone from Arlo Guthrie to Bette Midler has recorded it. Throughout her performing career de Leath recorded with labels such as Edison, General Phonograph Corporation, and Okeh. In 1923, she became one of the first women to manage a radio station.

Yet before her career as a radio singer, de Leath worked as a composer and stage performer. According to her obituary, she was responsible for over 500 songs, some published as early as 1912. “De Luxe Revue,” in the 1919 deposit with the Library, includes five handwritten songs, all by de Leath, and presumably in her hand.

Revues hit their stride in America in the first two decades of the 20th century and were made popular by Florenz Ziegfeld’s spectacular “Ziegfeld Follies.” These variety shows were filled with song, dance, and spectacle. Some revues had a central theme, but usually there was no overarching plot. They were humorous variety shows intended for a wide audience. De Leath’s “De Luxe Revue” is a whirlwind tour around the globe, taking the audience to Ireland, Spain, Italy, Egypt and the American South. This is a perfect setting for a revue; not only does each scene allow for character pieces that capitalize on exoticized notions of these far-away places, but each location calls for new scenery, new costumes, and new spectacle.

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Stage design for the “Irish Extravaganza” in Vaughn de Leath’s “De Luxe Revue.”

“De Luxe Revue” starts with an “Irish Extravaganza.” We can see de Leath’s stage design and outlines for the musical sequence. In this sketch, a character named Paddy sings “My Sweet Colleen” to an Irish lass on a stage adorned with harps. During the third chorus of the song, giant shamrocks—a woman perched on each one—are rolled on stage. After the shamrock ladies dismount their clovers by walking down the flowers’ stems, the chorus dances an Irish reel. In a moment of true spectacle, the sides of a large harp, placed center stage, open to reveal a couple who dances a “special dance.” For the big finish everyone comes forward and dances the Irish reel and the number concludes with one final chorus of “My Sweet Colleen.”

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“Along the Nile” stage directions. 

The stage directions de Leath provided in “Along the Nile” give us insight into the show’s performances in New York and across the country. This show was full of exciting stage action and complex scenery.

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Taylor McClaskie.

In addition to women-bearing shamrocks and giant harps, the De Luxe Revue also included men seducing women by dancing the fandango, a girl playing a grand piano in a balcony under a Venetian moon, and an on-stage pool built for none other than Cleopatra herself. Revue performances were flexible; it was not uncommon for singers to switch out songs because another piece suited their voice better or because the audience demanded a more popular tune.

While the copyright deposit for “De Luxe Revue” is certainly not an “urtext,” it certainly is a snapshot photo, allowing us to see how this show may have existed at a particular moment in time a century ago.

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National Book Festival: Monica Hesse — That Time David Foster Wallace Came Over…

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Author photo: Robert Cox.

We’ll be chatting with several of this year’s National Book Festival authors on the blog. First up is journalist and novelist Monica Hesse. She’s a Washington Post columnist and the author of “American Fire,” a bestseller in 2017. She’s written novels such as “Girl in the Blue Coat,” which won the 2017 Edgar Award for Young Adult fiction. Her most recent novel is “The War Outside.” 

You grew up (famously) in Normal, Illinois. Your father worked with David Foster Wallace, and he came over to your house for dinner. As a developing writer, what was that like?

Completely, utterly lost on me. This was after “Infinite Jest” had come out, so he was already famous, but I was a moron who did not really pay attention to the literary world, and David Foster Wallace was just a guy who came over to watch “The X-Files” sometimes and was really good with our dogs.  

From being a teenager to having a very successful writing career now: What’s most different about the writing life than what you might have pictured?

I think in my mind, being a writer always looked like the Colin Firth scenes from “Love Actually” — chunky sweater, chunky typewriter, picturesque setting. Lots of walks and coffee shops and waiting for inspiration to strike. It took me awhile to realize that words do not magically appear unless you, like, write them. And walking and sitting in coffee shops and wearing chunky sweaters is not writing. Writing is writing. So as much as we think of it as an artistic pursuit, it’s also work. There’s so much more relentless discipline in writing than my fantasies want there to be.

[image error]You wrote two books before “Girl in the Blue Coat” went big. Did that seem like a “make or break” book to you? Or was writing fiction something you knew you were always going to be doing?

