Library of Congress's Blog, page 80

African-American History Month: The Struggle for Civil Rights Past, Present and Future

This is a guest post by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, digital reference specialist in the Library’s Researcher and Reference Services Division.

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Maria Stewart’s “Meditations,” 1879.

A few weeks ago, we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his work as an activist. Some 100 years before King’s powerful entry into the civil rights movement, however, the fight for civil rights was already well underway, and at its center was Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879).

Stewart is one of the earliest women orators whose speech texts are available to us today. This is quite remarkable, given the economic and cultural realities of her time, including the widespread existence of state antiliteracy laws. The Library is fortunate to hold the 1879 edition of “Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart.” It is an enlarged and updated reprint of “Productions of Mrs. Maria Stewart, Presented to the First African Baptist Church and Society, in the City of Boston,” which was initially published in 1835.

Stewart was born free in Hartford, Connecticut. An orphan at 5, with no means of support, she was “bound out” or served as an indentured servant to a minister. It is believed that during these years she received some religious training and was able to avail herself of the minister’s library. At 15, her service to the minister ended, and she supported herself as a servant, pursuing her education through Sabbath schools.

At 23, she married James W. Stewart, who had served as a seaman during the War of 1812. After the war, he established a successful and independent shipping business that generated a substantial income. The couple settled in Boston, where Maria involved herself with a number of African-American organizations and institutions. Among these was the Massachusetts General Colored Association, through which she became acquainted with David Walker, an outspoken member and author of the provocative document, “Walker’s Appeal.” He became an important and influential force in Stewart’s life. Although they differed on tactics, they were both focused on ending the oppression of African-Americans.

Three years after her marriage, Maria’s husband died. Six months later, Walker was found dead in his doorway. The death of both men was very difficult for Stewart. Making matters worse, the sizeable estate her husband left her was taken away through the legal maneuvers of the white executors of his will. This series of tragedies inspired Stewart to turn to her faith, a change made manifest through a special commitment to God, African-Americans and political activism. She was transformed into a “holy warrior” and was willing and ready to fight.

It was “taboo” in Stewart’s time for a woman to speak to an audience comprised of both men and women, but she felt absolutely compelled to speak, to express herself and to inspire others to take action. One of her speeches was given in Boston at Franklin Hall, the meeting location of the New England Anti-Slavery Society. In spite of the danger, she challenged the audience of men and women, African-Americans and whites, to join the fight for equality and justice.

Although King and Stewart lived in vastly different times, and their work was accordingly very different, it is possible to identify characteristics they had in common in the struggle to improve the civil rights of African-Americans: strong spiritual convictions; courage to face hostility; use of the Bible to inspire audiences; and intense love for African-American people.

A final example is a shared message of the ultimate self-sacrifice, expressed by Stewart in a 19th-century manner:

Many will suffer for pleading the cause of oppressed Africa, and I shall glory in being one of her martyrs; for I am firmly persuaded, that the God in whom I trust is able to protect me from the rage and malice of mine enemies, and from them that will rise up against me; and if there is no other way for me to escape, he is able to take me to himself.

King and Stewart were exemplary activists in the struggle for equality and justice in America. This month, let us also be grateful for those in the past, present and future whose names we know and whose names we don’t know, but whose work, sacrifices and struggles pushed and will continue to push the civil rights movement forward for the benefit of all Americans.

Interested in learning more? The Library of Congress exhibit The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom captures, in a succinct manner, the history of the struggle for civil rights in America.  The Library’s website also makes available online the full text of speeches and essays written by Maria Stewart and other early African-American women activists. And if you have questions about the civil rights movement, Stewart or King, please don’t hesitate to Ask-Us.

Did Galileo Own the Library’s Copy of ‘The Starry Messenger’?

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A partial handprint is visible on the bottom of this page from near the end of “The Starry Messenger.”

Asking intriguing questions can be a great way to encourage research and creative thinking. The answer to this particular question was at first disappointing. Two experts, a historian and a rare book librarian, both said that although Galileo wrote “The Starry Messenger,” he did not himself own the copy of the book now in the Library’s collections — it has attracted speculation about such features as Galileo’s name written on the cover and two ink handprints. Naturally, I asked them how they and other colleagues had reached that conclusion. They told me a fascinating story about the printing of “The Starry Messenger” in Italy more than 400 years ago and described in vivid detail the special qualities of the Library’s copy.

Mark Dimunation, chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, and John Hessler, cartographic specialist and historian in the Geography and Map Division, helped me separate captivating lore from practical reality. Mark acquired this treasure in 2008, and his division hosted the symposium “Galileo’s Moons” in 2010; John has studied the text extensively and contributed to a 2013 Library co-publication about “The Starry Messenger.” I share an excerpt from our conversation below.

You can see the Library’s copy online to follow the key points and also to enjoy the beauty of the illustrations.

Tell us a little about the significance of “The Starry Messenger.”

Dimunation: At dusk on November 30, 1609, Galileo shifted his telescope in the direction of the moon. His recorded observations — the first view of the moon utilizing magnification — noted the surface of the crescent. The drawing he made that night in Padua, Italy, and five additional drawings and watercolor sketches became the basis for his revolutionary publication “Sidereus Nuncius” (“The Starry Messenger”) in March 1610. Galileo’s treatise changed the shape of the moon in the mind of the Renaissance world. He changed the nature of scientific discourse and the notion of the universe. With “The Starry Messenger” the moon was transformed into a world — not some perfect celestial sphere, but a land to be explored, charted and understood. And the heavens, often thought of in imaginative terms, were revealed to be a congregation of stars.

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The annotation on the cover, “Galil./Sidreus./1610,” identifies the book’s author, title and date. But the handwriting does not match Galileo’s.

Did Galileo own this copy of “The Starry Messenger”? Is that why his name appears on the cover?

