Library of Congress's Blog, page 88

Pic of the Week: Facilitating Access to Hebrew and Yiddish Periodicals

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Sasha Zborovsky of Ohio State University examines one of the Yiddish periodicals she is organizing this summer in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Reading Room.

She is one of 40 students participating in the Library’s 2018 Junior Fellows Summer Internship Program. Fellows are working across the Library on 33 different projects covering topics ranging from preservation research and testing and the National Book Festival to Hispanic literature and African-American migration. The fellows are currently in week seven of the 10-week program.

“We have periodicals in Hebrew and Yiddish published across Eastern Europe, Israel and the United States, from the early 19th century to the present, all gathered here in the Hebraic Section,” Zborovsky explains. “Unfortunately, many of the cataloging records for these periodicals lack holdings statements, so the outside world does not know what volumes the Library owns. My job involves fixing that.”

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

My Job at the Library: Bringing Collections to the Public Through Books

This post is reprinted from “ Baseball Nation: Still Indivisible ,” the July–August 2018 issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. Issues of the magazine are available online .

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Susan Reyburn. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Susan Reyburn of the Library’s Publishing Office writes and edits books that help make Library collections more accessible to the public. Over the years, she’s worked on book projects related to football, World War II and the Magna Carta.

In 2009, Reyburn co-authored “Baseball Americana,” a volume exploring baseball treasures in the Library’s collections. Now, she is serving as curator of a major new exhibition of the same name, which opened at the Library on June 29.

Here, Reyburn talks about her work and the Library’s baseball collections.

How would you describe your work at the Library?

It’s always interesting and at times eclectic. In the Publishing Office, we produce books and other products, such as calendars and quiz decks, based on the Library’s collections. Our role is to help make the collections more accessible to the public through what we publish.

With 167 million or so items here, we have no shortage of topics to consider or resources to explore each year. So, we excavate, research, write, edit and meet with Library subject experts on a variety of things.

How did you prepare for your position?

For this job, having a background in history has been really helpful. I have a bachelor’s in history and did a master’s program in library science, specializing in cultural-heritage management. After working in private industry – editing and preparing economic and environmental-impact reports – I did the publication-specialist certificate program at George Washington University in a single, crazed summer.

We covered a lot of territory, and it was ideal preparation for working in our small office at the Library, where we each wear multiple hats – sometimes even stacked up.

What book projects have you especially enjoyed?

Our books on baseball and football were great fun; I knew we had a lot sports material here, but just how much and the variety was a revelation. “The Library of Congress World War II Companion” was a huge collaborative and endlessly fascinating effort, and it was great to go through the original first-person accounts of servicemen and women in the Veterans History Project. We also interviewed veterans, including some who had not discussed their wartime experiences much before, and a marvelous woman who had been a WASP (in the Women Airforce Service Pilots). Those interviews are now in the VHP collections.

And I loved researching the history of Magna Carta’s adventures and its unexpectedly lengthy residency at the Library during World War II – with two of those years in hiding at Fort Knox – for a chapter in a book that accompanied the “Magna Carta: Muse and Mentor” exhibition.

I’ve also enjoyed working with Library curators and experts on their books, because they are passionate and enthusiastic about their subjects, and they know more about them than we can ever put in the book.

What are your favorite baseball items in the Library’s collections and why?

I am so taken by “A Little Pretty Pocket Book” (first American edition, 1787). This aptly named tome, only a few inches in length, appears in the “Baseball Americana” exhibition. It contains the first known printed reference to baseball in America and includes a woodcut drawing that shows wooden posts being used as bases.

This is baseball as a folk game, exactly a century before professional teams would pose in carpeted photography studios with balls hanging by string from the ceiling for the first sets of baseball cards in 1887.

The early baseball cards and early rule books are wonderful examples of a game that is definitely recognizable but is still coming into its own as a major sport.

Inquiring Minds: Exploring the Culture of Jazz Through Music and More

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Robert O’Meally gave a lecture at the Library of Congress on May 10 as part of his residency at the Library as a jazz scholar. Photo by Laurel Howard.

Robert O’Meally spent two weeks in residence at the Library of Congress earlier this year researching all things jazz. He is the Zora Neale Hurston Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and an authority on Ralph Ellison and African-American literature. He is also an internationally recognized scholar of jazz and founder of Columbia’s Center for Jazz Studies. He is known in particular for reaching across disciplines to interpret the place of jazz in American culture.

