Library of Congress's Blog, page 94

Pic of the Week: Dolly Parton, the “Book Lady”

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Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden (left) and Dolly Parton unveil “Coat of Many Colors,” the book Parton donated to the Library this week. Photo by Shawn Miller.

Legendary singer-songwriter Dolly Parton visited the Library on Feb. 28 to donate a book: the 100 millionth given away by her organization Imagination Library.

For more than 20 years, Parton and Imagination Library have given books to children around the world. Along the way, she earned the nickname “book lady” from kids who received her books.

Hoping to spark a lifelong love of reading in children, the Imagination Library each month mails a specially selected, age-appropriate book to more than 1 million children in participating communities from birth until they begin kindergarten. The book arrives in the mail addressed not to the parent, but the child.

“To them, it’s personal,” Parton said. “They’re going to take that in the house and make somebody read it to them.”

In conversation with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, Parton described her own childhood experiences with books growing up poor in the Great Smoky Mountains and the importance of reading for children.

Afterward, she read “Coat of Many Colors,” a book based on the classic song she composed nearly 50 years ago, to a group of children attending the event.

“We are so pleased to be part of a milestone,” Hayden said upon accepting Parton’s donation. “We are humbled that that book will join with millions of others at the Library of Congress.”

Women’s History Month: “Hidden Figures of Women’s History”

To celebrate the start of Women’s History Month, we’re pleased to share an excerpt from “Hidden Figures of Women’s History,” the March–April issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine, available in its entirety online. The except features a vignette about Lois Weber, an early 20th-century filmmaker, by Mike Mashon, head of the Library’s Moving Image Section.   

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Filmmaker Lois Weber is among the trailblazers featured in the March–April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Cathay Williams fought in the Civil War, posing as a man. Alice Marble became the best tennis player in the world and, during World War II, spied on the Nazis. Through her innovations, Lillian Moller Gilbreth improved everyday life for millions at home and in the workplace.

Why aren’t these women—these artists and athletes, reformers and rebels, explorers, journalists and scientists—better known or more appreciated today?

The just-published edition of the Library of Congress Magazine focuses on them: these “hidden figures” of history, women who broke barriers, accomplished great things or led bold and fascinating lives in eras of limited opportunity for women.

They explored the Arctic, flew the English Channel, mapped the ocean floor, directed films in the earliest days of cinema, published newspapers, made great music, fought for racial and gender equality and broke down barriers of what society thought women could do or should do.

Yet, they aren’t household names.

History remembers the great figures, women such as Susan B. Anthony, Rosa Parks, Billie Holiday, Marie Curie, Helen Keller, Harriet Tubman.

Driven by the same intrepid spirit, these hidden figures also lived extraordinary lives and helped shape the world we know today. Lois Weber, an early 20th-century filmmaker, is one such figure.

Even today, more than 130 years after the invention of cinema, it’s striking how relatively few female directors are working in Hollywood. Certainly, the history of silent-era filmmaking is dominated by names like D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin and Cecil B. DeMille.

But one of their contemporaries, Lois Weber, was responsible for an astonishing variety of films, noted for their directorial verve and addressing topics like economic inequality, birth control and the political rights of women. And she ran her own production company.

Weber began her career as a theater actress, frequently performing alongside husband Phillips Smalley. Like many stage performers, the couple was lured by the silver screen and, in 1907, started working in film. They quickly developed an on-screen persona as a sophisticated married couple and parlayed their reputation for highbrow entertainment into a 1912 contract with Universal Pictures to make films for the studio’s Rex brand. For the next several years, they co-directed an increasingly ambitious slate of films, almost all of them written by Weber.

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Lois Weber, far left, with world-famous ballerina Anna Pavlova, seated, on the set of “The Dumb Girl of Portici.” It was the first blockbuster directed by a woman—Weber—and the only feature film in which Pavlova appeared.