It didn’t seem like make or break because I’ve always been lucky enough to love my day job. I’ve worked at the Washington Post, first as a reporter and now as a columnist, while writing all six of my books. If I’d been making a living by beheading chickens or something (I have nothing personally against chicken beheaders, but I’m a vegetarian) then I probably would have approached each book with more panic and higher stakes. Instead, I get to approach each one as an adventure: something I want to make better because of my own sense of pride and dedication to the story, not because I’ll starve otherwise.

 People sometimes think the reporting/writing life is glamorous. I remember you once saying that, while reporting “American Fire,” you took a casserole (or similar) to a community dinner in the little town where this happened in order to introduce yourself to the locals. What did you cook? Did everybody like it?

Oh man, you’re going to make me rat myself out. It wasn’t “cook” so much as it was “buy from a very nice bakery.” I was trying to get the local sheriff to sit down with me for an interview, and he was a tough customer. My mother instructed me to put down my notebook, and bake that nice man a pie. Believe me when I tell you, though, that any pie crust made by me would not have won me an interview, it would have won me a restraining order. So I went to the local bakery and came out with enough cinnamon rolls and banana bread for the entire local police force. I don’t think the sheriff was charmed, I think he just took pity on me because the gesture was so desperate. 

Your festival appearance is headlined “Growing Up Hard.” What do you remember most about your own teenage years that were most difficult? A hilariously endearing awkward story you’d like to share with everyone?

At the time, the things that made my teen years hard didn’t seem funny, they seemed deeply tragic — like my boyfriend breaking up with me the day before the Homecoming dance so he could take another girl (I decided I would go anyway “to show him” and ended up just sobbing in the corner half the night). All I can say to any young people reading this is: The sucky stuff will happen, and it will one day be book material.

You seem to be doing everything at once – a column at the Post, books, social media. Do you have a set time each day that you work on your fiction? Do you still shoot for 1,000 words per day?

When I’m actively writing something, I do 1,000 words a day. I know different patterns work for different people; a novelist buddy of mine does it by hours, and works from 10 p.m. to midnight. For me, I have to do it by word count. If I did it by hours, I’d just sit at my laptop and play solitaire for 90 minutes, then call it a day.

Who’s a tougher crowd: Book readers or readers of your column at Post?

Are you kidding? Book readers are the loveliest humans on the planet. Newspaper readers live to tell you you’re an idiot.  

Am I remembering correctly that a chair once collapsed beneath you onstage at an event? Can I promise we’ll have a sturdy chair for you at the NBF?

I guess I’ll just have to find another way to embarrass myself.

Hesse will be appearing on the Teens Stage, Room 202, at 3:05 p.m. on a panel with author and illustrator Jarrett Krosoczka. It will be moderated by Maria Russo of the New York Times. 

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Crowdsourcing Challenge!

By the People , the Library’s crowdsourcing transcription project, is calling on volunteers to complete 1,000 pages from the “ Suffrage: Women Fight for the Vote ” campaign before Monday, August 19th. The speeches, diaries, and letters of suffragists reveal complex personalities and a multifaceted movement.  Here, Elizabeth A. Novara, a historian in the Library’s Manuscript Division, writes about some of the family and personal relationships that sustained the fight for the vote for over seven decades.

On June 5, 1856, Susan B. Anthony struggled to write a speech on women’s equal education. Who could she turn to but her friend and fellow women’s rights advocate, Elizabeth Cady Stanton?

“I can’t get up a decent document,” Anthony wrote, “so for the love of me, & for the saving of the reputation of womanhood, I beg you with one baby on your knee & another at your feet & four boys whistling buzzing hallooing Ma Ma set your self about the work – it is of but small moment who writes the Address, but of vast moment that it be well done.”

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Anthony’s letter to Stanton, June 5, 1856, Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Manuscript Division.

This letter, marked “Private,” is one of many women’s suffrage leaders’ newly digitized papers in the Library’s Suffrage Crowdsourcing Challenge. Volunteers can transcribe online documents related to the daily lives of suffragists such as Stanton, Anthony, Anna E. Dickinson, Mary Church Terrell, Carrie Chapman Catt, Lucretia Mott, Lucy Stone, Lydia Maria Child and Julia Ward Howe.

