Library of Congress's Blog, page 89

Pride in the Library: LGBTQ+ Specialist Shares Her Story

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Meg Metcalf. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Meg Metcalf dreamed of a career at the Library of Congress from the time she was 17, inspired by a job at a Borders bookstore in northeastern Illinois, where she worked the reference desk. She went on to earn a bachelor’s degree in women’s and gender studies and information science from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in 2012, and then obtained dual master’s degrees from the university in 2015 in library and information science and gender studies. Afterward, she applied to the Library and was delighted to be hired as a reference librarian in the Main Reading Room. Meg also serves as the Library’s women’s, gender and LGBTQ+ studies collection specialist.

Here she answers a few questions about her Library career and her advocacy on behalf of LGBTQ+ issues in honor of National Pride Month.

How did you arrive at the idea of combining librarianship with women’s studies?

I was already a self-identified feminist when I realized I wanted to go into librarianship, but I think these two fields have a natural compatibility in that both are concerned with justice, equality and access to knowledge, power and resources. I come from Wisconsin, which had the first women’s studies librarian, a position created at UW-Madison in 1977. That’s why I decided on Milwaukee for school, because I knew that I could pursue my library degree and conduct feminist-focused interdisciplinary research at the same time. When I was in grad school, I was working and teaching both in the women’s and gender studies department and at the university library, which gave me ample opportunity to explore the way these worlds collide.

Tell us a little more about what you do at the Library.

I wear many hats, and all of them are fabulous! I am a reference librarian in the Main Reading Room, where I provide research assistance for both general inquiries and those that fall within the scope of women’s, gender, and LGBTQ+ studies. As the collection specialist and recommending officer for the Library, I also have responsibilities in collection development, outreach, teaching and programming.

But my primary responsibility is to facilitate access to Library collections and services. It’s important to raise public awareness of Library resources in order to facilitate access. I get the word out by producing events like book lectures, research talks, monthly discussion sessions, outreach visits, workshops and more. I also do a fair amount of instruction through research orientations, Library and Main Reading Room tours and material displays and exhibits.

I have a background in teaching and instructional design, so I was excited to take the lead for a new video tutorial project shortly after I arrived at the Library. The project alleviates common barriers to use of Library collections and services by increasing instructional content on the website in the form of tutorial videos.

I want to make the user experience here as meaningful as possible, and often that starts with outreach. Many people don’t know that we are a working public library open to everyone, and we need to do what we can to make this as visible as possible. We live in an increasingly visual culture, so videos and image-based learning objects are essential to my instruction style.

Describe a couple of your favorite projects.

Recently, I put together a customized tour and display for “The Lily,” a new women-focused publication from the Washington Post. It is named after the original Lily (1849), considered the first U.S. newspaper edited by and for women. A lot of people don’t realize that newspapers and periodicals were one of the first publishing venues available to women. To witness this resurgence of women-focused publishing, and to be able to provide it with context using the collections, is a thrill.

I definitely had a pinch-me moment in September 2016 when I was approached to prepare a gallery talk for the America Reads Exhibit. In “Between the Waves: Reconstructing Feminist Narratives at the Library of Congress,” I discussed how barriers to publishing for marginalized peoples often results in a less-than-authentic historical narrative – that is certainly the case for mainstream conceptions of U.S. feminism. I encouraged listeners to imagine the great potential of Library collections to illuminate what mainstream history often gets wrong. Later, I presented an expanded version of the talk at the National Press Club for the American Women Writers National Museum, a reading partner of the Center for the Book.

How have you been involved in the LC-GLOBE?  

LC-GLOBE is the employee organization for the Library’s LGBTQ+ staff and allies. I’ve been a member since I arrived at the Library in August 2015. In 2017, I was elected to serve as chair of the LC-GLOBE steering committee, and in 2018 I was elected vice-chair.

Our goal is to connect our members with the essential resources they need not just to succeed but also to feel safe and welcome in the workplace. I think perhaps the most crucial resource we provide is a sense of a community and belonging. Throughout the year, we provide educational and recreational opportunities by hosting film screenings, author events, exhibits, workshops, trainings and more.

Among our members and leaders, we have more creativity, intelligence and talent than we could ever possibly use at once. It’s an honor just to be a part of this incredibly supportive group. They’re my work family.

How is GLOBE celebrating National Pride Month this year?

We organized a phenomenal Pride this year! Early this month, we had two major author events: an interview and book signing with André Aciman, author of “Call Me by Your Name,” and with Becky Albertalli, author of “Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda.” We had a fabulous display of LGBTQ+ materials set up for both events, and LC-GLOBE members talked with attendees about LGBTQ+ resources available here at the Library.

We also partnered with other library groups in Washington, D.C., and with our congressional LGBTQ+ colleagues to participate in the DC Pride Parade. It was my third time marching with LC-GLOBE and our congressional colleagues.

What has surprised you most about your Library career so far?

Getting this job was probably the biggest surprise of my life! This Library holds so much potential for discovery and creativity – it’s an enriching environment for patrons and staff alike.

I think most librarians hope to make a difference in the communities they serve, but I could never have anticipated getting to work in an institution with arguably the largest global reach of any Library currently in existence. It’s difficult to describe how it feels to know your work has meaning beyond your own limited conception of time and space. The work we do has a rich history behind it and an incredible legacy in front of it. It’s a great feeling.

