Library of Congress's Blog, page 74
May 10, 2019
Pic of the Week: Gayle Osterberg Edition
Gayle Osterberg and Carla Hayden, May 8, 2019. Photo: Shawn Miller.
Into each life, some rain must fall. And so it is, on this sunny spring afternoon, we must announce that this is the final day that Gayle Osterberg, the Library’s director of communications, will be our kind, benevolent and fearless leader. She’s off for adventures outside your favorite national library, but will still be in D.C., which we will take as a consolation prize. As anyone who’s worked with Gayle knows, she’s a class act and a good friend and, no, we are not crying. It’s just the pollen.
May 9, 2019
Perry in Edo Bay: The Dawn of the U.S.-Japanese Relationship
Perry’s ships arrive Edo Bay, as seen in “Kinkai kikan.” Photo by Shawn Miller.
The Black Ship scrolls are a genre of Japanese paintings that captured the historic meeting of two alien cultures: That 1854 moment when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry barged into Edo Bay with four American steamships, guns at the ready, to negotiate a treaty with a Japanese government that had been almost completely isolated for two centuries.
It was an astonishing moment. Perry insisted he was bringing “civilization” to “heathens” who had expelled Christian missionaries early in the 17th century. To the Japanese, Perry’s crew were “barbarians” and their black-hulled steamships, billowing black smoke, were monstrous behemoths from another world.
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The Susquehanna, by Bankei. Photo: Shawn Miller.
One of the most famous depictions of those tense days is “Kinkai kikan,” (“Strange View off the Coast of Kanagawa,”) by Otsuki Bankei, a Japanese artist, scholar and educator who was commissioned by a regional official some 200 miles away to record the encounter. Bankei’s report, put together with the help of two assistant painters, was a pictorial scroll that was nearly 38 feet long — 30 sections of rice paper, delicately glued together, depicting 20 scenes from the Americans’ four-month stay. Wrapped around a spindle and stored in a small wooden box for most of the past 150 years, it was recently acquired by the Library from a rare book dealer in New York and is not yet on public display. It is that rarest of things: the moment of contact between two cultures, separated by a vast ocean, recorded in the hand of an artist who was at the scene.
“What distinguishes this scroll from most others in the genre is that it has a clearly identified creator,” says Cameron Penwell, Japanese reference librarian in the Library’s Asian Division. “Bankei firmly sided with the view that the Japanese should pursue diplomatic relations with Western countries.”
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Cameron Penwell, unrolling part of the scroll. Photo: Shawn Miller.
The Americans’ intimidating arrival had been preceded by a short visit a year earlier. U.S. President Millard Fillmore had dispatched Perry with an audacious plan — to open up Japan to a relationship with the United States. Japan, though, had been sealed off from much of outside world for nearly 200 years. The nation’s foreign contacts were limited to a carefully regulated trade with Korea, the Ryukyu Kingdom (today’s Okinawa), and the Dutch. Even so, the Dutch were restricted to a single trading post on a small island in a bay in a distant part of the country. They were seldom allowed on shore. The Americans were so ignorant of life in Japan that they believed the emperor ran the country, unaware that he had long been reduced to a figurehead by the Tokugawa shogunate.
In this environment, on July 8, 1853, Perry sailed into Uraga, a fortified inlet off the entrance to Edo (now Tokyo) Bay, with two paddle-wheeled steamships and two sloops, both heavily armed and both far superior to any Japanese weaponry. Perry demanded that a delegation take a letter from Fillmore to the emperor. If they wouldn’t, Perry intimated, he would. It was gunboat diplomacy in its most basic form, but the Japanese recognized that they were outgunned. They accepted the letter and told Perry to come back the following year for a reply.
When Perry returned, it was with a far larger show of military muscle. This time, his fleet consisted of nine ships (four of them steamers) and nearly 2,000 sailors. They sailed directly into what is now Tokyo, pushing past smaller Japanese boats that attempted to keep them out. They sank anchor and ignored warning shots.
It worked. Perry was allowed to come on shore, negotiate with emissaries and stay for several months, signing the landmark Treaty of Kanagawa on March 31, 1854. Japan would no longer be a closed country. It was a major turning point in international affairs.
In this hubbub, Bankei and other artists — some professionals, some amateurs — sketched away. Japan did not have photography, so the paintings were the only visual records of the event.