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“Representative women,” portraits of seven figures in the suffrage and women’s rights movements. Prints & Photographs Division.

Five days after receiving Anthony’s letter, Stanton replied, “Your servant is not dead but liveth. Imagine me, day in and day out, watching, bathing, nursing and promenading the precious contents of a little crib in the corner of my room….Come here and I will do what I can to help you with your address, if you will hold the baby and make the puddings….Now that I have two daughters, I feel fresh strength to work for women. It is not in vain that in myself I feel all the wearisome care to which woman even in her best estate is subject.”

These letters not only reveal Stanton’s and Anthony’s complementary relationship—Anthony was the celebrated orator and Stanton the superior writer—but also Stanton’s role as a housewife and mother, which limited her ability to participate in suffrage activities during her child-rearing years. Anthony, who neither married nor had children, was free to travel and lecture throughout the country. Stanton, however, would remain a force in the women’s rights movement, serving as a national leader through the end of the 19th century.

Of her seven children, the baby on Stanton’s knee would grow up to be Harriot Stanton Blatch (1856-1940). She followed in her mother’s footsteps, becoming a suffrage leader in England and in the United States. Blatch’s ideas diverged from her mother’s in that she believed strongly that working-class women needed the vote more so than elite white women. Still, she worked to preserve her mother’s legacy. Harriot’s own daughter, Nora Stanton Blatch Barney (1883-1971) was the first American woman to earn a civil engineering degree and, like her mother and grandmother, was active in the suffrage movement.

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“A Sketch of the Life of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” showing three generations of suffragists. Elizabeth Cady Stanton Papers, Manuscript Division.

Few women who began the suffrage movement before the American Civil War, including Stanton and Anthony, lived to see the fruits of their labors with the passage of the 19th Amendment, which gave many women the right to vote in 1920. However, their work was carried on by a new generation of women whom they inspired and taught. By transcribing the letters, diaries, speeches and other documents in the Suffrage Topic on “By the People,” you can discover more about the family and personal relationships that sustained the suffrage movement and the intergenerational story of the women, their daughters, granddaughters, and protégées, who took up the fight for the vote.

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Pic(s) of the Week: Hotel, Motel, Holiday Inn… Special Edition!

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Dusk, Las Vegas, Nevada. The Carol M. Highsmith Archive. Prints & Photographs Division.

“Hotel, motel, Holiday Inn…” was part of a saucy lyric in the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” in 1979, and that inspires our quick tour through the Library’s new Free to Use and Reuse set of “Hotels, Motels & Inns” photographs.

They’re part of the Library’s vast catalog of copyright-free pictures that you can download, reprint and display any way you like. The Library’s homepage features a different assortment each month — last month, we went with ice cream — and this month, we’re going with vacation spots in this, the last great getaway month of the season. And what better to get you in the mood than Las Vegas at dusk, photographed above by the great Carol Highsmith?

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 Photochrom print of Interlaken, Switzerland, c 1890. Detroit Publishing Co. Prints & Photographs Division.

For our “hotel” entry, we’ll reach back to 1890 for a photocrom (colorized) print of the hotels in Interlaken, the central town in the Bernese Oberland section of Switzerland. The Alps provide a breathtaking backdrop. It just begs for the whistle stop of trains, of trunks being unloaded and taken to your room, and cigar rooms for gentlemen after dinner. This image is from the Detroit Publishing Company, which specialized in these sort of colorized, sweeping vistas, both of rural and city life at the turn of the century. The Library’s collection runs to 35,000 glass negatives and transparencies as well as about 300 color photolithograph prints.

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Motel in Wildwood, N.J. The Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Prints & Photographs Division.

There are a lot of “motel” options to pick from, but let’s go with this sunny, I-just-remember-we’re-in-the-room-with-red-door classic, also from Highsmith, in Wildwood, N.J. The colors pop, sure, but did you notice the color sequence slides down left to right, floor by floor? The lime-green steps down and over with each descending floor, as does the orange…it’s like the tic-tac-toe of roadside attractions.

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John Margolies, Roadside America photograph archive (1972-2008). Prints & Photographs Division.

