Library of Congress's Blog, page 83

Sample a Taste of History This Thanksgiving!

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

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“What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking” in the Rare Book and Special Collections Reading Room. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Thanksgiving is a holiday that evokes thoughts of food and history. Many items in the Library of Congress’ collections capture the intersection between food and history, but the most notable may be an 1881 cookbook in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division by a formerly enslaved person who during her life received an array of accolades for her culinary creativity.

Abby Fisher’s cookbook, “What Mrs. Fisher Knows about Old Southern Cooking, Soups, Pickles, Preserves, Etc.,” was a pioneering work. It was one of the first cookbooks to provide detailed instructions and precise measurements – Fisher wanted to ensure that even a novice cook would have success using her recipes. Her cookbook was also one of the first by an African-American, and the oldest known cookbook by a formerly enslaved person.

Fisher was born in 1831 on a plantation in Orangeburg, South Carolina. Her father, Andrew James, was the French-speaking owner of the plantation and her mother, Abbie Clifton, a domestic enslaved person there. Abby Fisher developed and perfected her distinctive southern flavors as an enslaved cook on the plantation. Her signature recipes combined foods and spices from Africa with American foods.

After the Civil War, she eventually made her way to San Francisco with her husband, Alexander C. Fisher, and four of their 11 children. She used her culinary skills to establish a successful upscale catering business and, with her husband, she created a flourishing pickle, jam and preserve manufacturing business.

Fisher won the “Diploma,” the highest award possible from the Sacramento State Fair. She also won both a bronze and a silver medal from the San Francisco Mechanics’ Institute Fair. One juror noted, “Her pickles and sauces have a piquancy and flavor seldom equaled, and when once tasted, not soon forgotten.”

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An interior page of the cookbook. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Following these accolades, she was commissioned by the Women’s Institute of San Francisco and Oakland to compile her recipes. The goal was to have her recipes documented so her style of southern cooking could be passed on to future generations. This presented a considerable challenge. Even though Fisher was a successful entrepreneur, neither she nor her husband could read or write. Being a resourceful person, she decided to enlist the assistance of her clientele, and she dictated the recipes.

Fisher passed away between the 1910 and the 1920 census. But thanks to her extraordinary journey from plantation cook to business owner and author, her remarkable culinary traditions live on.

On June 10, 2003, the Henry Ford Museum in Ann Arbor, Michigan, opened a lunch-style restaurant, Mrs. Fisher’s Southern Cooking, created and named in her honor. The menu reflects her specific cuisine and highlights her culinary talents. In addition, reprints of her cookbook are available.

Perhaps one reason the museum created this restaurant is so visitors can sample a taste of history. For Thanksgiving this year, you have a similar opportunity: Mrs. Fisher’s entire cookbook is available online through the Internet Archive.

The Rare Book and Special Collections Division is fortunate enough to hold two copies of Fisher’s cookbook.

For more about the array of food-related collections at the Library, read a 2015 blog post by the Library’s culinary specialist, Alison Kelly.

And if you have any questions afterward, let us know!

30 Years of Movies in 30 Days

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Over on our “Now See Hear!” blog, we’ve been featuring a special series of posts celebrating the 30th anniversary of our National Film Registry. Each year since 1989, the Librarian of Congress has selected 25 films of cultural, historic and/or aesthetic importance that showcase the range and diversity of American film heritage to increase awareness for its preservation. We think this is a great opportunity to share stories behind these important films, one for each year that we’ve been adding to the Registry.

Our “30 Years of the National Film Registry” series launched with “Casablanca” (1942), [link]  which entered the Registry in its inaugural year, 1989. “Duck Soup” (1933) followed in 1990, and “King Kong” (1933) in 1991. Each blog post includes an in-depth essay on the importance of each of these classic films and why they are deserving of preservation. We keep the ball rolling today with “Detour” (1945), which was selected for the Registry in 1992.

You can subscribe to the “Now See Hear!” blog and keep up with this list of classics as we work through the years each day up through December 12, when Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden will announce the next 25 films to join the National Film Registry.

The First Film Version of Frankenstein, Newly Restored!

