Library of Congress's Blog, page 87

George Washington: Gardener and Globalist

This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division. The division’s holdings of the papers of George Washington (1732–1799) constitute the largest collection of original Washington papers in the world.

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A garden at George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate, c1894. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston.

In 1786, English agricultural reformer Arthur Young wrote to George Washington, addressing him as a “brother farmer” and offering to send “men, cattle, tools, seeds, or any thing else that may add to yr rural amusement.” Washington took Young up on his offer and asked for two plows and many bushels of seeds, including cabbage, rye, hops, wheat and barley.

The correspondence between Washington and Young, in George Washington’s papers at the Library of Congress, began with these letters and lasted into Washington’s presidency. To Washington, these exchanges of seeds, plants and information were an effort to improve his and his neighbors’ farming practices and satisfy his interest in agriculture. But looking back after more than two centuries, it is clear that Washington, whether he knew it or not, was taking part in something much bigger: an exchange of plants, animals, people and diseases between America and the rest of the globe that had been ongoing since at least 1492. The historian Alfred W. Crosby, who died this March, called this process the “Columbian Exchange” in his 1972  book of the same name.

The Columbian Exchange was transformational in ways both beneficial and tragic. Foods native to the Americas, such as potatoes and corn, enriched the European food supply, contributed to a rise in population and spread around the world. European wheat and livestock reshaped American woodlands and plains. Diseases carried over from Europe, notably smallpox, decimated native American populations, and Africans were wrested from their homes to become American slaves.

Sometimes the exchange was accidental, as with infection, or when seeds traveled across the Atlantic in mud clumped on the soles of English boots. At other times, as with Washington and Young, it was intentional; the collecting, classifying and exchanging habits of 18th-century scientists meshed neatly with the Columbian Exchange.

When Young and Washington began writing each other, they were tapping into a transatlantic network of plant collectors and scientists that was already well established in Washington’s part of the world. One node on this network was John Custis IV. Born in Virginia in 1678, Custis had a house and garden in Williamsburg. In 1724 he wrote: “I have a pretty little garden in wch I take more satisfaction than in anything in this world.”

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John Custis IV, 1725. Washington-Custis-Lee Collection, Washington and Lee University.

One visitor to Custis’s garden was John Bartram (1699–1777), a Pennsylvania plant collector who became King George III’s “botanist for North America” in 1765. Another was Mark Catesby (1682–1749), an English plant collector and artist, whose paintings of American plants and animals are in Britain’s Royal Collection today.

One of Custis’s most important botanical friends was Peter Collinson (1694–1768). A London cloth merchant and botanist, he was a skillful scientific networker with ties to plant collectors, nurserymen, scientists and kings. He subsidized Bartram’s plant-collecting expeditions, filled the gardens of British aristocrats with American trees and flowers and was friends with Benjamin Franklin and Carl Linnaeus. John Custis’s letterbook, which has been published and is in the Custis-Lee Papers at the Library of Congress, contains the letters he wrote to Collinson between 1732 and 1742. These document Custis and Collinson’s regular exchanges of seeds, bulbs, plants, trees and the occasional creature, including an opossum Custis sent to Collinson in 1738.

In 1749, John Custis died. The following year his son, Daniel Parke Custis, married Martha Dandridge. When Daniel died within a decade of his marriage, he left Martha Dandridge Custis a wealthy young widow. When she remarried in 1759, she delivered a large portion of her father-in-law’s property, including his extensive library, into the hands of her new husband, George Washington. When Washington inventoried Custis’s library soon after his marriage, the first book he listed was Mark Catesby’s “Natural History of Carolina, Florida, and the Bahama Islands,” published in London between 1731 and 1743.

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In 1792, Washington ordered this list of plants from John Bartram to plant at Mount Vernon.

Washington’s interest in agricultural experimentation, nourished by his connection with John Custis, never abated. It is documented in his papers at the Library of Congress, which include the records of his purchases of seeds and books, the reports he received weekly from his farm managers, his reading notes, his letters and his diaries. This diary entry for March 21, 1763, describes Washington grafting English cherries and planting a variety of Italian pine, evidently the same tree whose seeds Peter Collinson had once sent John Custis for cultivation in his Williamsburg garden.

In at least one instance, Washington carried Custis’s botanical connections into the next generation. In Philadelphia in 1787 to preside over the constitutional convention, Washington visited the garden established by John Bartram, now run by his sons. He found it “Stored with many curious plts. Shrubs & trees, many of which are exotics,” but thought it “was not laid off with much taste, nor was it large.” Despite this sniffy comment, Washington ordered a long list of plants from John Bartram Jr.

Washington also made his own connections. Arthur Young was one, and another was John Sinclair (1754–1834), who, with Young, established the British Board of Agriculture. In the year before his death, Washington told Sinclair about a Virginia farmer who had found and cultivated a new variety of early wheat. “I send you a sack; that by experiment you may ascertain the utility of cultivating it in England,” Washington wrote Sinclair.

With letters like this one, George Washington maintained the transatlantic networks that made the world, even in the 18th century, global.

Ensuring the Long-Term Accessibility of Creative Content

This is a guest post by Ted Westervelt, a section head in the Library’s U.S. Arts, Sciences and Humanities Division; Kate Murray, a digital projects coordinator in the Digital Collections Management and Services Division; and Donna Brearcliffe, an electronic resources coordinator in the Collection Development Office.

Since the first edition of the Recommended Formats Statement came out in 2014, the Library of Congress has been committed to making it as useful as possible to a wide and varied audience. The statement identifies formats, or sets of technical characteristics – such as physical books, digital file types, specific editions or specific metadata elements – that encourage preservation and long-term access for creative works. Recently, the Library released an updated 2018–19 edition of the statement.