And, finally, we come to the “Holiday Inn” entry. Save a prayer for the souls behind the orange door of room 141 in Brockton, Mass., surviving life behind those mustard yellow curtains, the day photographer John Margolies stopped by in 1978. You can hear the ice machine chunking away in the stairwell a few doors down, just like you know that air conditioning unit below the plate-glass windows is going to start humming and leaking water on the sidewalk any minute now. The runoff will trickle down to those two sad little bushes that are never, ever going to do anything but trip people stumbling to their rooms in the dark.

Use these and the others all you like, but remember that checkout is at 11 a.m. and please drop off your room key at the front desk on your way out.  We’ll leave the light on for you.

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Remembering Toni Morrison

This is a guest post by Guy Lamolinara of the Library’s Center for the Book.

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Toni Morrison accepts the Library’s fiction prize in 2011 from James Billington, then the Librarian of Congress. Photo by Kristina Nixon.

The loss of the incomparable writer Toni Morrison leaves a gaping hole in the literary landscape.

Fortunately for us, before she died on Monday, she filled the world with prose that touched millions of readers worldwide. Through her novels, children’s books and essays, she communicated the black experience on a canvas writ large – one that spoke to the pain of slavery, racial prejudice and bigotry for audiences that knew it firsthand as well as for those who learned, perhaps for the first time, about the stinging and horrific aftermath of treating fellow human beings as less than equal.

Morrison’s works are of course an important part of the literary collections of the Library of Congress. But the Library also had a very special connection to her. In 2000, the Library named her a Living Legend; in 2011, it awarded her the Library of Congress National Book Festival Creative Achievement Award. (The prize has since been renamed the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.)

During the 2011 book festival, held on the Washington Mall, Morrison accepted the award from then-Librarian of Congress James H. Billington, who cited her for “being one of the most unique voices in world literature anywhere.” Scroll down to the end of this post to view a video of Morrison at the festival.

The award was just one of the dozens she received during her career of more than 40 years. Most notably, she received the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for her masterwork, “Beloved,” and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993; she was the first African American woman to receive the honor.

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The bench outside the Library’s Jefferson Building, installed in collaboration with the Toni Morrison Society, that honors the Library’s Daniel A.P. Murray. Photo by Shawn Miller.

In 2012, the Library mounted an exhibition called “Books That Shaped America.” It was no surprise that “Beloved” was one of 88 books named to the list, a novel that in 2006 was named by the New York Times as “the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years.”

Morrison was one of the rare literary writers of fiction whose works were also bestsellers. She was able to communicate, in prose both poetic and powerful, her message of the importance of humanity and righteousness in a world that sometimes seems to impart neither.

The Library is proud to have been able to present Toni Morrison to its appreciative audiences on several occasions throughout the years.

The Library is also honored to retain a physical manifestation of Morrison’s legacy on its campus. In 2017, a bench was installed in front of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building in collaboration with the Toni Morrison Society as part of its Bench By the Road Project, which recognizes African Americans who fought, in various ways, to improve the lot of their people throughout U.S. history. The bench is dedicated to Daniel A.P. Murray, the first African American assistant Librarian of Congress.

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Now Online! The Love Letters of James and Lucretia Garfield

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James and Lucretia Garfield, depicted in unnamed publication, ca. 1880

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It’s a lovely piece about how the slow-burning passion of the couple developed over years of time. “It is nearly ten o’clock Sunday night and I will not lie down to sleep till I have told you again that I love you,” he wrote to her on Nov. 24, 1867. It’s okay to swoon.

“I have for a series of years been accquainted [sic] with Miss Lucretia Rudolph and have been, for several months studying her nature & mind,” wrote future President James A. Garfield in his diary on December 31, 1853. While he respected her intelligence and her character, one question troubled him as to their romantic prospects: “whether she has that warmth of feeling– that loving nature which I need to make me happy.” The couple’s struggle to answer that question is amply documented in the hundreds of letters they exchanged on the course of true love. Those letters — as well as the former president’s diaries, professional and family correspondence, scrapbooks, speeches, and other materials relating primarily to his career and death — are now available online from the Library.

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James A. Garfield’s Greek class, Western Reserve Eclectic Institute, Hiram, Ohio, 1853. Garfield (far right, front row) is next to his future wife, Lucretia Rudolph.