Hessler: There is no evidence for Galileo’s ownership of the book for a number of reasons. In a letter that Galileo wrote just one week after the publication of the book, he states that he had 30 copies specially printed for himself. He refers in the letter to these copies as being owned by him personally and that they have not yet had the great figure of the moon inserted. Of those 30 copies, 11 are known to have survived, and they are on a thinner and finer paper than the Library of Congress copy. Also, those 11 copies have, in Galileo’s own hand, up to four corrections that he made to the text, which makes it certain that he actually had them in his possession. The Library’s copy has no corrections in Galileo’s hand, nor is it printed on the finer paper. Lastly, what appears on the cover is simply “Galil./Sidreus./1610.” This text is not in Galileo’s hand, and it misspells the title of the book, which is not a mistake an author is likely to make. The more interesting inscription is the one on the next and the first otherwise blank page, “Ex libris dominici/Fratei-/Veronae.” This says that the book is from the Library of the Dominican church of Santa Anastasia in Verona, a claim that has yet to be fleshed out by scholars.

Are those Galileo’s handprints, visible in images 49 and 52?

Hessler: It is hard to prove a negative, but in this case it is even harder to imagine Galileo, who was traveling in the highest circles of the Medici orbit, talking to popes and presenting his research to cardinals, being on the floor of a print shop in Venice, his hands covered in ink, helping to pull the sheets off the press. Many scholars have noted Galileo’s oversight in the design and production of “The Starry Messenger,” but not its physical printing. This was also a very busy time for Galileo, because Cosimo de’ Medici ascended the throne upon his father’s death in 1609. Galileo had tutored Cosimo in mathematics. The young grand duke knew him well, and in 1610 offered him the position of professor of mathematics at the University of Pisa and mathematician and philosopher to the grand duke of Tuscany, after Galileo had named the moons of Jupiter after him and the family.

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“The Starry Messenger” includes several illustrations of the moon based on drawings Galileo made from looking through the telescope.

Why is this specific copy so special?

Dimunation: The fact that the Library’s copy is untrimmed is a great benefit when viewing the two-page spread of stars showing the belt and sword of the constellation Orion and the Pleiades. The star map was printed very close to the edge of the original paper. Once bound and trimmed, copies would lose several of the stars at the paper’s edge. The Library copy is one of only a few to represent the illustration in its entirety. The Library’s copy has several features that suggest that it may not have entered the book market. It remains untrimmed, and it is only loosely stitched into a temporary paper board binder. Books treated as a printer’s or shop copy were often bound in this fashion. The copy is not pristine, and the evidence of a printer’s inky fingerprints underlines that this copy would be less likely to move into the market. This copy also displays evidence of a misprint on one set of the engravings depicting the moon; a double impression occurred when the engraving press bounced the plates.

What inspired you to study this book so carefully?

Hessler: Working on books like the Library’s copy of the “Sidereus Nuncius” is a rare privilege. I have worked for many years on a series of Galileo manuscripts about the logical foundations of scientific thought and on an ancient text called the “Posterior Analytics of Aristotle.” These early texts show how Galileo developed his scientific methodology, both embracing what was good in Greek scientific thought and rejecting its somewhat nonexperimental dogmatism. When I was first shown this copy of “The Starry Messenger,” it nearly moved me to tears, and I am not alone in those emotions. It is a truly amazing copy of one of the most revolutionary books in the history of science. It draws you in, and you cannot help seeing it as both an intellectual triumph of thought and will and as a material object to study. Holding it is a multisensory experience.

Learn More

• View the Library’s copy of “Sidereus Nuncius” online.

• For an introduction to Galileo’s discoveries, read “Stars in His Eyes,” a 2012 blog post by science reference librarian Margaret Clifton.

• Read abstracts from “Galileo’s Moons,” a 2010 symposium held to celebrate purchase of the Library’s copy of “The Starry Messenger.”

Omar Ibn Said: Conserving a One-of-a-Kind Manuscript

This is a guest post by Sylvia Albro, a senior paper conservator in the Conservation Division. Earlier this month, the Library released online the Omar Ibn Said Collection, including Ibn Said’s autobiography, the only known extant autobiography written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States. A wealthy and educated man, Ibn Said was captured in West Africa and brought to the U.S. as a slave. He wrote his autobiography in 1831.

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Conservator Sylvia Albro treats the cover of Ibn Said’s autobiography in a solution of deionized water.

As soon as Omar Ibn Said’s autobiography entered the Library of Congress collections, it came to the Conservation Division for evaluation. The manuscript was clearly fragile — its cover and text pages were torn in many places, and some pages were detached from the binding. Sewing thread had cut through pages and cover paper, causing breaks and tears along the spine as well. Compounding these issues, for much of its life, the manuscript seems to have been kept folded in half, as if to fit into a slim pocket. This strong center fold had caused multiple tears. Now, unfolding each page risked losing fragments and detaching other pages, calling for immediate conservation attention before the manuscript could be studied or displayed.

Together, a team of Library conservators and curators formulated a plan to treat and house the manuscript. It involved removing and repairing the cover; assessing the inks and papers of both the cover and the text for their degree of deterioration; and making repairs to the manuscript paper. The plan specified that, afterward, the original would be scanned and a facsimile created for scholarly use. As always, the process would be fully documented.

Conservators first removed the cover and its tight sewing, discovering the soft and thick cotton thread originally used to hold the manuscript together through the center fold.  Both threads were made of cotton fiber, but the original sewing thread matches that used to sew several of the other Arabic manuscripts in the Omar Ibn Said Collection that come from West Africa. To open and repair the text, both cover and original sewing threads were removed and saved with documentation.

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Tools and materials conservators used to mend the manuscript.

Once the text pages were separated, the ink was examined under a microscope and with ultraviolet light illumination. The type of ink is iron gall, which is inherently acidic and can cause damage to the paper underneath. In the case of Ibn Said’s writing, there was some sinking of the ink to the opposite side of the page, but mostly it appeared crisp and in reasonably good condition. A few heavily inked areas had, however, broken through the lightweight text paper.