I really look forward to continuing to make an impact on the breadth, depth, visibility of and access to the women’s, gender and LGBTQ+ studies collections and services here at the Library. I hope that by continuing to grow the collection and produce one-of-a-kind events and programming, we will be able to engage wider and increasingly diverse communities of people.

The John W. Kluge Prize: Recognizing an Impact on Public Life

This is a guest post by Dan Turello of the John W. Kluge Center.

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The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress. Photo by Shawn Miller.

As James English describes in his 2005 book, “The Economy of Prestige,” like so much in our cultural history, the practice of awarding prizes can be traced back to the Greeks, who, in addition to creating the Olympics, introduced drama and arts competitions as early as the 6th century B.C. Since then, prizes across a panoply of disciplines have become a mainstay of cultural life. Not only have prizes endured into the contemporary age, their number continues to increase, as does their significance in the world economy.

There is a burgeoning literature on prizes too, including a 2009 report by McKinsey and Company, the global management consulting firm, giving us a comprehensive picture of how prizes function societally, how they can be put to work to encourage innovation, how they influence our cultural hierarchies and how they can help create communities of interest.

For example, there is a noteworthy historical tradition of prizes’ being used to solve technical problems. In “Longitude,” her 1995 book, Dava Sobel recounts how in 1714, the British government devised the Longitude Prize to incentivize the creation of an instrument to measure longitude at sea. John Harrison developed the marine chronometer as a result. Napoleon’s France regularly created prize competitions, too, under the auspices of the Society for the Encouragement of Industry, writes James Burke in “Connections.” Among the prizewinners, Nicholas Appert devised a way of preserving foods in sealed champagne bottles—a method helpful for military provisioning that also served as a precursor to the modern canning industry.

Other prizes exemplify values and help create community. The Kluge Prize finds its distinctive place in a constellation of major international prizes including the Nobel, the Holberg and the Berggruen. It draws its uniqueness from its location at the Library of Congress, nestled in the midst of the institutions of political Washington. It seeks to reward sustained study that leads to greater understanding of the human experience, with an emphasis on leaders and ideas that have shaped public life. It is not directed at solving an immediate or pressing technical problem. Rather it seeks to reward those whose scholarship and career have had broad cultural impact, inviting us to question a current state of affairs, giving us a greater sense of context, a more in-depth understanding of the historical forces that have shaped our culture, or perhaps an inspirational vision of what the future might look like.

On occasion, artists and thinkers have resisted the formality of awards they have perceived as potentially neutralizing because of their institutional nature. In “Greatness: Who Makes History and Why,” Dean Keath Simonton reminds us that on receiving the Nobel Prize, T.S. Eliot compared it to “a ticket to one’s own funeral.” More recently, Bob Dylan declined to attend his own ceremony for the Nobel Prize in literature.

Yet the tradition of American self-government has always valued the creative tension between groundbreaking ideas and their potential institutional embodiment. This is the fertile ground the Kluge Prize seeks to inhabit. The Kluge Prize, as the Library of Congress envisions it, places value on creating space for a continued cultural conversation. It rewards thinkers who have taken risks; enshrines the values of pluralism and constructive critique; and dedicates time and resources to shining a spotlight on ideas and careers that have had an impact on public affairs and that are of continuing value to cultural and political life.

On June 12, the Library will announce the 2018 Kluge Prize winner. Look to the Library’s website for an announcement.

Baseball Americana: Root, Root, Root’s Debut

Welcome to week six of our blog series for “ Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29 . This is the sixth of nine posts – we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening. Matthew Barton, a record-sound curator in the Motion Picture, Broadcasting and Recorded Sound Division contributed this post.

  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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Lyricist Jack Norworth and composer Albert Von Tilzer submitted two copies of their new song, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” with a copyright registration in 1908.

More than a century after its debut, “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” stands as one of America’s best-known and most-loved songs—today, the unofficial anthem of baseball and a joyful ode to the pleasures of the ballpark.

The Library of Congress holds an original 1908 Edison cylinder of the first recording of the song, a rendition by Edward Meeker that in 2010 was selected for inclusion on the Library’s National Recording Registry for its cultural, historical and aesthetic importance.

Composers Jack Norworth and Albert Von Tilzer’s song was released early in the 1908 baseball season and quickly caught on with the public—reports recount it being sung in vaudeville and played by brass bands throughout the country, especially around Detroit, where the Tigers were embroiled in a four-way pennant race.

And if you were walking down the street in Manhattan in the late summer or early fall that year, you might have heard a young man sing this new song to promote the recently released Edison recording of it.

That would have been Meeker, who like other Edison recording artists in those days before radio, often sang on New York City street corners, in saloons and even on the steps of the main branches of the public library and post office to promote their recordings.

Today, everyone knows the chorus, but it is disconnected from the song’s story of a baseball-mad young woman named Katie Casey:

On a Saturday, her young beau

Called to see if she’d like to go,

To see a show, but Miss Kate said “No,

I’ll tell you what you can do:

“Take me out to the ball game …”

Northworth and Von Tilzer’s song inspired a slew of other baseball songs in the next few years. Those faded away quickly, but “Take Me Out the Ball Game” is well into its second century of popularity.

BONUS QUESTION

What is your most memorable baseball moment?

World War I: The Battle of Belleau Wood

This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

“The place: a wine vault, somewhere in hell – torn, blood streaked, shell plowed France.”