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American soldier. Photo: Shawn Miller
“On the Japanese side of things, this was quite a sight,” Penwell says. “They had never seen steam-powered ships before, and these were loaded up with artillery. The Americans made a show of it. The message was ‘We’re here, and we mean business.’ ”
Perry, in his memoirs, later wrote that his hosts “were constantly taking out their writing materials, their mulberry-bark paper, and their Indian ink and hair pencils, which they always carried in a pocket within the left breast of their loose robes, and making notes and sketches.”
For his part, Bankei began his scroll with calligraphy, explaining the situation. He then turned his brush from words to pictures. He started with a panorama of the bay, in light blues and greens, depicting Perry’s fleet off the shore of Yokohama. Then he painted and described each ship — the Powhatan, the Mississippi, and so on. The next panels portray the Americans coming ashore in small boats, marching in formation and greeting Japanese dignitaries. Ever the journalist, he even sketched out the seating chart at a formal dinner.
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Bankei’s sketch of Perry. Photo: Shawn Miller.
Finally, he painted portraits of the American leaders, a few soldiers, and depictions of their uniforms. Many of the portraits were unflattering. The Americans appear in two dimensions, with enormous noses and dull eyes, almost caricatures. Perry was dismissive, calling much of it “exceedingly rude and inartistic.”
Still, Bankei’s rice-paper scroll catches the two cultures on the cusp of vast social changes, in his own hand, as it is transpiring in front of him. As art, it is invaluable reportage; as reportage, it is delicate art.
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May 8, 2019
Fresh Life (Online) for the epic Shahnamah
Detail, illustration in the Shahnamah. Printed in India, circa 1600.
“The Shahnamah,” (translated as “The Persian Book of Kings”) is the majestic narrative that recounts the history of pre-Islamic Persia, a staggering work of literature first published about 1,000 years ago. Written by the poet Ferdowsi, it is composed of 62 separate stories set in 50,000 rhyming couplets and divided into 990 chapters. It was 33 years in the making. “Epic” doesn’t begin to cover it.
The book begins with the Persian creation story (Keyumars is the first human) and ends with the Arab invasion of modern-day Iran in the seventh century. It encompasses periods of myth, legend and actual history. It occupies a cultural space something like ‘The Illiad” and “The Odyssey” do in the western tradition, or “Mahabharata” in India — the cornerstone of an entire body of language and literature.
“ ‘The Shahnamah’ became the standard-bearer, the blueprint, for the modern Persian language,” says Hirad Dinavari, reference specialist for the collection in the African and Middle East Division. “The language has changed so little since then that a modern speaker would have little problem reading the 10th century text.”
The Library has three gorgeous manuscript copies of “Shahnamah” – and, as a four-year digitization process of the Rare Persian-Language Manuscript Collection is now wrapping up, you can now see them all online.
One is from modern-day Iran, the second is from Kashmir, and the third is from India. They, along with the rest of the 170-piece collection, will be at the heart of a May 10 conference at the Library devoted to the digitization project. The first panel will discuss ongoing relevance of 1,000 years of Persian literature to researchers, scholars and students in a range of disciplines. The second panel will focus on the work of a multi-disciplinary team of some two dozen people that brought the collection to digital life.
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Detail, illustration from the Shahnahmah. Printed in India, circa 1600.
The collection is composed of manuscripts dating back to the 13th century, and come from the range of the near Eastern world — Iran, India, Afghanistan, much of central Asia, and the then-powerful Ottoman Empire. It includes the poetry of Rumi, Saadi and Hafez.
But it’s “The Shahnamah” that remains at collection’s heart. Before the printing press, each manuscript of the epic was penned in a unique style that varied depending on the era, the calligrapher and the region. Only the story and the language remained constant.
“They’re a cultural study that walk you through the aesthetic challenges of the day, and how each place confronted them in their own time,” Dinavari says. “You see the Moghul style of painting in one copy, and, in another, the Ottoman/Turkish style of miniature painting. Plus, they are just stunningly beautiful, even to audiences who don’t know the language. They’re so eye-grabbing that they can engage you on many different levels.”
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May 7, 2019
Annals of True Crime: The Kidnapping of Charley Ross
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“KIDNAPPERS MOST NOTED VICTIM,” New York Times, June 29, 1947, p. XX4
Don’t take candy from strangers.