This is a guest post by Mike Mashon, head of the Moving Image Section of the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division. He writes about the first of many films based on Mary Shelley’s novel “Frankenstein,” published 200 years ago this year. The post is republished from the division’s blog, “Now See Hear!”

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A scene from “Frankenstein,” published on the cover of the March 15, 1910, issue of the Edison Kinetogram.

Rarely has the arrival of a film at the Library’s Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation occasioned as much anticipation as the day in April 2015 when we accessed into our collection the sole surviving nitrate print of the first cinematic adaptation of “Frankenstein.” It’s not because the film, produced in 1910 by the Edison Manufacturing Company, is all that revelatory—it’s most decidedly not—or because it’s especially rare, as a quick search on YouTube will attest. Rather, this is an instance in which the story of how a particular reel came to be in our collection is more interesting than the film itself.

As an acquisitions officer, I work a lot with collectors and have a great deal of respect for them. If it weren’t for collectors, huge chunks of film history would have vanished forever; in many ways, our Silent Film Project is a testament to them. But, sometimes, I have to explain to eager sellers that there’s a difference between rarity and value; just because there’s only one print of a particular film doesn’t mean the print has much monetary value if there’s no market for it.

The nitrate print of “Frankenstein” does, however, have market value, based not only on rarity, since it truly does seem to be the single extant print, but also crucially on the cultural durability of Mary Shelley’s 1818 creation, whose bicentennial we celebrate this year.

The print also comes with a bit of notoriety because of its previous owner: Alois F. “Al” Dettlaff of Cudahy, Wisconsin. He acquired the print as part of a larger collection in the 1950s, but he wasn’t aware of the film’s significance until the American Film Institute included “Frankenstein” on a list of “top 10 most wanted lost films” in 1980.

I never met Dettlaff, but it seems like everyone in film collecting circles has a story. Often they’re about the “Father Time” character he enjoyed portraying at film conventions, compete with robe, scythe and hourglass to complement his long white beard.

He was exceptionally protective of the “Frankenstein” print, traveling with it to film festivals and monster conventions. He even took it to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1986, where academy president and famed director Robert Wise was unable to convince him to let the reel be properly preserved and archived. Eventually, Dettlaff had the film transferred to DVDs he would sell at his appearances, and it’s rips from that DVD you can find on YouTube. Dettlaff died at home in 2005 surrounded by his film collection, including “Frankenstein,” still unpreserved.

Until now, that is.

The Library purchased the Dettlaff Collection in 2014. It is full of titles we are delighted to add to our holdings, but we were especially interested to see “Frankenstein,” joking that perhaps it might arrive from Wisconsin on a bed of spun gold.

While it came in a fairly nondescript can, it didn’t take us long to get the reel into our film preservation lab for a 2K scan in advance of photochemical preservation. From that 2K scan, we worked on a digital restoration. The film’s head credits and the first intertitle were missing, but fortunately the Edison Historic Site in East Orange, New Jersey, had a copy of the head credit we could drop into place; the intertitle was recreated using the style of the other titles. We asked Donald Sosin, a highly regarded silent film composer and accompanist, to provide a score.

The newly restored version of the 1910 “Frankenstein” is also available on the Library’s YouTube channel and in the National Screening Room, our recently launched digital collection of films. And, like most films in the screening room, it’s freely downloadable in both ProRes LT and MPEG-4 formats, complete with the Sosin score.

Not long after creating the monster, Victor Frankenstein was consumed with regrets, exclaiming that he “had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.”

In our case, however, reanimating this notorious bit of cinema history was, and remains, a delight.

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I Can’t Wait to Slow Down: Looking Forward to Tracy K. Smith on the Air

The following guest post is by Jeff Shotts, executive editor at Graywolf Press, publisher in association with the Library of Congress of the anthology “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time” by U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith.

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Tracy K. Smith. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Regular, daily poetry programming on the airwaves has not only been saved, it’s been revitalized. American Public Media, the Library of Congress and the Poetry Foundation recently announced a new program: “The Slowdown” with Tracy K. Smith, a weekday podcast debuting on November 26 and a radio broadcast beginning in January. “The Slowdown” will be a five-minute show that will include Tracy reading poems and offering a daily opportunity to listen and to participate by thinking deeply about what a poem can offer us and can open us to.