The Music Division hosted O’Meally through its Jazz Scholar Program, a collaborative effort of the Library and the Reva and David Logan Foundation. During his residency, he viewed holdings in the Music Division but also in the Manuscript Division, the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, the Prints and Photographs Division and the Motion Pictures, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division.

O’Meally’s books include “Lady Day: The Many Faces of Billie Holiday,” “The Craft of Ralph Ellison” and, most recently, “Romare Bearden: A Black Odyssey.” Several of O’Meally’s music projects have won awards, including his co-produced Smithsonian box set, “The Jazz Singers,” which was nominated for a Grammy Award. In recent years, O’Meally has also served as art co-curator for Jazz at Lincoln Center and curated exhibitions in New York, Paris and Istanbul.

Here he answers questions about his research at the Library and his scholarship.

What materials did you view at the Library?

In nearly every case, the collections I studied involved my ongoing work on Duke Ellington and Billy Strayhorn. But because of my interests beyond Ellington, and indeed beyond music as such, I also studied manuscript material of Zora Neale Hurston, information about the Broadway production “Swinging the Dream,” the libraries of Thomas Jefferson and Ralph Ellison and the paintings of Romare Bearden.

What surprised you most about the collections or the Library?

I have to say that it was a delightful shock to view a manuscript in Chopin’s handwriting as well as other scores in the handwriting of great composers. It surprised me that I was able – wearing white gloves as directed – to touch such magical materials. (Sometimes on back pages, secrets hide.)

Did you discover anything meaningful to the history of jazz that was new to you?

To me, it is highly significant that Max Roach was so very aware of his value as a composer and player of this music. And that he expected to be paid accordingly! I also was struck by how important it was to see Ellington and Strayhorn’s scores for “Such Sweet Thunder,” their Shakespearean “sweet.” It certainly changes my impressions of the piece to learn that Ellington wrote virtually all of it, and that the concert as a whole – Billy Strayhorn’s idea – represented a welcome-home gesture to Strayhorn, who’d been miffed at Duke for excluding him from proper credits. So this is a piece about reconciliation as well as one that reads African-American experience at the time of Little Rock and Greensboro (and of Sputnik and Aimé Césaire) through the kaleidoscopic lenses of William Shakespeare. No wonder that “Such Sweet’s” most prominent portraits are of Cleopatra and Othello.

You grew up in Washington, D.C., in a musical family. Did you have connections with the local jazz community as a youth?

I was born in Freedman’s Hospital on New Year’s Eve, 1948. So I came along at a time when the Bohemian Caverns, Blues Alley, the Showboat Lounge, Carter Baron Amphitheater and too many local clubs to mention were part of the scene. I played alto saxophone in Coolidge High School’s orchestra and marching band. Several kids in that band were gigging while still in high school. I sat in with a few of these youngsters’ combos in the mid-1960s. But my experience with professionals was primarily as a devoted fan. During those years, 1962 to 1966, I heard Sonny Stitt, Oscar Peterson, Jimmy Witherspoon, Sun Ra, Cecil Taylor, Charlie Byrd, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, Ahmad Jamal, Ramsey Lewis (“Live at the Bohemian Caverns”) and many others!

What was the importance of the jazz scene to D.C.’s African-American community?

I don’t want to wax nostalgic on this question. But as I look back, I found that at a time of Smokey Robinson and Little Stevie and Elvis Presley, it was thrilling to connect with the music of my father and his friends – and to realize that aside from the 8- to 16-bar sax solos on a rock n’ roll record (some of which were fantastic!), there had been a man called Charlie Parker; there had been a woman called Billie Holiday. Going out on a date to the “Caves” (before heading back to the neighborhood for a dancing party!) meant that you expanded your range of appreciation and connected to your parents and their friends in new ways. And to girls who were also stretching their range of musical experience. I would say that Afro-music in general was a binding force for the community. And that since it was so sophisticated, it had the greatest powers to hold the community together, to express its most profound values.

What was it like working at the Library of Congress as a jazz scholar?

It was a thorough pleasure. I could sit quietly and think. Then if something came up concerning a musician, I could see the pertinent material immediately. The staff was beyond golden.

What is the value to scholars, and the public, of the Library acquiring collections like those you consulted and making them accessible?

