Library of Congress's Blog, page 73

Clara Barton: A Memorial Day Story

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

Civil War nurse Clara Barton traveled to Falmouth, Virginia in December 1862, anticipating another bloody battle and a crush of wounded men needing medical assistance. Shortly before the December 13th battle of Fredericksburg, Barton gazed out over the tents and campfires of the Union troops in the Army of the Potomac. She imagined she “could almost hear the slow flap of the grim messenger’s wings, as one by one, he sought and selected his victims for the morning sacrifice.”

[image error]

Clara Barton to her cousin Elvira Stone, 2 a.m., December 12, 1862, Clara Barton Papers

“Oh! sleep and visit in dreams once more, the loved ones nestling at home,” she silently willed the soldiers. “They may yet live to dream of you, cold lifeless and bloody.”

Barton’s fears proved accurate for the Union, which in defeat suffered more than 12,000 casualties. Among the deceased was Lieutenant Edgar Marshall Newcomb of the 19th Massachusetts Infantry. Barton recorded Newcomb’s (which she also spelled “Newcome”) death on December 20 in a pocket diary she kept while tending the wounded at a Union hospital established at Lacy House in Falmouth. According to comrades, Newcomb had been shot in both legs while carrying the national flag during a charge on December 13.

[image error]

Excerpt from Barton’s diary regarding Edgar Newcomb.

Unlike many of his comrades, who died alone on the battlefield, or surrounded by strangers in a field hospital, Barton noted that Newcomb saw familiar faces in his final days. Edward Fitzgerald, a comrade in the 19th Massachusetts, tended to the 22-year-old lieutenant, and Newcomb’s brother, 17-year-old Charles, had arrived for a visit before the battle and “remained to care for him until his death.” By Civil War standards, Newcomb’s passing counted as a “Good Death” in Victorian terms, with the deceased attended by friends and family, and able to express parting words.

Newcomb was buried at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

[image error]

Edgar M. Newcomb, from an 1883 memorial publication.

His memory, however, lived on long after the Civil War. In 1883, Dr. A. B. Weymouth published a memorial sketch of Lieutenant Newcomb’s life and wartime letters. The book confirmed Barton’s presence at Newcomb’s deathbed, standing in for his mother as his mind wandered at the end.

Years later, Charles revisited the scene of his brother’s death at Lacy House. “It was an affecting scene to see him kneeling over his brother’s blood, which still remains on the floor,” remembered the new owner’s son, “and can never be erased.”

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

Pic of the Week: Crazy Rich Asians Edition

Novelist Kevin Kwan looks over a collection of Asian Division items with South Asian Specialist Jonathan Loar, May 22, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller.

“Crazy Rich Asians” was the book that started it all for Kevin Kwan, the Singapore-born, New York-dwelling visual consultant and novelist. The 2013 satire about fabulously wealthy Chinese ex-pat families living (and loving and gossiping and shopping) in Singapore became an international bestseller, spawning two sequels and a hit 2018 film directed by Jon M. Chu. He stopped by the Library for an onstage conversation about the trilogy of books this week, and included a visit to the Asian Division’s collections before the show.

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

Fragments of History

This is a guest post by John Hessler, Curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology and History of Early Americas at the Library of Congress.

As a linguist obsessed with the earliest history of writing, I am used to dealing in fragments. A shattered chunk of engraved stone, a handful of shards of painted pottery, a surviving blot of ink on vellum – sometimes these are the only evidence we have of long-lost scripts and languages. Small and insignificant as they may seem, they give us glimpses into great works of literature and poetry that we will never really know.

You find such fragments in the world’s great libraries all the time. Pulled from the bindings of books, unearthed from archaeological digs, donated by antiquarians, they can, despite their incomplete nature, become critical pieces for reassembling puzzles of the ancient world.

[image error]

Medieval manuscript fragments found in the binding of a Portolan Atlas by Placido Oliva.
Geography and Map Division, Library of Congress.  

Historian and bibliographer Seymour de Ricci, born in 1881, knew this. Early in his career, he was a scholar of ancient Greek and wrote about the graffiti found in ancient Egyptian tombs – some of the world’s ultimate literary fragments. Later, he turned his attention to medieval manuscripts and tapestries. After many years of research conducted in places like the Library of Congress, he produced the landmark “Census of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts in the United States and Canada,” in 1935.