With the founding of Lois Weber Productions in 1917, Smalley increasingly assumed a subordinate role; the couple divorced in 1922. The films Weber made during this period define her career: “Where Are My Children?” (1916), a bold defense of contraception; “Shoes” (1916), in which an impoverished woman sells her virginity in order to buy the footwear she needs to keep her job; and four films from 1921—“Too Wise Wives,” “What Do Men Want?,” “What’s Worth While?” and “The Blot”—that collectively explore shifting sexual mores, women in the workforce and cultural upheaval in a frank, socially conscious manner. Weber often spoke of cinema as a vehicle for societal change; her filmography is dramatic testimony to that belief.

Weber’s output dropped significantly through the 1920s. She directed only a handful of films before her death in 1939, destitute and hardly remembered.

The Library is fortunate to have many of Weber’s surviving films in its moving-image collection and has invested considerable effort into preserving them. Two years ago, it completed a digital restoration of “The Dumb Girl of Portici” (1915), starring Russian ballerina Anna Pavlova in her only screen appearance. Lately, we’ve been working on 12 titles for a forthcoming BluRay release with our partners at Kino-Lorber, “Pioneers: First Women Filmmakers.”

The Library is proud to facilitate the rediscovery of important women directors like Weber and her contemporaries Alice Guy-Blaché, Grace Cunard and Elsie Jane Wilson, whose collective contribution to the art of cinema is worthy of celebration and critical re-evaluation.

Irish-American Heritage Month: New Resources

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“The Irish American” by George M. Cohan, sheet music first published in 1905. It appears in a set about Irish-Americans in our Free to Use and Reuse archive.

To celebrate Irish-American Heritage Month—and of course St. Patrick’s Day!—we’re adding new images to our Free to Use and Reuse archive and releasing a new resources guide associated with the Irish-American experience.

Last month, we launched our Free to Use archive featuring sets of themed content: travel posters, presidential portraits, Civil War drawings and all manner of dogs—mutts, services animals and fancy show champions. All the sets highlighted in the archive—and these are just a few examples—are fee to use and reuse, meaning there are no known copyright restrictions associated with the content, and you can do whatever you want with it.

The new content associated with Irish-Americans originates from collections throughout the Library—the American Folklife Center, the Geography and Map Division, the Music Division and the Prints and Photographs Division. Included are color lithographs, historical photographs, sheet music, maps and images of famous Irish-Americans—F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Ford, Grace Kelly and the Kennedys among them.

Our new resources guide introduces the wonderful primary and secondary resources on Irish-American heritage available through the Library of Congress. A variety of formats can be explored, including photographs, historical newspaper articles and audio recordings of interviews and music. In addition to freely available online resources from the Library’s collections, selected online resources from sites outside of the Library are also listed. Other materials, such as printed books and subscription databases, are available onsite at the Library and through other libraries. This selective guide is not intended to be exhaustive; see Search Tips for finding more materials.

Scroll down for a few more examples from our Free to Use archive associated with Irish-Americans and make sure to check out other sets in the archive. And if you find a creative way to reuse any of the images, let us know by commenting on this post!

Cheers!

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Jacqueline Kennedy and John F. Kennedy cut the cake at their wedding on Sept. 12, 1953. Photo by Toni Frissell.

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James Donovan, street sweeper in Fall River, Mass., 1916. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine.

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Map showing distribution of the Irish natives in the United States, based on U.S. Census data from 1890.

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A mother pins clover on her son’s suit in a lithograph titled “St. Patrick’s Day in America,” published by Duval and Hunter of Philadelphia, c. 1872.

New Online: High-Resolution Color Images of James Madison’s Notes from the Constitutional Convention

This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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Shelly Smith, head of the Library’s Book Conservation Section, prepares a page of James Madison’s notes on the 1787 Constitutional Convention for scanning. Photo by Shawn Miller.

When the Constitutional Convention met in Philadelphia in 1787, James Madison, then a delegate from Virginia, later fourth president of the United States, took it upon himself to take notes. Later, as documented in the introduction to “Records of the Federal Convention,” Madison remembered how he “chose a seat in front of the presiding member, with the other members, on my right and left hand. In this favorable position for hearing all that passed I noted in terms legible and in abbreviations and marks intelligible to myself what was read from the Chair or spoken by the members; and losing not a moment unnecessarily between the adjournment and reassembling of the Convention I was enabled to write out my daily notes during the session or within a few finishing days after its close.”