The statement’s technical characteristics are of value to the work of the Library of Congress in building its own collection: The scope of the Library’s collection is so broad and diverse that all efforts to mitigate preservation costs down the line are embraced gratefully. This is true of physical works and, these days, even more so of digital works, as the Library dedicates more of its efforts to collecting digital content – including content that is available only in digital form as well as digital copies the Library has decided to obtain in lieu of print versions. Expanding the scope of collection building in this way, and on a large scale, requires care in selection and acquisition, for which the Recommended Formats Statement is a critical tool.

As America’s foremost cultural heritage institution, the Library understands its responsibility to the nation and the world. With regard to the Recommended Formats Statement, the Library is thus well aware of the need to identify the characteristics necessary to support preservation and realizes that others involved in the lifecycle for creative works also have an interest. From the authors, artists, musicians and programmers who create works; to the vendors and publishers who distribute them; to the organizations and institutions that dedicate resources to preserving them – all have a compelling interest in ensuring the survival of these works and the continued ability of people to use and enjoy them.

The value of the Recommended Formats Statement to this broad audience is, in large part, what moves the Library to invest in the annual review and revision of the statement, including reaching out to the creative community to get vital input. The review results from the need to reflect changes in technology and digital-format sustainability. But just as importantly, it allows for critical feedback from the practical, day-to-day work of those who dedicate their time and effort to these creative works, whether they are inside or outside the Library of Congress.

To make the statement useful, it has to reflect reality. For example, the 2018-19 edition of the statement emphasizes the benefit of electronic delivery of datasets. Datasets are a rapidly expanding content area that bring unique challenges for large-scale file delivery and repository management. The datasets section of the statement now includes a preference for access by public or private online URLs over tangible media such as CD-ROM or DVD-ROM. This more accurately reflects the reality of acquiring and managing digital content in modern workflows.

The new edition of the statement reflects a collaboration between Library of Congress staff and members of the creative community. For creators, the statement is a guide to consult before they start work, to help them choose the right canvas on which to express themselves, ensuring that their creative output will stand the test of time. For publishers and vendors, it offers a way to identify material that can continue to be distributed and disseminated long after its first creation. For archives, the statement helps to determine the level of effort that will be needed to ensure that a work will remain for generations to come. For all these partners and colleagues, as well as for its own internal needs, the Library of Congress has issued the new edition of the Recommended Formats Statement, and it very much looks forward to collaborating on future editions.

In the meantime, we welcome your feedback on the 2018–19 edition.

My Job at the Library: Helping Researchers Uncover New Narratives in Manuscripts

This interview with Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division, first appeared on the “Teaching with the Library of Congress” blog.

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Ryan Reft (standing) gives a presentation in June about original manuscripts included in the Library’s exhibition “Echoes of the Great War.” Photo by Shawn Miller.

Describe what you do at the Library.

One of the great things about my job is that the work changes on a daily basis. At the risk of over-simplifying: I oversee Manuscript Division collections that relate to domestic policy, which includes congressional papers; holdings related to certain cabinet officials, nongovernment organizations, journalists, Supreme Court justices and federal court judges; and our LGBTQ collections. One day I might curate a temporary exhibit for a congressional event; on another day, I might speak with members of the media regarding our collections; other times, I review potential collections for acquisition. I was also fortunate to work with Cheryl Regan and Sahr Conway-Lanz in curating the Library’s current exhibit Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I. Finally, I frequently help researchers navigate and explore our holdings, which can be a lot of fun. I not only get to learn about new history being made or discovered, but also contribute to it by aiding historians and others in their pursuit of new revealing narratives about our nation’s past.

What is your favorite item from the Library’s online collections?

I’m going to steal a page from my colleague Sahr Conway-Lanz, who noted in a blog post from last year that it is the connection between collections and the larger whole that is so fascinating. I write about our collections in both scholarly and popular venues. Rarely does a single item serve as a key to some historical mystery, but a collection of documents taken together as a sort of contextual whole can.

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Bullet, dog tags and coat buttons of Charles Hamilton Houston, circa 1917.

That said, however, the dog tags and coat buttons of civil rights pioneer Charles Hamilton Houston on display in our “Echoes of the Great War” exhibit encapsulate the kind of influence the war cast on its participants. Houston earned these dog tags and coat buttons by graduating from the first officers’ training camp for African-Americans organized during the war. Though segregated, the camp, like his service overseas, was an eye-opening experience for Houston, who returned from World War I determined to battle racism and segregation in American life. He became dean of Howard Law School and from that position trained Thurgood Marshall and others, while also serving as the NAACP’s most prominent lawyer for much of the 1930s and early 1940s. We discovered Hamilton’s dog tags in the papers of his father, William LePre Houston, which the Manuscript Division houses. We had no idea they were there, so it was a great surprise.

 

Describe an interesting discovery from the Library’s collections.

I went to the University of California, San Diego, for my Ph.D. in urban history. Being in California shifted my focus toward western history and the New Right of the 1970s and 1980s, a conservative political movement that had its roots in Southern California. When we acquired the papers of David Broder, the Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist from The Washington Star, The New York Times and The Washington Post, I was thrilled to discover his coverage of the 1966 gubernatorial race. That campaign brought Ronald Reagan to national prominence and gave the New Right movement a real boost. Broder’s notes, interviews and accounts of Reagan’s speeches and rallies during the campaign really provided new insight into what one could argue was the most salient political movement of the late 20th century.

Tell us about a memorable interaction with a Library user.

Honestly, I cannot think of one particular moment. But I can say that whenever I am able to help researchers discover collections that carry their scholarship further, I feel a certain sense of accomplishment. As someone who might have been described as a “hipster” in my younger days, finding that key document or documents that turn an argument for the better is as great as finding that obscure, ironic t-shirt from 1984 in a forgotten thrift-store pile of clothes.

What is one thing you would like to tell Library users about the Library?

The Library is so much more than you think it is. Until I worked here, I never realized what a resource it is for so many avenues of research: cartography, photography, prints, rare books, manuscripts, film, broadcasting and a great deal more. There really is something for everybody here.