This is no small thing. We have not had regular, daily poetry programming broadcast from public radio nationally for more than a year, and to lose that major platform for poetry would have been a substantial loss for bringing us together, hearing poetry aloud, building new audiences and making apparent to the larger culture what many of us know—that poetry is as necessary and alive as it has ever been. Poetry is made to be spoken aloud, and like music, it is an art form suited for broadcast and for the kind of amplification that radio as a medium provides. It feels like an essential component of the overall vitality of poetry in our larger culture for it to be made available daily on national airwaves.

What might be in store for us in “The Slowdown” as we listen and tune in? The vision and the voice belong to Tracy K. Smith. We know from her four collections of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize-winning “Life on Mars” and most recently “Wade in the Water,” that her imagination roves to the far side of the universe and back earthward to the plaintive voices of Civil War veterans and old spirituals that contain a map inside their choral arrangements. For all the vastness across Tracy’s poetry, and the many various registers of her voice, the intimacy made possible by her work feels palpable to what we will hear in “The Slowdown.” Tracy’s poems collapse distances—whether they be distances of time or space—and I think that is what listeners will experience in Tracy’s voice and in what she reads.

From the announcement preview of “The Slowdown,” we already get Tracy’s signature personality as host, and it’s tantalizing to hear her wonderful reading of Steve Scafidi’s “For the Last American Buffalo” and think what other selections are in store. That poem is the final piece in Tracy’s landmark anthology, just published by Graywolf Press in association with the Library of Congress, titled “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time.”

This book is a brilliant showcase of contemporary poetry, and so elegantly conceived and arranged, and it may well give us an idea of some of the other poems that Tracy may feature on “The Slowdown” as it gets started. The chorus of voices presented in “American Journal” feels like an essential component of what Tracy is preparing—a multiplicity of experiences and not merely a singular one. In that way, I think we can expect a daily show that is deeply engaging, far-reaching in scope while being voiced seemingly right beside us, and it will be as tuned into the news of our time as much as it will also be a reprieve. I can’t wait to slow down.

World War I: Armistice Day

This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division, to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the armistice ending World War I.

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Woodrow Wilson in France around the time of negotiations for the Treaty of Versailles, which formally ended World War I.

“Everything for which America has fought has been accomplished,” wrote President Woodrow Wilson on Nov. 11, 1918, in a statement addressed to his “fellow countrymen.” The United States, he opined, helped to bring World War I to conclusion through “sober friendly counsel and by material aid,” ultimately delivering “just democracy throughout the world.”

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Nov. 11, 1918, statement from Wilson to his “fellow countrymen.”

Wilson issued a separate statement to the press, invoking higher powers and noting that the “eyes of the people have been opened and they see. The hand of God is laid upon the nations.” National leaders able to deliver the “clear heights of [God’s] own justice and mercy,” he said, would find favor in the new political landscape, politically and metaphysically.

If the president proclaimed success with words of cautious optimism, those around him uttered more definitive pronouncements. Wilson advisor and sometimes confidante, Colonel Edward M. House, cabled the president asserting that “autocracy is dead. … Long live democracy and its immortal leader.”

Armistice, 100 years old today, ended much of the fighting associated with World War I, clearly a welcome development. However, as demonstrated by the Library of Congress exhibition Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I, the ceasefire and reactions to it touched those engaged in fighting the war in many different ways that continue to reverberate a century later.

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Lester Westcott in uniform.

Among the rank and file, relief from months at the front was palpable, even if balanced by some harsh realities. “Another day would have seen me taking very desperate measures with my life,” Lester B. Westcott of the 51st Pioneer Infantry wrote to his mother. “Well I suppose you are very much relieved now that I have scared the Kaiser out of Germany and I have come out of the mill without a scratch and have every reason to believe I will return O.K.”

For African-American personnel – between 350,000 and 400,000 served in the segregated military during the war – suspension of hostilities enabled many to enjoy their time abroad in France, where they found freedom from America’s Jim Crow strictures. The jubilation of the European public over the war’s conclusion, accompanied by jazz provided by American regimental bands, made passing the months after armistice one of revelry. “[A]ll Paris taken away with ‘Jazz-band’ and our style of dancing,” wrote Charles Hamilton Houston in a January 1919 diary entry. “Colored boys all the go.” Houston would go on to become dean of Howard Law School, an NAACP litigator and a civil rights activist.

