Library of Congress's Blog, page 77
April 1, 2019
Inquiring Minds: Peter Carlson Brings History to Life
Photo by Shawn Miller
Peter Carlson is the author of three books of history, drawing much of his research from the Library’s collections. Each book mines a different era. “Junius and Albert’s Adventures in the Confederacy” is about two intrepid Civil War reporters; “K Blows Top” details Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev’s tour of America in 1959; “Roughneck: The Life and Times of Big Bill Haywood” is the tale of the cowboy and silver prospector who became a founding member of the Industrial Workers of the World in the early 20th Century. A native New Yorker, Peter studied journalism at Boston University. Now a columnist for American History magazine, he has previously written for the Boston Herald American, People magazine and The Washington Post.
During his 22-year run at the Post, he was known for writing colorful yarns about cheerfully outrageous people. Or, as he describes it on his website: “…stories about cops and murderers and crooked pols and Arnold Schwarzenegger and the United States Senate and striking coal miners and Jerry Falwell, and wounded soldiers and a Virginia militia group and the 2004 Olympics and the guy who created Foamhenge, a life-size replica of Stonehenge carved out of Styrofoam.”
How did you get started writing?
I started writing shortly after I started reading Dr. Seuss books. I tried to write a Dr. Seuss book, complete with zany rhymes. A few years later, I created handwritten newspapers on looseleaf paper, filled them with fake news, and sold them to my neighbors for a nickel. Later, I worked on my high school newspaper, my college newspaper and then real newspapers. I’m pretty much useless for any activity except writing.
Your work so often features offbeat, larger-than-life characters. Is this a conscious choice? What sort of anecdotes are you looking for, and how do you know when you come across a great one?
I’ve always loved off-beat characters, perhaps because my father, who climbed poles for the Long Island Lighting Company, hung out with guys called “Rotten Socks” and “Shot-in-the Head.” They were wonderfully entertaining and funny. My father’s highest praise was to call somebody “a real character.” When I’m searching for a story, I look for “a real character”— or, better yet, two of them who are having some kind of conflict. Nikita Khrushchev, star of my book “K Blows Top,” is that kind of fabulous character, which made his 1959 tour of America—the topic of the book– a comic extravaganza.
How did you hear about Junius Browne and Albert Richardson, and how did you turn that into a book?
I got a job at American History magazine in 2011, which was the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War, so I suggested to an editor that we run a newspaper story from the war in every issue. He said, “That would be a good idea, but Civil War journalism was really lousy.” I thought, “Is that true?” So I read a book on Civil War journalism and came across a short version of the story of Junius and Albert’s amazing adventures covering the war for the New York Tribune and getting captured by Confederates. I followed the footnotes and learned that both men had written memoirs of their adventures, so I thought, “Aha! Primary sources!” Of course, I had to do a lot of other research, much of it in the Library of Congress, reading newspapers of the era and books about the battles they covered and the prisons they endured before they finally escaped.
How do you use the Library in your research? What’s your favorite story about finding something in the Library?
Mostly I read old newspapers in the newspaper reading room in the Madison Building, and old books in the fabulous Main Reading Room. But I’ve also ventured into the Rare Book Room and the Performing Arts collection.
When I was researching the book on Junius and Albert, I learned that while they were locked in a Confederate prison in Richmond in July of 1863, the Union prisoners celebrated the news of Grant’s victory at Vicksburg, which they read about in Richmond newspapers. I wondered: “Why didn’t they celebrate the victory at Gettysburg, which happened at the same time?” So I studied the Richmond newspapers that the prisoners were reading—the Library has the actual papers; they’re not on microfilm! — and I learned that the Richmond newspapers reported that the Confederates had won the battle of Gettysburg. “OUR ARMY VICTORIUS AT GETTYSBURG,” read the headline in the Richmond Examiner, “THE YANKEE ARMY RETREATING.” That’s why the Union prisoners weren’t celebrating Gettysburg—they thought they’d lost. And I never would have known that if not for the good old Library of Congress.
Any advice for researchers just getting started? The Library is so huge that it can seem intimidating.
Ask the librarians for help. They are incredibly knowledgeable and almost always eager to help you find stuff. Also, if you’re working in the Main Reading Room, there’s a tendency to get caught up in your work and forget that you are in the most beautiful room in Washington. Remember to pause periodically and gaze up at that magnificent dome. It’s such a privilege to work there. Enjoy it.
Lastly, what are you working on now?
I’m writing a column called “American Schemers” for American History. Each column is the story of a great American hustler. I write about con men, crooked pols, shameless hucksters, wayward preachers– colorful rogues of every stripe. The silver-tongued scam artist is an American archetype and the Library of Congress is chock full of their stories.
March 29, 2019
Pic of the Week: Harriet Tubman, Seen as Never Before
The restored Emily Howland Album featuring an a previously unknown portrait of Harriet Tubman, March 25, 2019. Photo by Shawn Miller.