Little Charley Ross, the first missing child to make national headlines, made that mistake. The Gilded Age kidnapping became the forerunner of sensational child abductions that transfixed the nation, much as the kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby did half a century later. To the current generation, Charley Ross was the Adam Walsh or the JonBenét Ramsey of his day.
It started in the summer of 1874, when two men in a horse-drawn buggy pulled into an affluent neighborhood in Philadelphia. They befriended two little boys who were playing in front of their stately home, in part by giving them candy. For five days in a row, four-year-old Charley Ross and his six-year-old brother Walter chatted with the pair.
On July 1, 1874, the men pulled up as usual, but this time they offered to take the boys to buy candy and fireworks for the upcoming Independence Day holiday, and the boys agreed. After driving a ways, the men sent Walter into a shop to buy fireworks, while they stayed with Charley in the buggy. When Walter came out of the store, the buggy was gone.
Several days later, the boys’ father, Christian Ross, received the first of 23 ransom letters from the kidnappers demanding $20,000 for Charley’s release. It was a miscalculation. Ross’s fortunes had been greatly diminished by the stock market crash of 1873. He could not afford the ransom. He went to the police.
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“THE CHILD STEALER’S LETTER,” The New York Herald, December 17, 1874
Detectives searched tirelessly for Charley. They got nowhere. Ross used the the personal column in the Public Ledger to try to communicate with the blackmailers, but to no avail. Theories about the kidnapping circulated. Still, there was no sign of Charley.
Some three months later, in December, police shot Joseph Douglas and William Mosher during a botched burglary in Brooklyn, NY. Mosher was killed instantly. But as Douglas lay dying, he confessed that the pair had kidnapped Charley. He told police that Mosher — now dead — had been the only person who knew where Charley was being held. Two hours later, he was dead.
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“THE REVELATION,” The New York Herald, December 15, 1874
Police later arrested a Mosher’s brother-in-law, William Westervelt, a disgraced Philadelphia policeman, and charged him with being part of the kidnapping. While awaiting trial, Westervelt told Ross that Charley had been alive at the time Mosher was killed. Westervelt beat the kidnapping charges in court, but the jury convicted him of conspiracy. He was sentenced to six years in prison.
Ross, meanwhile, kept searching. He wrote a book, The Father’s Story of Charley Ross, the Kidnapped Child, and poured all the profits from the book into the search. Thousands of circulars about the abduction and pictures of Charley were posted in police stations, railroad stations, post offices, and ship ports across the nation. Over several decades, the Ross family spent more than $60,000 looking for Charley, which included following leads and investigating more than a thousand imposters claiming to be the missing child.
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Court Identifies ‘Charley Ross’ But Family ‘Disowns’ Him,” The Evening Star (Washington, DC), May 9, 1939, p. 5
One of the last and most enduring claims was that of Gustave Blair, a carpenter. In 1939, an Arizona court ruled that he was Charley Ross after he told a jury that he vaguely remembered being held prisoner in a cave as a small boy and that the family who had raised him told him that he was a kidnap victim. After the ruling, he officially changed his name to “Charley Ross” and travelled to Pennsylvania, but the Ross family refused to accept him.
And there it ends. The kidnapping of little Charley Ross was one of the most sensational crimes of the late 19th century, yet what really happened to him remains a mystery.
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May 6, 2019
‘O Captain! My Captain!’ Walt Whitman, Two Centuries Later
Walt Whitman and Peter Doyle, 1865. Photo: Moses P. Rice and Sons. Feinberg-Whitman collection.
Walt Whitman, that most exuberant of poets, the 19th century bard of transcendent sensitivity, sensuousness and epic vision, was given to intimate correspondence in his personal life, too.
As the Library marks Whitman’s 200th birthday, it’s worth pausing over an affectionate letter he sent to Peter Doyle.
Doyle, a D.C. streetcar conductor, was some two decades Whitman’s junior, but the pair bonded one night in 1865 when Whitman stepped, alone, onto Doyle’s streetcar and sat beside him. Doyle later recalled that he put his hand on the older man’s knee and “we understood.” In August of 1870, the bearded poet wrote Doyle a letter, ending one section with:
“I believe that is all for to-night, as it is getting late, — Good night, Pete, — Good night my darling son —– here is a kiss for you, dear boy – on the paper here – a good long one.” Most charming is that the “o” in “one” is smudged. It is tempting to imagine Whitman giving the paper a playful wet smack before mailing, blurring the ink, though it is impossible to know.