When it comes to hard-digging scholarship and theorizing, jazz is still somewhat of an undiscovered continent. So as we as a nation finally begin to realize the vitality of this music – and of its importance as model for writers and visual artists as well as for musicians whose category may be far from “jazz” – collecting and studying this still relatively new work is of the utmost importance. We need to do all we can to obtain materials while a precious few of those musical revolutionaries – those like Jimmy Heath, for example, and his brilliant brother Albert Heath, who helped create the language of jazz – are still alive to tell their versions of where the music comes from and what it means.

Pic of the Week: Mandela Grandson Shares Lessons He Learned from His Grandfather

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Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden (left) with Ndaba Mandela on stage in the Coolidge Auditorium on June 27. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Ndaba Mandela, the grandson of South African leader and humanitarian Nelson Mandela, spoke in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress on June 27 with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about his recently published memoir, “Going to the Mountain: Life Lessons from My Grandfather.”

Drawing on the memoir, Mandela talked about growing up under his grandfather’s care and his own efforts to advance Nelson Mandela’s legacy through the Africa Rising Foundation, which he established in 2009.

Listen to a recording of the program on the Library’s YouTube site.

Baseball Americana: The ‘Unchanging’ Game

Welcome to week nine of our blog series for “Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening this Friday, June 29. This is the ninth of nine posts – we’ve published one each Thursday leading up to the opening. In this post, John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, writes about the evolution of baseball in America.

As a bonus, we’re counting down the innings to the exhibit’s launch by asking baseball fans a question each week. Your question for this week is at the bottom of this post. Join the conversation!

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John Thorn. Photo by Dion Ogust.

“Ninety feet between bases,” wrote Red Smith, “is perhaps as close as man has ever come to perfection.” Other writers have extolled the divine inspiration that must have produced a game of nine men and nine innings, with an exhilarating disregard for the clock. Baseball grew up with the republic and has been the rock around which life’s turbulent waters have swirled. Amid unceasing, unsettling change in all America’s institutions, our game has given us an everyday reminder of all that was once good about America and might once be again.

Or so it goes. In fact, the only permanent thing about America is change. Baseball has changed irresistibly, whether through innovation or evolution, sly turns in custom and practice or overt rule changes. Fans of a certain age have seen “their game” bloat from two hours to three; relief pitchers proliferate; defensive shifts turn former hits into routine outs; and increasing strikeouts and home runs result in fewer balls in play.

The belief in our nation’s historic game as a repository of its ancient values is strengthened by a shared belief in things that may not be so … we do no dishonor to baseball’s story to call it myth. Truly, much of what we love about the game today, and what binds us as a people, is its yesterdays. The ever-present past is what keeps Babe Ruth alive as we watch Shohei Ohtani, the remarkable pitcher-hitter of the Los Angeles Angels.

Ohtani may be the superior athlete of the two, but Ruth will be forever unchallenged as the greatest player the game has known, in part because he was a colossus among pygmies. (This is an inflammatory remark, I recognize, but this space is too limited for its justification.) Players of greater ability than the heroes of yore are among us today, their feats camouflaged by the heightened skills of those around them.

To those who revere the eternal verities of an unchanging game, such talk is blasphemy, of course. Baseball analysts who love the game – but fear for its future in an age of competing distractions – have suggested moving the pitcher’s slab, or splaying the foul lines, or restricting the use of infield alignments. Most radically, veteran pitcher and announcer Jim Kaat recently outraged his Twitter followers by proposing that baseball become a game of seven innings.

This tickled me, for the intensity greeting Kaat’s idea matched that at a baseball convention held long ago, in 1857, when the New York clubs agreed to play the new game of baseball by a set of rules that, for the first time, established:

the number of men to the side at nine;
the distance between bases at 90 feet;
the pitcher’s distance at 45 feet; and
the duration of the game at seven innings.

Yes, you read that right. The “Laws of Base Ball” offered at the convention provided for a game of seven innings (12 had been suggested, too). Only a last-minute reversal gave us our “divinely inspired” game of nine innings.

The Library of Congress will display, as part of its “Baseball Americana” exhibition, the treasured manuscript of these “Laws,” whose adoption in 1857 represent, in this writer’s view, the dawn of baseball as we might recognize it today.

BONUS QUESTION

Tell us what baseball means to you in three words.

New Online: Papers of the President People Love to Hate

This is a guest post by Sahr Conway-Lanz, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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Woodrow Wilson in 1879, the year he graduated from Princeton University.