The pair met at school in Ohio in the 1850s. She was nicknamed “Crete,” short for Lucretia. (I’ll refer to them by their first names for this rest of this post, to avoid confusion as to which “Garfield” I might be referring.) James’s passionate nature demanded that he “know & be known,” and he remained skeptical that the emotionally reserved Crete could give him the affection he craved. For her part, Crete vowed to “never give my hand to one who has not my heart.” Their romance blossomed, however, and they were engaged when James left Ohio in 1854 to attend Williams College in Massachusetts. They sustained their relationship through letters, but the physical distance tested James’s resolve after he became enamored with Rebecca Selleck of New York. James assured Crete that his love for her was “not a wild delirious passion, a momentary effervescence of feeling, but a calm strong deep and resistless current that bears my whole being on toward its object.” Yet a painfully awkward meeting of James, Crete and Rebecca at James’s graduation in 1856 exposed intense feelings and strained James and Crete’s relationship. When James dithered in making a decision, Crete took matters in hand, absolving James of blame for the “generous and gushing affection of your warm impulsive nature” and giving him permission to marry Rebecca if “you love her better, if she can satisfy the wants of your nature better.” Better to release him, Crete explained, than “to be an unloved wife, O Heavens, I could not endure it.”

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Lucretia Rudolph to fiancé James A. Garfield, August 19, 1858, expressing her fears that their marriage will be based on “duty.”

In April 1858, James and Crete resolved to “try life in union.” But James felt “restless & unsatisfied” with his life, and Crete worried that he would marry her “because an inexorable fate demands it.” While she vowed to make the best of their life together, “there are hours when my heart almost breaks with the cruel thought that our marriage is based upon the cold stern word duty.” James wed Lucretia on November 11, 1858, hopefully with more enthusiasm than his stark diary entry suggests: “Was married to Lucretia Rudolph….”

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Marriage license of James A. Garfield and Lucretia Rudolph.

Separation, both emotional and physical, characterized the marriage for several years. James stayed busy with a burgeoning political and legal career before going off to war in August 1861. As James’ star rose in the military and after his election to the U.S. House of Representatives in 1863, he and Crete struggled to sustain their frayed relationship. James held out hope on their fourth anniversary that “patient waiting and mutual forbearance has at last begun to bear the fruits of peace and love” after they had “groped about in the darkness and grief trying to find the path of duty and peace, and being so often pierced with thorns.” Crete blamed “the mask my own heart had worn” for their sorrows.

After the death of their daughter “Trot” in December 1863, their severest trial came in 1864 when rumors of an extramarital affair threatened James’ political career and his marriage. James confessed his transgression to Crete, hoping for her guidance and some measure of “respect and affection.” Crete offered sage advice, and forgiveness.

While painful for both, the episode seemed to awaken in James and Crete a genuine intimacy previously missing in their marriage. Their subsequent letters reflected a deep longing for and commitment to one another. “We no longer love because we ought to, but because we do,” James explained, and promised that “were I now alone, and with an unwedded hand and heart, but knowing your nature as I now know it, I would woo only you, and use all the powers of honor and effort to win you and make you mine.” To his “Precious Darling” he expressed the wish “that God would let us die together when we die; that neither of us might be left in the empty world for a single hour.”

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James A. Garfield to his wife Lucretia, November 24, 1867: “We no longer love because we ought to, but because we do.”

Alas, an assassin’s bullet thwarted James’s wish in 1881, leaving Crete a devoted widow until her death in 1918. But their letters are eternal, and through them we can share in the extraordinary love story of James and Lucretia Garfield.

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Pic of the Week: Mo’Ne Davis Edition

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Former Little League World Series star Mo’Ne Davis meets with the DC Force, part of the DC Girls Baseball program, in the Baseball Americana exhibit. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Mo’Ne Davis, the pitcher who rocketed to fame behind a historic shutout victory in the 2013 Little League World Series, stopped by the Library’s Baseball Americana exhibit this week. She’s 18 now, five years older and a lifetime removed from that summer when Sports Illustrated put her on the cover after becoming the first girl to win a LLWS game.  She’s learned to deal with fame, injuries and expectations. She’s toured civil rights sites and gained a deeper understanding of the world around her. And now she’s off to study sports media and play softball at Hampton University.