– Joel T. Boone, June 28, 1918

By the time he wrote those words to his wife, Joel T. Boone, a Navy doctor assigned to the Marine 4th Brigade, had just spent over three weeks suturing wounds, saving lives and providing solace to the soon-to-be-departed as one of World War I’s most famous conflicts, the Battle of Belleau Wood, raged all around him.

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Joel T. Boone’s World War I identity card.

The experience left no small impression. “Man cannot pass through hell as I have without feeling love more deeply, more sincerely than ever before,” he wrote. “Each of us is spiritually bettered, if physically weakened by the tortures and anguish of the recent past.”

On June 6, 1918 – 100 years ago today – the Battle of Belleau Wood began. Boone, whose story is told in the Library of Congress exhibition Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I, and whose papers reside in the Manuscript Division, provides unique and terrifying insight into the struggles, triumphs and myths that epitomize Belleau Wood, a conflict that would define the U.S. Marines for the next hundred years.

Though victory at Belleau Wood required the combined forces of the U.S. Marines and Army, the former usually receives the lion’s share of attention – a fact many Army veterans have pointed out. Regardless, it remains true that until World War II, Belleau Wood was the bloodiest Marine conflict in U.S. history. More than 1,000 were wounded on the first day of fighting alone, and 222 died. In all, nearly 10,000 members of the combined Marine-Army force were injured, deceased or missing when fighting ended around June 26.

Some historians have overplayed the battle’s strategic importance. Marine historian George B. Clark argued it was the most important battle fought by U.S. troops during the war’s entirety, while Richard Rubin claimed in a 2014 New York Times article that if the U.S. had failed to take the woods, “Germany would have won the war that month.”

U.S. efforts in the woods did contribute to a halting of the German offensive in 1918, but such observations are undoubtedly tinged by well-meaning hyperbole.

More recently, historian Edward G. Lengel disputed these conclusions, criticizing U.S. battlefield decision-making and tactics and lamenting the U.S. military’s denigration of French efforts. Yet Lengel and others acknowledge the battle did inject critically important vigor and enthusiasm into the Allied cause while also elevating the place of the Marines in the popular consciousness.

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The ruins of a farmhouse dressing station occupied by Joel T. Boone and his fellow corpsmen during the Battle of Belleau Woods can be seen in the background of this photo.

The American soldiers who fought at Belleau Wood might have been tactically poor, but they made up for it with adaptability, courage and aggressiveness. Boone asserted the same: “There have been such marvelous deeds of bravery and most everyone has displayed extreme courage under the most trying circumstances. The American has shown himself to be an unsurpassed soldier.”

Boone reported witnessing U.S. assaults in which “waves of our men attack in formation across open fields [while] German machine gun, rifle and gunfire rain over them.” Men fell, got up, pushed on and fell again, only to be replaced by their fellow soldiers “passing on undaunted to take the coveted territory.”

During the heart of the fighting, Boone and his fellow corpsman set up a dressing station near the battle where the injured, maimed and dying flooded their quarters. “Officers with both legs gone in the prime of youth is one of the most horrible to see,” Boone wrote his wife, “I had [two] such cases last night. We … dress and control hemorrhage, treat for shock, and evacuate the casualties.”

Boone and his counterparts endured three separate gas attacks and artillery barrages that caused housing to shake and the ground to “pulsate.” Another assault days later “demolished” one of the farm buildings from which they labored. Yet his fellow officers, Boone noted, rarely groused or lamented their condition. “These officers coming in wounded, terribly, terribly, wounded, rarely complain. They have endured their hardships and suffering gloriously. My heart has bled by the things I have seen,” Boone confided to his wife.

It was not just soldiers who drew praise from Boone. “Not only combatants, but non-combatants have done most highly commendable work,” he noted. “My [corpsmen] mean more to me now than ever before and they have proved themselves wonderful lads. All deserve commendation and I hope that each receives it and some very material reward. The bandsmen, as stretcher bearers, did splendidly and have established a tradition for future bearers that will be hard to surpass.”

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Franklin D. Roosevelt (left), who was then assistant secretary of the Navy, pins the Medal of Honor on Joel T. Boone in 1919.

Due to the constant bombardment, Boone sustained an ear injury that would require later medical attention. But he also suffered mentally. He found it difficult to write or talk. “The experiences of the recent past have had a most depressing effect upon me and I seem to be even more than usually serious.” He struggled with nightmares for days. “No wonder my mind, when uncontrolled in sleep, should be disturbed when the horrors of the past week have made a lasting impression on my mind,” he reflected. “I live my days over and over and there is but one present desire and that is to live nobly, righteously, and sacrificedly for my fellowman.”

Boone would recover. He did not receive a medal for his work at Belleau Wood. But in 1919, he was awarded the Medal of Honor in recognition of his contributions during the war. He went on to become White House physician to Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt during the 1920s and 1930s.

Reading Boone’s unpublished memoirs, included in his papers, reveals a man who believed he had witnessed, and played a role in, one of the great moments of U.S. military history. “Specific deeds of heroism are to be related by the fireside, if it may please God, in the years to come. My mind is full of them and someday I know that I may hold your hand and tell you of the men – every inch of men and the glorious American blood, richer, deeper red, and more glorious than ever in our history before.”