Harry Truman called Woodrow Wilson “the greatest of the greats.” Theodore Roosevelt called him “the lily-livered skunk in the White House.” Wilson won the 1919 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to forge peace after World War I, yet more recent critics have called him a racist. In the last several years, Princeton University, where Wilson served as president before entering politics, even debated whether to remove Wilson’s name from its buildings.

Wilson is arguably America’s most controversial president. Now anyone with internet access can explore his papers at the Library of Congress to understand why: The Library has made the largest single collection of original Wilson material in the world available online. More than a quarter-million documents from Wilson’s papers are included.

Presidents other than Wilson – Andrew Jackson and Warren Harding, for example – have more uniformly negative reputations, but their presidencies inspire little heat nowadays. Who gets worked up today about James Buchanan and his failed presidency on the eve of the Civil War?

Yet almost a hundred years after his death in 1924, Wilson and his outsized role in American history is still argued over, sometimes heatedly. He continues to have his dedicated admirers and his blistering critics in part because of the great influence he and his presidency had on the United States.

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Wilson’s shorthand notes for his 1918 “Fourteen Points” address, in which he proposed peace terms for ending World War I.

Wilson’s legislative agenda, which he steered through Congress, reshaped the American economy and its finances with changes such as the growing use of the federal income tax and the creation of the Federal Reserve banking system. He led the United States into World War I and then pursued a bold vision for postwar peace and reform of international relations, a vision largely unfulfilled. He advocated for the world’s first global organization, the League of Nations, where states could negotiate their differences and collaborate to provide collective security against aggressive states.

Wilson’s ideas on international relations met with ferocious resistance, and the United States never joined the League of Nations. Yet commentators still label certain current approaches to foreign policy “Wilsonian” – those that emphasize international cooperation and the spread of democracy around the world – his thinking has had that much resonance with later generations.

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Wilson’s personal draft of the covenant of the League of Nations, a postwar global organization intended to resolve international conflicts and prevent future wars.

Today, Wilson’s attitudes and policies toward race relations, including increased racial segregation of the federal workforce during his administration, generate the fiercest criticism of his presidency. Barring consideration of the most recent presidents, only Lyndon Johnson and Ronald Reagan raise a similar level of controversy, and their administrations have had less time for controversies to cool.

The online Wilson collection includes his correspondence during his presidency; extensive documentation on his involvement in World War I and the negotiation of a postwar peace settlement; and material on his life before and after the presidency. A correspondence of several hundred letters between Wilson and his second wife, Edith Bolling Galt, from early in their relationship in 1915 provides an especially intimate view of Wilson. Also available are protests that African-American leaders lodged against Wilson’s stances on race relations, such as a letter from the leadership of the NAACP objecting to the racial segregation of federal agencies.

Whatever one thinks of Woodrow Wilson, his digitized papers from the Library of Congress will make it much easier to get to know the United States’ 28th president.

Baseball Americana: A House of Cards

Welcome to week eight of our blog series for “ Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29 . This is the eighth of nine posts – we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening. In this post, Sara Duke, curator of popular and applied graphic art in the Prints and Photographs Division, writes about a remarkable collection of tobacco trading cards that captures baseball players from the game’s early days.

As a bonus, we’re counting down the innings to the exhibit’s launch by asking baseball fans a question each week. Your question for this week is at the bottom of this post. Join the conversation!

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King Kelly, baseball’s first big star.

American businessman Benjamin K. Edwards (1880–1943) carefully amassed a collection of more than 10,000 trading cards, most of which were created to help sell packets of cigarettes. Among the many topics represented in this collection, the 2,100 early baseball cards are especially interesting for the breadth of teams and players covered.

Those cards span 1887 to 1914, when baseball began to appear less frequently. Focusing on cigarette cards, Edwards collected only one baseball card set produced by a candy manufacturer – he never turned his attention to the baseball cards packaged with candy and gum after World War I.

In an era when collectors wrote letters and traveled to track down a trove of trading cards, Edwards noted, “To the true collector hobbiest, the difficulty of finding old American cards is most inviting, and along with the sport thereof is the interest of research work and the insight as to the living and thinking of our people a half century ago.”

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Ty Cobb, one of the first players to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.