Those notes—more than 600 pages in Madison’s tiny, neat handwriting—are in the James Madison Papers in the Manuscript Division at the Library of Congress. The Library has long made them available to scholars and the public, first on microfilm, and then online. Now, for the first time, the Library is making available online high-resolution color images of the notes that reflect modern standards for publication.

To see a published edition of the notes, consult “Records of the Federal Convention,” cited above, which was edited by Max Farrand and published in 1911. Part of the Library of Congress Law Library’s “Century of Lawmaking” website, “Records” includes Madison’s notes.

African-American History Month: Making a Way Out of No Way

This is a guest post by Beverly W. Brannan, curator of photography in the Prints and Photographs Division.

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George Henry Woodson in 1912, as a candidate running to represent Iowa’s Monroe County in the state legislature.

When the Prints and Photographs Division acquired the collection of Howard University law professor William Henry Richards in 2013, a 1912 campaign flyer included in the collection aroused my curiosity. It promoted the candidacy of George Henry Woodson for the Iowa House of Representatives. How did he fit into the politics of the times, I wondered?

I discovered extensive biographical and contextual information in the Library’s holdings and subscription databases, some of which I’m pleased to share with you here in honor of African-American History Month.

African-Americans born shortly after the Civil War faced the immediate challenge of supporting themselves when there were almost no institutions to help them begin. Yet George Woodson—Buffalo soldier, Howard University lawyer and Iowa Republican—rose to the challenge and, in doing so, championed some of the goals of the modern civil rights movement.

Woodson’s parents, George Woodson and Sena Sawyer, were enslaved in Wytheville, Va., where George was born in 1865. He attended the Wytheville Freedmen’s School, opened in 1867.

In 1883, at 18, he enlisted in the military in Louisville, Ky. He joined Company I, 25th Infantry, as a “Buffalo soldier,” a term referring to African-Americans who served from 1866 until 1951, when the military became racially integrated.

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Buffalo soldiers of the 25th Infantry, some wearing buffalo robes, at Fort Keogh, Mt. Photo by Chr. Barthelmess, 1890.

In 1890, Woodson received a B.A. from Virginia Normal and Collegiate Institute (now Virginia State University); in 1895, he earned a law degree from Howard University. Woodson then opened a law office in Iowa, where the Consolidated Coal Company employed many African-Americans. In 1898, he ran unsuccessfully for county attorney but went on to become a leader in the Iowa Republican Party.

With others, he founded the Iowa Afro-American Council, opened a law partnership that would last 20 years and helped organize the Iowa Negro Bar Association. Woodson operated on national scale. He attended meetings throughout the country and delivered talks that received favorable coverage in both the general and the black press. In 1905, he was one of the 29 founders of the Niagara Movement, advocating full civil rights for African-Americans.

In 1912, Woodson ran for the Iowa State House as a Republican candidate but again was unsuccessful. A contemporary African-American Iowan, Reuben Gaines, Jr., commented in his memoir, “It was too early to elect a black man to that position.”

The newspaper The Chicago Defender, in articles from 1918, offered insight into inequitable practices of the time. When Woodson was passing through Waterloo, Ia., he was refused restaurant service because of his race even though there were no black-owned restaurants in the town. When he asked a policeman to arrest the restaurant owner, the police refused. The white newspaper in Waterloo condemned the restaurant owner, citing Woodson’s peaceful behavior and his honorable military service record.

In 1921, as demand for coal declined, Woodson moved to Des Moines as deputy collector of customs and married Mary Montague, in her mid-50s and marrying for the first time, like Woodson.

In 1924, at the request of President Calvin Coolidge, Woodson led a commission to the Virgin Islands, which the U.S. had acquired in 1916. The commission studied unemployment and poverty, and elements of its report were incorporated into the 1924 Republican presidential platform.

In 1925, Woodson was a founder of the National Bar Association (NBA) in Des Moines and served as its first president. Harvard graduate Charles Hamilton Houston, future dean of Howard University Law School, numbered among its 120 lawyers. The NBA gave voice to black attorneys who were excluded from every nationally organized bar association at that time.