He also donated a small collection of rare papyrus fragments to the Library. They include pieces from two of the earliest works of literature known in the West: “The Iliad,” by Homer; and the book of Isaiah in the Bible.

The fragment of Homer that de Ricci collected is a section from Book II of “The Iliad,” which tells the tale of the Trojan War. This masterpiece of storytelling was, throughout the Greek world, told orally at first, and was later set down on papyrus, the medium of choice for ancient Egyptian, Greek and Middle Eastern scribes. The oldest complete manuscript dates from the 10th century, so any fragments from earlier versions help trace the poem’s history — and de Ricci’s fragment is from nearly 1,000 years earlier.

[image error]

Fragment of Homer’s Iliad from the Seymour de Ricci Collection. Rare Book and Special Collections, Library of Congress.

It’s from a section of the poem in which Homer begins to explain the details of the Greek war on Troy. He introduces Odysseus and Nestor, who support the main movers and shakers in the story, Achilles and Agamemnon. The fragment is the center part of the text from lines 466-477 (approximately shown in red). The complete section, translated here, narrates the drama of the warring forces gathering on the plains outside Troy:

So tribe on tribe, pouring out of the ships and shelters, marched across the Scamander plain and the earth shook, tremendous thunder from the trampling feet of men and horses drawing into position down under the Scamander meadow flats breaking into flower—men by the thousands, numberless as the leaves and seedlings that flower forth in the spring.

The armies massing, crowding thick and fast as swarms of flies seething over the shepherd’s stalls in the first spring days when the buckets flood with milk—so many long-haired Achaeans swarmed across the plain to confront the Trojans, fired to smash their lines. These men who are as goatherds among the wide flocks easily separate them in order as they take to the pasture, thus the leaders separated them this way and that toward the encounter, and among the powerful Agamemnon…

The scribe who wrote de Ricci’s fragment spelled several words differently than we see in other versions, and inserted an additional word here and there. This can be expected in a poem that was repeated orally for centuries, and then written down by different scribes in different places. Fragments like these let scholars explore these differences and see what they might mean.

The Isaiah fragment of de Ricci is from the 4th century, or about 1,200 years after the original was written, perhaps by Isaiah himself. The fragment has writing on both sides of the papyrus, from Isaiah 23:4-7 and 10-13. It is a small part of a prophecy about the cities of Tyre and Sidon. The full section reads:

Be ashamed, Sidon, fortress on the sea, for the sea has spoken, “I have not been in labor, nor given birth, nor raised young men, nor reared young women.” When the report reaches Egypt they shall be in anguish at the report about Tyre. Pass over to Tarshish, wail, you who dwell on the coast! Is this your exultant city, whose origin is from old, whose feet have taken her to dwell in distant lands?

Any ancient record of the Bible is important, and this one allows us to conclude that the fragment was once part of a codex or book. Note the round dot, the hole in the margin, which was once used to sew the sheet into a binding.

[image error]

[image error]

De Ricci fragment, Book of Isaiah, from the early 4th century. Rare Book and Special Collections. Library of Congress.

History is the story of fragments—what survives and what does not. For many manuscripts, for which there are no surviving complete copies, or whose history we know little, fragments are sometimes all we have to go by. For texts like these, and for linguists and scholars like de Ricci and myself, no piece is too small to save.

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

Chronicling America: 15 Million and Counting!

This is a guest post by Nathan Yarasavage, a digital projects specialist in the Serial and Government Publications Division. You can find more on the Headlines and Heroes blog.

This week we celebrate an exciting milestone. Chronicling America, the online searchable database of historic U.S. newspapers, now includes more than 15 million pages!

“WHADDYA TALKIN’ ABOUT! THERE’S MILLIONS ‘N BILLIONS….” Evening Star, September 18, 1932.

Since 2005, libraries, historical societies, and other institutions throughout the country have contributed newspapers from their collections to Chronicling America. This process is part of the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP), a collaborative program sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Library of Congress. To date, we have more than 2800 newspapers from 46 states, Puerto Rico, and the District of Columbia. To mark the 15 million milestone, we are throwing a #ChronAmParty on Twitter to highlight all of the things to be found in 15 million newspaper pages – from the funny and fantastic to the historically significant!