Interestingly, two different writing pens were used for Ibn Said’s text. Where he wrote of his own life, his pen had a narrow nib, but where he wrote in prayer verse, his pen had a wider, flatter nib like the reed pen used by Arabic scribes. Photomicrographs — photos taken under a microscope at high magnification — of the ink were taken, and conservators will monitor changes in ink and paper deterioration over time.

The cream-colored text paper was made by a papermaking machine with a woven cloth screen. It has no watermark, but it has an even texture and is made from good-quality fiber. Its pH is lower than the optimal range, but after 200 years of natural aging, it remains in reasonably good condition, aside from physical damage.

To mend text pages, we used a variety of adhesives and Japanese tissues. First, we humidified the broken spine pieces of the pages and flattened them under blotters and weights. We aligned split areas of paper with no text and mended them invisibly with tissues of different weights and colors, applied with wheat starch paste. Areas of the paper with ink present were mended with transparent tissue precoated with a hydroxylpropyl cellulose adhesive. All mends remain reversible in the future. After treatment, we stored the manuscript in an acid-free environment with a soft Japanese “mitsumata” paper interleaf isolating the text from the cover.

Unlike the text, the cover was brittle, made of a poorly processed pulp with visible undigested straw fibers, and with a suboptimal pH level. Discoloration from the cover had transferred to the adjacent text papers at the front and back of the manuscript. The cover ink was stable, meaning that the cover could be immersed in several baths of alkaline water until discoloration was no longer released from the paper and the surface pH rose to a neutral level. A layer of gelatin sizing was applied overall to provide greater strength for future handling. Losses in the cover were repaired with layers of toned Japanese “usumino” paper.

After scanning, the mended pages and cover were reassembled. They were not resewn, to avoid making new holes in the paper and orienting the text permanently in the wrong direction — the cover is meant to open right to left. A custom drop-spine box made from conservation quality materials was constructed to house the ensemble.

In addition to Ibn Said’s autobiography, conservators treated and rehoused the 41 other items in the Omar Ibn Said Collection.

Watch the video below for more about Ibn Said’s autobiography and its conservation at the Library.

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Inquiring Minds: Opening a Treasure Chest of Unfinished Stories

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Addie Card, whose photo inspired Joe Manning to launch a project to tell the stories of the people whose lives early 20th-century photographer Lewis Hine documented.

In fall 2005, Joe Manning agreed to help his friend, author Elizabeth Winthrop, with a task that had become something of an obsession for her: discovering the story of a little girl staring intently out of a 1910 picture taken at a Vermont cotton mill. Winthrop had encountered the image in an exhibition of child-labor photographs by Lewis Hine, and she couldn’t get the girl out of her mind — Winthrop had based the character Grace in her soon-to-be-published novel “Counting on Grace” on her. Through research, Winthrop had determined that the girl’s real name was Addie Card, but she wanted to know more, so she asked Manning, a New England writer and genealogist, for help.

Within two weeks, Manning had located and contacted Addie’s granddaughter. Two weeks later, he was standing at Addie’s grave. Not long afterward, he and Winthrop had met and interviewed Addie’s great-granddaughter. By that time, Manning had himself become fascinated by the subjects of Hine’s photographs, soon resolving to uncover more stories.

From 1908 to 1924, Hine took thousands of pictures for the National Child Labor Committee, exposing the often-dangerous conditions children endured working at textile mills, coal mines, vegetable farms, fish canneries and as late-night “newsies” on urban streets. Hine’s collection of more than 5,000 photographs is held by the Library of Congress and searchable on the Library’s website.

Since tracking down Addie’s story, Manning has researched and written about more than 300 other children Hine photographed as well as Americans photographed by the Farm Security Administration (FSA) in the 1930s and 1940s, another collection in the Library’s holdings.

Here Manning answers a few questions about his background and his quest to find the identities of the everyday people captured in long-ago photographs.

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Joe Manning

Tell us a little about your background.

I majored in sociology in college, and then had a 30-year career as a social worker for the state of Connecticut. At the same time, I had serious avocations as a songwriter and a freelance journalist. After I retired, I became interested in public history and wrote two books about North Adams, a small city in Massachusetts known historically for its many textile mills. It was there that I met author Elizabeth Winthrop and learned about Lewis Hine.

What inspires you to tell the stories of people in historical photos?

Insatiable curiosity, and my long-held belief that the stories of these working-class people are sadly missing from our history books. I have learned that in most cases, if I am successful in contacting descendants of the subjects in the photos, it will be the first time they have seen the photo of their ancestor. That in itself inspires me to keep choosing more and more photos to research. How can I resist?

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Giles Newsom, photographed by Hine in 1912.

Briefly, what is Addie’s story?

She quit school after the fourth grade to work in a cotton mill, had a long and difficult life, survived until the age of 94 and was loved and revered by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren. And none of those family members had ever seen Hine’s photo of Addie until I contacted them.

How do you choose which individuals to research?

It’s often the character of the face, staring back at me from the photo, and how I react to it emotionally. For obvious reasons, it is best to choose a photo that has a child’s name in the caption; but in some cases, I have been able to identify unnamed children. I also try to have a variety of occupations and localities represented.

Which stories stand out to you?

Here are a few:

The Catherine Young family, of Tifton, Georgia. Catherine and her nine children were photographed in front of their tiny mill house. Hine stated that she was a recent widow and that she and six of the children were working in a cotton mill. The family appeared desperate. In his caption, Hine gave only the surname of the family, making it extremely difficult to identify them. It took me almost five years to do it, and then I was able to interview dozens of descendants. I found out that three months after they were photographed, the mother placed seven of the children in an orphan home.

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The Young family, 1909.