Inquiring Minds: Bringing the Music Back to Silent Films

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Ben Model accompanies a silent film being screened in the Library’s Packard Campus Theater during the 2015 “Mostly Lost” film identification workshop. Photo by Shawn Miller.

What we today call “silent” films were anything but in their heyday. Usually, a piano, a theater organ, a musical combo – or sometimes an entire orchestra – accompanied screenings. For more than 30 years, Ben Model has been bringing the music back to early motion pictures. A lifelong silent film enthusiast, he has created and performed live scores for hundreds of films, some as short as a minute, others as long as five hours. Since 2009, Model has been a resident silent-film accompanist at the Library of Congress’ Packard Campus Theater in Culpeper, Virginia.

Most recently, from June 13 to 16, Model performed at the Packard Campus’ 7th annual “Mostly Lost” film-identification workshop. It seeks to identify the many silent-era films whose titles and credits are damaged or missing because of neglect, decay or mishandling. Attendees – scholars, archivists, film enthusiasts – view films searching for clues to any identifying details to the sound of live music performed by Model or fellow accompanists Philip Carli and Andrew E. Simpson.

Beyond his work as a composer and accompanist, Model has collaborated with the Library of Congress to produce and publicly release on DVD silent films from the Library’s collections, two of which have aired on the TCM network, and to acquire films and videotapes for preservation.

Model is also a visiting professor of film studies at Wesleyan University and a resident accompanist at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He has performed at theaters, museums, schools and other venues around the United States and internationally.

Here he answers a few questions about his background and his collaboration with the Library. Scroll down to the end of the post for examples of Model accompanying films.

What inspired your interest in silent film?

My folks tell me I discovered Charlie Chaplin on TV when I was a toddler. For some little kids, it’s trains or dinosaurs; for me, it was Charlie Chaplin. Until the cable TV era arrived, silent comedies were shown on TV. They were aired in the afternoon as kids programming, and they were on public television. There was a series in the early ‘70s called “The Silent Years” that aired on public TV. Produced by Killiam Shows, it featured the big classics in new restorations with excellent piano scores by William Perry. Like a lot of people my age, I saved up lawn-mowing and paper-route money to buy super-8-millimeter copies of silents from the Blackhawk Films catalog. Walter Kerr, The New York Times drama critic and author of the 1975 book “The Silent Clowns,” lived in my town and had a huge 16-millimeter collection. I used to go to his house, and he would show me silent comedies by Buster Keaton, Harry Langdon, Harold Lloyd and Raymond Griffith that weren’t available anywhere else.

How did you come to be a silent-film accompanist?

As a film-production major at New York University, I found that the silent films shown in the required “Film History 101” class were being screened without any music. This was the early 1980s, just before VHS, and so all film was shown in 16 millimeter, and those prints had no scores on them. It killed me that these films I loved were pretty much dying in front of a couple hundred film students every week. I’d been a pianist since I was a kid, and I wanted to help these great movies. My sophomore year, I went to the head of the film-studies department and volunteered to play for the silent-film screenings. I said to myself, “I don’t know what I’m doing, but it’s got to be better than nothing.”

I was playing for the basic film history class initially, and then also playing for university courses taught by the noted historian William K. Everson. I made a point of meeting everyone in New York City who accompanied silent films to get advice. I got help from Bill Perry at the Museum of Modern Art and in particular from Lee Erwin, who had been a movie-theater organist in the 1920s and who was still working.

At one point, I started shifting away from trying to work in film production and began focusing on silent-film accompaniment. It became the “what I do” in terms of my career, although I am slowly making my way back into filmmaking. Along the way, I’ve learned about the nuts and bolts of film programming, show production, publicity and social media and DVD production and distribution. The word I use for what I do now is “artrepreneur.”

Tell us about your work with the Library.

I have an agreement with the Library of Congress Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division to release co-branded silent films from the collection on DVD and Blu-ray. The project came out of my first DVD, “Accidentally Preserved,” a collection of rare and lost silent comedy shorts from prints made in the 1920s and 1930s that I owned. It was produced and released in 2013. I’d figured out a business model that combined crowdfunding and manufacture-on-demand. It was a wormhole I’d discovered that allowed me to connect film fans with lesser-known silents I knew they’d want to see, films that larger companies might not be interested in because of their extremely limited commercial potential. In my crowdfunding announcements, I tell fans that they can be part of the “somebody” in “Why doesn’t somebody put that out on DVD?”

How would you describe the value of silent films?

They’re important, now more than ever, in the sense that silent film is cinema’s original and pure form of visual storytelling. Because of easily accessible global video platforms, anyone on earth with anything from a smartphone to RED Digital Cinema equipment (or whatever format comes along next month) has the ability to make movies.

Cinema language was developed during the silent era, and a great deal can be learned about telling stories in a universal way from studying them. Silent films translate more easily around the planet than other types of film do. The lack of sound, color and real-time speed meant that silent films told stories of the human equation, the human experience, that anyone can relate to. That’s why they’re timeless.

You can show “Sunrise,” “The Gold Rush,” “Safety Last” or “Metropolis” anywhere, and people will have the same response. I show Keaton’s short “One Week” to school groups from Boise, Idaho, to Tromsø, Norway, every year, and the kids laugh the same way at the same gags every time. I played for Keaton’s “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” and Lloyd’s “The Freshman” to an audience of 3,000 in South Korea a few years ago, and the reaction was identical to that of any other audience.

What are a few of your favorite silent-era films?

I never know how to answer this question, because one of my favorite things is discovering great silent films I’ve never seen or heard of. Several years ago, I played for a series of silents at the Museum of Modern Art by the French director Julien Duvivier, and I loved them. How had I never heard of this director? Discovering the completely forgotten comedian-director Marcel Perez in the last few years has been a delight, and I’ve released two DVDs of his work through my collaboration with the Library.