“Science Finds the Father of the Cat – 15,000,000 Years Old.” The Washington Times, October 17, 1920.

“REPRESENTATIVES OF 15 MILLION POTENTIAL WOMEN VOTERS PRESENT PLANKS AT CHICAGO.” The Washington Herald, June 9, 1920.

We’re also unveiling a set of interactive data visualizations that help reveal the variety of content available in a corpus of 15 million digitized newspaper pages which you can find on this site - Chronicling America Data Visualizations. These data visualizations, which include coverage by time, coverage by state, and coverage by language and ethnic press, were created using Tableau Public. Head over to The Signal tomorrow for a blog post that goes into more detail on Chronicling America and these new tools!

To help celebrate these exciting accomplishments, please join our #15Millionpages #ChronAmParty on May 21st. All throughout the day, NDNP partners will be tweeting what is sure to be an eclectic assortment of content on the theme of #15Millionpages.  Follow along and retweet our finds to your own followers or tweet your own discoveries! Just include #ChronAmParty #15Millionpages to join in the fun.  Throughout the year, we’ll continue the #ChronAmParty with a changing theme every third Tuesday of the month.  We’re looking forward to celebrating with you!

Questions about NDNP or Chronicling America?  Contact ndnptech@loc.gov

And subscribe to our recent additions feed for more content updates!

Crowdsourcing Invitation: Help Tell a Civil War Soldier’s Story

By the People, the Library’s crowdsourcing transcription project, is rallying readers to complete 500 pages from the “Civil War Soldiers: Disabled but not disheartened” campaign before Memorial Day. These were gathered by journalist and chaplain William Oland Bourne as part of a left-handed penmanship competition for Union soldiers who had lost their right hand or arm during the conflict. Here, Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division, writes about one of the soldiers in Bourne’s penmanship contest.

“It was a day long to be remembered by those engaged in it, and by millions of liberty loving people,” Private Alfred D. Whitehouse recalled of the first battle of Bull Run near Manassas, Virginia, on July 21, 1861. That day certainly changed Whitehouse’s life  – he suffered a wound that led to the amputation of his right arm and the end of his military service.

[image error]

Cover page of Alfred D. Whitehouse’s second contribution to the left-hand penmanship contest sponsored by Wm. Oland Bourne’s newspaper, The Soldier’s Friend. William Oland Bourne papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Born in 1839 in London, Whitehouse immigrated to the United States in 1849. His family settled in New York City, where Whitehouse became a sign painter. In February 1859, he enlisted in Company D, 8th Regiment New York State Militia, known as the “Washington Grays.” Upon the outbreak of the Civil War in April 1861, Company D marched south, first to Annapolis and Baltimore, then to the Kalorama section of Washington, where the men mustered in as three-month recruits. Few people on either side of the war anticipated the conflict would last longer than that. Company D soon joined General Irwin McDowell’s forces, aiming to drive Confederate forces under General P. G. T. Beauregard from Manassas Junction.

[image error]

Surgeon’s certificate documenting Whitehouse’s amputation, noting that it was “3¾ inches from coracoid process.” Alfred D. Whitehouse pension file, application 290, certificate 9627, Record Group 15, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.

On July 21, “a beautiful Sunday morning, calm, and serene, to [sic] sacred to be disturbed by the horrid din of battle,” Whitehouse remembered, Federal and Confederate forces clashed in the first major land battle of the Civil War. It resulted in the rout of the Union army. Around 3 p.m., a minie ball pierced Whitehouse’s right arm about two inches above the elbow. He was taken prisoner by the Confederates and transported to Richmond. Surgeons amputated his right arm so near the shoulder that he could not wear an artificial arm.

Following his parole in October 1861, Whitehouse returned to New York City where he was discharged for disability in November. After having given his right arm to save the Union, Whitehouse became a naturalized U.S. citizen in December 1861.

His war now over, Whitehouse secured a government pension for his war wound, married his wife Mercy, returned to sign painting and mastered left-handed penmanship. When Bourne’s The Soldier’s Friend newspaper sponsored left-hand penmanship contests in 1866 and 1867 for previously right-handed disabled veterans, Whitehouse entered both contests. His first essay, awarded a twenty-dollar prize for ornamental penmanship, recounted his military service and feelings about the war effort.