The relationship was, in one way, critical to Whitman’s legacy as the poet who enshrined the national grief over President Lincoln’s death. The night Lincoln was assassinated, Whitman was in New York. Doyle? Sitting in Ford’s Theater, an eyewitness to the assassination.
“Whitman used that information in a lecture he often gave on the death of Abraham Lincoln,” says Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division and lead curator of the Whitman Bicentennial exhibit. “He spoke as if he was the eyewitness. He didn’t say, ‘My dear one was there and told me.’ He gave the ‘Death of Lincoln’ speech many times, and people assumed he saw it.”
Whitman’s letter to Doyle, along with other rarely seen letters, manuscripts, rare books and personal belongings, will be on display in the Jefferson Building from May 16 to August 15, as part of the Library’s bicentennial celebration of Whitman’s birth. The Library’s Whitman collections of his works and belongings are the world’s largest. They include his spectacles, haversack, notebooks, correspondence, manuscripts, a surviving draft page from his famous poem “Song of Myself” and an original print edition his seminal work, “Leaves of Grass.”
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Whitman. Photo: Mathew Brady. Feinberg-Whitman Collection.
There’s lots to do. His writings are available for transcription in a By the People crowdsourcing project at any time. There’s a May 23 evening lecture and movie at the Packard Campus Theater in Culpepper, and a family-oriented birthday party in the Young Readers Center on June 1, featuring author Robert Burleigh, illustrator Sterling Hundley and their book, “O Captain, My Captain: Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln and the Civil War.” On June 3, an Open House in the Jefferson Building will showcase some of most rarely seen material in the Library’s collections.
Whitman’s writings, most particularly the many editions of his “Leaves of Grass,” described the growing nation and helped define the idea of it. He wrote of an earthy, sweaty, protean America, a continent and a people entwined in a shockingly beautiful cosmos that ran as the universe intended, far above the teachings of any one religion. The book was sensual, often sexual — and frequently condemned as obscene.
He was largely self-taught and never outgrew his affection for men and women who earned their wages by muscle, sweat and grit. “When he lived in In New York, he loved to ride with the streetcar drivers, the stevedores, the sailors, the ferry-boat pilots — those were his guys,” Bair says.
He wrote so many iconic lines that, over the course of time, they seemed to have seeped into the groundwater of America’s mythology of itself.
“I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear…”
“O Captain! My Captain! Our fateful trip is done…”
“I sing the body electric.”
“I am large, I contain multitudes.”
“I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
He was the second of nine children, born to a Long Island carpenter on May 31, 1819. The family moved to Brooklyn when he was a child. At 12, he was a printer’s apprentice. At 23, he was the editor of a newspaper in New York. A tall, robust man who reveled in the natural world, heworked as a carpenter, printer, government clerk and, famously, as a volunteer at military hospitals in and around Washington during the Civil War. He later traveled by river and rail across much of the country, absorbing the landscape and people like a sponge. Though he opposed slavery, he was not immune from the racism and white supremacy of the era.
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Bethuel Smith. Feinberg-Whitman Collection.
He kept pocket-sized notebooks of his own making for his work in the hospitals and camps. Ever the journalist, he jotted down injured soldiers’ names, addresses, wants and needs (oranges, wine), and their memories from the war. He often brought them treats. Betheul Smith, a fellow New Yorker, was one of those soldiers and became a friend and correspondent.
In another entry, under heading of “Virginia Idioms,” he lists “How’s all?” and “Where you been at?” It’s that ear for the unpolished talk of the common folk that he gave back to the nation in timeless poetry and why, 200 years later, he remains a towering figure.
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May 3, 2019
Pic of the Week: Big Bad Wolf Edition
Page from “Red Riding Hood,” Lydia L.A. Very, 1863. Cover, right. Photos by Shawn Miller.
Frankly, we’ve always wondered about how quick on the uptake Little Red Riding Hood actually was. Not to put too fine a point on it, but if you can’t tell the difference between your granny and a cross-dressing wolf…well. Bless her heart.
It’s Children’s Book Week, so we present you this marvelous 1863 edition of “Red Riding Hood” (she hadn’t achieved “little” status yet), a tiny, 18-page book cut in the shape of the star herself, with the aformentioned wolf at her feet. Written by Lydia Louisa Anna Very (read those middle names again) and published by the Boston publisher L. Prang Co., it survives today in the Library, nearly a century and a half later. Click on the link above to traipse through the deep dark forest for yourself.