These baseball cards came to the Library by a circuitous route with more than 10,000 other cigarette cards on many subjects. In 1948, having learned that Carl Sandburg loved cigarette cards, Edwards’ daughter gave the albums to the noted poet and Lincoln biographer with the instructions, “[W]hen … they are of no further interest or value to you and you wish to give them to some museum or other institution, that you state in your letter of gift that they were the property of Benjamin K. Edwards, formerly of Chicago, Illinois.”

Sandburg, whose daughter Helga Golby worked in the Manuscript Division, donated the trading cards to the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division in 1954.

The Edwards Collection offers insight into the development of modern baseball and the marketing of popular players. More than 1,000 major and minor league players, from teams in 13 identified leagues and 75 cities in the United States and Canada, are represented in the collection. Major leaguers account for more than three-quarters of the images.

The cards, most of which are smaller than 3 inches on the long side, illustrate many of the greatest figures in the game’s early decades: King Kelly, baseball’s first big star; catcher Connie Mack, at the start of what would be a 60-year career as a player and manager; and Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson and Walter Johnson, three of the first five players elected to the Hall of Fame.

In 1998, the Library digitized the collection – also scanning the backs of cards when printed text existed – and made it accessible to scholars around the world.

BONUS QUESTION

What is your favorite baseball movie?

“ Baseball Americana ” features items from the Library of Congress collections and those of its lending partners to consider the game then and now – as it relates to players, teams and the communities it creates. The Library is partnering with ESPN, Major League Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in presenting the exhibition, made possible by the Library of Congress Third Century Fund, the James Madison Council and Democracy Fund.

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Like Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson (right) was among the first players inducted into the Hall of Fame.

My Job at the Library: Sharing a Love for the Library’s Music Collections

Cait Miller is a reference specialist in the Music Division. This post was first published in the May–June issue of LCM , the Library of Congress Magazine. “My Job” is a regular feature in the magazine, issues of which are available in their entirety online .

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Cait Miller holds lyricist Howard Ashman’s personal Sebastian the Crab, featured in animated form in “The Little Mermaid.” Photo by Shawn Miller.

How would you describe your work at the Library?

I am most often found in the Performing Arts Reading Room welcoming researchers, orienting people to the Music Division’s collections, answering questions about accessing the collections and presenting orientations to individuals and groups. I relish any opportunity, whether in the reading room, via Ask A Librarian or writing for the Library’s “In the Muse” blog, to share our collections and programs with the public. I’ve lost track of the number of times someone has commented to me at the reference desk or after an orientation: “You have the coolest job!” I couldn’t agree more!

How did you prepare for your position?

As a music major in college, I knew that a career in performance was not for me but desperately wanted to find something where I could maintain a strong tie to music. One career kept popping up in conversations: music librarianship. During a summer home from college, I took an internship in the American Folklife Center and was inspired by the Library’s collections and service to the public. I started a dual-degree program at Catholic University one week following my college graduation and received an M.S. in library science as well as an M.A. in musicology. (As a part of my library science program, I actually took an internship in the Music Division, thinking it was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity!) After graduating, I applied for a music reference specialist position in the Music Division and was incredibly lucky to be selected. About a year into the job, I decided to also pursue a Ph.D. in musicology. I am now officially working on my dissertation: “At the Intersection of Gender, Nationalism and the Dangerous Woman: Lorelei in Nineteenth-Century Song.”

What projects have you especially enjoyed?

While I am passionate about all genres of music, I’ve been particularly delighted to have the opportunity to work with musical theater. One of my favorite projects grew out of a passing comment by my colleague Mark Horowitz alerting me to correspondence in the Oscar Hammerstein Collection. The correspondence was between a nun named Sister Gregory and Oscar Hammerstein while he was working on “The Sound of Music.” As I read the letters, I realized that the correspondence brought new insight into the creative process of Hammerstein, and I requested and was granted permission from Sister Gregory’s Order (the Sinsinawa Order) to digitize the letters. You can read my blog post on Sister Gregory and see the letters online.

What have been some of your most memorable experiences at the Library?

I would have to say my most memorable experience in the Music Division was when Lin-Manuel Miranda visited the Performing Arts Reading Room in October 2017. He was here to conduct his own research in our collections, but my colleague Janet McKinney and I curated a small display of items that we thought he would appreciate (we have been inspired by him since our first listen to the “Hamilton” cast album). He tweeted about his favorite items in the display: an early draft of a lyric for “Maria” from “West Side Story” and lyricist Howard Ashman’s personal Sebastian the Crab stuffed animal (a favorite of mine as well!).