It was a magic moment: Harriet Tubman, revealed as a woman in the fierce prime of her life. In a March 25 ceremony, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and National Museum of African American History and Culture Director Lonnie Bunch unveiled the photo album of abolitionist Emily Howland, featuring a previously unknown portrait of Tubman. The photograph, taken around 1868, captures Tubman in her mid-40s, years younger than most surviving photographs that show her late in life. Here, then, is the leader of the Underground Railroad as she would have appeared to her followers during the 19 trips she made into slave states, leading some 300 enslaved people to freedom, including her aged parents. She also served as a Union spy during the Civil War. The photograph, purchased by the Library and the Smithsonian, is on display in the NMAAHC.
March 28, 2019
Opening Day! A Video Tour of Library’s Baseball Americana
Major League Baseball starts today, which makes it the start of spring, never mind the official calendar. We remind you that your friendly national Library is just a long fly ball from Nationals Park, where the Nats open today against the New York Mets.
If you haven’t made it to our Baseball Americana exhibit, it’s going strong till July 27. You can see all sorts of early gloves, uniforms and bats; check out historic documents such as Branch Rickey’s 1963 scouting report on Hank Aaron (“…one of the greatest hitters in baseball today….[but] frequently acts frozen on pitches”); and get your picture taken as if on a baseball card.
In between innings, here’s a quick video tour. We hope to see you at the ballpark … and at the Library.
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March 27, 2019
Branch Rickey Crowdsourcing Project: It’s Outta Here!
This is a guest post from Lauren Algee, LC Labs Senior Innovation Specialist.
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LOOK Magazine Photograph Collection, Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, [Reproduction number e.g., LC-L9-60-8812, frame 8].
Just four months after the Library partnered with the public to transcribe the papers of baseball icon Branch Rickey, volunteers have transcribed all 1,926 pages of Rickey’s scouting reports, making them available for digital research just in time for Major League Baseball’s opening day.These community-created transcriptions allow for keyword search and on-line scholarship, opening new avenues for baseball fans and researchers. The completed data is also available as a bulk download from LC Labs. Our volunteers showed amazing hustle in finishing so quickly. Their work now makes it possible for data research, including text analysis examining Rickey’s diction, or looking for patterns in names, places, or dates. Analyzing the texts as data can also reveal patterns and prompt new questions. We offer a respectful tip of the cap to our volunteers.
No one encapsulates baseball’s history quite like Rickey (1881–1965), a former player and manager who became an innovative baseball executive and part-owner over a career spanning nearly 60 years. He established the farm-league system, but is most often remembered for bringing Jackie Robinson into pro ball in 1947, breaking the Jim Crow-era color barrier. Famed sportswriter Red Smith summed him up this way: ”player, manager, executive, lawyer, preacher, horse-trader, spellbinder, innovator, husband and father and grandfather, farmer, logician, obscurantist, reformer, financier, sociologist, crusader, sharper, father confessor, checker shark, friend and fighter.”
The Library’s Rickey papers are extensive, including 29,000 items of correspondence, photographs, memoranda, speeches, and more. His scouting reports, compiled during the 1950s and 1960s, show him to be an astute, if caustic, judge of talent. Some resemble modern-day tweets in their brevity and wit. After watching a 1953 minor-league double-header, he summed up 29-year-old Bob Wakefield, who’d been bouncing around the minors for half a dozen years, in one sentence: “I think he’s a good man to get rid of.”
Reference guides show Wakefield was cut that season, and never played pro ball again.
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Rickey’s tart, one-line summation of Bob Wakefield.
At the Library, Rickey’s scouting reports were scanned in 2018 but could not easily be turned into searchable text. Many of the documents are grainy photocopies, including forms and tables, which stymied word-recognition software.
So, on Oct. 24, 2018, the Library launched By the People, a web-based crowdsourcing program, to harness public energy in transcribing the papers of Rickey and several other historical luminaries. The work these volunteers do improves the search, access, and computation of our digitized collections. Other By the People campaigns include letters to Abraham Lincoln, the diaries of Clara Barton, the personal papers of Mary Church Terrell and writings by disabled Civil War veterans. Volunteers have transcribed more than 10,000 pages so far.
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Word cloud made from most frequent words in Rickey’s scouting reports. Larger size indicates more frequent use.
To illustrate some of the research uses that can now be carried out on Rickey’s collection, the By the People team used Voyant Tools, a web-based text analysis environment, to make some initial forays into the data.
We found that one set of data — composed of Rickey’s memos — is comprised of 1,747 transcriptions, including 176,308 words and 6,881 unique words. In these documents, Rickey averaged 13 words per sentence. As illustrated above, his most used words were “good” (1902), “ball” (1841), “branch” (1122), “rickey” (1110) and “curve” (1037). As Wakefield discovered, Rickey using “good” in an evaluation did not necessarily mean “good” things for the player.