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

Baseball Americana: Baseball’s Magna Carta

Welcome to week five of our blog series for “ Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29 . This is the fifth of nine posts – we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening. 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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Knickerbockers president Daniel “Doc” Adams (bottom row, middle) imagined and recorded in his own hand the original draft of the “Laws of Base Ball.”

For decades, the documents that laid the foundation for America’s pastime were stashed away and forgotten, only to be discovered by the wife of an Italian prince. They’ve been misunderstood, unappreciated and sold for a relative pittance, rediscovered, researched and auctioned off for millions.

Now, the papers that first set forth the rules of modern baseball finally are ready to claim their proper place in history, 161 years after officials of a New York club proposed them to a convention of local teams. In June, those original documents, titled the “Laws of Base Ball,” will go on display at a major public exhibition for the first time when the Library of Congress opens its new exhibition, “Baseball Americana.”

Before that convention, the game included elements of something that might be recognized as baseball today—two opposing teams whose players used bats and balls and ran bases in a circular fashion. But there were drastic differences, too, according to John Thorn, Major League Baseball’s official historian.

“Some played with 11 men, some played with eight,” Thorn says. “Nobody played to a game of nine innings; they played to 21 runs. In the Massachusetts game, which had quite different rules … the number of runs required for a victory might be specified at the outset as either 75 or 100.”

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Knickerbockers officials presented these proposed “Laws of Baseball”—elegantly scripted in ink—to the rules committee at the 1857 convention, where the rules were debated, amended and adopted.

The Knickerbockers, a prominent New York team, organized the January 1857 convention of clubs to modify and standardize the game’s rules—a gathering that profoundly shaped the sport. “The convention was enormously important,” says Thorn, who likens the documents to a baseball Magna Carta or the Dead Sea Scrolls.

The proposed rules submitted to the convention’s rules committee, elegantly handwritten on 14 pages of blue paper, made baseball more like the game we know today, setting bases 90 feet apart, putting nine players on each side, establishing nine innings as a game, defining what constitutes an out and more.

This “Magna Carta,” on loan to the Library by Hayden J. Trubitt for the exhibition, actually consists of three sets of documents: separate drafts of rule proposals by two Knickerbockers officials and the final, formal document the club’s delegates presented to the convention rules committee.

The first is a handwritten draft of 23 proposed rules titled “Laws of Base Ball” written by Knickerbockers President Daniel “Doc” Adams—a man Thorn has called the “true father of baseball.”

Adams was born in New Hampshire, earned a medical degree from Harvard, moved to New York and joined the Knickerbockers soon after the club’s 1845 founding. There, Adams is credited with inventing the shortstop position and with helping standardize equipment—he made balls and supervised the production of bats.

He also pushed for a convention to standardize rules. The proposals Adams put down on three now-browned pages—a fourth likely existed but didn’t survive—gave America a game that, today, it still would recognize: Rule No. 3 places the bases 90 feet apart. No. 4 designates the position from which the ball is struck as “home base,” directly opposite second. Rules 10–14 define ways batters can be put out. Sixteen establishes a regular order of batters.

The second document, “Rules for Match Games of Base Ball,” presents a different vision, one attributed to Knickerbockers official William Grenelle. A Wall Street broker, Grenelle joined the club in 1850 and later served as a director and as a member of the convention organizing committee.

The four pages of the Grenelle draft bear edits, attributed to Adams, that would become key points: In a passage that set the number of innings in a game, Adams struck out “twelve” and penciled in nine.

The final document, formally written in ink by Grenelle and also titled “Laws of Base Ball,” was presented to the rules committee, which debated and amended the proposals, then presented them to the convention as a whole for ratification. Beneath a red ribbon threaded through the page, Grenelle inscribed, “The Committee of the Knickerbockers Base Ball Club respectfully proposes for the consideration of the convention the following rules and regulations as a manual to govern the play in all match games of Base Ball.”

The pages contain proposals for 34 rules, including two penciled in at the convention. The text is filled with alterations made as committee members debated and adopted rules: The number of innings originally is noted as nine, for example, then changed in pencil to seven—a decision later overturned in favor of nine.

The new way of playing laid forth in those pages took hold—though slowly. “It took forever,” Thorn says. “The old rules—some of them town ball, or the Massachusetts game—vestiges endured. There wasn’t blanket uniformity, there were always clubs that decided to play with 11 men or two catchers.”

A few years after the convention, Adams moved to Connecticut, where he served as a bank president, and died in 1899. Grenelle died in 1890, leaving behind a wife and children—and the original documents that helped establish baseball as we know it. Those papers remained with the family and out of public awareness for more than a century after the convention—until 1967, when Grenelle’s granddaughter wrote a letter to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

“I have discovered among my old family papers one which I am told is of great value and interest in the history of baseball,” wrote Constance Grenelle Wilcox Pignatelli, a fascinating character who had married an Italian prince.

The Hall of Fame declined to take the documents, which didn’t surface again for over three decades. In 1999, the papers appeared in a manuscript auction, offered with little background information. A collector purchased the lot, sight unseen, for $12,650, then put them away for 16 years. Finally, he enlisted help in fully researching their origins and, in 2016, put them up for auction—where they sold for over $3.2 million.

Now, those pages, aged and stained, will be available for the public to see at a major exhibition for the first time, a century and a half after they helped invent modern baseball.