Baseball Americana: Telling Stories Through Stats

Welcome to week seven of our blog series for “ Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29 . This is the seventh of nine posts – we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening. In this post, stats pro Sam Farber discusses how data has changed the way fans follow sports. He led the ESPN Stats and Information Group’s collaboration with the Library of Congress on “Baseball Americana” when he was an associate ESPN manager.

As a bonus, we’re counting down the innings to the exhibit’s launch by asking baseball fans a question each week. Your question for this week is at the bottom of this post. Join the conversation!

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Sam Farber. Photo courtesy of ESPN.

What is the ESPN Stats and Information Group?

It is a collection of the most knowledgeable sports enthusiasts you’ve ever been around. All your friends in high school who could always answer the sports trivia questions? That’s who we are. We take that collection of individuals and turn them into a dedicated team committed to uncovering statistical trends and distilling complex data to tell compelling, digestible stories.

How has data changed the way people follow sports?

It’s changed both how the games are played and how they’re consumed, incomparably. Fantasy statistics are available at the push of a button or even without that—getting alerts on your phone. Broadcasts display information that either wasn’t publicly available or just didn’t exist a decade ago, 20 years ago. Now, on baseball broadcasts, you’ll see fielding metrics, instant home run distances, catch probabilities. It’s seeped into every aspect of broadcasts and digital platforms.

The Library is a source for some of your work.

We put together a resource of information on college basketball games among ranked teams. The rankings date to the late 1940s, so a lot of that information isn’t publicly available. Librarians pointed us to the newspaper archives, which have been an absolute godsend for the work we do, trying to find historical information.

It’s totally changed what we’re able to produce for college basketball. One of the really cool examples was from this past year. Utah Valley, a program a little off the radar, on back-to-back days in the first two days of the season played a game at Kentucky, when Kentucky was ranked fifth, and less than 24 hours later, played a road game at Duke, which was No. 1. Using this resource created with the help of the Library, we were able to say that Utah Valley was the first team to begin a season with consecutive road games against top-five opponents.

That’s the kind of thing visitors to this exhibit can expect to learn as a result of this collaboration.

Yes. There are some really cool pictures, old baseball cards of Walter Johnson—the second-winningest pitcher in history. He pitched from the early 1900s to the 1920s and racked up complete game after complete game [531 for his career]. Johnson had over 100 shutouts in his career. There were fewer than 100 complete games across all of the major leagues last year, let alone 100 shutouts.

That illustrates how the game has changed. Now, a pitcher gets over 100 pitches in the fifth inning, and you’ll see five relievers come out to finish the game.

Why is baseball such a part of the fabric of our communities and our country?

No other major professional sport has been played as long in this country. Baseball has been played professionally in America, even at a major-league level, back to the 1870s and, semi-professionally and recreationally, well before then. As the country became more diverse, the game evolved with it. I think that diversity, that evolution, is inherently American, too. So, not only the origins of the game, but the evolution are things that we inextricably associate with America. I think that really ties the two together.

BONUS QUESTION

What is your favorite ballpark?

“ Baseball Americana ” features items from the Library of Congress collections and those of its lending partners to consider the game then and now – as it relates to players, teams and the communities it creates. The Library is partnering with ESPN, Major League Baseball and the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in presenting the exhibition, made possible by the Library of Congress Third Century Fund, the James Madison Council and Democracy Fund.

The John W. Kluge Prize: Q&A with Drew Gilpin Faust

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Harvard University President Drew Gilpin Faust, recipient of the 2018 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity. Photo by Stephanie Mitchell.

Today, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden announced that Drew Gilpin Faust—historian, Harvard University president and author of the Bancroft Prize-winning book “This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War”—will receive the John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity.

The $1 million Kluge Prize, bestowed through the generosity of the late John W. Kluge, will be awarded during a gala ceremony in the Great Hall of the Library of Congress on Sept. 12.

The Kluge Prize recognizes individuals whose outstanding scholarship in the humanities and social sciences has shaped public affairs and civil society. Administered by the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, the international prize highlights the value of researchers who communicate not only within the scholarly community but also beyond it.

“The Library of Congress is thrilled to recognize Drew Gilpin Faust for her extraordinary work researching, writing and teaching about the fabric of American life,” said Hayden upon announcing the 2018 award. “Through her extensive writing about Southern identity, she has explored themes of deep relevance to our national conversation on race and gender. As the first female president of Harvard University, she has also led one of the most esteemed educational institutions in the world through a period of intense growth and transformation.”