Many of the documents from the early 1960s, when Rickey advised the St. Louis Cardinals. These notes included a tag, “cc: Bing Devine,” the team’s general manager from 1957 to 1964, 266 times, thus illustrating Rickey’s close ties to top management.
But our analysis of “bing” also revealed a surprise – one instance of “Bing Crosby.”
This came from a 1951 report on pitcher Vern Law that Rickey put together for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Rickey was almost as unimpressed with Law as he was with the hapless Wakefield. He said the young player was overpaid by half and that he should be sent to a training camp in Florida. Law would either become a better pitcher or he “won’t be worth very much.” Still, Rickey knew there were personalities involved, and that Law had friends in high places. His evaluation adds: “His salary should be reduced back to $5,000 for ’52, but it may be unadvisable because of Senator Walker and particularly Bing Crosby whose final effort secured the player.”
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Branch Rickey Papers: Baseball File, 1906-1971; Scouting reports. Manuscript Division.
After Rickey’s evaluation, Law left baseball, entering the military for two years. But unlike Wakefield, he wasn’t finished.
Nine years later, the Milwaukee Journal ran an article in which Law’s mother described a long-ago phone call from the famous crooner, then part-owner of the Pirates, in which he had recruited her son for the team. Crosby’s friend, Herman Welker, later a U.S. Senator for Idaho, had seen Law play as a high school senior and had recommended him to Crosby. Thus, his youthful appearance before Rickey all those years ago.
It was a good time to run a piece on Law’s path to the majors.
Two days later, Law was the starting pitcher in Game 1 of the 1960 World Series, facing the powerhouse New York Yankees, who had won the Series eight times in the past 13 seasons. It would become one of the most famous of all the Fall Classics, and Law was a key figure.
Right off the bat, Law gave up a first-inning homer to Roger Maris, the American League MVP, but won the game, 6-4. The Yankees crushed the Pirates the next two games, 16-3 and 10-0. Desperate, the Pirates turned again to Law in Game 4. He turned in another gem, cutting down the powerhouse Yankees, 3-2.
The Pirates won the series with a Game 7, walk-off home run by Bill Mazeroski, one of the legendary moments in MLB history. The Yankees had outscored the Pirates 55-27, but lost the Series — largely because Vern Law, Bing Crosby’s pick, shut them down twice.
Rickey’s reaction, we regret to report, is lost to history.
March 26, 2019
Mary Ann Shadd Cary: Trailblazer for Feminism, Freedom
This is a guest blog by Jennifer Davis, a collection specialist in the Law Library’s Collection Services Division. It is has been slightly edited from her original blog.
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Mary Ann Shadd Cary residence, Washington, D.C. (photo by J. Davis)
Mary Ann Shadd Cary was a 19th Century African-American feminist, lawyer, anti-slavery crusader and newspaper publisher. She was also, as our colleague Jennifer Davis pointed out recently on a In Custodia Legis blog, a polymath who challenged the definition of what it meant to be a woman in her era. Even better, she often won those challenges.
We’re recounting a brief bit of that history here, in part because it’s Women’s History Month, but also because Cary seems not to be as widely remembered as many of her trailblazing contemporaries. This is perhaps because she was an “iconoclast” who “annoyed people by refusing to be deterred or to tone down her message,” Davis notes. At the age of 25, she wrote Frederick Douglass, “We should do more and talk less.” She wasn’t kidding, and she wasn’t here for nonsense.
She was born Mary Ann Shadd in Wilmington, Del., on October 9, 1823, to free parents. Although the population of free blacks was high in Delaware at the time, educational opportunities for black children were almost nil. Her parents left in 1833, moving to West Chester, Pa., where she attended a Quaker boarding school until she was 16. She then began teaching school, first in New Jersey, and later in Pennsylvania, Delaware and New York City.
When the Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, she moved to Windsor, Canada — just across the Detroit River from, well, Detroit — to join a community of expatriate African Americans. While there, she taught at an integrated school and wrote the pamphlet Notes of Canada West, urging black Americans to emigrate north as she had. She was the first black woman to publish a weekly newspaper, launching the abolitionist The Provincial Freeman in Chatham, a small city east of Windsor, in March 1853. She did everything at the paper — wrote, reported, edited, sold ads and subscriptions – all while keeping her day job as a teacher. In 1855, she traveled to Philadelphia to speak at the Colored National Convention, dazzling the crowd with her gift for oratory.
She married Thomas Cary, who owned several barbershops in Toronto, the following year. He commuted the 180 miles from Toronto to Chatham, trying to make ends meet, but the couple struggled financially. They had a daughter, but his health was failing. He died in 1860, when she was pregnant with their second child. The paper finally collapsed.
She was now the single mother of two young children, nearing 40 — and just getting started. When the Civil War ignited, she was appointed as a recruiting officer for the U.S. Army, the first black woman to be so designated. She moved to Indiana to enlist African American soldiers in the war effort. After Appomattox, she moved to D.C., settling into a rowhouse at 1421W St. NW, and enrolled in Howard University’s Law Department. She graduated in 1870, now in her late 40s, becoming the first African-American woman to get a law degree in the United States.