Says Thorn: “To hold history in your hands, as it was made in Adams’ hand and Grenelle’s hand and in the final versions, that is pretty spectacular.”

BONUS QUESTION

What is your most treasured piece of baseball memorabilia?

Linking Letters with Lyrics: “Hamilton” Songs Draw on Original Library Documents

This post is reprinted from “Brilliant Broadway,” the May–June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. The entire issue is available online.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda (center) as Alexander Hamilton in “Hamilton,” the show he created. Photo by Joan Marcus.

It started with hearing a catchy song on a new soundtrack—and then another. Soon Kaleena Black was hooked on one of Broadway’s biggest shows. And yet Black, an education specialist at the Library of Congress, isn’t usually a musical theater aficionado.

“Hamilton” was different, though, with its infusion of sounds from hip-hop, pop, jazz and R&B. After she listened a few times, Black noticed she was starting to remember key facts, dates and details from history. Could she be learning something new?

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Kaleena Black. Photo by Shawn Miller.

“When you hear a piece of art that’s based on historical fact, you always wonder how true is that, how real is that?” Black said. As she listened to the musical, “They would say things like ‘I wrote this letter’ … I was thinking, ‘Does that really exist?’ ”

The show’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, consulted with Hamilton biographer Ron Chernow and Hamilton’s published works. But no one had traced the finished lyrics from the show back to Hamilton’s papers.

When the Library’s extensive collection of Alexander Hamilton’s papers were made available online for the first time last fall, Black embarked on a months-long effort to link the lyrics of “Hamilton” with the actual letters written by Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and others. Over time, she pieced together a chronology—first on a color-coded spreadsheet and then in a PowerPoint presentation—that highlights lyrics based on documents for nearly every song in the show.

Piecing together the lyrics from “Hamilton” with original papers could be the basis for future programming and teaching tools. At least that’s the hope for Black and her team in Educational Outreach, who focus on teaching with primary sources.

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Lin-Manuel Miranda drew lyrics for the song “Right Hand Man” from this letter that Hamilton wrote as a boy in Saint Croix.

“We’re trying to make historical documents have a relevance and feel like living, breathing things that can be important now and can be used now,” Black said. The musical, with its diverse casting and innovative sounds, offers a new opportunity. “There’s definitely fidelity to the primary sources, but there’s also this new, fresh take that is trying to make it feel current and relevant to a 21st century world.”

The lyrics and letters are connected from the opening song, “Alexander Hamilton,” when the main character is introduced. First performed at the White House in 2009, the song includes details on Hamilton’s back story, growing up in poverty in Saint Croix and being orphaned at a young age.

As the song goes, “Then a hurricane came, and devastation reigned. Our man saw his future drip, drippin down the drain. Put a pencil to his temple, connected it to his brain, and he wrote his first refrain, a testament to his pain.”

Within the Hamilton papers, Black found the letter a young Hamilton had written to his father about the hurricane that was then published in the Royal American Danish Gazette. In it, Hamilton describes the destruction from the storm before he immigrates to New York City amid a revolution.

As Hamilton’s story develops, he falls in love and marries, and there’s a revelation he had an affair—as evidenced by his own written description.

“The Reynolds Pamphlet. Have you read this?” the lyrics go. “Alexander Hamilton had a torrid affair, and he wrote it down right there! Highlights: ‘The charge against me is in connection with one James Reynolds for purposes of improper speculation. My real crime is an amorous connection with his wife for a considerable time—with his knowing consent.’”

Black found the real Reynolds Pamphlet and compared the language. “From what I found, there are whole passages that are just taken verbatim,” she said. “That one stuck out.”

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Pages from the “Reynolds Pamphlet.”

While part of the musical involves Hamilton’s personal story, it also delves into arguments over how the new Constitution should be shaped and what role the federal government should have. Hamilton anonymously wrote dozens of essays known as The Federalist Papers, defending the Constitution along with James Madison and John Jay.

Among the Library’s many documents are Jefferson’s personal copies of The Federalist Papers, which include his notes as he tallied which author had written which essay. This copy had been given to Jefferson by Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton, none other than Alexander Hamilton’s wife.

“That’s the moment you think ‘I can’t believe we have this document here,’” Black said. “I’m really glad that’s been digitized because that means anyone can view that from anywhere.”

Lee Ann Potter, the Library’s director of Educational Outreach, said she is excited about Black’s research and the curiosity it may spark for students in the Library’s collections.

“I am convinced that harnessing the popularity of ‘Hamilton’ among young people will pique their curiosity about not only the Hamilton Papers, and how we know what we know, but other collections as well,” Potter said. “Perhaps a student who sees how the original documents inspired compelling lyrics will dig into some of those other documents and compose another great musical.”

The John W. Kluge Prize: Drawing on Jeffersonian Traditions

This is a guest post by John Haskell, director of the Library’s John W. Kluge Center.

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The statues that look down on the Library’s Main Reading Room – there are 16 in total – were selected to represent the diverse traditions of knowledge. The Kluge Prize builds on this tradition of valuing all areas of human inquiry. Photo by Shawn Miller.

After an extensive selection process, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden will announce the winner of the 2018 John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity on June 12. The privately endowed prize, which celebrates the impact of knowledge on society and governance, comes with a $1 million award. Understanding how it fits into the mission of the Library of Congress requires a brief historical excursion.