Although few veterans would argue in front of the Supreme Court, as did Houston, many black soldiers carried back with them a new racial consciousness that they devoted to securing civil rights – despite encountering some of the worst racially motivated urban violence in American history during summer 1919.

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Lester Westcott’s letter to his mother.

Civil rights advances aside, the caution Lester B. Westcott expressed in his letter to his mother spoke volumes about the experience of war. More than 126,000 Americans lost their lives, along with tens of millions of Europeans, Asians and Africans. The Ottoman, Russian and Austria-Hungarian empires collapsed, while new nations, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia, emerged. Independence movements in Asia and Africa deployed Wilson’s advocacy of self-determination to further their own break with colonialism.

But not everyone welcomed peace. George Patton, a lieutenant colonel and tank commander during the war, grew to appreciate the conflict on rare terms. “The more one sees of war, the better it is,” he wrote after arriving in Europe in 1917. “Of course there are a few deaths but … the party is worth the price of admission.”

The armistice filled him with “dismay” as he wrote in his poem “Peace” after the ceasefire’s announcement. Patton’s lyricism, or lack thereof, reveals his discomfort with peacetime realities:

When such times come, Oh! God of War

Grant that we pass midst strife

Knowing once more the ­whitehot joy

Of taking human life.

For the future general, World War II would deliver plenty of opportunity to indulge in the “whitehot joy” of warfare.

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“Peace,” by George Patton.

For Wilson, the armistice would prove to be his “greatest triumph and his greatest tragedy,” as historian John Milton Cooper Jr. points out. After all, once Wilson delivered his “Fourteen Points Speech” in January 1918 outlining his vision for peace in Europe, expectations ran high, and he became “for millions worldwide the icon” for a “just international society,” writes historian Erez Manela. Because of the speech’s discussion of self-determination, it resonated especially with peoples and nations under colonial rule. The speech was later embedded in the Versailles Treaty, which officially ended World War I.

Yet Wilson and the war are remembered more for what wasn’t accomplished. Europe and the world would engage violently again roughly two decades later with the Second World War. In the interim, the Senate refused to ratify the Versailles Treaty because of political differences and isolationism within the U.S. The treaty established the League of Nations – which also had its origins in Wilson’s “Fourteen Points” speech – as a forum for international cooperation and peace. But the league never enjoyed U.S. membership and failed to achieve most of its goals.

Still, the Versailles Treaty echoed through the decades. The League of Nations might have failed, but its successor, the United Nations, today functions much like the league was meant to. And international law has only expanded – the World Trade Organization now provides structures for international commerce that promote open economic exchange between nations.

By the beginning of the 21st century, presidents such as George W. Bush sought to emulate Wilson’s foreign-policy ideas, particularly in regard to Wilson’s emphasis on “self-determination” among nations and peoples and his focus on America’s role in spreading democracy. Indeed, many observers described Bush’s policies as Wilsonian.

Looking back, for ill and for good, it all began with the armistice 100 years ago today.

World War I Centennial, 2017–18 . With the most comprehensive collection of multiformat World War I holdings in the nation, the Library is a unique resource for primary source materials, education plans, public programs and on-site visitor experiences about the Great War including exhibits, symposia and book talks.

Inquiring Minds: A Prize-Winning Passion for Books

This is a guest post by Ena Selimovic, a winner of this year’s National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest, which recognizes outstanding book collecting by college and university students. The Library co-sponsors the contest with the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, the Fellowship of American Bibliographic Societies and the Grolier Club. Selimovic is working on a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Washington University in St. Louis. Here she answers a few questions about her love of books and her collection.

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Ena Selimovic

How did you come to be a book collector?

Stories have always been central to my family. My mother wanted to study literature in college, although she ended up studying biology. My brother was also an avid reader of fiction and, later, social and political theory. In the 1990s, as a result of the war in the former Yugoslavia, my family became refugees, and I found myself learning my third language before I turned 10.

My collection attests to this multiplicity of cultures, languages and life experiences – and the narratives that manifest the many combinations of the three.

Tell us a little about your collection.