The other thing for me is that I think like a programmer, and sometimes my favorite thing about a film is the audience I’m getting to show it to – whether it’s a bunch of kids at an education screening at the Museum of the Moving Image, residents of a senior-living facility or the folks who live in Culpeper, Virginia. I will say that one “desert island” silent for me, although it isn’t technically from the silent era, is Chaplin’s “Modern Times.”

What has your experience been like working with the Library?

I’ve really enjoyed collaborating with the Library of Congress’ Moving Image Section. I mainly work with Rob Stone, the moving-image curator, but I’ve gotten to meet and work with folks in the film and video lab, the nitrate vaults, film prep, projection, film restoration and more, and I’ve learned so much. The DVD releases I’ve worked on have meant that silent films that have been unavailable to the public since their initial release are now viewable to fans, and in quality editions. My association with the Library also led to my being able to help facilitate the Library’s acquiring the Ernie Kovacs and Edie Adams Collection a few years ago. I’m the archivist for the Kovacs-Adams material for Ediad Productions, and knowing that the videotapes and kinescopes of Ernie and Edie’s television shows are in good hands has meant a lot to me.

As of last month, my Undercrank Productions DVDs that are co-branded with the Library became more widely available, both in the United States and internationally. That means more fans are able to see rare films preserved by the Library that star Lon Chaney, Marion Davies, Marcel Perez and others whose work might otherwise still be sitting in cans on vault shelves. It’s a great collaboration, and symbiotic as well, and I look forward to what’s to come.

Below, listen to Model accompany “Spirit of ‘76” (American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, 1905) and The Immortal Voice (Bray Studios, 1923).

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Baseball and Hispanic Community: Finding Inspiration in the Collections

This post is by Marcos Castillo, a 2018 intern with the Junior Fellows Program . He is a senior at Lincoln University of Pennsylvania. This summer, he worked in the Library’s Hispanic Division.

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Marcos Castillo pitches for Lincoln University. Photo by Jacob Mullins, Lincoln University Athletics.

The opening this June of the exhibition “Baseball Americana” at the Library of Congress prompted me to think about the history of our national pastime. Baseball is not only a national phenomenon, but an international marvel as well. While interning in the Hispanic Division, with access to its remarkable collections, I learned more this summer about how the game became a significant part of Hispanic culture in Latin America and the United States.

As a member of the Hispanic community myself, and the ultimate baseball fan, I am fascinated by the impact of baseball on the Hispanic community and the community’s impact on baseball. Had I not had professional Hispanic baseball players as role models, I know I would have found it difficult, as an average player, to envision playing on a college baseball team on an athletic scholarship, as I do at Lincoln University. Moreover, if it were not for my favorite player, Mariano Rivera, from my family’s home country of Panama, I would not have had the privilege of being part of the Library’s Junior Fellows Program – and I would not have written this post! – because baseball is what motivated me to pursue a degree.

When tracing how Hispanics became part of U.S. baseball, we have to look back to the 1860s when the first Cuban player joined a professional U.S. league. Estevan Enrique Bellán, born in Havana, made his baseball debut in the U.S. in 1868. Earlier, Cuban students studying in the U.S. had brought the game back home and helped to develop its popularity.

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Cuban-born Rafael Almeida is featured on this tobacco company baseball card. One of the first Hispanics to compete in the major leagues, he played for the Cincinnati Reds from 1911 to 1913.

In 1878, the inaugural game of the Cuban baseball league took place, starting a trend. Soon, other countries, including the Dominican Republic, Venezuela and Mexico, formed their own leagues, producing many players who eventually played in the U.S.

It took time for Hispanic players to be accepted into mainstream American baseball. But thanks in large part to outstanding players like Rod Carew (Panama), Roberto Clemente (Puerto Rico), Tony Pérez (Cuba) and Fernando Valenzuela (Mexico), Latin America is now a key region for developing players’ skills and a leading source for scouts looking for new players. And Latin American countries have embraced the sport as part of their culture.

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Print of a tobacco-package label from Cuba showing a baseball game, circa 1867.

Today, we can truly see the impact that Hispanic players have had on Major League Baseball (MLB). In 2017, they made up 31.9 percent of the league, according to the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport, the highest percentage ever in MLB history. They are represented on every MLB team – each team has at least one Hispanic player. And some of contemporary baseball’s greatest stars are either from Latin America or of Latin-American descent, including José Altuve (Venezuela), Nolan Arenado (Cuba/Puerto Rico), Robinson Canó (Dominican Republic), Aroldis Chapman (Cuba) and Francisco Lindor (Puerto Rico).

Apart from sheer numbers, Hispanic players act as ambassadors for the game, inspiring young players to continue pursuing their dreams of playing league ball no matter their circumstances.

From the strong foundation early players created in the 19th century to the great players of today’s MLB, Hispanics have influenced baseball in important ways. With their numbers increasing, they no doubt have much more to achieve.

Learn More

Search the Handbook of Latin American Studies for articles, books and more about baseball and Latin America.
Listen to Library of Congress webcasts:

Baseball scholar Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria, author of “The Pride of Havana,” speaks at the Library in 2006.

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Journalist and author Cesar Brioso discusses his book “Havana Hardball: Spring Training, Jackie Robinson and the Cuban League” at the Library in 2016.

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Inquiring Minds: Olmsted Holdings Offer Blueprint for Preserving Historical Landscapes

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Arleyn Levee

Landscape historian Arleyn Levee first visited the Library’s Manuscript Reading Room in the early 1980s to consult the records of Frederick Law Olmsted and his firm. A 19th-century pioneer who developed the field of American landscape architecture, Olmsted shaped many notable sites throughout his career – New York’s Central Park, the U.S. Capitol grounds, the Biltmore estate in North Carolina and the park systems for Buffalo and Boston, among many others. Last week, the Library announced the online availability of Frederick Law Olmsted’s papers.