Woodson continued attending bar association meetings and worked at the customs office until 10 days before he died on July 7, 1933. Several of his outgoing letters are included in the papers of W.E.B. Dubois at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The first generation of African-Americans born after slavery lived through the nadir of race relations in the United States. One of Woodson’s most important accomplishments was to help create an intellectual community for people to achieve full citizenship. Woodson is not a household name today. But through his example as a student, citizen and founder of participatory organizations, he helped make it possible for people like Thurgood Marshall and Rosa Parks to rise to international prominence.

On a drugstore bag found in the collection of Rosa Parks at the Library of Congress, Parks, who died in 2005, wrote over and over the phrase “the struggle continues.” Although her struggle lasted a lifetime, she continued the work that others, including George Woodson, had begun before her.

Stay Fresh, Poetry 180: 15 New Poems Added

This is a guest post by Anne Holmes. It was first published on “ From the Catbird Seat ,” the blog of the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center.

[image error]This month, high schools across the country are now about halfway through the academic year. At the Poetry and Literature Center, we are marking this milestone with help from former poet laureate Billy Collins, who has added 15 new poems to Poetry 180 for the second half of the school year.

To help propel us into the spring and summer, Billy Collins has this to say:

I started the Poetry 180 program after I was appointed U.S. Poet Laureate back in 2001, and I am thrilled that the people at the Library of Congress have kept the program going strong over all these years. One way we keep the program active is by replacing some poems every now and then with new poems, so the big list always stays fresh.

I’m excited about this new set of poems we just added. They include a bittersweet poem by Mark Halliday about a teacher leaving his office for the last time; a funny poem by Thomas Lux about a Christmas family photograph; a poem by Mary Oliver that is inspirational in its defiance of death; and “Aunties,” a Kevin Young poem about aunts who refuse to let go of their purses. In choosing new poems, I look for ones that reflect the rich diversity of today’s poetry scene, but one thing they all have in common is that each one arises out of common everyday experience. That’s the soil where poems like to grow.

If the element of surprise is not your style, here are the new poems we’ve added to the mix:

“Slumnight” by Colette Inez
“The Halls” by Mark Halliday
“Second Estrangement” by Aracelis Girmay
“Exotic Treats” by Laura McKee
“When Death Comes” by Mary Oliver
“Decades” by Gerald Stern
“The Courtesy of the Blind” by Wislawa Szymborska
“Ode to Dirt” by Sharon Olds
“Tinnitus” by Robert Wrigley
“The secretary chant” by Marge Piercy
“Family Photo Around Xmas Tree” by Thomas Lux
“Proof of Life” by Tony Hoagland
“Dress Rehearsal” by Brandon Kreitler
“Aunties” by Kevin Young
“Gone” by Eamon Grennan

Spring and summer may seem worlds away, but you’ll get there. Just let poetry be your guide.

Make sure to keep up with Poetry 180 by subscribing to our RSS feed or daily e-mail blast. To learn more about the project, visit the Poetry 180 website.

World War I: African-American Soldiers Battle More Than Enemy Forces

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

“Interpreters were brought from everywhere to instruct our men in the French methods of warfare because be it known that everything American was taken from us except our uniform.”

—Noble Sissle, 369th “Harlem Hell Fighters” Regiment

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Recruits for what would become the 369th Regiment, also known as the “Harlem Hell Fighters.”

The Library of Congress exhibition Echoes of the Great War: American Experiences of World War I explores the role of African-American soldiers in the war and ways in which the international conflict contributed to a growing racial consciousness among black veterans.

Over 350,000 African-Americans served overseas for the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) during the war. Most toiled away in important but menial positions—as stevedores, camp laborers, clerks. But between about 40,000 and 50,000 black American troops served under French commanders in the war, largely in the 93rd Division of the AEF, consisting of the 369th through the 372nd regiments. No black troops experienced as much combat as those assigned to the French military.

