Library of Congress's Blog, page 82

An 1848 Christmas Story: The Gift of Freedom

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

[image error]

Ellen Craft disguised in men’s garb.

December is a month of holidays and festivities that bring families and friends together to celebrate their good fortune and look forward to the year ahead. For the enslaved couple William and Ellen Craft, the month of December 1848 promised more reason to celebrate than any they’d ever experienced. The potential was uncertain, however, and fraught with peril. After years of careful planning and preparation, this was the optimal time, they decided, to implement their plan to gain their freedom.

A search of all of the documents in the Library of Congress would be unlikely to yield a scheme for freedom more intriguing and daring than the Christmas escape strategy of the Crafts. Even though theirs is heralded as one of the most brilliant escapes from slavery in American history, it’s far less well known than the exploits of Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass or Josiah Henson.

The Crafts’ ingenious plan is documented in their 1860 narrative, “Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery.” The Library holds four different reprints of the account.

When Ellen Craft left her life as an enslaved person, she was dressed elegantly in a fashionable suit, stayed in the top hotels and traveled in first-class accommodations the entire route from Macon, Georgia, where she lived, to Philadelphia. But there was a twist: Ellen was disguised as a man, William Johnson, a very sick plantation owner traveling to Philadelphia for special treatment.

Resembling her father, Ellen could easily pass for white. She was the daughter of Major James Smith, a rich slaveholding cotton planter, and Maria, a young enslaved mulatto who worked in his house. Due to Ellen’s appearance, the plantation mistress frequently brutalized her. Ellen’s work in this wealthy household, though painful, gave her the opportunity to absorb the language and observe the behavior and nuances of southern aristocracy. The escape plan she and William formulated required Ellen to disguise herself as Johnson, because a “southern lady” surely would never travel alone with an enslaved male. She feigned illness during the trip, which discouraged conversation and interaction, justified dining alone in her room and provided a rationale for traveling north with her enslaved valet. Her right arm was placed in a sling to imply it was impaired, covering for her inability to write.

William Craft took the role of Johnson’s devoted enslaved valet. His appearance was well suited for this role, and it enabled him to nurture the ailing Johnson. He was trained as a cabinet maker, and it was customary for him to travel throughout the region. This travel gave him the opportunity to acquire knowledge that was important for the journey north. Though the money he earned as a cabinet maker was confiscated by his owner, he was allowed to earn separate funds that he kept. He used this money to pay for the many expenses on the route to freedom.

Christmas season was selected for their departure because it was one of the few occasions that enslaved people could get a “pass.” The holiday pass provided permission to visit nearby relatives for a few days and served as a great cover for the Crafts’ initial absence.

Their quest for freedom was well designed, but failure would result in severe consequences: brutal whippings, mutilated bodies, sale to the “deep” South or worse. From the beginning of their journey to the end, they faced harrowing experiences that caused them to question their ability to succeed.

The morning of departure, Ellen purchased train tickets to Savannah, the first leg of the journey. She chose a window seat in one of the best carriages but was filled with fear when she saw that the gentleman who approached to be her seat mate was Mr. Cray, a very close friend of her master who had known her for years. Her fears subsided when he greeted her, “It is a very fine morning, sir.”

Purchasing steamer tickets from Charleston, South Carolina, to Wilmington, North Carolina, proved to be a nearly unsurmountable challenge. To prevent white abolitionists from transporting and freeing enslaved persons, slaveholders purchasing tickets had to provide verification that each enslaved person with them was indeed their property. Often, this policy detained travelers for days. The Crafts were able to get around it only because a military officer from their previous steamer happened by and vouched for them.

With much joy and relief, Ellen and William Craft arrived safely in Philadelphia precisely on December 25, 1848. Freedom, what a magnificent Christmas gift!

The life stories, trials and tribulations of enslaved people such as the Crafts are found in a wealth of Library material. To explore these resources, an excellent starting point is The Slavery Resource Guide, compiled by the Library’s Researcher and Reference Services Division. This guide focuses on the wide range of digital material associated with the period of enslavement in various Library collections.

Looking for other materials on our website related to African-American history? Try exploring our African-American history resources guides, created by the Researcher and Reference Services Division, or contact us for help.

New Acquisition: Billy Strayhorn Archive

This is a guest post by Larry Appelbaum, senior reference librarian and jazz specialist in the Music Division. It was first published on “In the Muse,” the division’s blog. Appelbaum interviewed Gregory Morris, nephew of Billy Strayhorn, to mark the Library’s acquisition of the Billy Strayhorn Music Manuscripts and Estate Papers.

[image error]

Billy Strayhorn. Music Division.

In January 2017, I traveled to a suburb outside of Phoenix, Arizona, to meet Gregory Morris and family. Morris is the nephew of Billy Strayhorn and executor of the Billy Strayhorn Estate. Dr. Morris, a retired educator originally from Pittsburgh, kept the collection in safe hands for nearly five decades. The papers, including holograph scores, manuscripts, photographs and business papers, are a treasure trove for researchers and scholars of 20th-century American music. They are also of special interest to anyone interested in the work of Duke Ellington, with whom Strayhorn worked and collaborated until his early death from esophageal cancer in 1967. It’s taken nearly a year to process and catalog the collection, but it is now available for researchers to consult in the Performing Arts Reading Room; an online finding aid has also been prepared.