At the Library, she signed autographs (on jerseys and baseballs), met with fans and introduced a showing of  “A League of Their Own.” “I hope I encourage people just to be themselves, no matter what happens,” she told a Washington Post reporter during the visit. “But I think it’s pretty cool that I’m in this spot to do this.”

We do, too.

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Guest Column: Nancy Pelosi on Women’s Suffrage Anniversary

This is a guest post by Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives. It is (lightly) adapted from the “Last Word” column in the current issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. That issue marks the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage in the United States. 

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Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House. 

One hundred and seventy-one years ago, 300 women and men gathered in Seneca Falls, New York, and shook the world with a simple proclamation: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men and women are created equal.” With those words, the women of Seneca Falls ignited a relentless, generations-long struggle by America’s women to secure what is rightfully ours: the sacred right to vote.

Yet, for more than 70 years after, the full promise of equality would be denied to America’s women. During that time, women did not wait for change — they demanded change. For decades, in the face of overwhelming challenges, courageous women protested and picketed, marched and mobilized, were beaten and jailed and finally won the right to vote.

The first woman elected to Congress in 1916, Jeanette Rankin of Montana, led the fight to pass the 19th Amendment, asking, “How shall we explain the meaning of democracy if the same Congress that voted for war to make the world safe for democracy refuses to give this small measure of democracy to the women of our country?” It would be another two years before the 19th Amendment was finally ratified, but Rankin and countless other suffragists never wavered in their fierce determination to secure the right to vote.

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Jeannette Rankin, circa 1916. Prints & Photographs Division.

When the amendment was ratified, headlines described this milestone as women being “given” the right to vote. Nothing was given; women fought for their rights.

Generations after women won the right to vote, we would have to fight for another right: the right to take our seat at the decision-making table. When I came to Congress, there were only 25 women in Congress. Back then, women weren’t considered a threat to the established, male-dominated power in Washington. Yet, we refused to sit on the sidelines. We knew our purpose and we knew our power — and we used it to make progress, demanding not only a seat at the table, but a seat at the head of the table.

Today, how incredible it is that, in the same Congress that will mark 100 years since women won the right to vote, we serve with more than 100 women members – and, of course, with a woman Speaker!

Our women members made history — and now, they are making a difference. Just like the suffragists of the past, these women are fighting to ensure that every freedom, every liberty and every right belongs to every American — including the right to be heard at the ballot box, which is the mainstay of our democracy. The suffragists’ noble cause continues in our fight against blatantly partisan, morally wrong voter suppression efforts that target communities of color.

As we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the 19th Amendment, we must channel the same pioneering spirit of the suffragists and rededicate ourselves to the important work left to be done to bring our nation closer to its founding promise of full fairness and equality.

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“Shall Not Be Denied” exhibition at the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress’ exhibition, “Shall Not Be Denied: Women Fight for the Vote,” plays an important role in this mission. This special initiative not only celebrates the suffragists of the past, it informs and inspires the change-makers of our future. It is my hope that all who experience this exhibition will be empowered to stand on the suffragists’ shoulders, to speak out and make their voices for change heard, particularly young women and girls. As we say: When women succeed, America succeeds!

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Now Online! The Gandhara Scroll, a Rare 2,000-Year-Old Text of Early Buddhism

The following is a guest post by Jonathan Loar, a South Asia reference librarian in the Asian Division. It is adapted from a longer post on the 4 Corners of the World blog.

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The Gandhara scroll as it arrived at the Library in a pen case. Asian Division . Photo: Holly Krueger.

The Library’s Gandhara Scroll, one of the world’s oldest Buddhist manuscripts, has been painstakingly preserved and digitized, making it available to readers online after years of delicate work. The document, written on a birch bark scroll about 2,000 years ago, offers rare insight into the eary history of Buddhism.

The story of its preservation at the Library began in 2003, when the Library acquired the scroll from a private collector. It arrived, in pieces, in an ordinary pen case, accompanied by a handwritten note: “Extremely fragile, do not open unless necessary.” Its digitization was completed earlier this year by the coordinated efforts by the Digital Scan Center, Conservation Division and Asian Division.