“I thank God who hath spared my life, to see Victory and Peace,” he closed his essay, “although at a terrible sacrifice.” His more ornate second entry included his photograph and poetry, the theme of one poem urging Americans to give disabled veterans “work that we can do.”

[image error]

William Oland Bourne papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

Government records, city directories, and other sources document that Whitehouse continued to make a living with sign painting and civil service positions (clerk, watchman) in the New York City area. He and Mercy had six children, four of whom lived to adulthood. Mercy died in January 1919, and Alfred followed his wife of nearly fifty-four years the following month. They are buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York.

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

Remembering I. M. Pei

I.M. Pei died Thursday at his home in Manhattan. He was 102. In recognition of his extraordinary achievements, we reprint this guest post by Mari Nakahara, curator of architecture, design and engineering in the Prints and Photographs Division, focusing on his items in the Library. It ran on his 100th birthday.

[image error]

Former first lady Jacqueline Kennedy with I. M. Pei in 1964. He is speaking to the press about funding for the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, which he designed.

Chinese-American architect Ieoh Ming Pei celebrates his 100th birthday today, April 26. The Library of Congress is fortunate to have original design sketches by I. M. Pei as well as thousands of his manuscript papers.

With the beautiful spring weather in mind, I decided to revisit this master designer’s work by looking first at his drawings for the Louvre Museum in Paris—I did so while picturing myself humming “Aux Champs-Élysées” and enjoying the walk from the Arc de Triomphe to the Louvre. I then turned to Pei’s designs for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum in Boston.

[image error]

Whimsical rendering of Pei’s design for the Louvre pyramid by architect Walker Cain, 1984.

French President Francois Mitterrand commissioned Pei in 1983 to develop a solution to a long-term problem with the Louvre’s original entrance, which was no longer adequate to receive the increasing number of daily visitors to the museum. Pei’s innovative idea was to insert a 71-foot glass and metal pyramid in the center of a courtyard surrounded by centuries-old structures. As an architectural grad student when the pyramid was completed in 1989, I admired his imagination and technical skill tremendously. A shape from ancient times, made of modern materials, melded beautifully and astonishingly into a historical setting.

Pei’s careful study of axes in site-plan sketches includes one drawing in black and red that determines the center of the pyramid by connecting the site to the Arc de Triomphe. A site plan on the bottom of a sheet of yellow tracing paper highlights the large main pyramid with a small pyramid behind, water pools and pavement patterns. All of these elements repeat the diamond shape, reflecting the pattern in the metal structure of the pyramid.

[image error]

Site plan sketch for the Louvre, 1983.

[image error]

More sketches for the Louvre site plan.

Pei also created multiple models such as those shown below to study the structure and opening of the pyramid.

[image error] [image error] [image error]

Before the Louvre project, Pei worked on a design for the National Gallery of Art’s East Building in Washington, D.C., between 1968 and 1978. I can easily walk down the hill from the Library of Congress to the National Gallery of Art to enjoy this Pei masterpiece.

The triangular rhythms in the design sketches are what reveal Pei’s genius for me. He turned the unusual trapezoidal shape of the site to great advantage by creating a smaller but identically shaped trapezoid area and dividing it into two triangular buildings. The axis of symmetry of the larger triangle aligns perfectly with the central axis of the West Building. The hand-drawn diagram with diamond-shaped grids served as the basic module of Pei’s design of the East Building.

[image error]

Diagram for Pei’s design for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art, 1969.

[image error]

Sketches for the East Building.

Pei started one of his most significant commissioned projects in 1964—the John F. Kennedy Library. During the selection of the architect for the Library, Jacqueline Kennedy visited each nominated architect’s office. While others welcomed her with their definite ideas, Pei told her he did not yet know what the library would look like. He said he would like to propose his idea after he spent more time contemplating what John F. Kennedy would have liked. I think that was a gutsy response, and this answer caught her heart. As shown in the photo at the top of this post, Mrs. Kennedy and Pei are both smiling at the press conference called to announce that public contributions to the fund for the library had exceeded $10 million.

Pei’s serious studies of traffic and pedestrian flows also influenced his design for the Kennedy Library. The two sketches below, right, represent his concept of combining triangular, square and round shapes.