The Library was established by an act of Congress in 1800, with James Madison providing the intellectual leadership behind the effort. The idea that members of Congress needed immediate access to the best Enlightenment thinking, classical philosophy and other influences on modernity was self-evident to him and many others – most notably, Thomas Jefferson.

Back at Monticello after his presidency, Jefferson offered his own vast and eclectic collection to the Library when its original holdings were burned along with the Capitol during the War of 1812. A few members of Congress objected to purchasing a collection of books that ranged so broadly in scope, but Jefferson countered: “There is in fact no subject to which a Member of Congress may not have occasion to refer.”

Given the reach of today’s federal government into virtually every area of science and mathematics, the humanities, foreign affairs, technological innovation, economics and the other social sciences, coupled with the fact that Congress is responsible for authorizing and overseeing all government activity, no truer words could have been spoken. The importance of knowledge to lawmakers has never been greater.

Today, the Library’s collections are by far the largest in the world. The Library has virtually limitless potential to make connections between scholarship and the challenges facing 21st-century society.

Following the Jeffersonian ideal, the John W. Kluge Center was created with a private endowment to, in the words of its charter, “reinvigorate the interconnection between thought and action.” Jefferson meant for the collections to be a resource to inform policymakers. Keeping with that tradition, the charter envisioned an ideal in which Kluge Center scholars would “have the opportunity both to distill wisdom from the rich resources of the Library and to stimulate, through conversations and meetings, Members of Congress, their staffs and the broader policy community … [bridging] the divide between knowledge and power.”

The recipient of the Kluge Prize is expected to reflect on the interconnection the center’s charter cites. The request for nominations for the prize states:

Nominees … are expected to have developed, in their creative pursuits and career, unique insights into the forces that have shaped and continue to shape humankind. Candidates should be distinguished by their intellectual achievements, by the fundamental importance of their work and its impact on public affairs, as well as the ability to communicate the significance of their work to broad audiences.

The Library was created based on the notion that ideas matter, that thought must inform public policy for the nation to thrive and for humankind to advance. Establishing the link between knowledge and governance is at the heart of everything we do at the Kluge Center. The Kluge Prize was created to celebrate the achievement of that goal.

Japanese-America’s Pastime: Baseball

This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. In recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, he explores the role of baseball in the nation’s Japanese-American community. For more about baseball, check out our blog series counting down the weeks until the June 29 opening of “ Baseball Americana ,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition.

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Japanese-Americans play baseball in Nyssa, Oregon, in 1942. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese-Americans were forcibly evacuated from their homes and sent to government-run camps. Members of this team resided at a Farm Security Administration mobile camp. On Sundays, they came in a supervised group to play on the town ball field.

Few sports are as entwined with the American identity as baseball. The sport, its early proponents argued, promoted teamwork, individualism and meritocracy and gave immigrants a way to participate in and lay claim to their own piece of American culture. By the late 19th century, writes historian Samuel A. Regalado, it had become “the watchword for democracy.”

Especially on the West Coast – though never producing a luminous icon on par with a Jackie Robinson, Joe Dimaggio or Ted Williams – baseball for Japanese-Americans served as a critical force in shaping identity, binding ethnic enclaves, forging ties with Japanese culture and promoting civil rights. Moreover, in the face of debilitating World War II internment policies, baseball mitigated the trauma of forced incarceration.

Japanese immigrants to the United States were deeply familiar with baseball: Japan had embraced it in the late 1800s. In 1871, Hiroshi Hiraoka established the Shimbashi Athletic Club, the first of its kind in the nation, and soon the sport expanded in the Japanese imagination.

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A team from Japan’s Waseda University in 1916.

During the Meiji Restoration, which lasted roughly from 1880 to 1910, leaders promoted baseball as a way to transform the image of Japan while facilitating international connections. In particular, the Japanese viewed the sport as a means to correct racist stereotypes casting Asians as sensuous, feminine and irrational. Baseball, in its inherent masculinity, helped Japan move away from exoticism to masculine competitiveness, to paraphrase historian Akira Iriye.

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Okuma Shigenobu (left), the prime minister of Japan, shakes hands with Paul Raymond “Shorty” Des Jardien, a U.S. baseball, football and basketball player, who visited Japan in 1915.

From 1885 to 1907, as Japan’s economy modernized, leaving some Japanese behind, 155,000 traveled east to Hawaii and the American West Coast. Nearly 25,000 of these immigrants had settled in Hawaii by 1896. Unsurprisingly, Japanese-American baseball leagues first emerged in the U.S. territory and often featured multi-ethnic and -racial competition, as Caucasian, Filipino, Japanese and Portuguese laborers demostrated their skills on the diamond.

As more Japanese immigrated to California, Washington and Oregon, the leagues followed. By 1900, more than 24,000 resided on the mainland, with just over 10,000 in California alone. Banned from playing in segregated mainland leagues, Japanese-Americans developed their own. San Francisco fielded the first U.S. mainland team of Japanese-American players in 1903, with the creation of the Fuji Athletic Club. The sport helped bring together the community’s urban-rural diaspora across California and the West Coast.

In Southern California, the weather enabled year-round play, helping to give coherence to the Japanese-American community. In this way, baseball clubs cultivated Japanese-American civil society in an era of “yellow peril” and anti-Japanese legislation, which ranged from discriminatory state laws prohibiting Asians and newcomers from land ownership, to immigration legislation like the 1924 Johnson and Reed Act, which more or less banned citizenship for Asian immigrants. Clubs soon emerged in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Fresno, San Jose and Stockton, and beyond California in Portland, Seattle and their hinterlands.