Mamie and Eglantine Laberge of Winchendon, Massachusetts. Hine photographed the sisters and other family members more than a dozen times. Nearly the entire family of 14 children worked at a cotton mill. Winchendon is only 60 miles from my home, so I was able go there and find the spots where Hine photographed them. I interviewed many descendants, several of whom have become friends.

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The Laberge sisters, 1911.

Giles Newsom of Bessemer City, North Carolina. Giles, 12 years old, was photographed wearing a large bandage on his right hand. In his caption, Hine explained: “A piece of the machine fell on to his foot mashing his toe. This caused him to fall on to a spinning machine and his hand went into unprotected gearing, crushing and tearing out two fingers.” This turned out to be a very sad story. Giles died at age 18 and was buried in an unmarked grave. But the name on his death certificate and in his newspaper death notice was badly misspelled. After working with the director of the cemetery and a monument maker, I was arranged to have a flat stone with Giles’ correct name installed in the cemetery near his family members.
Yetta Finkelstein and family of New York City. Yetta and several of her young daughters were photographed doing piece work in their tenement home for a garment factory. Her husband had died, and she had very little money. My research revealed that at the time of the photograph, four of her children were living temporarily in an orphan home. I interviewed a number of descendants and learned that this courageous family not only survived, but went on to lead normal and productive lives.

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The Finkelsteins, 1908.

Addie Card of North Pownal, Vermont. This was my first story. Somehow, I recognized right at the start that it could turn out to be a great story, so I kept a detailed diary of my research: the dead ends, good hunches and serendipity. After I was successful, I wrote a long and detailed narrative about my search for Addie. It was a life-changing experience.

How are you making the stories available?

They are all on my website — MorningsOnMapleStreet.com — and anyone can see them for free.

What is the value, in your view, of the Library’s making available the collections you use?

The collection is indispensable to the study of American history. With the FSA collection and the Hine collection, we have a remarkable record of what poor and working-class people looked like in the first half of the 20th century, how they were dressed and how their daily lives were lived. I often refer to the collection as a treasure chest of unfinished stories.

Omar Ibn Said: Transcribing Documents from the Unique Collection

This is a guest post by Adam Rothman, a professor of history at Georgetown University and an expert on the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. Last fall, he was a distinguished visiting scholar at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center. Here Rothman writes about the Omar Ibn Said Collection, which the Library released online earlier this month. A wealthy and educated man, Ibn Said was captured in West Africa and brought to the U.S. as a slave. His autobiography, included in the collection, is the only known extant autobiography written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the U.S.

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Omar Ibn Said. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

While working at the Kluge Center for Scholars at the Library of Congress in fall 2018, I had the good fortune to be asked to collaborate with the team processing the newly arrived Omar Ibn Said Collection. The Library needed someone to transcribe the English-language letters and other documents in the collection. Knowing the importance of Omar Ibn Said’s autobiography and eager to contribute to the project, I happily obliged.

As a historian of American slavery, I’ve transcribed my share of documents, and I like to think that I have a knack for deciphering 19th-century handwriting. But transcribing the documents involves more than just solving the riddles of the writing. The extremely close reading that is required forges a more intimate bond with the sources and a desire to dig deeper into their meanings. The challenge of transcribing these documents pulled me into a world that I had known very little about.

A Fula scholar from the West African kingdom of Futa Toro, Ibn Said was captured in war around 1807, sold “into the hands of the Christians” and shipped across the Atlantic to Charleston, South Carolina, to endure a life of perpetual slavery in the United States. He was in his late 30s when he endured the middle passage and about 61 years old when he wrote his autobiography in Arabic in 1831. By then, he apologized, his eyesight had gone downhill and he had forgotten most of his native language. His autobiography tells of the hardship of his experience of enslavement, but it also expresses gratitude for the kindness of his American owners, the Owen family. It’s a unique, poignant and enigmatic narrative.

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Page from Isaac Bird’s translation of Muhammed Dukur’s work.

Ibn Said’s autobiography has been known to scholars for decades. A translation was published in the American Historical Review in 1925, with an introduction by none other than J. Franklin Jameson, who would soon thereafter become the chief of the Manuscripts Division at the Library of Congress. More recent scholars of Atlantic slavery have unearthed additional writings by Ibn Said, prepared new translations of his work and revisited the question of his identity amid a broader rediscovery of the influence of Islam in the African Atlantic. But what the documents in the Omar Ibn Said Collection also reveal is that scholarly interest in Ibn Said goes back to colonizationists and ethnologists of the 19th century, who took a keen interest in Ibn Said for their own agendas.

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Ibn Said’s obituary from the North Carolina Standard.

There are many fascinating documents in the collection aside from Ibn Said’s autobiography. One that really caught my attention is Rev. Isaac Bird’s translation of an Arabic manuscript written by Muhammed Dukur, which was sent to Theodore Dwight, the secretary of the American Ethnological Society, by President John J. Roberts of Liberia. This short treatise contains a brief but remarkable description of China from a West African perspective.

“China is a far off country,” writes the author, “so that though you have shoes of iron they would be all worn out before you would reach it.” The author reports that China has 10 mountains, and on one of the mountains there are two trees. One of the trees casts a shadow that covers the entire country, and the other grows virgins. This fantasy tells us something about West African knowledge of China in the middle of the 19th century, and the fact that it was transmitted by the president of Liberia to an ethnologist in New York tells us something else about the global circuits of knowledge of that era.

While immersed in the Ibn Said Collection, I made a discovery of my own that I hope will add to our own world’s ever-growing knowledge about Ibn Said. Searching the Library of Congress’ massive online newspaper database, Chronicling America, I came across his obituary in a North Carolina newspaper dated Aug. 19, 1863 — a rare thing indeed for an American slave. The obituary praised Ibn Said (or, as it called him, “Uncle Moreau”) as “a remarkable Negro” and a pious Christian. He died at the age of 93, having lived a remarkably long life. But it was not quite long enough to see freedom again before he died.