[image error]

Site plan study for the Kennedy Library.

[image error]

Sketches for the Kennedy Library.

“I think a great building reaches into the folklore, if that is the right word, of the people it serves,” Mrs. Kennedy wrote to Pei in 1981.

“I hope it touches you the way it has affected the lives of all who live near it or discover it as they come to Boston by land, sea or air. . . . You made that possible for Jack. I will always think of it as a monument to your spirit—to your humanity and perseverance. . . . With my deepest thanks that stretch back through the years, and with much love, Jackie.”

This letter must have been very rewarding, especially after all the challenges Pei had to overcome during this project.

Congratulations on your centennial birthday, Mr. Pei!

Learn More

The Prints and Photographs Division holds visual materials from the I. M. Pei Papers. Additional materials will be transferred from the Manuscript Division this year.

The I. M. Pei Papers are available for research in the Manuscript Division.

The Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division holds transcripts and photographs from the John Peter Collection (1951–95), including an interview with Pei.

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

PIc of the Week: Roses Edition

[image error]

Flower arrangement. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Sometimes, it’s just all about the image.

In that spirit, we bring you this gorgeous photograph of a floral arrangement from a special-collections display this week that was part of a memorial to former Librarian of Congress James Billington, who passed away in 2018. It’s so delicate, so lovely and so mesmerizing. Happy Friday.

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

New Online: The AP Washington Bureau, 1915-1930

Ryan Reft, a historian in the Mansucript Division, and I put together this piece about an important segment of American journalism. Wire service reporting from Washington, particularly in this era, provided much of the nation with coverage of federal government and politics. 

 

The Associated Press Washington Bureau News Dispatches between the tumultuous years between 1915 and 1930 are now online at the Library, providing readers and researchers with a look at how some of the biggest events of the era were reported to millions of readers across the nation.

The 378,082 images in the collection fill 375 volumes and cover World War I, women’s suffrage, the Roaring ’20s, the Jazz Age and the stock market crashes of 1929 that ushered in the Great Depression. Written in the news agency’s terse style, the dispatches show the immediacy of news as it broke, in the era in which it was lived.

One dramatic example is the afternoon of May 7, 1915, about one year into World War I. That day, a German U-Boat torpedoed the RMS Lusitania, a British liner, as it was returning from New York to Liverpool with 1,959 people aboard. The boat sank in 20 minutes, killing 1,128 people, a toll that included more than 100 Americans. It was a shell-shock to a nation that had, to that point, stayed out of the conflict.

[image error]

The Lusitania. The Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

“News of the torpedoing of the Lusitania struck official Washington like a bomb,” the AP wrote in a bulletin at 2:09 p.m. that same day. “While disposed to await full details before expressing opinions, all administration officials realized that the incident was probably the most serious Washington has faced since the beginning of the war.”

[image error]

AP Washington Bureau News Dispatches, LIbrary of Congress.

They were correct. Two years later, President Woodrow Wilson asked Congress to declare war on Germany, with Germany’s U-Boat warfare as one of the key justifications.

It was about 8:40 p.m. on April 2, 1917, when Wilson reached the Capitol Building to make his request for an official war declaration to the combined House and Senate, the AP reported. The mood was “serious and quiet.” But when Wilson came to his point and said, “We will not choose the path of submission,” the audience burst into applause. That din had scarcely died down when Wilson said, “Congress should declare that a state of war existed,” as the AP story had it, and the chamber rose to its feet in a standing ovation.

[image error]

AP Washington Bureau News Dispatches, LIbrary of Congress.

By the end, at 10:11 p.m., the chamber was in full roar. “As the President finished every person on the floor and in the galleries arose and shouted. Most of the Senators unfolded flags they wore in their upper outside coat pockets and waved them vigorously.”

Congress declared war four days later. Troops began arriving in France in June.

The AP’s reporting of Wilson’s speech (and other major events) was transmitted across the nation and reprinted in newspapers from Maine to California. This centralized reporting came to provide a cohesiveness to daily news coverage across the nation. It was the early days of “mainstream media.”

News services had become popular in the 1840s and 1850s, greatly abetted by the invention of the telegraph in 1845. Telegraphs required short, staccato messages, and “wire” reports soon adapted to that reality. The resulting style became known as the inverted pyramid school of news writing. A reporter’s “lede,” as it came to be called, spelled out the most important item of the story in the first paragraphs, with the rest of the information following in a descending order of importance.