Part of the game’s power lay in its appeal across generations: “Baseball allowed each generation to interpret the meaning of the sport,” noted writer Wayne Maeda. First-generation Japanese immigrants, known as Issei, saw it as a means to connect their American-born children with Japanese culture, and believed it emphasized Japanese values of loyalty, honor and courage. In contrast, Nisei – second-generation immigrants – saw baseball as more modern than Kendo or Judo. Both generations believed the sport testified to their dedication to American ideals.

For parents, a simpler explanation also existed: It kept their kids out of trouble. More than a few older Issei worried about their children boozing, drugging or gambling their lives away in American environs.

The 1930s represented the high-water mark of Japanese-American baseball, particularly in California – by 1930, 70 percent of America’s Japanese population resided in the state. In 1936, Northern California communities started the first July 4th baseball tournament, a clear attempt to display attachment to American traditions and ideals.

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The sports page from the Oct. 20, 1943, issue of the Poston Chronicle, produced by occupants of the Poston, Arizona, internment camp.

Tragically, such gestures meant little in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, after which President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed an executive order that allowed the forcible removal of nearly 120,000 U.S. citizens and residents of Japanese descent from their homes to government-run camps across the West.

During internment, baseball once again took center stage, providing an outlet for the trauma of incarceration. At the Merced County Fairgrounds, internees transformed an empty landscape into a diamond. “We had to make the baseball diamond, and there were no stands, no seats, no nothing, so the crowd just stood around the field and watched the game,” remembers internee and baseball standout, Fred Kishi. Camp newspapers devoted nearly as much coverage to baseball as to Nisei serving on the front.

Internment robbed many of the best Japanese-American players of the opportunity to compete at the professional level. Eventually, Japanese nationals became a common site in Major League Baseball, no doubt facilitated by earlier transnational connections. But their American counterparts failed to achieve such success.

The fact remains, however, that baseball shaped Japanese-American identities, stitched together communities and generations and provided solace in the face of unjust incarceration. If the journey matters as much as the destination, baseball took Japanese-Americans across oceans and cultures while rooting them more firmly in American soil on their own terms.

Baseball Americana: When Jackie Met Rickey

Welcome to week four of our blog series for “ Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29 . This is the fourth of nine posts—we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening. As a bonus, we’re counting down the innings to the exhibit’s launch by asking baseball fans a question each week. Your third question is at the bottom of this post. Join the conversation!  

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Branch Rickey

When Jackie Robinson walked onto the Ebbets Field diamond in 1947 and broke baseball’s color barrier, he made history and remade America’s game, forever changing the sport, the culture and the country.

The Library of Congress holds the papers of both Robinson and the man who helped him break that barrier, Branch Rickey—two great figures linked in baseball history.

Rickey flopped as a player and achieved only modest success as a manager. Yet, as an executive, he helped reshape the game. He invented the farm system and the batting helmet, encouraged the use of batting cages and pitching machines and hired a full-time statistician, foreshadowing modern “sabermetrics.”

Player development was a special Rickey talent—the Cardinals teams he built won four World Series. “He could recognize a great player from the window of a moving train,” sportswriter Jim Murray once wrote. His skill as an evaluator is captured in the 29,400 items of the Library’s Rickey Papers: Among the letters, speeches, memos and scrapbooks are some 1,750 scouting reports he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s, assessing prospects and current players.

“His work on the hill itself has an unusual amount of perfection. … It is probable that this chap is worth whatever it takes,” Rickey wrote about future Hall of Fame pitcher Don Drysdale in 1954, two years before his major league debut.

Others are brutally to the point: “Can’t throw. Can’t run. Can’t hit”—Rickey’s six-word assessment of a prospect who would last only a year in the majors.

One of his great legacies was his work to integrate baseball—he signed Robinson as the right man for the job.

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Jackie Robinson comic book, Fawcett Publication, 1951.

Robinson had lettered in four sports at UCLA, was drafted into the Army in 1942 and, following his discharge, joined the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs in 1945.

That year, Rickey, then a co-owner and the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed Robinson to a minor league Dodgers affiliate with an eye to eventually breaking the majors’ color barrier. Robinson, he felt, could handle the abuse sure to come—he had “guts enough not to fight back.”

Two years later, Robinson joined the Dodgers and made history. Playing under intense scrutiny and often open hostility, Robinson proved to be one of baseball’s best players: He earned the National League Most Valuable Player award in 1949, competed in six World Series in 10 years, compiled a .311 lifetime batting average and, in 1962, six years after he retired, was elected to the Hall of Fame—the first black player inducted.

Robinson’s widow, Rachel, gave his papers to the Library in 2001—more than 7,000 items that chronicle his early life, college years, military service, baseball career, civil rights work and corporate career. An extensive speech file covers the entire range of Robinson’s interests, complete with his handwritten notes. Letters document correspondence with wide range of figures: John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, civil rights leaders Roy Wilkins and Walter White, other players, ordinary fans.

After his Dodgers debut, Robinson’s story quickly captured the nation’s imagination. Other Library collections illustrate his place in popular culture: the 1951 Jackie Robinson comic book bears his likeness on the cover, a script bears signatures of Robinson and his fellow cast members in the 1950 biopic, “The Jackie Robinson Story.”