I interviewed Dr. Morris via email about the importance of the collection and significance of the materials for scholars from various disciplines. Here are his responses.

Billy Strayhorn died on May 31, 1967. Pick up the story from there. Did he discuss with you what he wanted for his papers?

A few years before my uncle, Billy Strayhorn, died, he asked if I would be the executor of his estate. I asked what that meant, and he said to take care of his stuff. I agreed to serve. Upon his death, I gathered his belongings and music from his apartment. I surmised from his comments that he wanted me to make certain that he got credit for all the work he had written. That meant that everything that had not been copyrighted should be copyrighted in his name.

[image error]

Strayhorn’s essay “Harmony.” Music Division.

Give an idea of what’s in the collection and how it might serve musical scholarship.

In the Billy Strayhorn collection, there are original manuscripts, titled and untitled, that would enable scholars to examine how Billy wrote music. He wrote many parts for specific musicians in the orchestra. A close study may reveal other secrets about Strayhorn’s approach to composition.

What kind of creative community did Billy emerge from in Pittsburgh?

Pittsburgh, a relatively small city, had a major symphony orchestra and opera company, as well as a Negro opera company. Billy studied classical piano for many years and then moved into jazz. Pittsburgh has a rich jazz history that produced Ahmad Jamal, Mary Lou Williams, Art Blakey, Billy Strayhorn, Ray Brown, Dakota Staton, Billy Eckstine, Dodo Marmarosa, Roy Eldridge, Erroll Garner, Earl “Fatha” Hines and many others. The free expression of the listening and learning of music flowed like the three rivers.

What items resonate the most with you and the family? Surprises or revelations?

I was pleasantly surprised by the volume and variety of music Billy created such as “Valse,” “Chelsea Bridge,” “Lush Life,” “Upper Manhattan Medical Group,” “Take the ‘A’ Train,” “Swing Dance,” “Something to Live For” and “Blood Count.”

Do you feel Duke ever exploited Billy’s good nature?

Duke and his sister, Ruth Ellington, thought they owned everything Billy created and produced, including songs he wrote prior to leaving Pittsburgh.

Can you tell from listening which pieces were composed by Duke versus Billy?

Personally, I cannot, but Strayhorn aficionados can distinguish between the two.

We know which Strayhorn compositions are most famous. Any thoughts about which have the most musical significance?

Billy had so many different periods of writing. One significant period was in 1941 during the ASCAP strike. Billy was responsible for filling the Ellington band book with new songs since Ellington was restricted from performing any of his compositions on the radio — the radio was the life blood of the band. Billy’s most famous song was “Take the ‘A’ Train,” which became Ellington’s theme song. There was also a string of titles that are some of the most often recorded today. Among these compositions was “Johnny Come Lately.” That and others like it revealed that Strayhorn was in tune with the soon-rising style of be-bop.

How about his work before joining Ellington?

Before joining Duke Ellington, he wrote “Something to Live For” for his trio, the Mad Hatters, in Pittsburgh. He also wrote a production for Westinghouse High School entitled “Fantastic Rhythm.” From “Fantastic Rhythm,” “My Little Brown Book” remains. Billy also wrote “Lush Life” before leaving Pittsburgh. It is interesting that this title was never part of the Ellington book, and Ellington never performed or recorded it.

[image error]

Gregory Morris with wife Thelma Morris (center) and Strayhorn scholar Alyce Claerbaut. Photo by Larry Appelbaum.

What was the role of Walter Van De Leur in organizing the collection?

What I brought from Billy’s apartment was from my nonmusical background lots of paper. I had many people look at it, but no one came back until David Hadju introduced us to Walter van de Leur. Walter came to Pittsburgh to organize and catalog what we had brought from Billy’s apartment. Walter organized the manuscripts and spent 10 years studying the music. Since Walter was a fellow in the Ellington Collection at the Smithsonian, he could compare the Ellington hand and the Strayhorn hand. As a result of Walter’s work, he took copies home to the Netherlands to have the Dutch Jazz Orchestra play them. It eventually produced “A Portrait of a Silk Thread: Newly Discovered Works of Billy Strayhorn.”

What did you think of Van De Leur’s book and David Hajdu’s?

David Hajdu’s book, “Lush Life,” explored the life of Billy Strayhorn, while Walter van de Leur’s book, “Something to Live For,” explored the music and the genius of Billy Strayhorn. Both were milestones in the effort to advance the legacy of Billy Strayhorn.

Are there any aspects of Billy’s life or work that have not yet been adequately examined?

A researcher can always find something to pique their interest.

What made you feel the Library of Congress was the appropriate home for the collection?

The Library of Congress was selected because it is the premier repository for valuable documents. The Library is also easily accessed by scholars and, being in our nation’s capital, it is in close proximity to the many museums and research centers of the Smithsonian.

Happy 30th Birthday, National Film Registry

Today we announced the 2018 National Film Registry selections! Read the following guest post by Stephen Leggett, program coordinator for the National Film Preservation Board, to find out how the registry helps to ensure the survival of our cinematic heritage. Scroll to the bottom to see video clips of this year’s selections.

From an unexpected beginning, the National Film Registry has established itself as an important record of American cultural creativity, a modern-day Noah’s Ark of dazzling artistic icons. The registry, a Library of Congress program, this year marks its 30th anniversary—three decades of ensuring the survival and accessibility of America’s cinematic heritage.