As historians like Jennifer Keane, Chad Williams and Adriane Lentz-Smith have demonstrated, racism was deeply embedded in the segregated World War I military. Among officers and the rank and file, white soldiers felt no compunction in demeaning their black counterparts. In France, “U.S. troops were busy spreading rumors among the civilian population that blacks were rapists, thieves, and had tails,” Keane points out.

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Although the soldier pictured here is unidentified, his uniform indicates that he served with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Its three-towered castle appears on his collar insignia and is echoed in artist Dan Smith’s commemorative certificate.

Although the government organized its first officer’s training camp for black troops during World War I, the camp was segregated. Located in Des Moines, Ia., it trained only enlistees for the infantry. White officers eschewed imparting artillery and engineering skills to camp enlistees even though such skills proved crucial at the front, where many soldiers found themselves assigned to artillery and engineering units. And even in its limited focus on infantry, the camp’s military leaders failed to adequately train their charges for the challenges ahead. The division that emerged from the camp experienced combat, but under white officers who took every opportunity to denigrate the division’s efforts while obscuring their own failures of leadership.

What to do with black soldiers generally once they were trained bedeviled leadership. AEF commander General John J. Pershing and others refused to integrate the armed services, and military leaders struggled with how to assign the 93rd Division. By assigning it to the French army, Pershing fulfilled a pledge to supply combat regiments to the French, while also freeing “himself from the dilemma of how to use the African-American fighting regiments of the provisional 93rd,” writes Williams.

Doing so came with a cost, however. “They now became France’s problem, an act that cast African-American troops as outside the U.S. Army, and in a symbolic sense, outside the nation itself,” Williams states. W.E.B DuBois summed up the treatment endured by black soldiers from their white American counterparts: “[T]he American Negro soldier in France was treated with the same contempt and undemocratic spirit as the American Negro citizen is treated in the U.S.”

The 369th was the first black regiment to reach European shores in late December 1917; it was also the first to gain notoriety for its fighting skills when Henry Johnson and Needham Roberts successfully defeated a German assault, earning the French military’s highest honor, the Croix de Guerre. “The first heroes of the American Army came from that regiment,” wrote Noble Sissle.

He described relations between the French and their African-American counterparts as generally good. French officers befriended African-American troops and officers, while the noncommissioned officers “treated our boys with all the courtesy and comradeship that could be expected.”

Most African-American soldiers, whether fighting for the AEF or the French military, experienced a great deal more freedom in France than they did in the U.S. Though the French had their own racial issues, black Americans found the country devoid of Jim Crow segregation. Many dated French women, which infuriated their white AEF counterparts.

When the 369th returned from the front in 1919, it enjoyed a boisterous parade in New York City to celebrate its contributions. But many other black veterans experienced hostility, finding themselves subject to verbal abuse, assault and even lynching.

“The disillusion of wartime encounters would feed the transformation of black soldiers’ political consciousness,” notes Lentz-Smith of African-Americans in the AEF.

Even before the war concluded, thousands joined civil rights organizations to push for racial equality—from 1917 to 1919, the NAACP expanded its ranks sixfold. More militant veterans allied with the League for Democracy, organized by and for black veterans as a means to promote racial equality and democracy. The government took a dim view of the organization, including it in a 1919 report entitled “Negro Subversion.”

In the end, DuBois captured the attitude of black World War I veterans best in his 1919 poem, “Returning Soldiers”:

We return

We return from fighting

We return fighting

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.

New Online: William A. Gladstone Afro-American Military Collection

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This photograph is featured in the Gladstone Collection with documents from 1869 related to Gilbert Montgomery of the 4th United States Cavalry.

The Library of Congress is delighted to launch online in time for African-American History Month the William A. Gladstone Afro-American Military Collection, consisting of about 500 items. Gladstone was a historian and author of books about black Civil War troops.

The collection spans the years 1773 to 1987, with the bulk of the material dating from the Civil War period, 1861–65. The collection consists of correspondence, pay vouchers, orders, muster rolls, enlistment and discharge papers, receipts, contracts, affidavits, tax records, miscellaneous military documents and printed matter.

Most items document African-Americans in military service, especially the United States Corps d’Afrique and the United States Colored Troops, which were organized during the Civil War. Also included are many documents concerning slavery and various other Civil War documents that mention African-Americans.