I have more than 1,000 books now. When I first started collecting, I never imagined I would run out of room, but I am. At my parents’ house in St. Louis, I recently alphabetized my bookshelves to get a better sense of what I have there. I still live in St. Louis, so I can easily access those books during odd days of dissertation writing when I have this impulsive thought that I need a certain book, and I need it now, and I own it, margin notes and all, and it’s sitting on a shelf 20 miles away.

Some of the subject matter relates to courses I have taken or taught: literary modernities in Europe and America; children’s literature of the Holocaust and the Third Reich; first-year composition; introduction to comparative literature. The main collection at my own place relates more specifically to my dissertation project and to subjects I will always be interested in: minority discourses, nationalism, colonialism, critical race studies, narrative theory, humor.

When did you first begin collecting books?

In my junior year of high school, to the dismay of my mathematics teachers, it became clear I would be pursuing literature in college. “Pursue” seems like the pertinent word here, as reading and writing (with the exception of spelling) had not come easily for me, especially after the challenge of learning English. By this point, I had not only pursued Camus, Kafka, Atwood, Dostoevsky and Coetzee; I had also committed to being thorough and read all their works (often translations into English).

I wanted to convert my bedroom into a reading room, so I accumulated bookshelves and replaced my bed with a wide sofa I could sleep on. At the same time, I began to supplement trips to the library with buying books I saw myself rereading or talking about in the future. I became a very thorough reader, taking copious margin notes and recording favorite excerpts into a separate notebook – something that proved useful during my doctoral comprehensive exams a decade later, though I did not have this foresight!

I think I always had the urge to try not to forget, beginning early on with journaling in elementary school through my first years of graduate school. Reading and journaling became an ideological, existential way for me to understand and to reflect in the mode of the books I had been reading. The books I gravitated toward were most often about war, migration, multilingualism, “alienation,” colonialism and so on.

I also wanted to track my own development. I distinctly remember the point at which I decided to own all the books I had ever read, to see how far I had gotten in my reading comprehension, partly out of pride and partly out of a need to understand why things tend to turn out the way they do for so many people (the omission often being that they tend to turn out poorly). Another part of this desire was linked to the fact that my mother had lost all her books during the war. When I visited Bosnia during the summers, I would buy contemporary editions of the books she used to read.

What are some of your favorite books in your collection?

This is my favorite question, and one I always struggle to answer concisely! I can cheat by saying: anything by Flann O’Brien, Toni Morrison, Virginia Woolf, Adam Phillips or James Baldwin. Add Junot Díaz’s “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Or Anita Loos’ “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.” And Tillie Olsen’s “Yonnondio,” Salvador Plascencia’s “The People of Paper,” Aimee Phan’s “We Should Never Meet.” In English translation, my favorite books are Dostoevsky’s “Notes from the Underground,” Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” and Cervantes’ “Don Quijote.” In Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian, they are Miroslav Krleža’s “On the Edge of Reason,” Danilo Kiš’ “The Encyclopedia of the Dead” and Dubravka Ugrešić’s “Ministry of Pain.”

I’m proud of how many languages are represented in my collection, and that Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian is there among English, French, German and Spanish. Many languages get sidelined as irrelevant, unimportant, even antithetical to our conception of the literary canon, and I take pride in highlighting translation and the construction of this hierarchy among languages and literatures. As wars target people, they target their languages and cultures, and I take pride in the fact that these books have not been obliterated, though much else has.

The Jay I. Kislak Foundation generously underwrites prizes each year for the National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest.

New Finding Aid: Theodore Roosevelt’s Big-Game Library

This is a guest post by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins.

“In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen.”

—Theodore Roosevelt

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An 1885 photograph of Theodore Roosevelt shows him in a deer-skin hunting suit, holding rifle.

A new finding aid for the Theodore Roosevelt Hunting Library is now available from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Roosevelt (1858–1919), a champion of the American conservation movement as well as an avid hunter, was also a voracious reader and collected many volumes on the topic of his beloved hobby of hunting.

The 256 books in this collection reflect his interests in hunting, natural history, exploration, conservation, endangered species, cultural anthropology, ornithology and sport. Most of the titles give instruction and techniques for hunting specific types of game in varying weather conditions, terrain and locations around the world. Other genres in the collection include memoir, art and poetry as well as animal and land conservation.