[image error]

L.A. Gobright, AP Washington bureau chief, circa 1865. Brady-Handy Collection, Library of Congress.

New York was the nation’s news center at the time, and newspapers there joined to form the New York Associated Press in 1846, a cost-cutting means to share basic reporting on meat-and-potatoes issues among member papers. Other regions followed suit. By 1856, after an internal reorganization of the AP, the agency’s first formal bureaus were established in Albany (the New York capital) and Washington, D.C., the nation’s capital. The AP grew to be the biggest of the wire services, but competed with others, such as the United Press, and virtually all newsrooms began to subscribe to their services. “Wire copy” became a staple phrase of American newsrooms.

But, as many a frustrated reader has lamented over the ensuing decades, reporters did not always get straight to the point, a journalistic malady known as “burying the lede.” AP Washington correspondent Lawrence Gobright was at Ford’s Theater the night of April 14, 1865, when Lincoln was assassinated. It was one of the most significant breaking news stories in American history. His reporting that night was phenomenal. He made it to the booth where the Lincolns had been sitting; at one point, someone even handed him the assassin’s gun. (He dutifully turned it over to the police.) However, in his dispatch to New York, it took him three paragraphs to get around to saying that Lincoln had been shot.

Readers can go through the AP’s dispatches of reports from these 15 turbulent years of American history and decide for themselves how reporters fared on deadline. The finding aid can help you find particular subjects and events. The site has stories listed chronologically.

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

Doris Day: At the Beginning

[image error]

Doris Day at Aquarium in New York, 1946. Photo: William P. Gottlieb.

It’s hard to imagine Hollywood, or mid-century American pop culture, without Doris Day, the blond-haired, blue-eyed girl-next-door, as famous for her on-screen virtue as for her honey-dipped voice.

“Que Sera Sera” became her signature song, an Academy-Award winner today remembered as a confection of sunny maternal advice and optimism. But, of course, it’s from “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” an Alfred Hitchcock film in which she co-stars with James Stewart. Her character, a distraught mother, sings the song in an impromptu performance at a mansion in which their young son is being held captive, and about to be murdered. It’s a little edgier than you might think.

It was that way in real life, too. Her cheerful “Miss Chastity Belt” brand contrasted with a complex love life, four husbands and a dark side of Americana worthy of David Lynch. Her son, Terry Melcher, a Los Angeles record producer in the 1960s, was introduced to a wanna-be singer named Charles Manson. After Melcher turned down Manson’s bid for a record deal, Manson went to the house to confront him. But Melcher had moved out — at his mother’s insistence, Beach Boy Mike Love later wrote — and Manson’s followers soon killed the new residents instead, actress Sharon Tate and three others.

[image error]

Doris Day and Kitty Kallen, Central Park, 1947. Photo: William P. Gottlieb

The Library has a collection of photos of Day before life got all that complicated. They’re from the archives of jazz photographer William P. Gottlieb, who worked with many of the legends of the day for Downbeat Magazine, the Washington Post and others. His photographs are still some of the most widely reproduced images of jazz musicians, such as Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Dizzy Gillespie,  Coleman Hawkins and Ella Fitzgerald.

Day’s first success, “Sentimental Journey,” was a massive hit in 1945, catching the yearning of sweethearts separated by World War II. A year later, Gottlieb photographed her in New York City. She was 24 and full of promise. That smile! That sparkle in the eyes! America, and the rest of the century, was waiting on her.

Doris Day and Les Brown, Aquarium, New York. 1946. Photo: William P. Gottlieb

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

Bug Story: The Secret of Pre-Modern Colors

[image error]

Preservation Science Specialist Cynthia Ryan working with cochineal dyes in the Library’s Preservation and Research Testing Division lab. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Cindy Connelly Ryan is working at a lab bench deep inside the Library. A preservation science specialist, she’s part of a team using state-of-the-art science — chemical analysis, multispectral imaging, X-ray fluorescence — to understand the long-lost inks, pigments and dyes that gave the pre-modern world its dazzling color palettes.