Inquiring Minds: Author Takes a Deep Dive into the Library

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Barb Rosenstock talks with students at the Library on Dec. 10. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Barb Rosenstock writes children’s book about people who have changed history — Ben Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Joe DiMaggio and racing legend Louise Smith among them. “The Noisy Paint Box,” her story about the artist Kandinsky, was a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book. In 2013, she published “Thomas Jefferson Builds a Library” about Jefferson’s massive book collection, which he sold to Congress and from which the Library of Congress evolved.

Rosenstock’s most recent book, “Otis and Will Discover the Deep: The Record-Setting Dive of the Bathysphere” — about a pioneering 1930 ocean dive by Otis Barton and William Beebe aboard a craft they invented — also has interesting ties to the Library. Just this month, the book won a Golden Kite Award from the Society of Children’s Book Writers and Illustrators.

Here Rosenstock answers a few questions about her writing and research.

Tell us a little about your background and how you became a children’s writer.

I was in corporate design management, worked as a stay-at-home mom and got a second degree in elementary teaching before I ever thought of writing for children. When my sons were young, they liked true stories but found a lot of the children’s history picture books at the time kind of like textbooks. I started making up stories the way my grandfather would tell a story to go with the pictures and the rest is … history (I couldn’t resist, sorry).

What draws you to historical nonfiction?

It is a goal of mine to communicate to children that there is no such thing as “special” people and “regular” people. After all, the young Ben Franklin or Dorothea Lange or Bill Monroe didn’t know they would grow up to accomplish great things. They were just kids who followed their interests and kept learning and growing and then wound up doing great things in history … which means any kid living today can do the same.

How did you decide on Jefferson’s library as a book subject?

I was at Monticello on my eighth-grade field trip (many, many years ago), and I thought Monticello and Jefferson’s study were perfect — I would have happily moved there if they would’ve let me. I never forgot the beauty of the place. Decades later, I read that Jefferson offered his personal library to rebuild the Library of Congress after the War of 1812 and thought “How did I not know that?” And had to find out. It’s always my own curiosity that gets me wondering, and I figure if I’m interested, hopefully kids will be! I researched at Monticello primarily but also at the Library of Congress — on the web page for Thomas Jefferson’s library and in person in the exhibit itself. I love that exhibit, and it’s cool that the Library will still find one of Jefferson’s books off and on. The search for Tom’s books continues!

What inspired you to write “Otis and Will”?

I ran across the word “bathysphere” and looked it up. Seriously, I had never heard of it before. The photo I saw of the craft and its inventors, Otis Barton and William Beebe, reminded me of the adventure cartoons I used to love as a kid (“Diver Dan,” “Clutch Cargo”). Otis and Will were two curious kids who became curious scientists and who had to know what the deep ocean looked like. Their curiosity led to their risking their lives to expand our knowledge of the oceans. Curiosity can take us to great places.

“Otis and Will” has several connections to the Library. Tell us about them.

The first connection was early in the research. I used the “Ask a Librarian” function on the Library’s website to see if there was any audio from the bathysphere dives at the Library. The librarian who happened to respond to my request was a woman named Constance Carter (the former head of the Library’s Science Reference Section) who proceeded to tell me that one of her first jobs after college was working for William Beebe in Bermuda doing ocean research! Connie shared research, videos and firsthand knowledge, gave a great tour of the Library and has been just such a joy to know as her curiosity about people and subjects knows no bounds. The second big connection was when I was at the Library on Dec. 10 to give a talk on “Otis and Will” for some third-graders from Washington, D.C. Before the presentation, I was introduced to Matthew Barton, Otis Barton’s great-nephew, who also works at the Library of Congress as a curator of recorded sound (he looks like his late uncle, by the way). The Library of Congress is simply full of Barton, Beebe and bathysphere connections!

What do you have to say to other writers about working with the Library’s staff and collections?

The Library of Congress is the largest library on the planet. If that doesn’t motivate a writer to use the Library, with its extensive digitized collections and its amazing staff as a resource, the writer probably don’t belong in research or writing at all!

 Do you know yet what you will write about next?

“Yogi: The Life, Loves and Language of Baseball Legend Yogi Berra” will be published next month by Calkins Creek, illustrated by Terry Widener. Books I’ve already written on Frank Lloyd Wright, Alice Paul, Abigail Adams, Monet and monarch butterflies are all in process. My next new project will be either something to do with mountains (Mt. Everest? Denali?), or I may have a new idea about the sea. I hope the Library’s staff is ready for some more questions!

Crowdsourcing Helps to Unlock the Mystery of Cursive

This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division, and Victoria Van Hyning, a senior innovation specialist in the division. This post coincides with National Handwriting Day.

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Washington, D.C., students learn to read cursive at a Nov. 19 event at the Library celebrating the 155th anniversary of the Gettysburg Address and a new crowdsourcing initiative for transcribing historical documents. Photo by Shawn Miller.

“That’s so beautiful, but what does it say?” This is what we often hear from visitors to the Library of Congress when they see letters and other documents written by hand. This phenomenon — the inability of so many people to read handwriting — is the byproduct of a moment of technological change that is every bit as significant as the one that began with the introduction of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg in the middle of the 15th century. The digital age has transformed us from people who read and write by hand to people who type and read on a screen, from letter-writers to emailers, texters and tweeters.

This change is so recent that our population now includes a mixture of people born before the digital age, who learned the techniques and conventions of handwriting and letter writing, and younger people, who grew up online. While older people have had to learn the ways of the digital age, younger people know less and less about the ways of the analog world, even when its language and symbols persist into the digital — “cc,” for example, which appears inklessly atop every email message, recalls the inky blue sheets of carbon paper typists rolled into their typewriters to make copies.

Why does it matter? This isn’t just a question of nostalgia, of regret for the old ways, such as the lost art of cursive, which few children now learn in school. It matters because when people are unable to read old documents, they lose the ability to make personal contact with the past.