Amid a national debate over the colorization of black-and-white films, Congress passed the National Film Preservation Act in 1988, recognizing motion pictures as a “significant American art form deserving of protection.”

The act created in the Library a 13-member National Film Preservation Board comprised of industry groups, artist guilds, film historians and archival organizations. It mandated selection by the Librarian of Congress, after consulting with the board, of up to 25 “culturally, historically or aesthetically significant” American films each year to a National Film Registry.

Films are chosen in a three-step process: public nominations, discussion by the board and final selection by the Librarian of Congress after consulting with Library experts. Public nominations have increased over time (last year, over 5,200 individual titles were proposed) and often feature creative campaigns: One write-in effort used a full-court press by Indiana schoolchildren in support of “Hoosiers”—teamwork of which Gene Hackman would approve.

To narrow the field, the board holds spirited, candid discussions on the merits of titles and advocates forcefully for different types of films (Hollywood classics, silent films, documentaries, home movies, experimental works).

Once a film is chosen, the Library ensures the film either has already been preserved or will be. Registry titles are saved by a conservation honor roll: film studios, preservation organizations and archives, including the Library’s Packard Campus. Almost all are now available in some format, be it DVDs, streaming, screenings or a mélange of cable channels.

Today, the board contains 44 members/alternates, and the registry numbers 750 titles. Neither a compilation of the best or most-popular films, the registry instead represents works the librarian and board deem significant and having stood the test of time. The registry’s incredible variety showcases the many creative paths American cinema has taken since its emergence in the early 1890s.

Watch Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden introduce the 2018 registry and see clips of the films below. Be on the lookout for the January/February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine which will be all about film.

{mediaObjectId:'7CC37B1063860004E0538C93F1160004',playerSize:'mediumStandard'}

TCM Celebrates 30 Years of the National Film Registry

Tomorrow is the big day! On Wednesday, December 12, we will announce the 2018 National Film Registry selections. Be the first to know by subscribing to our news alert. This is the 30th year of the registry and we have been highlighting films added each year on our “Now See Hear” blog.

Our friends at TCM (Turner Classic Movies) will show films from the registry tonight and tomorrow to help us celebrate! Here is the lineup:

Tuesday, December 11 on TCM:

Stagecoach (1939, inducted into the National Film Registry in 1995): 8:00 p.m. ET
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966, inducted 2013): 10:00 p.m.
Easy Rider (1969, inducted 1998): 12:30 a.m.
Mildred Pierce (1945, inducted 1996): 2:30 a.m.
The Mark of Zorro (1920, inducted into the registry 2015): 4:30 a.m.

Martin Scorsese, a member of the National Film Preservation Board (public advisory group to the Librarian of Congress), says this lineup “gives you a little thumbnail history of Hollywood moviemaking from the silent era through the very end of the studio system.” Read more of Scorsese’s comments on these registry films.

[image error]

Mildred Pierce ad from 1945 edition of Modern Screen. Courtesy Media History Digital Library.

[image error]

Motion picture poster for Easy Rider, 1969. Library of Congress.

[image error]

Douglas Fairbanks, Marguerite De La Motte, Robert McKim in The Mark of Zorro. Library of Congress.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wednesday, December 12 on TCM (8:00 p.m. ET)
[image error]

TCM’s Leonard Maltin interviews Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about the National Film Registry selections for 2017. Photo by Shawn Miller.

 

On Wednesday, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and Leonard Maltin kick off the watch party by discussing the 2018 list and announcing the newest registry additions that will be shown on TCM that night. Read more about TCM’s National Film Registry tribute.

The 2018 list will be announced early tomorrow! Check our home page for the latest news.

Uncovering Surprises in the Collections, Serendipitously

This is a guest post by Jer Thorp, the Library’s innovator-in-residence. On November 8, he took over the @LibraryCongress Twitter account to host a #SerendipityRun in which participants connected with one another and shed new light on Library holdings by taking a serendipitous “run” through the online collections. Here Thorp describes the inspiration behind this experiment in making the accidental purposeful.

Let’s start with a story about two men named Horace.

One of them was Horace Walpole, son of the first British prime minister, parliamentarian, art collector, wanderer, man of letters. On January 28, 1754, this Horace wrote a letter to another Horace — Horace Mann, a diplomat living in Florence. In the letter, Walpole described a painting he’d recently acquired by Giorgio Vasari, a portrait of an Italian noblewoman named Bianca Capello.

“Her Serene Highness,” Walpole wrote of the painting, “is arrived safe at a palace lately taken for her in Arlington Street. She has been much visited by the quality and gentry, and pleases universally by the graces of her person and comeliness of her deportment.”

Horace #1 goes on to tell Horace #2 that he has “bespoken” a frame for the painting, an elaborate affair meant to match the elegance of the painting. The frame has the lady’s grand-ducal coronet at top, a label in Latin “as short and expressive as Tacitus” and two coats of arms on the bottom: Capello’s own and the Medici’s (Capello was the second wife of Francesco I de’ Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany). In researching these insignia, Walpole made a discovery, which he shared in his letter to Mann: Both sets of heraldry contained the same symbol, a fleur-de-lis on a blue ball.