Faust spoke about her research and accomplishments as a leader in higher education with Colleen Shogan of the Library’s National and International Outreach program in advance of the award’s announcement. Here is an excerpt from their conversation.

What drew you to the study of history, particularly the Civil War and the American South?

I grew up in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia at a time when history was very much under scrutiny and contention. It was in the 1950s and early 1960s, when the Civil War centennial was very much on people’s minds, so that around me there were reenactments of battles, and there were commemorations of what had happened in those very places 100 years before.

But at the same time, there was the emerging civil rights movement, with the Brown v. Board decision in the mid-‘50s, and the response of Virginia’s Senator Harry Byrd—who lived actually in my own county—who argued that schools should be closed rather than integrated. Questions of race were very much an issue surrounding me and my childhood. So the question of contemporary society, the world I was growing up in and its relationship to the past, was already very prominent in my mind, even from the time I was quite small.

How did you come to write about death and the Civil War in “This Republic of Suffering”?

“This Republic of Suffering” grew out of earlier work I’d done on the Civil War, particularly the experience of women in the Confederate South.

I did a book called “Mothers of Invention” about slaveholding women in the South during the war, and I found that, repeatedly, what was most on their minds was loss—the loss of a loved one, the fear of a loss of a loved one, the impact of the loss of a loved one—and the presence of death was so palpable in those women’s writings and in their voices as I heard them, that it made me look at the Civil War anew, even though I’d been teaching and studying it for years.

When we recognize that an equivalent rate of death would mean something like 7 million individuals dying in the United States today, that gives us a little bit of a sense of what an enormous toll that the Civil War took. It makes one think, how did people grapple with that in every dimension—from their views of religion to their views of politics to just the simple question of how did they dispose of the dead? That was the real impetus for that study.

What lessons can contemporary Americans draw from the painful reality of the Civil War?

One thing I think we can learn is how costly war is. The Civil War was begun by both sides thinking that it would not be costly, that it would end very quickly. A Southern senator said that he would drink all the blood that was going to be shed, assuming there would be none.

This underestimation of what war becomes is something that we should be aware of, and we should be careful about, and what we ask of our military as well. Politicians may get us into wars as they did in the years before the Civil War, but it was young people from all over the country, young men as soldiers, who died because of those decisions.

And so I think underscoring the enormous cost of war is one of the lessons of the book. That’s not to say that there aren’t times when war should be fought, and that the decision to fight the Civil War was an important and valuable one for the impact it had on the nation. But we need to make those difficult decisions in the context of understanding the cost that is involved. We shouldn’t fool ourselves.

How do you as a higher education leader advocate for the value of humanities, especially as enrollments in humanities disciplines are declining at U.S. colleges and universities?

The importance of studying the humanities—and indeed, in the words of the Kluge Prize, the importance of studying humanity—seems to me at the core of any educational experience. I’ve learned a lot during my 11 years as president of Harvard about the increasingly vocational emphasis in higher education, because I think it diminishes the opportunities for students and the potential for growth that education can involve.

We shouldn’t be training students for a first job, we should be giving them habits of mind—discernment, judgment—that I believe come out of the broad study of liberal arts and particularly out of understanding the humanities. Any student graduating today is going to have to deal with people who are very different from the graduating student—people who will come from different parts of society, different parts of the world, will challenge assumptions that any individual may have grown up with—and so, the ability to empathize, to see the world through others’ eyes, to understand different cultures, different times, and to imagine a world that is different from the one we live in now. That all comes from the study of other times, peoples and places. That, to me, is the essence of what humanistic study involves.

Your appointment as the first woman president of Harvard held special significance for women. How did you respond to expectations placed upon you because of your gender?

Well, when my appointment was announced in February 2007, there was a press conference, and I was standing up there for the first time in front of a crowd, and a reporter said something about being the woman president of Harvard, and I found myself responding almost instinctively – I don’t remember what went through my head – I just found myself saying, “I’m not the woman president of Harvard. I’m the president of Harvard.” And that got very widely quoted. I think my intention in saying that was to not be seen as having this special and different—or diminished—state of power or being an individual with a kind of asterisk after her name, but rather to fully occupy the office of president with as much authority as any of my male predecessors.