Some very old documents necessarily require interpretation by experts. For example, the Library’s collection of cuneiform tablets, written by the Sumerians on clay more than 4,000 years ago. Or the leather-bound volume of town records, in Spanish, from 16th-century Peru in the Library’s Harkness Collection. Or the 17th-century manuscript law books, in Shakespeare’s English, collected by Thomas Jefferson.

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This is from an outline of a speech Alexander Hamilton gave at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. Note where he uses the long “s,” as in “Importance of the occafion.” Can you find more?

But documents from the 18th century, when the United States was founded, are written in English that, with a couple of differences, is essentially modern. We sell ourselves short when we think we can’t read them. There are a few things to learn, such as the long “s,” which looks like an “f,” the relatively nonstandard spelling and punctuation and some unfamiliar abbreviations. Another key to learning how to read 18th- and 19th-century writing is just to spend time looking at it, learning the writing conventions of the relatively recent past, as well as the idiosyncrasies of individual writers. In time, the letters of George Washington will become as familiar to you as, say, a postcard from your Uncle Melvin.

We saw living proof of this at a Nov. 19 event at the Library marking the 155th anniversary of President Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. Members of the public and students from local Washington, D.C., schools were invited to the Library to view a copy of the Gettysburg Address and try their hands at transcribing letters and other documents in the Abraham Lincoln Papers on the Library’s newly launched crowdsourcing website. Titled “By the People,” the site makes images of thousands of original documents available to volunteers online, inviting them to type documents, tag them with keywords to make them searchable and review typed documents for accuracy. The transcripts are then added to the Library’s website alongside the original documents.

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Here is an example of what the long “s” looked like in print. From “The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved,” a 1764 book by James Otis.

At first, many of the visitors on Nov. 19, viewing 19th-century handwriting, said “I can’t read this.” But when asked to pick out a letter or word anywhere on the page and then build on that kernel of understanding, they soon started to identify familiar words, then phrases. By the end of a half hour, they were able to read 70 percent or more of documents. Dozens teamed up to arrange the full text of the Gettysburg Address using a large-format printed “puzzle” made of the words composing Lincoln’s speech. They eagerly hunted through piles, looking for letters and words that were becoming increasingly familiar.

Many said they wished that cursive was still taught in schools, as do many people who come to the Library. Some teachers and students vowed to take the project back into their classrooms or afterschool clubs.

Although we live in a world where writing by hand is less necessary than before, it is vital that we keep the knowledge of cursive and other handwriting alive. “By the People” is just one way in which you can encounter original documents and hone your skills, but we encourage you to give it a try. The more you transcribe and review, the more you will learn. At the same time, you will help to make Library of Congress collections more readily available for everyone.

Scroll down for more examples.

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George Washington used the long “s” only occasionally. In this 1782 letter, written during the Revolutionary War, paragraph two begins: “I am fully perswaded that it is unnecefsary.”

 

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Thomas Jefferson routinely used some idiosyncratic spellings, and he generally did not capitalize the first word in a sentence. In this 1788 letter to James Madison, the second sentence begins: “the first part of this long silence in me was occasioned by a knoledge [knowledge] that you were absent from N. York.” Then he complains that a pamphlet Madison sent him “unluckily omitted exactly the pafsage [passage] I wanted, which was what related to the navigation of the Mifsisipi [Mississippi].”

Recovering Silent Films: The Mostly Lost Workshop

This is a guest post by Mark Hartsell, editor of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. The post is reprinted from the January/February issue of LCM, available in its entirety online.

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Mostly Lost workshop participants gather outside the Packard Campus theater. Photo by Shawn Miller.

At any other theater, they would be the world’s most annoying moviegoers — the last people with whom you’d want to spend a few hours in a confined space.

They talk endlessly among themselves as the film plays. They shout to acquaintances across the theater. They talk back to the screen. They forever check their phones and furiously type away on laptops.

This behavior, frowned upon anywhere else, is not only tolerated here at the Packard Campus theater but, for one week each June, is explicitly encouraged.

“Please talk loudly. Please bring out your laptops or iPads,” patrons are instructed just before the lights dim and the film rolls — the cinema equivalent of an airline steward ordering passengers to recline their seats, lower their tray tables, turn on all electronic devices and walk about the cabin during takeoff.

All that distraction would make for a nightmarish night at most theaters. But for the Library of Congress, it represents something productive and important: an effective, if noisy, way to preserve film history.

Each June, the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation in Culpeper, Virginia, holds Mostly Lost, a workshop that enlists cinema experts and movie buffs from around the country to help identify silent films whose titles have been lost to history.

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Workshop participants use laptops to find information to help them identify the film they’re watching on screen. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The four-day workshop taps, in real time, the collective brainpower of the historians, archivists and fans in the seats: As films roll, they shout out clues they see onscreen that might help identify the film and search online databases for titles that match the clues.

Out of the chaos, a more complete understanding of silent film emerges: Since their inception seven years ago, the workshops have identified 403 films — just over half the number screened.

“Before each workshop, we preview the films submitted and often are able to identify a film prior to the workshop, so that submission doesn’t make the final cut onto the workshop program,” said Rob Stone, who, along with Rachel Del Gaudio, organizes the event. “We try not to include any easy ones at the workshop, we want our Mostly Lost attendees to really work, and our high percentage of identifications show that they do just that.”

Moviemakers released some 11,000 silent feature films in the U.S. during cinema’s first few decades. According to a 2013 Library of Congress study, about 70 percent of them no longer exist, and many that survived did so in an incomplete form.

Today, international archives collectively hold thousands of reels that — whether through neglect, human error or the ravages of time — no longer bear the markings that would reveal the identities of the films they contain.

In cinema’s early years, distributors provided films to theaters and didn’t require them to be returned. After a movie’s run ended, the projectionist might keep the whole film, throw it out or just save a few favorite bits.