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Mary Ann Shadd Cary Residence sign (photo by J. Davis)
Gaining steam, she joined the growing women’s voting movement. Fellow activists such as Douglass and Susan B. Anthony testified before Congress, and she was one of 600 citizens who signed a petition that suffragists presented to the House Judiciary Committee, arguing for a woman’s right to vote. She joined the National Woman Suffrage Association. Later in the 1880s, she founded the Colored Women’s Progressive Franchise Association.
In her final years, Cary used her degree to help family, friends and neighbors in her D.C. neighborhood deal with legal issues. She continued to work for women’s rights and for equal rights for all black Americans. She died in June 1893. Douglass once wrote of her, “We do not know of her equal among the colored ladies of the United States.”
It was, by any measure, a remarkable life.
You can read more about her here:
LA2325.C34 Bearden, Jim and Linda Jean Butler. Shadd: the Life and Times of Mary Shadd Cary.
E185.97.C32 F47 2003 Ferris, Jeri Chase. Demanding Justice: A Story About Mary Ann Shadd Cary.
E185.97.C32 R48 1998 Rhodes, Jane. Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century.
March 25, 2019
Suffragists in Song
Our colleague Cait Miller published a pair of delightful posts about songs in the women’s suffrage movement over on the “In the Muse” blog recently, the most recent of which is here. But it being Women’s History Month, we just had to know more about one of the sheet music covers she featured — the one with the remarkable title, “She’s Good Enough to be Your Baby’s Mother and She’s Good Enough to Vote with You.”
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“She’s Good Enough to Be Your Baby’s Mother” by Herman Paley (music) and Alfred Bryan (lyrics). New York: Jerome H. Remick & Co., 1916. Call number M1665.W8 P
Wait. Child production equals…voting rights?
Published in the winter of 1916,when the suffrage movement was a hot-button political issue, the song (and its sheet music, featuring perky mom and radiant baby) are a nifty bit of insight into an earlier version of American pop culture. The song, after all, at face value, is an appeal to the male idea of a woman’s worth, as if women had no other merit than what men might deign to assign them.
First, while it might not have been the “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” of its day, the song nonetheless made waves, as it fell into a well-established social groove. Suffrage songs had been quite the thing during the decades-long struggle for women’s voting rights. The first National Women’s Rights Convention was in Massachusetts in 1850. The next year at a convention in Ohio, Sojourner Truth made her immortal “Ain’t I a Woman?” speech. Icons such as Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony formed the American Equal Rights Association a little over a decade later, and years of progress, setbacks (and no small amount of infighting) followed. Songs were routinely written for and sung during these meetings, usually spirited affairs about uplift and equality. The Library holds hundreds of them in its collections.
By the middle of the second decade of the 20th century, the Progressive Era was well established, and suffrage songs had left the meeting halls and entered pop culture. Several states had already passed suffrage laws — Colorado, Utah, Idaho and California among them — but the federal government had not. As you might imagine, protest marches drew thousands.
One of these marches, pictured below, took place in New York in late October, 1915. The careful eye will note that while nearly all the marchers are women (wearing white, to represent the movement), the overwhelming majority of the street-level viewers are men.
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New York City suffrage parade Oct. 23, 1915. LOT 11052-4. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
New York in this era was also the home of Tin Pan Alley, the hothouse of American popular music. Novelty songs were all the rage, so how could such a huge hometown protest, and a national issue, go ignored by the industry?
Three months after the big parade in New York, the sometimes songwriting team of Alfred Bryan (lyrics) and Herman Paley (music) came out with, “She’s Good Enough…”
These were big-time players. Bryan, a Canadian who had moved to New York in the 1880s, was hitting his mid-career stride. He had written “Peg ‘o My Heart” for the Ziegfeld Follies a few years earlier — one of the most memorable songs of the era — and was a charter member of The American Society for Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP) in 1914. Today, he’s in the Songwriters Hall of Fame for a career that included Broadway and Hollywood. Paley, the composer, was a Russian immigrant who also had a long career in the music industry in New York and L.A.
They combined for a bouncy, vaudeville-like melody that rolled along, letting you know you’re supposed to laugh. They’re having good-natured fun, by all appearances:
She’s good enough to love you and adore you
She’s good enough to bear your troubles for you
And if your tears were falling today
Nobody else would kiss them away
She’s good enough to warm your heart with kisses
When you’re lonesome and blue
She’s good enough to be your baby’s mother
And she’s good enough to vote with you
“This is an example of popular music that draws upon women’s suffrage as a topical theme,” says Miller, a Music Reference Specialist at the Library. “It was not intended for suffrage meetings or parades.”