Levee was initially drawn to the Library’s Olmsted holdings through the National Association of Olmsted Parks, a coalition of scholars, municipal officials, citizen activists and preservation professionals who came together in 1980 to highlight Olmsted’s legacy. At the time, historical parks in many cities across the country were in a state of neglect and disrepair, and the association sought – and still seeks – to educate people about the origins of these beautiful spaces and to advocate for their preservation.

More than 30 years later, Levee is a recognized specialist on the Olmsted firm, and she continues to consult the Library’s holdings to inform her work with preservationists and landscape architectural firms to rehabilitate Olmsted-designed historical landscapes.

Levee has written many articles about the design work of the Olmsted firm and about its professionals. Her latest work, published in 2016, “The Blue Garden: Recapturing an Iconic Newport Landscape,” traces the creation, decline and renewal of a Newport, Rhode Island, garden designed by Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.

Here she answers questions about her career and her experience as a researcher at the Library.

Please tell us a little about your background.

I have degrees from Wellesley College and Harvard University. Until a graduate school course in American intellectual history, however, I had never heard of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.  But I had always been around gardens and landscapes. With roots in Scotland and relatives who owned an Edinburgh nursery, being out in nature and observant was a given. As soon as I became a homeowner, I began to manipulate my own hillside space into something with seasonal appeal both for the eye and the “table,” making lots of design errors along the way, but trying to learn from my mistakes. It became clear that some professional guidance was required, so I enrolled in what was then the Radcliffe Seminars Program for Landscape Design. Beyond learning the craft of shaping and planting the land, there were informative courses offered in American landscape history – and Olmsted entered my scope of interest!

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Frederick Law Olmsted designed the grounds of the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina. Photo by William Henry Jackson, circa 1900.

For a paper on planning history, I decided to tackle the “unknown Olmsted” – John Charles Olmsted, the nephew and adopted son of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr., whose papers had recently been acquired by Harvard. Unlike his younger half-brother, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., John Charles did not bear his father’s name; thus he was continually overlooked in references.

After hours, too many to count, spent in pencil transcriptions of his letters and other documents, I was hooked. The “middle” son led to the Frederick Law Olmsteds, senior and junior, and then to all those working “hands” behind the vast output from the Olmsted firm.  Slowly, the significant impact of the firm’s work, both on the American land and beyond –mostly unrecognized in the early 1980s – began to unfold before my eyes and stimulate my curiosity to explore further.

Two other events coincided at this time. In the first, the National Association for Olmsted Parks was born, bringing with it an ever-changing but enduring family of friends, mentors, colleagues and citizen advocates, all of whom want to share and learn from a mutual passion for “things Olmsted.”

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Central Park’s terrace reflects Olmsted’s vision, circa 1894. Photograph by J.S. Johnston.

Second, activism had brought about the acquisition of Fairsted, the Olmsted home and office in Brookline, Massachusetts, which became the Frederick Law Olmsted National Historic Site. This modest farmhouse at a curve in a road revealed a treasure trove of information – thousands of plans, photographs and other documents about sites across the country and abroad.

Conserving and making this trove of documents publicly accessible was only part of the challenge. The senior Olmsted’s voluminous writings had been gifted to the Library of Congress, followed later by the gift and acquisition of thousands of client files and other records from the Olmsted firm. These records are critical to interpreting and fully comprehending the visual records at Fairsted.

With my burgeoning interest in matters Olmsted, I became inextricably involved in both these occurrences, an involvement that has continued unabated to the present.

How did you uncover the story of the Olmsteds and their firm at the Library?

Before the age of microfilm, laptop computers and scanning devices, I spent hours – and a fortune – at the copy machines, acquiring critical documents from the hundreds of files relevant to my search for information about community designs or the work of John Charles Olmsted. As a result, I am now saddled with file cabinets of paper records that cry out to be scanned.

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Another view of Olmsted’s work in Central Park, circa 1905.

Augmenting my Olmsted files research, I branched out into other, but connected, Manuscript Division collections – the papers of Laura Wood Roper, the biographer of Olmsted Sr., and the records of the American Society of Landscape Architects. I have also ventured into the Main Reading Room to look at collections of park reports from various cities, and into periodical literature from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The collections of the Prints and Photographs Division and the Geography and Map Division have added to my visual understanding of the design and landscape planning that molded communities nationwide.

My research is a never-ending fascination that I hope will keep me engaged and productive for decades, not just for personal interest, but also because of the importance of gathering and sharing critical information about this design heritage with the people who are fortunate enough to inhabit or use these historic landscapes and to those who are responsible for their stewardship.

What is the significance of the firm’s story?

We are really still in the infancy of understanding the full impact of the Olmsted firm, both the individuals and their endeavors, on the culture and the landscape of this country. Not only were there the three Olmsted principals and their partners over the firm’s nearly 100 years of existence, but there was a remarkable staff of professionals, from various disciplines, trained at the firm. Some spent their entire careers associated with it. Others moved on to establish their own practices, bringing their skills and philosophical approach into ever-expanding venues.

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Olmsted designed the grounds surrounding the U.S. Capitol. Circa 1908.

Research has yet to follow all these diverging paths to fully recognize the considerable contributions and influence of the Olmsted firm. With more than 4,000 commissions, and projects across the country and in Canada, Bermuda, Venezuela and beyond, each with a story to explore, there is material aplenty for curious scholars and practitioners for decades to come.

You were a consultant for the renovation of the Olmsted-designed U.S. Capitol grounds in the 1990s. Can you tell us a little about that?

