Library of Congress's Blog, page 89

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

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

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

How would you describe your work at the Library?

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

How did you prepare for your position?

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

What projects have you especially enjoyed?

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

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

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

Baseball Americana: Telling Stories Through Stats

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

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

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Sam Farber. Photo courtesy of ESPN.

What is the ESPN Stats and Information Group?

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

How has data changed the way people follow sports?

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

The Library is a source for some of your work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

BONUS QUESTION

What is your favorite ballpark?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.