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A Civil War-era broadside featuring the song “The Colored Volunteers.”

Revolutionary War items are primarily pay vouchers to Connecticut blacks who served in the Continental Army. World War I is represented by the papers of Lieutenant Edward L. Goodlett of the 370th Infantry, 93rd Division.

Printed matter includes government orders, broadsides, 19th-century speeches and writings on slavery and 20th-century booklets and journal articles for scholars or collectors.

The Library of Congress purchased the collection from Gladstone in 1995. It has been kept in the numerical order established by him, which is neither topical nor chronological.

The Gladstone Collection of African-American Photographs in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division complements and enhances this collection of manuscripts.

For a chronology of key events in African-American military service, click on the screen shot below!

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New Online: James Buchanan and Harriet Lane Johnston Papers

This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division.

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Harriet Lane, c. 1855–65.

“There is no wish nearer my heart than that you should become an amiable & intelligent woman,” Senator James Buchanan of Pennsylvania wrote to his niece and ward, Harriet Lane, on February 16, 1842. “You can render yourself very dear to me by your conduct.”

Buchanan’s words to Harriet took on added significance as the bachelor Buchanan rose in Democratic political and diplomatic circles, and Harriet shouldered the responsibility of serving as her uncle’s official hostess when he became president of the United States in 1857. Buchanan wrote to his niece frequently when the two were apart, and more than 100 of his letters to Harriet are included in the James Buchanan and Harriet Lane Johnston Papers at the Library of Congress, which are now available online. (Transcriptions of many of these letters can be found in “The Works of James Buchanan.”)

Buchanan’s letters to Harriet show him to be an affectionate uncle, but one with a steady stream of advice intended to rein in her natural exuberance and encourage good conduct. He advised her during a visit to Washington, D.C. in 1851, (January 17) to “keep your eyes about you in the gay scenes through which you are destined to pass; & take care to do nothing & say nothing of which you may have cause to repent.” Later that same year (November 4) he reminded her to “be prudent & discreet among strangers,” and to not squander the “favorable impression” she had made. He counseled Harriet to conduct herself in such a way when visiting that her hosts would not be “twice glad, once on your arrival & still more so on your departure” (July 3, 1846). While Buchanan’s warnings could have applied to any young woman moving in polite society, his political aspirations and her role in his official life no doubt increased his concern that her behavior should be above reproach. Harriet seems to have at least tolerated his guidance, writing “I am always happier, and better satisfied with myself, when my actions are fully sanctioned by your wishes” (February 6, 1853).

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James Buchanan, 1857

When Harriet failed to live up to his standards, he offered gentle, and sometimes not so gentle, correctives. He critiqued her letter-writing skills as to her spelling (July 3, 1846) and the style in which she wrote (March 15, 1853). He celebrated her good fortune at receiving eight Christmas presents, and then inquired how many presents she had given to others (January 11, 1856).

When Harriet’s only sister, Mary Lane Baker, died in 1855, Buchanan rebuked Harriet severely for her excessive display of grief. While Buchanan understood “the first natural overflowings of sorrow” (December 21, 1855), he disapproved of Harriet’s prolonged mourning, remarking that her grief “exceeds all reasonable limits; & I am truly sorry that you have not more self command” (January 4, 1856).

Buchanan displayed his own lack of self-control with regard to her letters, however, and repeatedly apologized for “accidentally” opening her mail. On April 7, 1851, he forwarded a letter “inadvertently opened by me; but the moment I saw it was addressed to ‘my dear Harriette’, it was closed. It may contain love or treason for aught I know.”

Buchanan sometimes justified opening her letters to read news from Washington or other important subjects, but his biographer Philip Klein suggests that Buchanan’s nosy tendencies reached such heights during his presidency that Harriet had to find creative means to send private letters unopened from the White House to a friend in Philadelphia.

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James Buchanan to Harriet Lane, January 4, 1856, regarding her excessive grief.