This fact came to him not through search but rather through coincidence — through the purchase of the painting and his decision to commission a frame. There is a word for this this kind of discovery, made by chance, and we find it coined for the first time in the next lines of the letter:

This discovery, indeed, is almost of that kind which I call Serendipity, a very expressive word, which, as I have nothing better to tell you, I shall endeavour to explain to you: you will understand it better by the derivation than by the definition. I once read a silly fairy tale, called The Three Princes of Serendip: as their Highnesses travelled, they were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things which they were not in quest of: for instance, one of them discovered that a mule blind of the right eye had travelled the same road lately, because the grass was eaten only on the left side, where it was worse than on the right. Now do you understand Serendipity?

Walpole’s phrase — “of things which they were not in quest of” — has rattled around my mind during my year at the Library, one of the world’s great research institutions. As you read this, many dozens of scholars and genealogists, amateur and professional, are filling out call slips, consulting with librarians, viewing materials and making notes in the Library’s many reading rooms. These people, for the most part, are “in quest of” something. They’ve come to the Library to read a particular book, to dig into a specific manuscript, to look at a photograph or to listen to a recording.

But what of those of us who are not in quest of something? What if we come to the Library not to look for a specific thing, but instead in the hopes of stumbling upon something wonderful?

Lately, I’ve been experimenting with ways to foster serendipity, tools and methods that make the accidental a little bit more purposeful. Serendipity is not something that you can try to look at directly. You can do your best to cultivate it, though, and one way to do that is to find fertile soil for chance. For example, Library of Time, a clock that displays time through titles of random objects from the Library’s collection.

[image error]

A screen shot from the Library of Time.

This is a tool that functions the opposite of a search engine. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to use Library of Time with any specific purpose. Anything that you might find comes from some combination of patience and luck.

Another serendipitous tool I’ve made is called Library of Color. As with the clock, this tool uses the titles of works from the collection. However, it shows them to you in a more ordered way: through the creation of huge color palettes, generated by color words that the titles contain. This tool gives you more control than Library of Time, but it still doesn’t really let you search with purpose. Looking at images whose titles contain the word “blue,” you are as likely to find a musician from New Orleans as you are a postcard of the Aegean. By design, there is a lot of accident to be found.

[image error]

A screen shot from the Library of Color in which each small color slice represents an object in the collection.

These two tools are fun to use. But they’re a bit lonely, aren’t they? While it’s possible to experience either of them with another person, in a crowd, with a class, chances are you’ll use them alone. One of the things I’ve come to understand about serendipity is that it is a social thing — it works better with friends. People are wonderful engines of chance, and when you engage in the act of finding with another human, or with a group of humans, you are more likely to stumble on the unexpected. Horace #1’s “silly fairy tale” was not, for a reason, titled “The One Prince of Serendip.”

Serendipity also tends to beget more serendipity. In groups, one person’s strange discovery spurs another’s, such that small sparks of coincidence can be readily fanned into bonfires of inspiration. This property of serendipity was at the center of an experiment I led a week ago on the @LibraryCongress Twitter account — #SerendipityRun.

The idea was simple: We’d start with a single item from the collection, and we’d ask the Library’s followers to post things that in some way reminded them of it. We’d Kevin Bacon our way from object to object, from image to book to film to website to web page. Over the course of two hours, we’d see how far and wide we could range as one big, collective, serendipity-powered search engine.

And range, we did. Within the first 10 minutes, we’d moved from a handwritten letter by Rosa Parks to suffragettes on horseback, baobab trees and maps of the Turkish Empire. Later we’d drift together to Babe the Blue Ox, One Direction, W.E.B Du Bois and photos of kittens (of course). We saw aerial images of World War I trenches, hand-drawn diagrams for dances and photographs of Houdini’s great escapes. We ended up at a map of the United States, shaped like a pig.

[image error]

One of #SerendipityRun’s last surfaced items, a U.S. map in the shape of a pig, surrounded by pigs representing the different states, with notations about state foods.

None of this was planned, which is not to say that our run didn’t take us to useful places. I had no idea that we’d find one of the Library’s banjos or a collection of 2,753 speech accents. One of #SerendipityRun’s participants found a photo of the boat her parents had migrated to the U.S. aboard more than eight decades previously.

Years ago, I had the chance to collaborate with the writer and photographer Teju Cole on a project called “The Time of the Game.” For the piece, Teju engaged with thousands of people on Twitter, asking them to post photos of themselves watching the 2014 World Cup Final. The result was a collection of images, all from different places in the world of the same thing: a soccer game on a television. Working with Mario Klingemann, I made a web interface that overlaid all of these unique images exactly on top of one another so that it looked like everyone was watching the same TV set. In an essay he wrote about the project, Cole referred to “The Time of the Game” as an experiment in “public time,” which he described as the chronological equivalent of public space. “It is basically about finding ways to make the public space intimate, and yet to do it without going directly to Kumbaya,” he wrote. “Under the guise of football, we actually testify to each other’s existence.”

[image error]

“The Time of the Game” by Teju Cole, Jer Thorp and Mario Klingemann.

#SerendipityRun was likewise an experiment in public time. It gave its participants a chance to be in the Library’s collections together at the same time, to humanize a vast dataset of hundreds of millions of objects together, to weave the stories held by the books and photos and films and banjos with stories of their own, all at the same moment.