Further evidence of its impact is that it was recorded by Anna Chandler, a mezzo-soprano and an established star. In 1912, the Edison Phonograph company ran an ad in the Saturday Evening Post listing her (she’s on the far right, middle row, wearing what appears to be flower-covered hat), alongside stars such as Sophie Tucker, John Philip Sousa and the wildly popular Billy Murray.
Saturday Evening Post, Jan. 13, 1912, p. 36. Includes portraits of Sophie Tucker, Stella Mayhew, Nat M. Wills, Victor Herbert, Lauder, Sousa, Sylva, Slezak, Carmen Milis, Anna Chandler, Ada Jones, and Billy Murray. Reproduction Number: LC-USZ62-99979 (b&w film copy neg.) Call Number: Illus. in AP2.S2 [General Collections]
And, of course, on Aug. 16, 1920, the 19th Amendment passed. Women — mostly white women, as a practical matter — gained the right to vote.[image error]
“She’s Good Enough to Be Your Baby’s Mother” by Herman Paley (music) and Alfred Bryan (lyrics). New York: Jerome H. Remick & Co., 1916. Call number M1665.W8
Still, the song wasn’t done.
It lingered in the cultural memory, as comic relief and as reference to the period. It was anthologized in 1999’s “Respect: A Century of Women in Music” (Rhino), along with the likes of Judy Garland’s “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” Marian Anderson’s “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen,” and Patti Page’s “The Tennessee Waltz.” Minnesota musician and songwriter Ann Reed included it in her 2007 show, “Heroes: A Celebration of Women Who Changed History and Changed Our Lives,” produced by Minnesota Public Radio. Denise Tabet, a Minneapolis-based actress, sang it live on stage, bringing a burst of laughter and applause from the audience when she hit the chorus – a century after Anna Chandler had done the same in a distant, different era.
March 23, 2019
Pic of the Week: Code Girls Reunion
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The Veterans History Project hosted a special reunion of World War II veteran “Code Girls,” March 22, 2019, at the Library of Congress. Photo by Shawn Miller.
More than 10,000 women were recruited by the U.S. Army and Navy as secret code breakers in World War II, working to decode enemy communications. Their story was finally, fully revealed in 2017’s bestselling, “Code Girls: The Untold Story of the American Women Code Breakers of World War II.” The Veterans History Project at the Library of Congress hosted a reunion on Friday, March 22. Here, “code girl” veterans Nancy Tipton and Katherine Fleming chat with author Liza Mundy, who told their story.
March 22, 2019
National Recording Registry: Stories Behind Some of the Greatest Hits
This is a guest post by Cary O’Dell, an assistant at the National Recording Registry.
Since its inauguration in 2002, the National Recording Registry of the Library of Congress has been documenting and celebrating some of the greatest recordings in American history, with more than 500 pieces selected. This year’s class was announced earlier this week.
This makes it a good time to remember that the Library and the Registry have been working for years with Ben Manilla Productions to produce short audio documentaries about some of the recordings. The 52 documentaries — none longer than 15 minutes — frequently include interviews with artists to convey the richness of the material. Consider: Conan O’Brien talking about Bob Newhart; Emmylou Harris discussing Kitty Wells; Renee Fleming chiming in on Leontyne Price; Lewis Black on Will Rogers; George Clinton on Sly Stone; Marc Maron on George Carlin; and the Queen of Soul herself, Aretha Franklin, on Sam Cooke.
In 2012, the series was awarded a Peabody Award for broadcast excellence.
To hear some of these recordings — “I Will Survive,” “Bob Newhart” “American Pie” and “A Change is Gonna Come”— click on the link labeled “Radio Feature.”
Here are some of the greatest hits from previous classes — but remember, this gets addictive fast.