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A silent film is screened during a Mostly Lost workshop. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Or, some reels from a multireel feature might get misplaced over the decades, leaving, say, only one title-less reel behind. In other cases, a film might deteriorate and the degraded sections get cut out, leaving a partial film with no opening title and credits.

Are these works masterpieces? Lost classics? Without doing some film archaeology, those questions would go unanswered.

The purpose of Mostly Lost is to uncover as much information about each film as possible and identify its proper title. Nothing is known about some of the films screened. About others, archivists know a little — the name of an actor, perhaps, or the production company.

The workshop held this past June drew 191 participants from seven countries to screen about 130 potential titles submitted by collectors and institutions from around the world: the Library of Congress, Lobster Films, the George Eastman Museum, the Packard Humanities Institute, Fondazione Cineteca Italiana, Cinematek, EYE Film Instituut Nederland and Centre national du cinéma et de l’image animée.

The films ranged in date from about 1900 to the 1960s, in length from about five seconds to nearly 25 minutes and in subject from westerns to slapstick to travelogue to animated clowns banding together to defend Earth from a Martian invasion.

Clues found onscreen help attendees identify unknown films or at least add to the knowledge about them. The typeface used in an intertitle helped date a silent film to the early 1920s. Recognizing a car as a Studebaker President Roadster and an actor as George LeMaire resulted in the identification of one film as the 1929 short “The Salesman.”

At the workshops, questions are raised (“Is that Andy Devine?” “NO!!”), observations offered (“The furniture looks French, but the acting doesn’t”) and jokes made (“The car is a ’39 Mercury, but what year is the fish?” someone quips during a 1940s fishing travelogue.)

After the workshop ends, the work continues. For weeks afterward, the screening notes are researched in databases such as the American Film Institute, the British Film Institute and the Complete Index to World Film, resulting in more identifications.

The workshops, it’s hoped, will not only restore long-lost information about these films but also restore the films themselves to public consciousness.

“I am constantly surprised by the knowledge and research skills of the Mostly Lost attendees,” Del Gaudio said. “They have been able to identify films that I thought would remain unknown forever. Films that seemingly have no visual clues still elicit responses from someone who recognizes that location or are familiar with that particular story. I receive emails years after the fact from attendees who come across helpful information that they want to impart in case it helps to identify a film. It is wonderful.”

New Online: Rare Autobiography by Enslaved West African Scholar

This is a guest post by Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division.

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Omar Ibn Said. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

In the summer of 2017, the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress acquired a collection of unique documents, some dating back to the 1830s. Although the documents are not very old by Library standards — the division and the Library hold manuscripts that are more than 1,000 years old — nonetheless this collection is special. The reason is that at the heart of the 42 documents purchased by the Library is the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a native of West Africa captured in 1807 and brought to North Carolina as a slave. He wrote his 1831 autobiography in Arabic while still in captivity. It remains to date the only known one of its kind still in existence.

Now, for the first time, the Omar Ibn Said Collection is available online at the Library of Congress.

The autobiography is short, no more than 15 handwritten pages, in addition to which are blank pages. In it, Ibn Said relates how he was captured and brought on a ship from his homeland to foreign shores in Charleston, South Carolina. He describes how his first owner was a small and evil man who did not fear God and who treated him so badly that after a month, he ran away, moving north until he reached Fayetteville, North Carolina. There he was captured and jailed for 16 days, eventually ending up in the home of General John Owen, the brother of the governor of North Carolina, where he spent the rest of his days until his death in 1863.

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The first page of Ibn Said’s autobiography.

But who was Ibn Said before his enslavement? He gives a brief sketch of his life in Africa but enough to create a portrait of a highly educated and well-to-do individual. He says that before he came to this Christian country, meaning the United States, he was a follower of Muhammad the Prophet of God, meaning he was a Muslim. He writes that he went on pilgrimage to Mecca, prayed five times a day, went to the mosque, fought the jihad (holy war) against nonbelievers and gave alms to the poor.

It is from his charitable donations that we can deduce how wealthy he was: “I used to give alms … every year in gold, silver, harvest, cattle, sheep, goats, rice, wheat and barley — all I used to give in alms,” he is quoted as saying in the book “A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said.”

Ibn Said also names the place where he was born: Fut Tur, or Futa Toro, located between the two rivers of Senegal and the Gambia. He recounts how he studied and names his teachers, stating, “I continued seeking knowledge for 25 years.”  He also describes his family in West Africa, saying that his father had six sons and five daughters, while his mother had three sons and one daughter, implying that his father had had more than one wife. He himself never got married in the United States, and he makes no reference to a wife or children in West Africa.

Ibn Said wrote his autobiography in response to a request by someone he referred to as “Sheikh Hunter” and apparently also at the request of Theodore Dwight (1796–1866), a founder of the American Ethnological Society and a member of the New York Colonization Society, either directly or through the slave owner.

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A July 1831 letter from Joseph Jenkins Roberts to Theodore Dwight.

It is thanks to Dwight that much of this collection of documents still exists. It includes his own correspondence with a number of notable individuals who translated, referred to or discussed the autobiography of Ibn Said. For example, the first two presidents of Liberia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1809–76) and Stephen Allen Benson (1816–65), responded to Dwight’s enquiries. Their handwritten responses are part of the documents the Library acquired, as are those of Daniel Bliss (1823–1916), one of the founders of what became the American University of Beirut, and those of the Reverend Isaac Bird (1793–1835), a Protestant missionary in Syria who translated some of Ibn Said’s writings.

Dwight, as well as other prominent colonizationists, wanted Ibn Said to write his autobiography, and wanted it to be translated, to undermine claims justifying slavery in the United States. The autobiography was meant to bolster an argument linking literacy and monotheism to manumission, or the freeing of slaves. Dwight was also interested in Islam and in educating Americans about Africa and the people they were capturing and enslaving.