It may come as a surprise to many that Roosevelt, the consummate outdoorsman, was Harvard educated and an avid reader. His persona as a Rough Rider seemed to over shadow his penchant for quenching his intellectual curiosity through the written word. It is said that Roosevelt read several books a day in multiple languages and was the most well-read American president. In fact, he also wrote many books found in this collection, including “American Big-Game Hunting,” “African Game Trails, an Account of the African Wanderings of an American Hunter-Naturalist” and “Hunting in Many Lands and Through the Brazilian Wilderness.”

The book that likely had the most personal relevance to Roosevelt in this collection is John Dean Caton’s “The Antelope and Deer of America,” as it was presented to him from his mother as a Christmas gift in 1877, when he was 19 years old. The earliest work in the collection dates from 1566, and there are a few finely bound items. Yet others include lovely illustrated plates.

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Roosevelt with a hunting party and dogs, circa 1905.

However, most of the items in the collection were prized for their informational value rather than their scarcity, beauty or other unique attribute. Still, Roosevelt crowed, “I am very proud of my big-game library.” And he took great personal care and interest in it, eventually bequeathing it to his youngest son, Kermit, who in turn left it to his son and namesake. In 1963 and 1964, Kermit Roosevelt presented his grandfather’s hunting collection to the Library of Congress.

Keenly interested in nature from a young age, Roosevelt embraced the great outdoors, noting, “There is a delight in the hardy life of the open.” His interests led him to North Dakota beginning in 1883, where he took up the life of the frontiersman, learning hunting and other skills in self-reliance. In 1884, Roosevelt retreated there after the death of both his mother and wife on Valentine’s Day. In a log cabin he had built, he immersed himself in nature and concluded, “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy and its charm.” The area and the cabin are now part of the Theodore Roosevelt National Park in Medora.

Roosevelt was strong on what he considered masculine qualities, including rugged resilience, dogged determination and a willingness to roll up one’s sleeves and get dirty. He viewed office life with a critical eye, feeling that it ruined a man’s character and softened his masculinity, making him ineffectual. To Roosevelt, hunting was a birthright for men. With this mindset, it may seem curious that he was an ardent conservationist. But he believed that man should use the bounty of the outdoors with the understanding that he is also nature’s caretaker, replenishing that which he takes.

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Roosevelt’s North Dakota cabin, now located in Roosevelt State Park in the western part of the state.

He well understood that this notion seemed to be a contradiction and sought to explain, “The excellent people who protest against all hunting, and consider sportsmen as enemies of wild life, are ignorant of the fact that in reality the genuine sportsman is by all odds the most important factor in keeping the larger and more valuable wild creatures from total extermination.”

His great love of nature is apparent, as he went on to say, “It is also vandalism wantonly to destroy or to permit the destruction of what is beautiful in nature, whether it be a cliff, a forest, or a species of mammal or bird. Here in the United States we turn our rivers and streams into sewers and dumping-grounds, we pollute the air, we destroy forests, and exterminate fishes, birds and mammals – not to speak of vulgarizing charming landscapes with hideous advertisements. But at last it looks as if our people [are] awakening.”

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Roosevelt hunting big game in Africa, circa 1910.

With this awakening, Roosevelt went on to protect wildlife and public lands by creating the United States Forest Service and establishing 150 national forests, 51 federal bird reserves, four national game preserves, five national parks, and 18 national monuments.

During his presidency, Roosevelt protected approximately 230 million acres of public land. He proudly declared, “Here is your country. Cherish these natural wonders, cherish the natural resources, cherish the history and romance as a sacred heritage, for your children and your children’s children. Do not let selfish men or greedy interests skin your country of its beauty, its riches or its romance.”

Other Resources in the Library

Many photographs from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division visually inform just how extensive Roosevelt’s hunting hobby became. He can be seen posing with many animals, including those now facing extinction.
“New Online: Theodore Roosevelt Papers” is a blog post about the online release of Roosevelt’s papers at the Library.
Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times on Film consists of 104 motion pictures and four sound recordings from the Theodore Roosevelt Association Collection in the Library’s Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.