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Sam Cooke. New York World-Telegram & Sun Collection. LIbrary of Congress, Prints & Photographs. Call Number: NYWTS – BIOG–Cooke, Sam–Dead–Singer P&P
“A Change Is Gonna Come.” Sam Cooke. (1964)
Sam Cooke — born in Mississippi, raised in Chicago — became a central figure in the creation of soul music in the 1950s and 1960s. He composed “A Change Is Gonna Come” to express his impatience with the progress of civil equality in the United States. The song would go on to become an anthem of the civil rights movement in the United States. Selected for the 2006 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 88KB)
Radio Feature (MP3)
“I Will Survive.” (single). Gloria Gaynor. (1978)
According to its co-writer, Dino Fekaris, “I Will Survive” was initially inspired by his being fired from his job but then realizing that he was going to be okay. For performer Gloria Gaynor, it took on added meaning as she was, at the time, recovering from a serious spinal injury. Originally released as a “B” side, so many deejays began playing “Survive” that the record company reissued it as a single. It was immediately embraced as an emblem of women’s empowerment and soon became anthem among the LGBT community. Over time, it has also been adopted as an anthem by survivors of all kinds. Selected for the 2015 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 88KB)
Interview with Gloria Gaynor (PDF, 146KB)
Radio Feature (MP3)
“The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” (album). Bob Newhart. (1960)
Bob Newhart introduced his fresh, new style of deceptively satiric comedy to audiences with this recording in 1960. “The Button-Down Mind” is the first collection of Newhart’s subtle, archly understated, humorous monologues that often represent a one-sided dialog with an unheard partner delivered in his characteristically deadpan style. His humor focuses on an average guy trying to hold on to his composure under some of the most unusual predicaments imaginable. Like Jack Benny, Newhart uses significant pauses to achieve heightened humorous effects. This recording contains his comedy classic, “The Driving Instructor,” where he shines in a one-sided monologue as the instructor of the most dangerous and inept driving student ever to get behind the wheel. Selected for the 2006 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 74KB)
Interview with Bob Newhart (PDF, 56KB)
Radio Feature (MP3)
“American Pie” (single). Don McLean. (1971)
Don McLean had been singing “American Pie” in concert for several months when his album and single of the same name began to reach a wider audience in the fall of 1971. After a decade of social and musical tumult, new affection for ’50s rock and roll was growing not only among its original fans but with new generations. “American Pie” seemed to reach all of them with its cascade of images from 1959 to 1969 and a chorus that was both playful and ominous. At the time, McLean mostly declined to confirm the many interpretations and analyses of his lyrics. However, the album was dedicated to Buddy Holly and McLean acknowledged that his description of reading of Holly’s death in a plane crash in the newspaper he delivered as a boy was from personal experience. Selected for the 2016 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 259KB)
Interview with Don McLean (PDF, 55KB)
Studio 360 Feature External
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Ornette Coleman, publicity photo, Oct. 24, 1960, Shaw Artists Corp. 1960. NYWTS – BIOG–Coleman, Ornette–Musician [item]. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division
“The Shape of Jazz to Come” (album). Ornette Coleman. (1959)
On his debut for Atlantic Records, Ornette Coleman pushed the boundaries of jazz even further into the unknown than he had before. Critic Ralph J. Gleason observed that “the musical and critical world [was] split neatly in two,” by Coleman’s willingness to abandon bebop’s harmonic structure and timing when his music required it.
What Coleman never abandoned was the centrality of improvisation to jazz. In this effort he is ably assisted by Don Cherry on cornet, Charlie Haden on bass and Billy Higgins on drums – all musicians with whom he had played for years. For all the record’s iconoclasm, it swings, and even Coleman’s more outrageous timbral experimentation can be understood as rooted in the expressiveness of the blues. Selected for the 2012 registry.
Learn more (PDF, 197KB)
To access all Manilla-NRR programs produced to date, see the following link and search for “Radio Feature.”
March 21, 2019
Long-lost Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz Letters Now at the Library
This is a guest blog by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division.
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“I wish that I could look out over the desert with you for a moment – Georgia.” From New Mexico, December 1, 1939, Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 13.
The Library’s Manuscript Division has acquired a collection of long-lost letters written by Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz that offer insight into the couple’s art, marriage and ambitions during an eighteen-year span in which they were primary shapers of American Modernism.
The letters — never available to the public until now – were written, independently of one another, to their mutual friend and artistic colleague, the filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz, between 1929 and 1947. After being in private hands for decades in Santa Fe, New Mexico, they are now available to the public in the Manuscript Reading Room. (They are not digitized.)
Stieglitz’s letters, written mainly from New York City and Lake George, reveal behind-the-scenes details of his management of his third and last gallery in Manhattan, An American Place, as he showcased O’Keeffe’s art work there along with that of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and John Marin.
But it is the letters from O’Keeffe that compose the bulk of the newly revealed find.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1919. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-123456].
Written from both New York and New Mexico, they are sensitive, sensual and personally revealing. She pens them in her distinctively expressive calligraphy, with dashes and innovative spellings that make the letters read like a cross between Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. She writes of her well-being and artistic hopes, and shares descriptions of the world around her, written through her unique vision as a painter.Going to the Southwest invigorated her and stirred her to take new directions in her art work. “Here it is color again,” she writes in October, 1938. “I am painting an old horses head that I picked out of some red earth,” she says in another.
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“I am painting an old horses head that I picked out of some red earth…” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, from New Mexico, Summer 1936. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 8.
“I’ve been a long time resting myself since you went off into the sunset that afternoon — Now that I begin to feel good – really rested – I wish that I could see you,” she writes in December, 1939. “– wish that I could look out over the desert with you for a moment.”
There’s a long, kite-tail line of black ink that sighs down into her sign-off: “Georgia.”
In Sept. 1937, she wrote that she had clambered onto the roof of her adobe house at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico in the darkness: “But tonight the whole cliff is white and full of color in the moonlight. I went up the ladder alone with my coat on – pretty chilly and cheerless on the roof but the whole cliff is white And it seems some thing to tell you.”
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“but tonight the whole cliff is white….” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, from New Mexico, Sept. 1937. On Ghost Ranch letterhead. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 10.
