Library of Congress's Blog, page 98
December 19, 2017
Trending: Who Invented Electric Christmas Lights?
A Christmas tree sits at the center of a Washington, D.C., bank, built in the early 20th century. Photo by Carol M. Highsmith.
Thomas Edison, inventor of the first successful practical light bulb, created the very first strand of electric lights. During Christmas 1880, strands of lights were strung outside his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, giving railroad passengers traveling by their first look at an electrical light display. But it would take almost 40 years for electric Christmas lights to become a tradition.
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On Christmas Eve 1923, President Calvin Coolidge presided over the lighting of the National Christmas Tree with 3,000 electric lights.
Before electric Christmas lights, families used candles to light their Christmas trees. This practice was dangerous, and led to many home fires. In 1882, Edward H. Johnson, Edison’s friend and partner, put together the very first string of electric lights meant for a Christmas tree. He hand-wired 80 red, white and blue light bulbs and wound them around his Christmas tree. Not only was the tree illuminated with electricity, but it also revolved.
But the wider world was not yet ready for electrical illumination—many people continued to greatly mistrust electricity. Some credit President Grover Cleveland with spurring the acceptance of indoor electric Christmas lights when in 1895 he asked for the White House family Christmas tree to be illuminated by hundreds of multicolored electric light bulbs.
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Two small children around a lighted Christmas tree sitting above a village complete with a train.
At the time, the wiring of electric lights was very expensive, requiring the services of a wireman, the equivalent of our modern-day electrician. Some have estimated that lighting an average Christmas tree with electric lights before the turn of the century cost $2,000 in today’s dollars. In 1903, General Electric began to offer preassembled kits of stringed Christmas lights, making their use more affordable.
Thomas Edison and Edward H. Johnson may have been the first to create electric strands of lights. But it was Albert Sadacca, whose family owned a novelty lighting company, who saw a future in selling them. In 1917, when he was still a teenager, Albert suggested that the company sell brightly colored strands of Christmas lights to the public. Later, Albert and his brothers organized what became the National Outfit Manufacturers Association Electric Company. It cornered the Christmas light market until the 1960s.
This post draws on the science reference site, “ Everyday Mysteries: Fun Facts from the Library of Congress .”
December 18, 2017
Rare Book of the Month: Caldecott for Christmas
This is a guest post by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins.
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A winter scene by Caldecott from the “Complete Collection of Pictures & Songs.”
This December, the Rare Book and Special Collections Division is revisiting the lively and whimsical illustrations of Randolph Caldecott (1846–1886), who customarily published works at Christmastime, giving his young readership a special holiday treat.
This tradition started as the result of a lucky circumstance for Caldecott. When Edmund Evans (1826–1905), one of England’s finest engravers and printers, lost the services of the popular and well-established artist Walter Crane, he needed a replacement illustrator for his publications. Admiring Caldecott’s work, Evans reached out to Caldecott, which resulted in two Christmas books, “The House That Jack Built” and “The Diverting History of John Gilpin.” Published in 1878, both works became instant successes. Caldecott went on to create many beloved works, continuing this Christmas tradition by producing two works each Christmas until his death in 1886.
The book that is the focus of this blog, “The Complete Collection of Pictures & Songs by Randolph Caldecott,” is a posthumous retrospective work of Caldecott’s published in London and New York by G. Routledge and Sons in 1887.
The engraver Evans undertook one last work of Caldecott’s to give homage. He engraved on woodblocks using photographed copies of Caldecott’s pen-and-ink drawings to etch his images. He then used a technique called chromoxylography in which a few colors could be used with each impression, creating a variety of hues and tones. This technique was inexpensive and could be mass produced, but it was also quite intricate, requiring an engraver of great skill. For Caldecott’s images, six blocks were used for each image to apply various colors and hues, making Caldecott’s busy and fanciful illustrations come alive. This 500-page treasure is fully digitized and chronicles the great talent of both Caldecott and Evans.
The American Library Association recognizes Caldecott with an annual award named in his honor. It is given to the artist of the most distinguished American picture book for children. Past recipients include well-loved artists such as Maurice Sendak, Ezra Jack Keats, Ludwig Bemelmans and Virginia Lee Burton, to name a few.
The Caldecott Medal is designed with scenes from Caldecott’s work. The front of the medal is derived from “The Diverting History of John Gilpin,” which illustrates a poem by William Cowper. Here, Gilpin rides his runaway horse.
The reverse side of the medal is based on an illustration from the widely known nursery rhyme, “Sing a Song of Sixpence,” shown below.
[image error]Scroll down to view more of Caldecott’s wonderfully active and vivid illustrations that bring to life humorously depicted animals and the English countryside they inhabit.
Also check out the Caldecott Pinterest Board for “The Complete Collection of Pictures & Songs.”
And here are examples of Edmund Evans’s engraving for works by prominent children’s writers of his time:
The Baby’s Own Aesop by Walter Crane, engraved by Evans
Little Ann and Other Poems by Jane and Ann Taylor, illustrated by Kate Greenaway and engraved by Evans
Wonder Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne, illustrated by Walter Crane and engraved by Evans
Enjoy!
December 15, 2017
Pic of the Week: Happy Holidays!
Photo by Shawn Miller.
The Library of Congress honored Christmas and Hanukkah on December 13 with a program in the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building. Here, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, who started her career as a children’s librarian, reads “The Night Before Christmas” to children of Library staff and the public.