So, what was it that roused the interest of Dwight and others in Ibn Said? There is no doubt that from the start of his captivity Ibn Said stood out because of his erudition and his demeanor. For example, as documented in a 1925 issue of the American Historical Review, a pastor who met him in North Carolina noted, “His whole person and gait bear marks of considerable refinement.” Articles also appeared in journals at the time describing him and discussing his literacy in Arabic and his conversion to Christianity.

The Ibn Said collection also includes a few items written in Arabic by other West Africans. For example, there are three short texts in Arabic by a man called Sheikh Sana See, which were collected by Frederick Hicks, a Sunday school teacher in Panama. See may have been working on the Panama Canal Railway, which was built between 1849 and 1855. In any case, his texts reveal him to have been educated in the Sufi tradition of Islam. Another important Arabic text in this collection, “On the Origin of Man,” was written in a beautiful calligraphy by Mohammed Dekr. This text appears to have been sent to Dwight by Liberian president Benson or former president Roberts. It combines elements of Genesis in the Bible, as well as Islamic thought and African concepts regarding the origin of the world and of man.

New Online: Rare Autobiography in Arabic by Enslaved American

This is a guest post by Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division.

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Omar Ibn Said. Courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

In the summer of 2017, the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress acquired a collection of unique documents, some dating back to the 1830s. Although the documents are not very old by Library standards — the division and the Library hold manuscripts that are more than 1,000 years old — nonetheless this collection is special. The reason is that at the heart of the 42 documents purchased by the Library is the autobiography of Omar Ibn Said, a native of West Africa captured in 1807 and brought to North Carolina as a slave. He wrote his 1831 autobiography in Arabic while still in captivity. It remains to date the only known one of its kind still in existence.

Now, for the first time, the Omar Ibn Said Collection is available online at the Library of Congress.

The autobiography is short, no more than 15 handwritten pages, in addition to which are blank pages. In it, Ibn Said relates how he was captured and brought on a ship from his homeland to foreign shores in Charleston, South Carolina. He describes how his first owner was a small and evil man who did not fear God and who treated him so badly that after a month, he ran away, moving north until he reached Fayetteville, North Carolina. There he was captured and jailed for 16 days, eventually ending up in the home of General John Owen, the brother of the governor of North Carolina, where he spent the rest of his days until his death in 1863.

[image error]

The first page of Ibn Said’s autobiography.

But who was Ibn Said before his enslavement? He gives a brief sketch of his life in Africa but enough to create a portrait of a highly educated and well-to-do individual. He says that before he came to this Christian country, meaning the United States, he was a follower of Muhammad the Prophet of God, meaning he was a Muslim. He writes that he went on pilgrimage to Mecca, prayed five times a day, went to the mosque, fought the jihad (holy war) against nonbelievers and gave alms to the poor.

It is from his charitable donations that we can deduce how wealthy he was: “I used to give alms … every year in gold, silver, harvest, cattle, sheep, goats, rice, wheat and barley — all I used to give in alms,” he is quoted as saying in the book “A Muslim American Slave: The Life of Omar Ibn Said.”

Ibn Said also names the place where he was born: Fut Tur, or Futa Toro, located between the two rivers of Senegal and the Gambia. He recounts how he studied and names his teachers, stating, “I continued seeking knowledge for 25 years.”  He also describes his family in West Africa, saying that his father had six sons and five daughters, while his mother had three sons and one daughter, implying that his father had had more than one wife. He himself never got married in the United States, and he makes no reference to a wife or children in West Africa.

Ibn Said wrote his autobiography in response to a request by someone he referred to as “Sheikh Hunter” and apparently also at the request of Theodore Dwight (1796–1866), a founder of the American Ethnological Society and a member of the New York Colonization Society, either directly or through the slave owner.

[image error]

A July 1831 letter from Joseph Jenkins Roberts to Theodore Dwight.

It is thanks to Dwight that much of this collection of documents still exists. It includes his own correspondence with a number of notable individuals who translated, referred to or discussed the autobiography of Ibn Said. For example, the first two presidents of Liberia, Joseph Jenkins Roberts (1809–76) and Stephen Allen Benson (1816–65), responded to Dwight’s enquiries. Their handwritten responses are part of the documents the Library acquired, as are those of Daniel Bliss (1823–1916), one of the founders of what became the American University of Beirut, and those of the Reverend Isaac Bird (1793–1835), a Protestant missionary in Syria who translated some of Ibn Said’s writings.

Dwight, as well as other prominent colonizationists, wanted Ibn Said to write his autobiography, and wanted it to be translated, to undermine claims justifying slavery in the United States. The autobiography was meant to bolster an argument linking literacy and monotheism to manumission, or the freeing of slaves. Dwight was also interested in Islam and in educating Americans about Africa and the people they were capturing and enslaving.

So, what was it that roused the interest of Dwight and others in Ibn Said? There is no doubt that from the start of his captivity Ibn Said stood out because of his erudition and his demeanor. For example, as documented in a 1925 issue of the American Historical Review, a pastor who met him in North Carolina noted, “His whole person and gait bear marks of considerable refinement.” Articles also appeared in journals at the time describing him and discussing his literacy in Arabic and his conversion to Christianity.

The Ibn Said collection also includes a few items written in Arabic by other West Africans. For example, there are three short texts in Arabic by a man called Sheikh Sana See, which were collected by Frederick Hicks, a Sunday school teacher in Panama. See may have been working on the Panama Canal Railway, which was built between 1849 and 1855. In any case, his texts reveal him to have been educated in the Sufi tradition of Islam. Another important Arabic text in this collection, “On the Origin of Man,” was written in a beautiful calligraphy by Mohammed Dekr. This text appears to have been sent to Dwight by Liberian president Benson or former president Roberts. It combines elements of Genesis in the Bible, as well as Islamic thought and African concepts regarding the origin of the world and of man.