I have had the good fortune to be engaged as a landscape historian on a number of significant projects, beginning initially in the mid-1980s with research for a park in Fall River, Massachusetts. From that work, other projects, both public and private, came my way, which enabled me to explore so much more of the Olmsted oeuvre in different locations and in different design modes. I began examining the development of the U.S. Capitol grounds, beginning in the late 1990s, with my colleague and mentor Charles Beveridge, editor of the Olmsted Papers Project. Our research took us into the depths of archival material, tucked away in various repositories besides the Library of Congress, bringing to light information that has hopefully helped to reshape the thinking about this iconic and complex American landscape.

Over the recent decades, other on-the-ground preservation projects have taken me across the country to Louisville, to the Pacific Northwest, to California, to Wisconsin, to Rhode Island and presently to Cleveland.

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A stereograph card shows the grounds around the east front of the Capitol Building, circa 1903.

What has your experience been like working at the Library and with Library staff?

Working with the staff of the Manuscript Reading Room over the years has been a great pleasure, as we have all learned together about the dimensions and implications of the very complex Olmsted collections. I am in awe of the staff’s knowledge and in continuing appreciation of all their courtesies in helping me with my numerous queries.

The digitization of the papers of Olmsted Sr. and their availability online is a remarkable step forward by the Library to aid the intensively used Olmsted collections. For landscape scholars and practitioners, for stewards of and advocates for the properties designed by the senior Olmsted and for the interested public, providing easy access to the words of the “master” will greatly enhance our understanding of the process of his thinking and his design and the philosophical and social intentions behind his endeavors.

I am very glad the Library plans to continue this progress in the digital processing of Olmsted documents to include the much larger collections from the Olmsted Associates records, where the bulk of the client files for the thousands of design and planning projects across the country reside. These records contain correspondence and other material critical to comprehending and protecting the diverse and often city-shaping Olmsted projects.

New Online: Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted

This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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Frederick Law Olmsted, 1893. Engraving by T. Johnson from a photograph by James Notman.

Frederick Law Olmsted (1822–1903) is most famous as the creator in the late 1850s of New York City’s Central Park with Calvert Vaux. But Olmsted had an enormous and geographically widespread impact on America’s lasting ideas of what cityscapes should be.

As we bicycle today in Riverside Park in New York, feel the spray of Niagara Falls, picnic in the forest at Biltmore, hurry to class at Stanford University, climb a hill in Mount Royal Park in Montreal or fly a kite with our children in the Emerald Necklace in Boston, we may be unaware that we are visiting and enjoying places Olmsted had a hand in creating. We might not even be aware we are in a place that was planned or carved by a human hand at all.

Olmsted believed philosophically in the important restorative powers of natural beauty to help humans cope with harried and often depleting urban environments. In Central Park, and so many other public parks in other cities, he created pastoral places of respite where people of all classes could go for relaxation, exercise, inspiration, fun and renewal of their worn psyches. He brought idealized rural landscapes into urban environments and designed gathering places where people could meet friends and family and children could romp and play away from dangerous city streets, regardless of their economic backgrounds.

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Aerial view of Central Park, circa 2000. Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith.

Olmsted became inarguably the most important landscape architect in America in the 19th century. Indeed, through his work he pioneered the entire field of landscape architecture that thrives today. His name and legacy continued on past his lifetime through the work of his stepson, John Charles Olmsted; his son, Frederick Law Olmsted Jr.; their Olmsted Brothers firm (1898–1961); and their many associates.

The digitized collection of the Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted, newly available from the Library of Congress, consists of approximately 24,000 items (over 47,000 images) of Olmsted’s personal papers, most of which were digitized from 60 reels of previously produced microfilm. While the collection spans from 1777 to 1952, the bulk dates from 1838 to 1903. The collection contains primary materials stemming from both Olmsted’s private and professional life. These include diaries, letters, printed reports, drafted manuscripts, clippings and other documentation.

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A June 11, 1862, letter from Olmsted to his wife, Mary Cleveland Perkins Olmsted, about the horrors of war.

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A May 20, 1865, letter from Calvert Vaux to Olmsted, urging him to commit to the field of landscape architecture.

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A plant order Olmsted placed on January 15, 1877, for the U.S. Capitol grounds.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Despite his fame, and the many projects, big and small, accomplished in the United States, Olmsted did not always know he would be a landscape architect. As a teenager, he learned surveying, mathematics and other skills by apprenticeship with farmers and educated men.

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View from Central Park bridle path, 1984. Photograph by Jet Lowe.

As a young man, Olmsted traveled to England and the continent to view great art and architecture. He discussed innovations with master gardeners, botanists, civil engineers, water specialists, arborists and park managers. He would later draw on what he learned to help shape the aesthetics of cities, campuses, hospital grounds and residential communities across the United States. Before doing so, however, Olmsted worked as a clerk in New York, sailed to China on a merchant ship and taught himself about scientific farming by reading, observing and sitting in on lectures at Yale College.

As a young farmer himself, bankrolled by his father on small farms near Guilford, Connecticut, and on Staten Island in New York, he experimented in using organic methods and growing for local markets. He became a writer, a publisher and a journalist, a friend to antislavery advocates and reformers. He traveled on commission as a reporter through much of the pre-Civil War South, narrating to northern readers his opinions on agricultural economics and slavery.

Olmsted was working as an administrator at Central Park when the Civil War began. He turned his managerial skills to a leadership position with the wartime U.S. Sanitary Commission, reforming ways in which wounded and ill soldiers were transported and treated for battlefront maladies and attending to the public health of Union troops. He tried his hand briefly as the manager of a gold-mining estate in the foothills of the Sierras and investigated other business ventures in California.

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Grounds of the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston.

It took the prodding of his friend Calvert Vaux to lure him back East to work in partnership on Prospect Park in Brooklyn after the war. Vaux advised Olmsted to make a commitment to landscape architecture as a profession, and the two paired on several important projects before striking out on their own.

During Olmsted’s later life, when the Olmsted firm was based at the Olmsted family’s Fairsted home in Massachusetts, the architect H.H. Richardson became another important friend and ally. Olmsted became deeply involved in planning the grounds for the U.S. Capitol. His crowning design achievements before he retired in ill health were the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago and the grounds of the Biltmore Estate in North Carolina.