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Film still from “The Jackie Robinson Story.” Jackie Robinson, second from right, played himself.

In 1950, Rickey sold his stock in the Dodgers and joined the Pirates. In a letter, Robinson bid him a sad farewell.

“It has been the finest experience I have had being associated with you and I want to thank you very much for all you have meant not only to me and my family but to the entire country and particularly the members of our race. … I hope to end my playing in Brooklyn as it means so very much but if I have to go any place I hope it can be with you.”

In history, and in the Library’s collections, they’re still together.

BONUS QUESTION

What is your go-to baseball food?

“ 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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Leonard Bernstein Centennial: The Mind of a Maestro

This is a guest post by Mark Horowitz of the Music Division. It is reprinted from the May–June issue of LCM, the Library of Congress magazine. Titled “ Brilliant Broadway ,” the entire issue is available online.

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Leonard Bernstein in 1956.

In honor of the 100th anniversary of Leonard Bernstein’s birth, the Library has dramatically expanded – by some 2,400 items representing tens of thousands of pages – its online Bernstein Collection , which, for the first time, includes musical sketches and scrapbooks as well as many more letters, photos, scripts, recordings and other material. 

It’s been 27 years since Leonard Bernstein passed away, yet he seems more omnipresent and influential than ever. The doings related to his centennial are staggering, dwarfing the centennial celebrations of any previous American musician – including titans John Philip Sousa, George Gershwin, Aaron Copland or Richard Rodgers.

More than 2,000 concerts are scheduled on six continents, along with exhibits, including a Grammy Museum touring exhibit; several books; two documentaries in Germany alone; a 25-CD box set of just his musical compositions; and a 100-CD box set of him conducting. And, Steven Spielberg is planning a film remake of “West Side Story.”

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A manuscript for the unproduced ballet, “Conch Town,” from about 1940. It includes music for the song that became “America” in “West Side Story.”

Contributing to all this is the Library’s extraordinary Leonard Bernstein Collection, estimated at 400,000 items – one of the largest in the Music Division. Those items go far beyond the expected music manuscripts. The collection also includes, but is far from limited to, his writings, personal correspondence, fan mail, business papers, photographs, datebooks, scrapbooks, recordings and objects that range from passports to batons to the suit in which he conducted his New York Philharmonic premiere. The Bernstein Collection long has been among the most heavily used in the Music Division, but this year it seems to eclipse all others.

Bernstein arguably was the most prominent musical figure in America in the second half of the 20th century. A polymath – a Renaissance man – he was a composer, conductor, pianist, educator and social activist. He composed musicals, ballets, operas, a film score, a mass, chamber music and symphonies.

He conducted the New York Philharmonic during 40 seasons, most as music director – its first to be American-born and American-trained. All told, he conducted more than 75 orchestras. He virtually invented musical education on television, mostly with his Young People’s Concerts – 53 concerts from 1958 to 1972. Those broadcasts and subsequent showings in music classes inspired generations of musicians. Bernstein also was politically involved and a passionate advocate for peace and nuclear disarmament, racial equality and AIDS research.

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A letter Bernstein wrote to his mother, Jennie Bernstein, while on a trip to Israel in 1948.

The Bernstein Collection holds, among many other things, more than 50 boxes of his music manuscripts and sketches alone, including an anthem he wrote when he was a student at Boston Latin in 1935; “It’s Not So Hotsy Totsy Being a Nazi,” a song he wrote during World War II; and his notes for a Holocaust opera (tentatively titled “Babel”) he was working on the year he died.

There have been wonderful discoveries along the way, such as a manuscript for an unproduced ballet, “Conch Town,” he wrote circa 1940 while staying in Key West. On examining the score, librarians discovered it included the music for what became the song “America” in “West Side Story” some 17 years later. There’s also the tender “A Valentine (for Jamie and Alexander),” written for two of his children, which became the majestic finale to “Candide,” “Make Our Garden Grow.”

The correspondence includes all the things one might expect – and the unexpected. There’s an extraordinary letter from Jackie Kennedy written at 4 a.m. the day after Bernstein conducted the funeral mass for Robert Kennedy at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. “It was so much more appropriate for this Kennedy – my Kaleidoscopic brother-in-law – and his wife who loved him mystically,” she wrote of Bernstein’s musical selections.

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The conductor at a rehearsal in 1988, two years before his death.

In the fan mail was discovered a letter from the composer John Adams, while a student at Harvard in 1966. Having just heard Bernstein’s “Chichester Psalms,” he expresses frustration in understanding how Bernstein can “turn his back on the future.” Bernstein’s thoughtful reply is written on the back: “One writes what one hears within one, not without. Lord knows I am sufficiently exposed to the ‘influences’ of non-tonal music; but obviously I have not been conditioned by them. … I cannot conceive music (my own music) divorced from tonality.” That response seems to have changed Adams’ life. In a follow-up letter in 1968, Adams writes: “You replied to my letter with a patience and wisdom which did a great deal towards shaking me out of my inertia.”

Learn More

View two presentations recorded at the Library of Congress: “Bernstein’s Life in Letters,” featuring musicologist Nigel Simeone, and an interview of Bernstein assistant Charlie Harmon by Mark Horowitz.

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