Horace #1 said that serendipity was a kind of divination — a seeking of guidance by which by which he found everything he wanted, “à point nommé, wherever I dip for it”. À point nommé: just when needed.

With #SerendipityRun and the projects that will follow over the coming months, I hope that we can all find new ways to roam the Library’s collections, to share public time with others and to discover strange and wonderful things.

Visit labs.loc.gov to see more of the work that Thorp has done as Innovator-in-Residence.

“Forbidden Planet”: National Film Registry 30/30

The following is part of a 30-post series on the Library’s Now See Hear! blog celebrating 30 years of our National Film Registry, which selects 25 films each year showcasing the range and diversity of American film heritage to increase awareness for its preservation. The 30th National Film Registry selections will be announced next month. This post was written by Cary O’Dell, boards assistant to the National Film Preservation Board and the National Recording Preservation Board.

[image error]We are only days away from the latest announcement about the newest 25 films being  added to the National Film Registry.  That big reveal will occur on December 12, 2018.  In the meantime, take a new look at “Forbidden Planet,” the classic MGM science fiction film that was named to the Registry in 2013.

Based loosely on “The Tempest,” and the film debut of Robby the Robot–soon to have a long career on both film and television–author Ian Olney recaps the film and gives some of the reasons it earned its spot on the Registry by saying:

Visually stunning and thematically rich, Fred M.Wilcox’s ‘Forbidden Planet’ is a landmark film in science-fiction cinema. Set in the twenty-third century, it tells the story of a United Planets space cruiser sent to the distant world of Altair IV to investigate the fate of a group of colonists with whom Earth has lost contact. Upon landing, the ship’s commander J.J. Adams (Leslie Nielsen) and his crew learn that most of the colonists are dead, the victims of a mysterious planetary force. The sole survivors are a scientist, Dr. Edward Morbius (Walter Pidgeon), and his teenage daughter Altaira (Anne Francis), who live comfortably in a fortified home, their needs tended to by a mechanical servant, Robby the Robot. Morbius insists that he and Altaira are perfectly safe and demands that their would-be rescuers leave them in peace.

Read the rest of the Olney “Forbidden Planet” (PDF) essay.

Title:  “Forbidden Planet”

Year of Release:  1956

Year Added to the National Film Registry:  2013

See a sortable list of all films on the National Film Registry.

Trivia:  This film was the debut feature film of Leslie Nielsen.

Subscribe to the Now See Hear! blog and read about another great film every day up until Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announces the 30th anniversary National Film Registry selections on December 12, 2018.

Letters About Literature: A Life-Changing Book

This is a guest blog post by Maya Mau, a 10th-grade student at West Windsor–Plainsboro High School North in Plainsboro Township, New Jersey. She is a national winner of the 2017–18 Letters About Literature contest , a reading and writing competition for students in grades four through 12 that involves reading a work and writing to its author (living or dead). Entries for the 2018–19 contest are now being accepted. Here Mau writes about her experience as a participant.  

[image error]

Maya Mau

It was my ninth-grade language-arts teacher who announced that we would be writing letters – something that I hadn’t done since I was in elementary school. Specifically, we were to write a letter to the author of a book that had changed our lives. In the beginning, I was skeptical. The idea of a book that had changed my life seemed a bit far-fetched and lofty. So, naturally, I went about it the wrong way. I tried thinking of every single book I’d read that had had any discernable impact on my life.

Half-heartedly, I picked up a few books from the library. A week went by and I bounced from novel to novel, unable to decide on one.

Funnily enough, it was my sister, Maddy, who suggested that I should look at this assignment another way. Instead of trying to find a book first, she told me to think of something significant in my life. Immediately, my thoughts went to her. Because she had been born blind, a large part of my life is intertwined with Maddy’s, more so than some other siblings. It was then that I visited my own bookshelf. Now that I think about it, that should have been the first place I looked.

I saw Helen Keller’s “The Story of My Life” sitting between my math textbook and science fiction novel. Pulling it off the shelf triggered countless memories I had of reading and re-reading this book – of laying on the ground next to my sister and pouring over words that she helped me understand. I wondered why I hadn’t thought of Helen’s memoir earlier. Sometimes the most obvious choices are right under our noses, and it took me a while to figure that out.

My letter wrote itself after that. My sister and I have desks right next to each other in our “office,” so I frequently questioned her about everything I was writing about. She remembered how Helen’s book changed our relationship even better than I could. I pulled certain quotes from the memoir to enforce points in my letter and analyzed them, linking them to specific experiences I had with my own sister. My sister was by far my best critic. I also met with my teacher to go over my letter. After hours of peer editing, revising and spell-checking, my letter was sent in with the 24 other submissions from our class.

When my name didn’t show up on the semi-finalist list sent to my language-arts teacher a few weeks later, I pushed my letter to the back of my mind and continued adjusting to high school life. I eventually shared my finished letter with the rest of my family – it was the first time I had written about my experiences having Maddy as a sister, and I was excited to share Helen’s memoir with them.

You might be wondering how my letter reached the national competition if it hadn’t even passed the semi-finals for New Jersey. My teacher pulled me aside during class near the middle of the school year and told me that she had sent my letter back to the judges after the list had come out. It turned out that the judges simply hadn’t read my submission! They sent the letter on to the national judges, and I was announced as a national finalist.