Moral of the story: Listen to your mom and make sure granny hasn’t shape-shifted on you since Thanksgiving.
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May 2, 2019
Inquiring Minds: Watching New York City Grow, Block by Block
Myles Zhang’s portfolio includes beautiful watercolors of New York City neighborhoods; drawings of buildings in Newark, New Jersey — his hometown; and a video imagining the construction of a 12th-century English church.
Recently, drawing on maps from the Library of Congress, the Columbia University senior built an animation showing the growth of New York City from 1609 to today. Here, he answers a few questions about his work and his use of the Library’s collections.
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Myles Zhang. Photo by Chioma Nwana for Studybreaks Magazine.
Tell us a little a little about your background.
I study architectural history, urban studies and art history at Columbia. My upbringing in inner-city Newark initially inspired my interest in urbanism. From a young age, I’ve painted architectural watercolors, and I’m enthusiastic about website design and computer modeling. With my background in art history, I’m concerned about presenting my research visually in a way that is easy to digest.
What inspired your New York map?
Over the past 400 years, humans transformed the natural landscape of hills, rivers and wetlands around New York Harbor into a metropolis. My interest in this transformation began when I started examining old city maps and realized the locations of many city streets correspond to former trails, streams and valleys. For instance, the winding path of Broadway as it slices across the Manhattan grid follows a Lenape Indian trail. Canal Street, where I go to the barber, began life as a drainage ditch in the wet and marshy soil of lower Manhattan. I realized that visualizing and mapping these changes could capture the scale and pace of human intervention.
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Film stills from the animation.
Which Library maps did you incorporate?
The Library of Congress and the New York Public Library have extensive collections of historical maps. The most significant are scanned online and free to download in high resolution. I analyzed several hundred and selected 25 that capture “snapshots” of every 20 to 30 years in the city’s history. From the Library, I used a 1767 lithograph of New York City; an 1807 map of the island of Manhattan; an 1857 city-county map; an 1860 depiction compiled from maps of the U.S. Coast Survey; a 1921 aerial survey; and other maps extending in time to a 1964 street map. I include a full bibliography on the documentation page for the animation.
How did you do the animation?
I began by identifying historical periods in New York’s history – Dutch colonization of Lenape land, English control, American independence and accelerating growth thanks to industry, railroads and immigrants. I found historical city maps for each of these periods.
Individual maps had different dimensions, colors and scales, and these differences made comparison of urban change difficult between each interval of 20 to 30 years. By stretching and warping these maps to align to each other and then redrawing each with consistent color and line weight, the changing pace and type of urban growth became clearer.
How does the animation relate to other work you’ve done?
The animation is about capturing environmental change on a macro level. My art projects based on walking around New York City reflect the microcosm of individual streets and buildings, but not how these streets and buildings are part of a larger network.
I’m more interested in storytelling than I am in the technical aspects of data and animation. How can I use old maps to tell the story of America’s evolution from wilderness to agrarian society to Industrial Revolution to an advanced service-sector economy? The methods of this animation are different from anything else I’ve done. But the objective of visual storytelling is consistent with the rest of my work.
How would you describe the value of the collections?
A lot of historical maps and documents are fragile to handle and unwieldy to move. It is a public service of great value to have these records online, where anyone can consult them from anywhere in the world.
Maps in particular connect people to the history of their built environment. I find the Library’s collection of Sanborn fire-insurance maps valuable in this regard. They document the materials, functions and locations of buildings and streets for almost all major American cities. Streets can change a lot in 400 years; I often use Sanborn to verify how and why a particular street was added or lost.
I’ve also used scanned photos from the Library’s Historic American Buildings Survey collection.
What is next for you?
I’ve two possible animation projects in mind: either an animated history of New York’s water supply system or a data visualization of how the 1832 cholera epidemic spread by street and neighborhood in New York. Records exist from the 1830s of who died and where they lived. Plotting these locations on a map might reveal the geography of disease and help determine whether geography or income correlated with one’s chances of falling sick. Next year, I’m studying for a master’s degree in architecture and urban studies.