Join Us for a Serendipity Run – No Sneakers Required

And now for something completely different. On November 8, Jer Thorp, the Library of Congress Innovator-in-Residence, will take over the @LibraryCongress Twitter account to host a #SerendipityRun.

What’s a #SerendipityRun? Let’s ask Jer:

#SerendipityRun is an experiment in collaborative serendipity. During the run, we’ll see how far and wide we can range across the Library’s vast collections, riding waves of whimsy, curiosity and chance. On November 8, join an all-star cast of artists, writers, curators and Library staff as we explore the endless sea of possibility that can be found in the Library!

It can be challenging to find what you’re looking for in the Library’s enormous collections. We are always working on new ways to help you get the content you want. The #SerendipityRun is an opportunity to discover what you didn’t know you wanted and what you happen upon by chance. We’re excited to go where this experiment takes us, to see what you find and to hear your stories.

What: #SerendipityRun on Twitter

When: Thursday, November 8, from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. ET

Where: We’ll kick it off from the @LibraryCongress Twitter account. Follow the activity using the #SerendipityRun hashtag.

Why: Take a serendipity-powered tour through the Library of Congress collections. Connect with others and share stories through primary sources.

Who: You! We will have special guests joining us throughout the three-hour run and we want you to participate, too.

How: During the run, if someone tweets an item from the Library’s collections that connects with you, look at the item on loc.gov. What did the item make you think of? Does it remind you of something or make you curious to find other content? If you find a new item that interests you, tweet that item using the #SerendipityRun hashtag and share your story. Be sure to add the loc.gov link and attach an image, so others can use it as a jumping-off point for their discovery.

Join us Thursday on Twitter!

New Online: A Civil War Marriage Confronts Illiteracy

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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May 28, 1864, letter from John Arnold to his wife, Mary Ann.

Students of the Civil War are fortunate that so many Americans of the era were literate, and during the war made good use of their ability to read and write. Soldiers wrote to loved ones with stirring sentiments of patriotism, observations of camp life, longings for home, news of their comrades (who were often relatives, friends or neighbors) and sometimes frank statements of the horrors of battle they witnessed. Servicemen treasured the letters they received from home, and complained when their names were not included at mail call. But what if their loved ones could not write back? The John Carvel Arnold Papers, now available online from the Library of Congress, document how one couple dealt with illiteracy during the Civil War.

Laborer John Carvel Arnold of Snyder County, Pennsylvania, enlisted in February 1864 as a private in Company I of the 49th Regiment Pennsylvania Infantry, and was sent to the front in Virginia. He wrote to his wife, Mary Ann, as often as time, marching orders and mail service allowed. He typically began his letters with a comment on his health before telling her about regimental activities and movements, updating her on soldiers they both knew and providing advice about domestic matters she had to attend to in his absence. And he frequently wrote about writing. He noted when he received a welcome letter from home, or implored her to write more often when letters did not arrive regularly enough. The postscript of his May 28, 1864, letter said it all: “write soon.”

Mary Ann Arnold would have written her husband sooner, except that she was illiterate. Mary Ann relied on neighbors in Port Trevorton, Pennsylvania, to transcribe her sentiments onto paper, and the clear variations in handwriting in letters John Arnold received from his wife attest to the community effort on Mary Ann’s behalf. Some scribes – examples from three appear below – seem to have been only slightly more literate than Mary Ann, whose husband also employed irregular grammar and phonetic spelling in his own correspondence.

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John wrote out the alphabet in a letter to Mary Ann to help her learn to write.

To Mary Ann’s suggestion that with some guidance she could try to write a letter on her own, John sent a reply containing the upper and lower case letters of the alphabet so that she could learn to write. “I can Read any Writeing,” he stated, and exhorted her to “write oftener.”

Mary Ann’s efforts did not always satisfy John’s expectations, however. “Dear wife what is the reason that you Don’t Write oftener I was Exspecting a letter every male that come in But all in wane [vain],” he next wrote on June 20. After not hearing from Mary Ann for five weeks, John had resolved in October to not write again until he first received a letter from his wife. But word that guerrilla forces in northern Virginia had captured the mail caused him to reconsider, thinking that perhaps one of her letters had been seized. Mary Ann replied to this news that she “was sorry that you sought that you would not write to me till you would get a letter from me,” but, she reminded her husband, “you no that i cant write myself and so I cant write when i pleas.”

