Library of Congress's Blog, page 74

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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Doris Day: At the Beginning

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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.

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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

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Bug Story: The Secret of Pre-Modern Colors

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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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.

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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.

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

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Pic of the Week: Gayle Osterberg Edition

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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.

Perry in Edo Bay: The Dawn of the U.S.-Japanese Relationship

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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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Fresh Life (Online) for the epic Shahnamah

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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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Annals of True Crime: The Kidnapping of Charley Ross

Today we bring you a harrowing true-crime story from Heather Thomas, a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division. She posted this on the division’s website recently, and we wanted to make sure you saw it. It’s one of those stories that lingers in the mind — particularly for parents.



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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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‘O Captain! My Captain!’ Walt Whitman, Two Centuries Later

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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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Pic of the Week: Big Bad Wolf Edition

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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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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.