The email sent to me informing me of my letter’s success showed up in my inbox during the school day, so it was my mom who told me about it after school ended. The first person I told after hearing the news was my sister – we were both super excited that everyone would soon be able to learn about how Helen’s memoir changed our lives.

This letter forced me to reflect on my relationship with my sister in a way that I had never really done before. It forced me to put my thoughts and experiences into words, which was hard at first. As I look back on my writing process and finished letter, I’m realizing more and more that writing the letter was for me more than anyone else. It helped me be more self-aware of how I was interacting with Maddy – a reminder of what I had read in Helen’s memoir all those years before.

But enough about me. Because last year was my first time submitting anything to this competition, there were so many things that I could have done differently to make the process smoother. Now that I’m rereading my letter after nearly a year since it was written, I’m still finding entire paragraphs that could be rewritten. I noticed some sentences that were unnecessary and others that were lacking. For students looking to enter this contest, it is so important that you start early. Don’t wait until a week before the submission deadline to go book-searching. This way, you can put your letter down for a week or so and visit it again later with fresh eyes. You’ll notice things you’ve never noticed before. To get another pair of fresh eyes, recruit a peer or teacher to look over your letter with you. Their feedback is invaluable.

Arguably the most important component of writing a heartfelt letter is finding a book that has actually changed your life. The first few I considered were very important to me, but they weren’t nearly as personal as Helen’s memoir. I learned lessons from them, yes, but I rarely used them explicitly in day-to-day life. With Maddy, however, I was able to apply what I learned from “The Story of My Life” every single day. No matter how well you write, the idea behind your letter is the most significant.

This contest is a brilliant way to bring literature and self-reflection together. Writing a letter about a book that has changed your life is more than just a submission to a contest – it’s a way to share what you’ve learned with the world.

The 2018-19 Letters About Literature contest for young readers is made possible by a generous grant from the Dollar General Literacy Foundation, with additional support from gifts to the Center for the Book in the Library of Congress, which promotes the contest through its affiliate Centers for the Book, state libraries and other organizations.

Inquiring Minds: Inspiring Students Through Primary Sources

[image error]

Saundra Maley (center) with her students Stephanie Salinas (left) and Lorena Rodriguez in the Manuscript Reading Room. Photo by Shawn Miller.

For more than 20 years now, Saundra Rose Maley has required her English composition students — first from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and now from nearby Montgomery College in Montgomery County, Maryland — to make a short trek to the Library of Congress. There, in the Manuscript Division, the students research primary sources, looking for a subject that captures their imagination. By the end of the semester, the students must write a paper reporting on what they discovered.

Besides being an English professor, Maley is a textbook writer and poet. She has published in journals including The Calvert Review, Dryad, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Sligo Journal and Innisfree Poetry Journal. Her first book of poems, “Disappearing Act,” was published in 2015. She also co-edited with Anne Wright “A Wild Perfection: The Selected Letters of James Wright,” and she is now working with Anne Wright on a book about James Wright and translation.

Here Maley answers a few questions about her background and her association with the Library.

Tell us a little about your background.

I’m a second-generation native Washingtonian and my family moved to Silver Spring, Maryland, when I was a senior in high school. So, for in-state tuition I was able to go to the University of Maryland for my bachelor’s in English, my master’s in English and finally my Ph. D. in English — maybe a record! Obviously, I am not big on change, but I am adventurous when it comes to research and writing — that’s one reason I started to send my students to the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.

What prompted you to start assigning your students to do research at the Library?

When I finished my dissertation on the poet James Wright, a professor sent me to see another University of Maryland graduate, Francis Burkle-Young, to help me format my footnotes, which back then were too many for my primitive word processor to handle.

Subsequently, Young and I co-wrote two textbooks — “The Art of the Footnote: The Intelligent Student’s Guide to the Art and Science of Annotating Texts” and “The Research Guide for the Digital Age: A New Handbook to Research and Writing for the Serious Student” — neither of which, for obvious reasons, became a bestseller. But just writing the books was an education in the art of research for me.

Young was a historian and a researcher’s researcher. He had spent many hours in the Main Reading Room of the Library as a boy when his mother worked there. Although my first love is and always has been poetry, my research on James Wright sparked a love of research in me.

Young encouraged my “inner-researcher” to think about sending my composition students to do research at the Library of Congress. I took him up on that idea and have been doing so ever since.

What, exactly, do you ask your students to do?

I ask them to think of themselves as scholarly detectives trying to find an original piece of information or a new slant on a person whose papers are in the Manuscript Division. I steer them toward some unknown figures, but allow them to work on more notable characters if they can dig around in the primary sources and find something new to write about.

How have they responded to being assigned Library research?

Most students are excited about the prospect of doing research at the Library and, at the same time, somewhat intimidated, but I walk them through the process. Every semester there are at least five (maybe more) students who turn out to be excellent researchers and discover that they really like doing the work. Some even decide to change their majors when they discover something intriguing about their research subject or that person’s field that interests them a great deal. I often put it to them this way: If no one had ever thrown a basketball to LeBron James, he would never have known how good he was at basketball. Of course, the names of the athletes have changed over the years.

