Library of Congress's Blog, page 88

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.

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.