Over the course of his career, Olmsted accepted private commissions and designed estates and institutions for wealthy clients, and he built a thriving business in doing so. But the heart of his work was in urban planning for public good and shared enjoyment.

Olmsted’s belief in the importance of creating and preserving natural spaces within cities extended to his commitment to wilderness preservation and forest conservation. As an original commissioner in California for what would become Yosemite National Park, Olmsted helped lay the groundwork for the idea of a national park system and the modern environmentalist movement. Fighting against overly intrusive commercial use, he argued that wilderness areas of extraordinary historic or natural consequence should be preserved for public use and be managed in ways that made it possible for ordinary citizens to visit for recreation and to witness the grandeur there, while the landscapes were protected to last as a public legacy into many future generations.

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The Yosemite Valley from the Mariposa Trail, 1870s. Photograph by Carleton Watkins.

A Summer of Mid-1940s Melodies: Processing Master Recordings from the Decca Label

This is a guest post by Yuri Shimoda, a 2018 summer intern with the Junior Fellows Program in the Library’s Recorded Sound Section. She is pursuing her master’s degree in library and information science at the University of California, Los Angeles, with a specialization in media archival studies. Shimoda is the founder and chair of the first student chapter of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections and a recipient of an American Library Association’s 2018–19 Spectrum Scholarship. She plans to become an audio archivist and music librarian.

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Yuri Shimoda beside a 1945 master recording of “Cry You Out of My Heart” by Ella Fitzgerald with the Delta Rhythm Boys.

In 2011, Universal Music Group (UMG) donated more than 200,000 master recordings to the Library of Congress’ Recorded Sound Section, which maintains approximately 3.6 million sound recordings at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia. Within the collection’s 5,000 linear feet of material are historic recordings by artists such as Bing Crosby, Louis Armstrong, the Andrews Sisters, Billie Holiday, Guy Lombardo and Les Paul.

Many of these tracks were recorded onto thousands of 16-inch lacquer discs. Those created during the mid-1940s on UMG’s subsidiary label Decca serve as the focus of my project this summer. My goal for the 10 weeks that I am in Culpeper is to process as many of the discs as possible, which may seem like monotonous work, but has proven to be quite the opposite.

My work days consist of sorting and arranging the discs in order of matrix number, the unique identifier assigned to each recorded track; assigning them a shelf number and barcode; looking up the matrix number in Michel Ruppli’s authoritative discography of Decca recordings; and entering into an inventory spreadsheet information from the discography and from the discs, their original sleeves, or accompanying recording-engineer notes.

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Processing lacquer discs entails research to adequately describe each recording.

Some discs might not have a matrix number, artist name or song title written on them, so they become a mystery for me to solve with some online research. In cases where a disc has no identifying information at all, I ask one of the Audio Preservation Unit’s studio engineers to play it so the curator of recorded sound, Matt Barton, and I can find out what songs are on it.

It can be easy to slip into the rhythm of processing without letting the significance of the artist’s name or song’s title I’m entering into the database really sink in. When I actually get to sit down and hear these tracks in the engineer’s studio, though, the impact of how unique and culturally relevant the content of these discs are hits home.

While the aforementioned list of UMG artists is impressive to say the least, and I did feel a thrill of excitement upon coming across an Ella Fitzgerald recording session last week, some of the lesser-known artists like Joe Mooney and a radio-broadcast recording of “The Lonesome Train” cantata, directed by Norman Corwin, about Abraham Lincoln’s funeral train (narrated by Burl Ives) are among what I would call unexpected gems of my exploration thus far.

Once the contents of each disc have been inventoried, I carefully remove the disc from its original envelope to assess its physical condition before placing it into a fresh sleeve. Most of the discs are extremely fragile, since they were made during World War II using a glass base instead of aluminum, due to wartime rationing. Aside from being prone to cracks and breakage, lacquer discs are at risk of other environmental conditions that can speed up deterioration, thus making them a high preservation priority.

Although my experience as the only junior fellow stationed in Culpeper is quite different from my colleagues – while they make their way to work through throngs of tourists visiting our nation’s capital, I might encounter a deer or maybe some rabbits during my daily commute – I would not trade my post for anything. Since I am studying to become an audio archivist, the skills that I am honing and the staff expertise I am exposed to are incredibly valuable. I am enjoying my work with the UMG recordings immensely, and I will be quite sad to leave the discs at the end of the summer.

For more information about the Junior Fellows Program, visit the Library’s website.

My Job at the Library: Researching African-American Genealogy

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Ahmed Johnson. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Ahmed Johnson is a local history and genealogy reference librarian in the Library’s Main Reading Room and a specialist in African-American history. A bibliography he created, “African-American Family Histories and Related Works in the Library of Congress,” guides Library researchers seeking to understand their families’ stories to printed and digital sources at the Library.

Here Johnson answers questions about his career of nearly 30 years at the Library, how he developed a passion for African-American genealogy and his search for his own family’s roots.

Tell us a little about your background.

I am one of the few native Washingtonians at the Library of Congress – my family goes back four generations in D.C. In 1989, when I was as a rising senior at Archbishop Carroll High School, I started as a deck attendant in the Library’s Collections Management Division. While attending Hampton University in Virginia, I continued to work at the Library, eventually securing a position as reference assistant in the Manuscript Division. After I graduated, I was selected to participate in the Professional Development Associate Program, a 24-month training that led to my being hired as a reference librarian in the Local History and Genealogy Section.

How did you become interested in African-American genealogy?