And on the last day of January 1939, she dashed off a few lines to him on stationery from The Streamliner, the Union Pacific train that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. “Wyoming with thin sun and blowing snow is beautiful — cold drifting snow, as if there are no people — as we come to pine trees they look black in the whiteness — white in the air and white on the ground.”
O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz first met in New Mexico in 1929, when she and fellow artist Rebecca Salsbury Strand [James], spent months together in Taos and became part of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s artistic network. O’Keeffe stayed and painted in subsequent years as a guest at the H&M Ranch in Alcalde, New Mexico, owned by Rodakiewicz and his wife, the writer Marie Tudor Garland. From there she explored the area that would become her eventual permanent home, near Abiquiu.
Both O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz were married during most of the time period of these exchanges. O’Keeffe, famously to Stieglitz until his death in 1946; Rodakiewicz, first to Garland, and later, to Peggy Bok—both of whom were good friends of O’Keeffe’s.
It is not known if their relationship went beyond platonic friendship, but these letters document that O’Keeffe felt emotionally close to him. She writes to him as a trusted confidante, revealing her feelings, her vision, and her work as an artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1950. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231]
At the same time, Stieglitz’s letters also reveal a close bond of affection for Rodakiewicz, and mutual ties in the New York art world.The new trove of correspondence came to the Library as a purchase/gift from Susan Todd and Michael Kramm of Santa Fe, New Mexico, through the auspices of art and manuscript dealer William Channing.
The materials complement letters in other archives, most notably at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Taken together, these letters add fuller dimension to the complexities of O’Keeffe as person, wife, friend and artist.
In them, she writes notes from trains; on the same paper or stationery that Stieglitz uses from their apartment at the Shelton Hotel in New York; from the Stieglitz family property, The Hill, at Lake George; and on letterhead from Ghost Ranch, which used her design of a cow-skull emblem.
She mentions her travels to Canada, Bermuda and Hawaii, as well as the complexities of her life split between residences in New Mexico and New York. She writes of periods of inner turmoil and longing, of anxieties suffered, and joys in new works and artistic triumphs. She reports conundrums as she makes professional and personal commitments outside Stieglitz’s orbit, in her effort to strike out more on her own, and around the responsibilities that fell to her to settle Stieglitz’s estate after his death in 1946.
[image error]
“I wish you were here – So much of this is so beautiful that it seems unreal to me.” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, writing from Hawaii, ca. Feb.-April 1939. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division.Box 1, Folder 13
During their correspondence, Rodakiewicz worked on a series of films. Stieglitz showed Rodakiewicz’s short film, “Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements” at An American Place in 1933. Rodakiewicz collaborated with Paul Strand on the artistically acclaimed “Redes” in Mexico. Released in that country in 1936, the film was distributed in the United States as “The Wave” in 1937. His “One Tenth of Our Nation,” about discrimination in African American education in the South, briefly landed him in jail for violating local Jim Crow mores.
The letters between O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz came to an end in 1947, after Rodakiewicz featured O’Keeffe as a southwestern artist in “The Land of Enchantment.”
“The wind blows every afternoon,” O’Keeffe wrote to him at the end of one June 1945 missive from New Mexico, with a long line running to form the end of the sentence, “and it blows.”
As calligraphy, as an expression that seems to carry a tantalizing meaning beyond the words on the page, it’s beautiful. It is O’Keeffe in her element and at her philosophical best, and one of many revelatory passages in this new group of letters.
[image error]
Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division.Box 1, Folder 13.
Long-lost Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz Letters now at the Library
This is a guest blog by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division.
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“I wish that I could look out over the desert with you for a moment – Georgia.” From New Mexico, December 1, 1939, Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 13.
The Library’s Manuscript Division has acquired a collection of long-lost letters written by Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz that offer insight into the couple’s art, marriage and ambitions during an eighteen-year span in which they were primary shapers of American Modernism.
The letters — never available to the public until now – were written, independently of one another, to their mutual friend and artistic colleague, the filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz, between 1929 and 1947. After being in private hands for decades in Santa Fe, New Mexico, they are now available to the public in the Manuscript Reading Room. (They are not digitized.)
Stieglitz’s letters, written mainly from New York City and Lake George, reveal behind-the-scenes details of his management of his third and last gallery in Manhattan, An American Place, as he showcased O’Keeffe’s art work there along with that of Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove and John Marin.
But it is the letters from O’Keeffe that compose the bulk of the newly revealed find.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Photograph by Alfred Stieglitz, 1919. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, The Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Gift of Georgia O’Keeffe, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-123456].
Written from both New York and New Mexico, they are sensitive, sensual and personally revealing. She pens them in her distinctively expressive calligraphy, with dashes and innovative spellings that make the letters read like a cross between Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein. She writes of her well-being and artistic hopes, and shares descriptions of the world around her, written through her unique vision as a painter.Going to the Southwest invigorated her and stirred her to take new directions in her art work. “Here it is color again,” she writes in October, 1938. “I am painting an old horses head that I picked out of some red earth,” she says in another.