The scroll originated in Gandhara, an ancient Buddhist kindgom located in what is today the northern border areas of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Surviving manuscripts from the Gandharan realm are rare; only a few hundred are known to still exist.

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Close-up of the scroll, now digitized. Asian Division.

Understanding the history of the region helps us realize the significance of this scroll. Gandhara was a major cultural crossroads between Greek, Iranian, and Indian traditions. The region was under the rule of numerous kings and dynasties, including Alexander the Great, the Mauryan emperor Ashoka and the Kushan emperor Kanishka I. Between the reigns of reigns of Ashoka and Kanishka I, Gandhara became a major seat of Buddhist art, architecture and learning. One of the region’s most notable characteristics is the Hellenistic style of its Buddhist sculptures, including figures of the Buddha with wavy hair, defined facial features, and contoured robes reminiscent of Greco-Roman deities.

Gandharan scrolls were typically buried in terracotta jars and interred in a stupa, a dome-shaped structure often containing Buddhist texts or relics. The Library’s scroll retains 75 to 80 percent of the original text, missing only its beginning and end. Its preservation is due in part to the region’s high altitude and dry climate. The completeness of the scroll makes it noteworthy because many of the other surviving Gandharan manuscripts are even more fragmentary.

Th scroll is written in Gandhari, a derivative of Sanskrit, and styled in a script known as Kharoshthi, thought have its origins in Aramaic. Kharoshthi reads from top to bottom and right to left.

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Conservators are using gold-handled dental tools, an eye surgery tool and an array of treatment-specific, handmade light glass weights. Photo: Yasmeen Khan.

The Library’s scroll has been called the Bahubuddha Sutra, or “The Many Buddhas Sutra,” in the scholarship of the University of Washington’s Richard Salomon, one of the world’s leading experts on Gandharan Buddhism and the Gandhari language. Salomon explains that the likely identification of this scroll as the Bahubuddha Sutra stems from its similarity to a Sanskrit text of the same name found in the much larger Mahavastu, or “Great Story,” a biography of the Buddha and his past lives. Locating a very early attestation of the Bahubuddha Sutra in the Gandhari language thus sheds new light on the formative period of Buddhist literature.

Many people are probably familiar with the story of Siddhartha Gautama, who reached enlightenment underneath the Bodhi tree in Bodh Gaya in eastern India and became the Buddha. He lived about 2,500 years ago. Various Buddhist traditions, including the very early Mahayana tradition of ancient Gandhara, also refer to previous buddhas whose lives stretch across a cosmic understanding of history, eons and eons before the birth of Siddhartha Gautama. The Library’s Gandharan scroll is narrated in the voice of the Buddha summarizing very brief biographies of thirteen buddhas who came before him, followed by his birth and enlightenment, and ending with the prediction of the future buddha, Maitreya.

With regard to conservation, it is safe to say that the Gandhara scroll is one of the most complicated and fragile items ever treated at the Library of Congress. After its arrival in 2003, it took several years of thought and planning to devise a treatment strategy. A memorable anecdote from this time period is that the conservator practiced her unrolling technique on a dried-up cigar—an item that only approximates the difficulty of working with a compacted birch bark scroll.

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Conservators use gold-handled dental tools and specially-made bamboo lifters to work on the scroll. Photo by Yasmeen Khan.

With assistance from a conservator at the British Library who had worked on similarly ancient materials, the treatment plan was put into action: Gradual humidification over a few days, careful unrolling by hand with precision tools on a sheet of inert glass, followed by placing another sheet of glass on top once the scroll was completely unrolled. The edges were then sealed. The six largest scroll fragments — which contained the majority of the text — were placed inside one glass housing, while another was used for the more than 100 smaller fragments, some with only parts of a single syllable. Both glass housings were then placed in specially constructed drop spine boxes designed to protect the scroll from damage caused by vibration.

Glass housing, shock-absorbing foam, sturdy boxes—all of these contribute to the scroll’s long-term preservation. But even in its well-preserved state, the physical scroll is too fragile for public display. This is the reason for the excitement behind its new digital reincarnation, a format in which this unique item can be shared with a global audience.

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Conservation staff turning the Gandhara scroll during its digitization. Photo: Jonathan Loar.

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