Despite the occasional moments of frustration with one another, the Arnolds’ letters showed them to be a loving couple. In one letter, for example, John Arnold signed himself her “Cinsear Husband Father friend and lover.” In another, he wrote their names followed by an illustration of clasping hands.

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John drew a picture of clasping hands in a Dec. 28, 1864, letter.

Unfortunately, the Arnolds’ love story did not have a happy ending. Arnold wrote his wife on June 5, 1864, about the casualties his unit had suffered, and the trust he placed in God to spare his life. “I feel confident that iff it is not gods will for me to be shot the is no reb that can shoot me.” Arnold’s prayers were not answered. Less than a month after being promoted to the rank of corporal, John Carvel Arnold was killed in action on April 6, 1865, at the battle of Sailor’s Creek, Virginia. Three days later, Confederate general Robert E. Lee surrendered at Appomattox Court House, essentially bringing the war in Virginia to an end.

Explore, Transcribe and Tag at Crowd.loc.gov!

This is a guest post by Lauren Algee, senior innovation specialist with the Library’s Digital Innovation Lab.

What yet-unwritten stories lie within the pages of Clara Barton’s diaries, the writings of civil rights pioneer Mary Church Terrell or letters written by constituents, friends and colleagues to Abraham Lincoln? With the launch of crowd.loc.gov, the Library of Congress is harnessing the power of the public to make these and many other collection items accessible to everyone.

Crowd.loc.gov invites the public to volunteer to transcribe (type) and tag with keywords digitized images of text materials from the Library’s collections. Volunteers will journey through history first-hand and help the Library while gaining new skills – like learning how to analyze primary sources or read cursive.

Finalized transcripts will be made available on the Library’s website, improving access to handwritten and typed documents that computers cannot accurately translate without human intervention. The enhanced access will occur through better readability and keyword searching of documents and through greater compatibility with accessibility technologies, such as screen readers used by people with low vision.

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A poem, written in 1864 by poet, editor and clergyman William Oland Bourne (1819–1901), is now transcribed and tagged in crowd.loc.gov, greatly increasing its readability and accessibility.

The pages awaiting transcription represent the diversity of the Library’s treasures. Today, volunteers can choose to work on selections from the papers of Mary Church Terrell, letters the public wrote to Abraham Lincoln, Clara Barton’s diaries, Branch Rickey’s baseball scouting reports or memoirs of disabled Civil War veterans. We’ll continuously add new materials. Coming soon are documents related to women’s suffrage, Civil War veterans, American poetry, the history of psychiatry and more.

So how does it work? We import digitized items into the platform from loc.gov. Volunteers type what they see in an image, check transcripts created by others and tag images, enhancing existing collections metadata. We expect to release the first set of publicly transcribed materials in early 2019.

Participatory projects like these are known as crowdsourcing, meaning that they invite the public – nonspecialists and specialists alike – to engage with collections and process information. This is not the Library’s first foray into these approaches.

We have long invested in building digitized collections and making them searchable. Our first attempt to recruit volunteers to increase their findability began in 2008 when the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division published thousands of photographs on Flickr Commons. For more than 10 years, this project has invited the public to help identify people and places in the photographs, generating rich information about them.

Two additional crowdsourcing efforts within the Library – the American Archive of Public Broadcasting’s Fix-It initiative and the Library of Congress Labs’ Beyond Words project –  invited people to transcribe historical public broadcasting programs and to identify cartoons and photographs in the Library’s historic newspaper collections. These projects have demonstrated the passion of volunteers for history and learning as well as the knowledge and expertise the public has to share with the Library.

Crowd.loc.gov runs on an open-source software, Concordia, developed based on the user-centered design principles. It has been open source from the beginning and is available in the Library’s Github repository. Because Concordia is open source, other libraries and organizations can use the code to create transcription projects focused on their own collections.

Have we got you curious?  Good! Consider visiting crowd.loc.gov today to contribute to our Letters to Lincoln Challenge. We hope to inspire volunteers to finish transcribing 10,000 items from the Abraham Lincoln Papers by the end of 2018. Help us meet our goal by transcribing at least one page and sharing your work with others.