May 1, 2019
New for research! LibGuides
Today, we want to give a heads-up to our researchers to make sure they know that the Library is part of LibGuides, where thousands of libraries post and share their research guides.
If you’re not already familiar: The guides show what’s available on a given subject, highlight key books, subscription databases and primary historical sources. They’re a great tool for researchers, from the beginner to the expert, particularly since the information has been vetted by a librarian. Better, LibGuides are available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Here at the Library, you might have heard of our research guides referred to as bibliographies, subject overviews, webguides, or a virtual reference shelf. These guides (there are more than 50) cover a vast array of subjects: the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution; American Realism; BREXIT; Halloween & Día de Muertos Resources; Native American History and Culture: Finding Pictures; Rosa Parks and so on. We are always updating these and adding new ones.
LibGuides has been so seamlessly implemented you probably haven’t noticed. In a Google search about a particular subject, for example, you’ll see the Library higher in your search results. Click on the link, and you’ll find our reference material. Experienced researchers, who might start a search at loc.gov, will also find the guides incorporated in the list of all the Library’s resources; no separate searching is needed.
Questions? Just hit the “Ask a Librarian” button on any guides to get friendly help. Meanwhile, some frequent questions about research methods are answered below by our LibGuides coordinating team.
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Can a researcher ask that a new guide be created? How do librarians prepare these subject overviews? Suggestions for new guides are welcome! Please send them to the Ask a Librarian service. Librarians start a new guide by outlining the topic, investigating the different types of resources available, and confirming which sources are reliable. Descriptive notes indicate the scope of a source or draw attention to a special feature. We’re sharing our best advice about where to locate useful information, whether you need an overview of a subject, tips for starting points, or comprehensive and exhaustive coverage.
The “Beginner Guides” series for law topics on In Custodia Legis and Law.gov look interesting, with more than 10 guides already released. We want to create guides that help with daily life. To that end, we have recently published “Landlord-Tenant Law: A Beginner’s Guide,” “Neighbor Law: A Beginner’s Guide,” and “Small Claims Court: A Beginner’s Guide,” “Legal Drafting: A Beginner’s Guide,” “Wills, Probate, and Advance Directives: A Beginner’s Guide.”
Why do you include old as well as new books, subscription databases, subject headings, and external websites in the guides? As reference librarians, we include both historical and recent sources because it is important to provide researchers with broad and deep coverage of authoritative sources on a topic. The research guides have links to subscription databases so that researchers are aware of ways to access thousands of sources, such as scholarly journal articles, historical and current newspapers and periodicals, auction records, art images, and much more. Many of the research guides contain Library of Congress subject headings as a way to narrow and focus a user’s search in online catalogs. Links to important collections and items at external institutions are included to give researchers a wide array of resources.
Do I have to come to the Library of Congress? No. Many of the sources are available in other libraries or online collections. For the subscription databases, rare books, and unique historical documents, please contact us for information about availability.
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LibGuides Working Group: Front, l-r: Debora Keysor, Laura Berberian, Barbara Bavis. Back, l-r: Elizabeth (Betsy) Fulford, Donna Brearcliffe.
How can I can find these guides? You can start with an Internet search service, such as Google or Bing. Try a search for “13th amendment” and you’ll likely see “guides.loc.gov” early in the search results. Or, if you are already on the Library of Congress website, any search will include the Library’s LibGuides publications. Online collections and other Web pages at the Library also link directly to relevant LibGuides.
What else should researchers should know about using LibGuides? Keep sending us your questions! Every “research guide” from the Library of Congress includes an “Ask a Librarian” box for easy access to our reference librarians. We’re here to help you succeed with your research by email, in person, or by phone. Learn more: Mann, Thomas, 1948- The Oxford Guide to Library Research. Fourth edition. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, [2015]. Springshare. LibGuides Community.
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April 30, 2019
Howard University, Library, Team Up for New Internship Program
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Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden speaks at the AHHA ceremony April 22, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller.
One of the Library’s newest outreach programs to college students is the Archives, History, and Heritage Advanced Internship Program, which wrapped its first season this week. AHHA is a partnership between the Library and our hometown Howard University. It pairs students with Library staffers to work on projects that increase public access to the Library’s collections.
It’s modeled on the Library’s Junior Fellows Summer Internship program, and the student stipends for AAHA were provided by Craig and Diane Welburn, members of the Library’s James Madison Council. This year, we started with three students who worked 20 hours a week for three months.