It’s a realm as exotic as it is mysterious. For centuries, tradesmen scoured the planet for anything that could be used to produce vibrant colors: bug guts, squid bones, shredded wood, hardened tree sap, walnut rinds, lye, tannic acid, iron sulfate, wine and, um, urine. Most of their recipes have been lost to time, and the ones that do survive are often wildly inaccurate.

[image error]

Cochineal-dyed swatches in “The Practical Dyer,” Cornelius Molony, 1833.  Photo by Shawn Miller.

But re-creating these colors is critical. It’s part of a burgeoning field of research that seeks to understand both the history of these long-ago tradesmen and the future of the works they helped create. Historians want to re-create them to better understand worlds gone by. If a particular color used in an Italian medieval manuscript can be traced to India, for example, it helps document trade routes of the time. Preservationists, meanwhile, need to know the chemical composition of items in their care. Identifying colorants or substrates (linen, canvas, paper, cloth, etc.) with particular sensitivity to light, say, or that are composed of volatile organic compounds, may inform decisions about storage, exhibitions or conservation treatments.

“If you’re looking at something from the 15th century, there are going to be materials in that that nobody has used in 300 years, and you can’t just go online and order them,” Connelly Ryan says. “The detective work comes in looking at things that you can’t buy, that were never produced commercially, things that have long since replaced by less poisonous, less expensive or more chemically stable materials.”

[image error]

Cochineals, pre grinding. Photo: Shawn Miller

Which is why, in a lab in the Library’s Preservation Research and Testing Division, she takes out a mortar and pestle and begins grinding up … bugs. Specifically, the dried bodies of cochineals (ko-shih-NEALS), a cactus-loving insect that was once the crème de la crème of colorants for its deep, glorious shades of red. In pre-Columbian times, Mayan and Aztec societies used the carminic acid found in cochineals to dye rich fabrics. Spanish explorers were so smitten with the color that they shipped it back to Europe, where its scarlets shades created a sensation.

Today, Ryan shakes a small handful of dried cochineal (obtained from a specialty shop in New York at about $20 an ounce) into her mortar. They are tiny brown things and, it has to be said, not particularly impressive. “But as I grind them down, it turns red, right?” she says, offering a peek.

[image error]

Cochineals, after grinding. Photo: Shawn Miller.

After a few minutes, the insects are reduced to a pinkish red powder. She pours this into a glass beaker, adds lye from a graduated cylinder and … presto.

“Look at that amazing purple,” she says, painting out a small square sample onto a swatch card.

This color sample takes its place among hundreds of others that she and her colleagues are making. These help match methods, paints and inks that were used to create priceless items in the Library’s collections.

In a different part of the lab, X-ray fluorescence tests are even more precise. These tests subject a pin-dot sample of a document or artifact to a high-energy X-ray beam, revealing the chemical signatures of individual ingredients. Multispectral imaging, meanwhile, done in another part of the lab, reveals markings on the page — watermarks, earlier writings that have been scraped off or written over — invisible to the naked eye.

[image error]

Detail, illustration in “Apocalypsis S. Joannis.”

Stephanie Stillo, a curator in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, is working with Ryan’s group to investigate a 1470s block book, “Apocalypsis S. Joannis” (the “Apocalypse of St. John.” The greens and reds and orange in the illustrations are shockingly vibrant more than 600 years after someone inked them in.

But block books — popular just after Gutenberg invented the printing press — are publishing enigmas. Today, few copies exist. Scholars know they were printed in Germany and the Low Countries. They know reverse-image wood-block carvings were used to imprint the images on rag paper. But that’s it.

The laboratory’s research into what the book is made of, however, is unlocking clues that have been hidden for centuries. Chemical analysis has revealed the brilliant orange is from a red lead. The deep green is copper based. The light maroon is from a brazilwood dye, made from a tree in southeastern India, not Brazil itself (those would come later). And multispectral imaging has revealed that the black ink is made from iron gall, not the more common carbon black.

“Knowing what a book is composed of helps us know more about production sites and methods,” Stillo says. “If they’re using this certain kind of ink, if they’re using this certain kind of pigment, then we can make some assumptions about where these were produced and who produced them.

[image error]

Ryan paints test swatches from cochineal dyes. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Subscribe to the blog— it’s free! — and the largest library in world history will send one cool story to your inbox Monday-Friday.