Correctives and opened mail notwithstanding, James Buchanan displayed genuine affection for Harriet and concern for her future. Buchanan encouraged Harriet to marry a man with good morals and financial security, but with whom she was also emotionally compatible. “The first wish of my heart is to see you comfortably & respectably settled in life,” he wrote her on February 21, 1854. “[B]ut as ardently as I desire this, you ought never to marry any person for whom you think you would not have a proper degree of affection.”

Harriet did not marry until she was 35, but offered to remain with him if he wished her to (October 21, 1865).

Although their correspondence became less frequent after his political career ended and she moved to Baltimore with her husband, Buchanan assured his niece (July 18, 1866) that “my house is ever open to you & you shall always receive a cordial welcome.”

Harriet Lane Johnston returned to live at Buchanan’s Wheatland estate after his death in 1868, and tried to safeguard her uncle’s legacy until her own death in 1903.

Composition the Library Commissioned Wins a Grammy Award!

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Composer Jennifer Higdon (standing, right) with Curtis Chamber Orchestra conductor Robert Spano (center) and soloist Roberto Díaz following the March 7, 2015, premiere of Higdon’s “Viola Concerto” in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium. The debut recording of the composition won a 2018 Grammy Award. Photo by Shawn Miller.

The Library of Congress is delighted to report that a composition it co-commissioned won a 2018 Grammy Award: Jennifer Higdon, acclaimed composer of contemporary classical music, accepted the award in Madison Square Garden in New York on January 28 for “Viola Concerto.” The Library co-commissioned the work from Higdon with the Curtis Institute of Music, the Aspen Music Festival and the Nashville Symphony for the 90th anniversary season of Concerts from the Library of Congress.

Commissioned in honor of Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, “Viola Concerto” premiered in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on March 7, 2015. Robert Spano conducted the Curtis Chamber Orchestra, and Roberto Díaz performed on the Tuscan-Medici viola, made by Antonio Stradivari in 1690. It is on long-term loan to the Library. The debut recording of “Viola Concerto,” performed by Díaz with the Nasvhille Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero, won the Grammy for the Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

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Roberto Díaz warms up on the Tuscan-Medici viola backstage at the Coolidge Auditorium before the premiere of “Viola Concerto.” Photo by Shawn Miller.

“This project was a wonderful way to honor the Library’s impressive nine decades as a concert presenter, and also to spotlight the 325th birthday of the Tuscan-Medici. It’s a truly magnificent instrument, made for the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando de’ Medici,” says Anne McLean, senior producer for concerts and special projects and the Library.

The commission was made possible thanks to generous support from the family of Jane and Cameron Baird and from John J. Medveckis of the Library’s James Madison Council. The Musical Fund Society supported the participation of the Curtis Institute.

This was not Higdon’s first Grammy Award. Her “Percussion Concerto” won the Grammy for Best Contemporary Classical Composition in January 2010. Higdon also received the 2010 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her “Violin Concerto.”

The Washington Post has described Higdon as a “savvy, sensitive composer with a keen ear, an innate sense of form and a generous dash of pure esprit.” Her music has been performed throughout the world, and she has more than 60 CDs to her name. Her orchestral work, “blue cathedral,” is one of the most performed contemporary orchestral compositions by a living American.

Higdon’s Grammy win was not a first for the Library of Congress, either. The Recording Academy presented the Library with a special Grammy Award in 2013 in recognition of its work in preserving historic audio recordings.

Earlier, in 2006, “Jelly Roll Morton: The Complete Library of Congress Recordings by Alan Lomax” won Grammys for best historical album and best liner notes; the Library’s American Folklife Center houses the original Jelly Roll Morton discs.

Over the years, the center’s archives have inspired multiple Grammy nominations and wins, among them Bruce Springsteen’s 2007 Grammy for best traditional folk album for “We Shall Overcome: The Seeger Sessions.” Springsteen interpreted folk music songs made popular by famed folk musician Pete Seeger, who learned many of the songs as an intern at the folk archive in the 1930s.

Scroll down to view the webcast of the 2015 premiere of “Viola Concerto” in the Coolidge Auditorium and a preconcert interview of Higdon.

The Performing Arts Reading Room holds Higdon’s score with hand-written revisions, available to researchers today and preserved for future generations of scholars to study.

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