Jacquelyn Chin worked on the Alvin Ailey Dance Foundation collection in the Music Division. Brittney Meadors worked on the Pete Welding Collection, as well as that of Bruce Jackson and Diane Christian, in the American Folklife Center. Keshad “Ife” Adeniyi worked on the papers of civil rights pioneer Ann Tanneyhill in the Manuscript Division.
“So much history of people of color is … lost, misplaced and not made accessible,” said Carla Hayden, Librarian of Congress, in a ceremony that concluded the program. Interns have the chance to “open up a treasure chest and be the person that is going to find that letter, that is going to find that film clip, that is going to find that recording … and make it accessible.”
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Ife Adeniyi works in the Manuscript Division, April 17, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller.
Here, adding to the posts by his peers, Adeniyi writes of Tanneyhill’s passion for preserving her family’s story:
As a doctoral candidate in history at Howard University, my research is in the Civil War – more specifically, the experiences of fugitives fleeing southern plantations to Union occupied territory. They were labeled “contrabands.” I’m focusing on the nature of impressment and how it was used against black people as the Union Army’s need for both laborers and soldiers intensified as the war dragged on. This requires extensive work in the archives. It’s actually what led Professor Nikki Taylor – chair of the Howard’s department 0f history — to tell me about the university’s program with the Library.
In my daily work here at the Library, I am identifying, arranging, and describing the Ann Tanneyhill papers. These have had a tremendous impact on me. For four decades, Ms. Tanneyhill (1906-2001), worked at the National Urban League headquarters, dedicating her life to improving the material conditions of African Americans. She began working for the League in 1928, and for years worked as the director of vocational guidance. Employment was a critical issue for activists during this period of the Great Migration, when 6 million blacks left the South in search of a better life. She worked tirelessly to find and develop employment opportunities for young people attempting to traverse many of the hardships that awaited black people once they relocated.
As I’ve sifted through her life’s work, I’ve found myself connecting with her on both a professional and personal level.
Professionally, as an activist and an advocate, I’ve worked with young people of color who are caught up in the criminal justice system. In prisons, jails and detention centers, I’ve taught classes on race, state violence, identity and classism, particularly as they relate to life inside those facilities. Ms. Tanneyhill’s long career has been an inspiration for me to continue that work.
Personally, it’s her family history that intrigues me. Her great-grandfather escaped from slavery in Louisiana and made his way to freedom in Nova Scotia. His son, William Grandison, settled in Massachusetts and became the first black member of a printer’s union. I was moved by a photoengraving of him that I found in the papers. That she held onto his picture underscored how important family pride and connections were to her. This motif became more prevalent as I combed through her collection. She really had a keen interest in documenting and preserving her family’s history.
I found this to be admirable, particularly considering my own family’s history. I grew up in Los Angeles amid sometimes difficult circumstances. Once, we were evicted. We put nearly all of our belongings – pictures, family documents — into storage. Later, when we could no longer pay the storage facility, all was lost. So much of our family story was just gone.
Today, as I process Ms. Tanneyhill’s papers, her dedication reminds me of how hard it can be to keep a family history intact. It also reminds me of the many, many families like mine who have lost so much of our past.
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April 29, 2019
Children’s Book Week: Classic Freebies
Children’s Book Week is 100 years old this year, and there are a lot of cool things to do and see at your favorite national library. Here, let’s check out a handful of insanely popular titles that kids were reading in 1919, when the very first book week was launched. This is particularly fun because all of these are FREE on our website.
A century ago, the population of the U.S. was less than a third of what it is now (106 million), large parts of the country were without electricity, indoor plumbing or even the illumination to read by. Not only did people still look up when they saw an airplane go overhead, virtually no one had seen an airplane go overhead. World War I had ended, but the Roaring Twenties hadn’t started. It would be nearly a decade before movies had sound. It was an era of long silences and quiet nights; when reading words printed on paper was still the dominant means of mass entertainment.
Ready?
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Let’s jump right in with some extraterrestrial adventure that starts in…Virginia. Well, of course. Where else would you start your interplanetary travel?
This is “A Princess of Mars,” the first adventure of John Carter, in which a southern gentleman escapes the depressing aftermath of the Civil War by heading for a gold mine in Arizona and winding up on Mars. It could happen to anyone. Complications ensue.