I was always curious as a kid and loved history. Every chance I got, I would ask my grandmother – she is now 98 – about how she grew up and about my relatives. I wanted to know about their occupations, their education, their everyday life. My grandmother showed me a photograph from 1922 of her as a 2-year-old sitting on the porch of the family home in Clarke County, Mississippi. The picture included my great-great-great grandfather, who lived to be 106, my great-great grandparents, three cousins and a traveling preacher. I was fascinated by the black-and-white portrait – it looked ancient, it was so dark and blurred. The house looked like a log cabin, and everyone’s clothing was tattered. I quickly realized the sacrifice made by my ancestors and how this sacrifice benefited me – and this sparked even more questions. But I had no idea this curiosity would lead to a career helping others trace their family histories.

What are the special challenges of doing African-American genealogy?

For any group, the further back you go, the fewer records that exist. But the slavery system increased the difficulty. Some individuals were free before the Civil War, but most black Americans are descended from slaves. Considered property, slaves left no real paper trail. They did not record their marriages at the local county courthouse. Also, slavery split families apart, and few slaves could read or write, so the likelihood of family histories being left behind is low. Census records did not include the names of slaves, only the age and the gender of each slave belonging to a specific owner.

By the time slavery ended, for generations of people, much of their original identity and history was lost. And after the Civil War, many families migrated. Some took on the names of former masters, but others simply made up names. Former slaves were poor, and records are always scarce for the poor. Stories about blacks didn’t make the mainstream newspapers until decades later. Some unique records do exist that are helpful in tracing African-American roots, but usually the history is documented by finding the last slave owner.

Which collections have you used to track your own genealogy?

Genealogy is about more than names, dates and locations. It’s about how people lived and why they did the things they did. In genealogy, we call it “putting meat on the bones.” I began my research by interviewing my older relatives. This information led to other resources and collections.

The Library of Congress has local histories from throughout the country in its collections, for example. I searched for books relating to the counties where my relatives had lived. These books provided records pertaining to county history, marriages, taxes, deaths and other details. The Library also has family histories compiled by people who researched their own families. I searched our catalog for these books as well, but unfortunately none related to my line of the family.

The Library subscribes to hundreds of subscription databases, which are free to the staff and public – although some are accessible only on site. I have searched several and located fascinating records. Ancestry Library Edition, which is our subscription to Ancestry.com, has over a billion names and allows you to search for your ancestors’ names. I’ve located U.S. census records, military records and marriage records for my family in Ancestry.

“Chronicling America” is a newspaper database that allows keyword searching. My research in this database has revealed obituaries and other information. I continue to search the “Records of the Ante Bellum Southern Plantations,” a microfilmed collection housed in the Manuscript Reading Room. These are records of plantation owners containing information about everyday life on the plantations. They document when people were bought and sold, and provide details about occupations, clothing and food allowances and list slaves by their first names.

Has anything you’ve learned about your own family surprised you?

Using “Chronicling America,” I located a letter to the editor, “Remember the Fireman,” written by my great-great grandfather complaining about his pay and that of his colleagues. Imagine my surprise! I had no idea my ancestor was a firefighter. The letter was published in The Washington Herald on Dec. 10, 1913. But history tells me that black firemen didn’t exist during this time in D.C. I figured out that my ancestor was one of the guys who lit the gas lamps around the city. In 1913, they were called firemen.

Junior Fellow Builds Access to Postwar Poetry Archive

This post is an interview of Antonio Parker, a 2018 summer intern with the Junior Fellows Program . He is a recent graduate of the University of Maryland, College Park, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in English literature. This summer, he is interning with the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division.

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Antonio Parker

Tell us a little about your project.

I am working on the St. Mark’s Poetry Project archive housed in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. The project is part of a community arts program that has operated out of St. Mark’s Church in the Bowery neighborhood of New York City since 1966. After a split with the Café Le Metro, a coffee shop once popular for hosting poetry readings, many poets from the Beat and Counterculture generation searched for a new venue for their readings. They found a home at St. Mark’s Church, and it has remained a venue for not only poetry readings but also film screenings, musical performances, writing workshops and many other creative arts endeavors for the past 50 years.

The St. Mark’s Poetry Project has cultivated both emerging and established poets since its inception. Allen Ginsberg, Paul Blackburn, Anne Waldman, Ron Padgett and many other poets have contributed to the development of the project through readings, workshops and administrative work. The project has also served as an escape for alienated youth from the dangers of street delinquency. It offers writing workshops for children and has a recreational area for children to play in a safe environment.

The Rare Book and Special Collections Division recently digitized the project’s archive, and my job is to help organize it to enable greater public access.

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A flyer from the archive advertising a 1973 poetry reading by Ted Greenwald and Peter Schjeldahl.

Describe your typical day.

My day consists of organizing audiocassette tapes of readings, musical performances and screenings from as early as the 1970s and entering metadata for the tapes and their contents into a spreadsheet. In addition, I organize and enter data for the flyers from poetry readings and different events at the church into a Library database, and I scan images.

Have you discovered anything of special interest?

Among the most exciting things I’ve found are the elaborate and creative flyers made during the 1970s and 1980s. In addition to the flyers, members of the St. Mark’s Poetry Project collaborated to create book covers and illustrations. George Schneeman’s designs stand out to me within the collection of illustrations and flyers. I’ve also had the opportunity to listen to hours of audio recordings of poetry readings that have not been heard since they were recorded.

What attracted you to the project?

I was interested in learning about the St. Mark’s Poetry Project from my background in creative writing. I was also familiar with some of the poets who have given readings at the project, such as Allen Ginsberg and Sonia Sanchez, through poetry workshops. In addition, being an English major, I have a lot of familiarity with researching library databases such as WorldCat and JSTOR, and I developed an interest in archival conservation and access through my research.

What has your experience been like so far as a junior fellow?

My experience at the Library of Congress has been amazing. The staff has been nothing but kind and helpful to me, and every day has been a learning experience. Not only is the work engaging, but I have enjoyed the many informative sessions and events at the Library that have made me feel involved in the community.

For more information about the Junior Fellows Program, visit the Library’s website.