But right away after my announcement, I started receiving letters from young women all over the world, and sometimes parents of young women all over the world, talking about how important it was to them that I was a woman and president of Harvard, and so it seemed to me important to fully inhabit the category of president of Harvard who is a woman. On my travels across the United States and around the world, I’ve often met with young women, gone to girls’ schools, talked about ambition and aspiration and tried to do the best job I could for all those young women who wrote to me and who are now 11 years older and perhaps inspired a little bit by the fact that I have done this job.

During your tenure as president, you diversified Harvard’s student body and faculty with a concerted effort to make a Harvard education affordable. How, in your view, does an emphasis on diversity advance the study of humanity, the focus of the Kluge Prize?

The diversification of our student body is a fundamental part of our educational mission because we believe that students who come to a residential university experience like that at Harvard College don’t just come for [what] goes on in the classroom, that a substantial part of what they learn happens in corridors, in houses and dormitories, in between classes, in debates after classes.

And so we want to make sure that that entire environment is just filled with diverse perspectives, with different individuals who bring different experiences, come from different religions, geographic locations, races, ethnicities and political persuasions, because they are all going to educate one another. That happens best when they don’t duplicate one another, when instead, coming to college opens up new views, new visions and new kinds of experiences. That happens in part through what we have in the curriculum, but it happens also through what our students bring to one another. And that, of course, is what the study of humanity is about. In a sense, what I’ve been saying is that we want our student body to be a cauldron for the study of humanity as people get to know one another and are curious about circumstances and surroundings and histories that have made them alike and different.

The Kluge Center encourages mutually enriching relationships between scholars and political leaders. What do you see as the benefits of such exchanges for public life?

There’s so much that scholarship and politics can offer one another. I was asked last year actually to write a little introduction to a speech that John F. Kennedy gave at a Harvard commencement in the late 1950s. I was so fascinated to read this speech because the point he was making was how much intellectuals and politicians had to offer one another and how knowledge and broader perspectives could make a politician’s efforts more fruitful and more wise.

I think we in the academy need to learn about the ways in which our knowledge can have an impact beyond the walls of our institutions. So these interactions I think can be very fruitful. I must say that one of the parts of my presidency that I have enormously enjoyed has been meeting with individuals in Washington and our state and local politicians here in Boston to talk about the impact that universities have on our society, and to try to work together with those political leaders to enhance our ability to be positive forces within our state, local and national communities.

Going back to your book “The Republic of Suffering,” it features striking photographs from the Library’s collections. Can you comment on your experience researching at the Library?

Well, the photographs are obviously such a treasure trove for anybody working on Civil War history. In my book about death, obviously there are many photographs that I think are quite familiar to many Americans of the dead on the battlefield of Antietam or of Gettysburg, of bodies awaiting burial. But there are also things I found that illustrated other dimensions of the history of death. For example, pictures of an embalmer, pictures of a shed on the battlefield where embalmers were working, pictures of Sanitary Commission officers trying to identify bodies. The rich experience of death in the war is chronicled in a very vivid and powerful way in the Library of Congress photography collections.

I’ve been using the Library of Congress since I was a graduate student. Using manuscript collections, I wrote about [a member of Congress] –  first used him as a character in one book, my dissertation, and then wrote a biography about [him]. He served in Congress and then in the Senate from South Carolina. He was the senator from South Carolina at the time of secession, James Henry Hammond. And there’s a very large collection of his papers in the Library of Congress that were essential to my work.

There are other smaller collections of papers I’ve used over the years. But one of my favorites actually was central in the death book, and those are the papers of Clara Barton, battlefield nurse and a really significant figure in trying to transform U.S. policy about obligation to the dead in the aftermath of the war. So the Library of Congress is just an essential institution for historians and has been an essential institution for me as a historian as well.

Your tenure as president of Harvard concludes in July. Can you share with us your plans post Harvard?

Well, I hope to learn to be a historian again in a very direct way. I haven’t had the time to spend in places like the Library of Congress over the last 11 years, and I haven’t had time to stay entirely up to date in my field. There’s a great deal that gets published in the field of Civil War and Southern history every year, and I’ve not read all those books, I confess. I’m eager to catch up on what the latest insights and directions are, and also to catch up with some of the remarkable new means of access to library materials and search materials in the digital revolution that’s been going on over the last 11 years. I have some thoughts about what I might want to write about next, but I’m not entirely sure.

I’d like to explore some research possibilities and get back to writing and thinking about both history and also the impact of history on our own time.