Even those students who don’t turn out to be “basketball” stars get a great deal out of the experience of going to the Manuscript Division, which most visit at least twice — others go many times during the semester. Since the course I teach is a composition course, I am always amazed at how much every student’s writing improves as a result of the research. The reading of scholarly biographies, articles and other sources they dig up makes a big difference in their writing and in the way they think about research. I see their confidence grow.

What are some of the students’ more surprising findings?

Every semester I learn a great deal from my students and their research, and this keeps things interesting for me and for them. The collections are treasure troves, and I ask students to bring in copies of the primary sources they are using (letters, diary entries, notebooks, speeches and so on) to show to the class. This way we all have a chance to see these rare materials. The students bring back photos on their cell phones or copies on flash drives to show on the drop-down screens in the classroom. Sometimes we have to puzzle out the cursive and the context, which can be difficult, but is always rewarding.

Here are a few interesting finds students have brought in over the years:

One student found a little-known essay on eugenics in Alexander Graham Bell’s huge collection and centered her work on Bell’s sometimes-controversial ideas about eugenics. She discussed his essay and the genetic ideas he put forward on marriage and even discussed his experiments with breeding sheep on his farm on Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia.
Another student brought in a letter signed by Leonard Darwin to show the class. When we saw the name Darwin, someone asked if this Leonard Darwin was related to Charles Darwin. It turns out it was his brother, and the contents of that letter and its relation to the famous Mr. Darwin gave the student a great lead for his research.
In a small collection of Nikola Tesla material, one student uncovered the letters of Robert Underwood Johnson, who turned out to be Tesla’s best friend. There were quite a few letters between the two men, and they reveal a more human side of the enigmatic and eccentric inventor.
One of my favorite discoveries by a student came from the Fredric Wertham Collection. Wertham was a psychiatrist best known for his belief that violence in comic books had a harmful effect on the mental health of children — his work led to the creation of the comic book code in the 1950s. Among Wertham’s papers, this student found the papers of Horace Westlake Frink, a psychiatrist who had been analyzed by A. A. Brill, Sigmund Freud and Wertham. After his analysis of Frink, Freud decided that Frink was to replace Brill as his American deputy. Frink, who later died in a mental hospital, has been forgotten, despite his central place in the early days of psychology — but what an amazing research adventure came out of that topic.

How have you worked with staff over the years?

When I first started sending my students to the Manuscript Division, I had to write individual letters of introduction for each student, since the division requires such letters for undergraduates. After consulting with Jeff Flannery, head of the Manuscript Reading Room, we decided that Patrick Kerwin, a manuscript reference librarian, would instruct the class each semester to prepare students prior to their visits. This has been a great help. The students feel more comfortable about going to the Library after having met Patrick, and he goes out of his way to be helpful to them throughout the semester. Students come back to class with stories of how Patrick and the other librarians guide them to relevant resources and materials for their research — the librarians make this experience invaluable for my students.

Do you have advice for other professors considering asking their students to use the Library’s resources?

I think I would say to them, especially those who teach at colleges and universities in the Washington, D.C., metro area, why not give the students the opportunity to visit the Library of Congress, one of the greatest libraries in the world? For those professors who are not in the area, I would suggest they look into ways to use the online collections that have been digitized. There are many — Frederick Douglass, Alexander Graham Bell, Clara Barton, Susan B. Anthony, Benjamin Franklin and Ulysses S. Grant, to name a few.

As the Library’s online page for teachers states: “Primary sources are the raw materials of history.”

“Rear Window”: National Film Registry 30/30

The following is part of a 30-post series on the Library’s Now See Hear! blog celebrating 30 years of our National Film Registry, which selects 25 films each year showcasing the range and diversity of American film heritage to increase awareness for its preservation. The 30th National Film Registry selections will be announced next month. This post was written by Cary O’Dell, boards assistant to the National Film Preservation Board and the National Recording Preservation Board.

[image error]“Rear Window” is the classic film thriller of window-watching and murder; it was added to the Registry in 2005. Former Library of Congress Film Preservation Board member John Belton recapped the film:

“Rear Window” tells the story of a globe-trotting photo-journalist who breaks his leg on a dangerous assignment and is confined to a wheelchair in his Greenwich Village apartment with nothing to do all day but look out the window at his neighbors. The film alternates back and forth between two story strands—a murder mystery and a love story, intertwining the two plot lines through the theme of voyeurism. The hero’s voyeurism is integral to the murder mystery which he pieces together by looking out his window, but it is also connected to his relationship with the heroine. Refusing to commit himself to a love relationship, Jeff (James Stewart) prefers to look out his window at his neighbors across the way rather than to look at Lisa (Grace Kelly), the beautiful woman who is in the same room with him and who repeatedly throws herself at him. He opts for the freedom (and irresponsibility) of a one-way relationship based on voyeurism (seeing without being seen) instead of a two-way relationship rooted in mutual regard, recognition, and concern.

Read the rest of the “Rear Window” essay (PDF).

Title: “Rear Window”

Year of Release: 1954

Year Added to the National Film Registry: 2005

See a sortable list of all films on the National Film Registry.

Trivia: Not surprisingly, Alfred Hitchcock has several films on the National Registry including “Vertigo” (also with Jimmy Stewart), “Psycho,” “Notorious,” and “The Birds.”