[image error]
“I am painting an old horses head that I picked out of some red earth…” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, from New Mexico, Summer 1936. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 8.
“I’ve been a long time resting myself since you went off into the sunset that afternoon — Now that I begin to feel good – really rested – I wish that I could see you,” she writes in December, 1939. “– wish that I could look out over the desert with you for a moment.”
There’s a long, kite-tail line of black ink that sighs down into her sign-off: “Georgia.”
In Sept. 1937, she wrote that she had clambered onto the roof of her adobe house at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico in the darkness: “But tonight the whole cliff is white and full of color in the moonlight. I went up the ladder alone with my coat on – pretty chilly and cheerless on the roof but the whole cliff is white And it seems some thing to tell you.”
[image error]
“but tonight the whole cliff is white….” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, from New Mexico, Sept. 1937. On Ghost Ranch letterhead. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division. Box 1, Folder 10.
And on the last day of January 1939, she dashed off a few lines to him on stationery from The Streamliner, the Union Pacific train that ran from Chicago to Los Angeles. “Wyoming with thin sun and blowing snow is beautiful — cold drifting snow, as if there are no people — as we come to pine trees they look black in the whiteness — white in the air and white on the ground.”
O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz first met in New Mexico in 1929, when she and fellow artist Rebecca Salsbury Strand [James], spent months together in Taos and became part of Mabel Dodge Luhan’s artistic network. O’Keeffe stayed and painted in subsequent years as a guest at the H&M Ranch in Alcalde, New Mexico, owned by Rodakiewicz and his wife, the writer Marie Tudor Garland. From there she explored the area that would become her eventual permanent home, near Abiquiu.
Both O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz were married during most of the time period of these exchanges. O’Keeffe, famously to Stieglitz until his death in 1946; Rodakiewicz, first to Garland, and later, to Peggy Bok—both of whom were good friends of O’Keeffe’s.
It is not known if their relationship went beyond platonic friendship, but these letters document that O’Keeffe felt emotionally close to him. She writes to him as a trusted confidante, revealing her feelings, her vision, and her work as an artist.
Georgia O’Keeffe. Photograph by Carl Van Vechten, 1950. Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, Carl Van Vechten Collection, [reproduction number, e.g., LC-USZ62-54231]
At the same time, Stieglitz’s letters also reveal a close bond of affection for Rodakiewicz, and mutual ties in the New York art world.The new trove of correspondence came to the Library as a purchase/gift from Susan Todd and Michael Kramm of Santa Fe, New Mexico, through the auspices of art and manuscript dealer William Channing.
The materials complement letters in other archives, most notably at Yale’s Beinecke Library. Taken together, these letters add fuller dimension to the complexities of O’Keeffe as person, wife, friend and artist.
In them, she writes notes from trains; on the same paper or stationery that Stieglitz uses from their apartment at the Shelton Hotel in New York; from the Stieglitz family property, The Hill, at Lake George; and on letterhead from Ghost Ranch, which used her design of a cow-skull emblem.
She mentions her travels to Canada, Bermuda and Hawaii, as well as the complexities of her life split between residences in New Mexico and New York. She writes of periods of inner turmoil and longing, of anxieties suffered, and joys in new works and artistic triumphs. She reports conundrums as she makes professional and personal commitments outside Stieglitz’s orbit, in her effort to strike out more on her own, and around the responsibilities that fell to her to settle Stieglitz’s estate after his death in 1946.
[image error]
“I wish you were here – So much of this is so beautiful that it seems unreal to me.” Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz, writing from Hawaii, ca. Feb.-April 1939. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division.Box 1, Folder 13
During their correspondence, Rodakiewicz worked on a series of films. Stieglitz showed Rodakiewicz’s short film, “Portrait of a Young Man in Three Movements” at An American Place in 1933. Rodakiewicz collaborated with Paul Strand on the artistically acclaimed “Redes” in Mexico. Released in that country in 1936, the film was distributed in the United States as “The Wave” in 1937. His “One Tenth of Our Nation,” about discrimination in African American education in the South, briefly landed him in jail for violating local Jim Crow mores.
The letters between O’Keeffe and Rodakiewicz came to an end in 1947, after Rodakiewicz featured O’Keeffe as a southwestern artist in “The Land of Enchantment.”
“The wind blows every afternoon,” O’Keeffe wrote to him at the end of one June 1945 missive from New Mexico, with a long line running to form the end of the sentence, “and it blows.”
As calligraphy, as an expression that seems to carry a tantalizing meaning beyond the words on the page, it’s beautiful. It is O’Keeffe in her element and at her philosophical best, and one of many revelatory passages in this new group of letters.
[image error]
Georgia O’Keeffe to Henwar Rodakiewicz. From the Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Collection, Manuscript Division.Box 1, Folder 13.
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