Chicago native Edgar Rice Burroughs created Carter in a magazine serial in 1912, the same year he created Carter’s more famous counterpart, John Clayton, aka Tarzan. (Burroughs’ prodigious imagination did not seem to apply in picking names for his heroes.) “Princess” was published as a full novel in 1917, was a runaway success, and nine more books followed. If he wasn’t the Lord of the Apes, he was still kind of a big deal.
Burroughs opens the book, writing as himself, in the foreword. He makes the (fictional) claim that he was a boy of five, living in antebellum Virginia, when the dark, handsome Carter showed up at the family homestead, a great friend of his father’s. (It is a jolt when he casually says that his family owned slaves.) Carter is a manly man, a first-rate charmer. But then the war breaks out and nobody sees Uncle Jack for 15 years or so. When he returns, there is something curious about him — he does not appear to have aged. Carter moves to a beautiful cabin on a bluff overlooking the Hudson River in New York. In 1886, he sends an urgent message to Burroughs, summoning him to come at once. But by the time Burroughs arrives, Carter is dead. The body was found in a snowy field, with no marks of violence, arms outstretched to the heavens.
Burroughs is to surprised to learn that he is to receive all of Carter’s wealth, provided he carry out one spectactularly peculiar final request: He must take Carter’s corpse back to Virginia and place it inside an open coffin in a pre-constructed, ventilated burial chamber. The mausoleum has a gold-plated spring lock that can only be opened … from the inside.
That’s the first few pages. Not bad, not at all. Then you get to go to Mars. And, as our illustration documents, Carter swashbuckles his way across the red planet with a kilt and a really big belt. Love.
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Long before Little Orphan Annie was everyone’s favorite 11-year-old red-headed orphan, everybody’s favorite 11-year-old red-headed orphan was the loquacious Canadian, Anne Shirley. She’s better known as “Anne of Green Gables,” she predates her comic counterpart by 16 years, and since Lucy Maud Montgomery’s brought her to fictional life in 1908, more than 50 million readers have gulped down her adventures in some three dozen languages.
There are no monsters or extraterrestrials and not even a princess in this one. It’s 1874, and Green Gables is a quiet little spot in a quiet little corner of Prince George’s Island, just off the coast of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In this sleepy stretch of farmland, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, an aging brother and sister, tend a farm. They have agreed to adopt a strapping boy from a Nova Scotia orphanage. He’ll get a new home; they’ll get a farmhand.
Except there’s a mistake in the orphanage shipping department, because it’s slender, bony Anne who gets off the train! Matthew is just fine with this. Marilla, though, wants to send Anne packing back to the orphange for a gender-based exchange.
Literary history is relieved that she didn’t, for its Anne who gives the Cuthberts new life, the little town of Avonlea a new spark and generations of readers a new friend. Two world wars have come and gone, airplanes and spaceships, cell phones and Netflix, and still Anne has been there all these many years, waiting to play by the creek.
The final line — ” ‘God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world,’ whispered Anne softly” — reads more like a benediction as the years pass, a gentle ode to a quiet corner of the world, tucked in just so.
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Generally, when a woman loses a brand new shoe on her way out of a really hot party, as Cinderella does here, bad things happen. She is grumpy the entire way home, the good vibes vanish, and the remaining shoe is likely to be thrown, at the very least, at or in the closet.
Cue Prince Charming, Patron Saint of Lost Footwear. Everything turns out spiffy.
This is short, perfect for a bedtime story, and an excellent reminder that very little in life beats a fairy godmother with a keen sense of sartorial style.
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Wolves have a hard time of it in kid lit, let’s be honest.
From “Little Red Riding Hood” to “The Story of the Three Little Pigs,” the wolf is always sharp of tooth but not of mind. (Cross-dressing as a little old lady? Who does that?)
But you can’t have a selection of kids’ stories without a big bad wolf (or a dark forest), and, besides, “Pigs” is one of the all-time champs for adults who like to make ridiculous narrative voices while reading bedtime stories. There’s the basso profundo joy of “Or I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll bbbbllllooooow your house in!” and the falsetto delight of “Not by the hair of my chinny chinny chin!”
This 1904 retelling, published by the Frederick Warne Co. with illustrations by Leslie Brooke, highlights the benefits of solid home construction and the perils of working with cheap contractors, messages as modern as anything you’ll hear on HGTV.
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