Subscribe to the See Here Now! blog and read about another great film every day up until Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announces the 30th anniversary National Film Registry selections on December 12, 2018.

Native American Heritage Month: Bringing Native Voices to Light

[image error]

Dwayne Tomah performs at the Library on June 4. Donald Soctomah, the Passamaquoddy tribal historic preservation officer, stands behind him. Photo by Valda Morris.

On June 4 in the Madison Building’s West Dining Room, Dwayne Tomah of the Passamaquoddy Tribe of Maine stood to sing a tribal war song at a celebration organized by the American Folklife Center. It was an emotional moment for Tomah — the song hadn’t been performed publicly in 128 years.

He was able to do so, in part, because of modern digital technologies at the Library that had helped uncover indistinct words from an 1890 recording of the song in the Folklife Center’s collections.

“For me to stand here before you in 2018, to be able to sing our songs … is very powerful,” Tomah said. “To know that our language is still alive. I want to thank each and every one of you.”

For the past several years, the Library has been collaborating with the Passamaquoddy to digitize, curate and expand access to content from 31 Passamaquoddy recordings made in March 1890 by anthropologist Jesse Walter Fewkes. In addition to songs, Fewkes documented folktales, origin stories, vocabulary, numbers and more using wax cylinders, the recording medium of the day. Those cylinders are the oldest ethnographic field recordings known to survive anywhere; in 2002, they were added to the Library’s National Recording Registry in recognition of their cultural importance.

To begin sharing recordings online, the Folklife Center launched the project, Ancestral Voices, on the Library’s website in the spring. Eventually, field recordings of other tribal communities will join the Passamaquoddy’s online.

Ancestral Voices builds on the Folklife Center’s Federal Cylinder Project. From 1977 to 1987, that project preserved early ethnographic field recordings of the sung and spoken traditions of Native American communities by transferring audio from wax cylinders to reel-to-reel tape. The Library holds about 9,000 such cylinder recordings, the largest collection in the U.S. Researchers — many from native communities — can access listening copies in the Folklife Center reading room.

[image error]

Library audio preservationist Patrick Smetanick digitizes a wax cylinder using the Archeophone. Photo by Bryan Hoffa.

Ancestral Voices got started when former Librarian of Congress James Billington asked whether new digital tools at the Library might facilitate retrieval of additional content from aging media. For early Native American recordings, the query raised a question: “What does the Federal Cylinder Project in the digital age look like?” said Guha Shankar of the Folklife Center, an Ancestral Voices project coordinator.

The answer involved not only digital solutions but consideration of innovative ways to work with native communities to curate recordings — to the benefit of both the communities and other researchers.

The project began in earnest with the 2015 transfer of cylinders containing Native American field recordings from Capitol Hill to the state-of-the-art audio-visual conservation facilities at the Packard Campus in Culpeper, Virginia. Soon after, audio engineers there began digitizing the Passamaquoddy recordings using a specially designed modern cylinder player called the Archeophone.

At the time of the Federal Cylinder Project, few machines existed dedicated to extracting information from cylinders. Instead, project staff used modified period equipment from the heyday of cylinder recording — the late 19th and early 20th centuries, said Bryan Hoffa, a recording engineer at Packard.

Invented in France by a cylinder collector, the Archeophone’s components include a motor with variable speed control, modern stereo pickup and changeable styli that can fit wide cylinder grooves, all of which makes it possible to capture more information.

Hoffa recalls playing a Passamaquoddy recording on the Archeophone for the first time for Judith Gray, head of reference services for the Folklife Center and a longtime coordinator of the Federal Cylinder Project. “Her jaw just dropped; she couldn’t believe the difference,” Hoffa said.

After creating digital preservation copies of the Passamaquoddy recordings, Hoffa and his colleagues began the painstaking process of digital restoration. “You’re kind of peeling back layers of noise,” Hoffa said. “It’s like a surgical operation. … It’s subtle.”

Afterward, Hoffa said, it became clear what was being said on a few cylinders. On others, voices can now be heard where previously they could not.

As digitization proceeded, the Folklife Center began sharing files with Passamaquoddy community members. “They’re going through them to do translations, sort out the meanings that emerge from carefully listening to them,” Shankar said.

In turn, the Passamaquoddy are sharing their knowledge to help the Library correct and augment catalog records for digitized recordings — many records still include rudimentary descriptions supplied by early field recorders like Fewkes.

Two organizations — Local Contexts, a digital initiative based at New York University, and Mukurtu, a content-management system at Washington State University — are partners in helping to incorporate the Passamaquoddy’s perspective into Ancestral Voices.

Local Contexts developed digital labels for traditional knowledge released online to educate researchers about acceptable uses of the content; the Passamaquoddy adapted several labels for its Ancestral Voices recordings. Mukurtu hosts the Passamaquoddy’s website and arranges for transfer of data the tribe chooses to share with outside repositories like the Library.

“More than 100 years after these recordings were made, now they’re getting back into public circulation in a robust way, and the Library is at the forefront of leading that initiative in some really important ways,” Shankar said.

As for the Passamaquoddy, the Ancestral Voices project not only is helping the community recover its lost or forgotten history but also is building language fluency, which had seriously dwindled in recent years.

“This comes at an important time,” said Donald Soctomah, the tribe’s historic preservation officer. “It’s bringing a gift back to the tribe.”