December 14, 2017
This Day in History: Wright Brothers Take Flight
A photograph of the first powered, controlled and sustained flight. Orville Wright is at the controls, lying prone on the lower wing. Wilbur Wright, running alongside, has just released his hold on the right wing. Orville preset the camera to take this photo, and assistant John T. Daniels squeezed the rubber bulb to trip the shutter.
On a dark and windy morning on the Outer Banks of North Carolina, 114 years ago this Sunday, Orville Wright took flight in a tiny airplane he and his brother Wilbur had painstakingly constructed. The 605-pound craft flew all of 120 feet and remained airborne only 12 seconds. After Orville’s first success, Wilbur set the record for the day: He flew a little more than half a mile in 59 seconds. Their flights seem almost absurdly brief. Yet they made history.
December 17, 1903, was “the beginning of change for the world far greater than any of those present could possibly have imagined,” writes historian David McCullough in “The Wright Brothers,” his 2015 best-seller. With their “homemade machine, Wilbur and Orville Wright had shown without doubt that man could fly.”
McCullough carried out much research for the book in the Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers at the Library of Congress:
Rare is the collection that provides so much depth and range, and all in such detail. In a day and age when, unfortunately, so few write letters or keep a diary any longer, the Wright Papers stand as a striking reminder of a time when that was not the way and of the immense value such writings can have in bringing history to life. Seldom ever did any of the Wrights—father, sons, daughter—put anything down on paper that was dull or pointless or poorly expressed. And much that they said to each other, and only to each other, was of great importance. In all, the family letters in the Library’s collection number in excess of a thousand. In addition, there are their large scrapbooks, a gold mine of insights.
The Wright Papers were donated to the Library by the executors of Orville Wright’s estate after his death in 1948. The Library received additional Wright material by gift, transfer and purchase from various sources between 1949 and 2002.
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David McCullough (right) with Laura Kells (center) and Jeff Flannery of the Manuscript Division at a 2015 exhibition of items from the Wright Papers. Photo by Shawn Miller.
Laura Kells, senior archives specialist in the Library’s Manuscript Division, has worked with the Wright Papers extensively and has assisted researchers, including McCullough, in using them. Here Kells answers a few questions about the collection.
An interview of David McCullough from the 2015 National Book Festival follows her responses.
What are the highlights of the Wright Papers?
The papers include their diaries and notebooks, family papers, correspondence files, photographs, scrapbooks, business files and legal papers. The key documents in the story of the invention of the airplane and the development of aviation have been digitized and are available online. Some of the most significant are:
The pocket-sized diaries and notebooks in which Wilbur and Orville wrote accounts of their flights at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and jotted down data, scientific formulas and computations relating to their aeronautical experiments and their work to design, build and pilot their airplane.
An exchange of correspondence between the Wrights and their mentor, engineer and aeronautical authority Octave Chanute, in which they discuss the status of the Wrights’ flight experiments and the development of the airplane. Chanute’s letters to the Wrights are among the many letters from aviation pioneers, business associates, friends, famous people and the public in the Wright Papers. The letters that the Wright Brothers sent to Chanute are part of the Octave Chanute Papers, which the Manuscript Division holds. But these letters were digitized and added to the online Wright Papers collection as well.
The hundreds of letters that members of the Wright family wrote to one another. They provide a glimpse into this close-knit family and illuminate the personalities of Wilbur; Orville; their sister, Katharine; and their father, Milton. The letters that Wilbur and Orville wrote to their father and sister while they were away conducting flight experiments at Kitty Hawk or making flight demonstrations in Europe and Fort Meyer, Virginia, are filled with details about their activities and their thoughts about what they were doing. Those that Wilbur and Orville sent to each other when they were apart include technical information and provide insights into their partnership.
What interesting insights do the papers convey about the Wrights?
The papers show the incredibly serious and diligent manner in which Wilbur and Orville progressed from the belief that human flight was possible to being the first people in history to prove it. Their scientific experiments and use of formulas and complicated mathematical calculations demonstrate their high level of knowledge and technical skill—even though neither of them graduated from high school. The family correspondence highlights the significant role their sister, Katharine, played in their lives. Files from later years show that both Wilbur and Orville devoted a lot of effort to protecting what they had accomplished. Wilbur focused on lawsuits over patent rights, and Orville had a dispute with the Smithsonian Institution over challenges to the claim that the Wrights invented the first aircraft to achieve powered, sustained flight.
What items, for you, are especially compelling?
One item that I find compelling is a letter that Wilbur wrote to Octave Chanute on May 13, 1900. He began, “For some years I have been afflicted with the belief that flight is possible to man.” In five pages, Wilbur conceptualized the flight problem and explained how he planned to solve it in such a way that Chanute took him seriously and replied with an encouraging letter.
I am also fond of a lengthy letter that Orville wrote to Katharine on September 29, 1902, from Kitty Hawk where he and Wilbur were conducting gliding experiments. It is filled with anecdotal details about camp life and humorous accounts of his efforts to smoke out mosquitoes, chase pigs and trap a mouse.
I am also struck by Orville Wright’s account from his 1903 diary of the historic first flight on December 17 as well as the other three flights that the brothers made that day. The six-page entry details the events of the day in a matter-of-fact manner. There is no sense of celebration on achieving the brothers’ dream.
What percentage of the papers are available digitally, and how best can researchers access the others?
There are 10,121 items in the digital collection, which brings together material from a number of sources. In addition to the core items from the Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers that are housed in the Manuscript Division, there are also letters from the Wright Brothers that are part of the Octave Chanute Papers and images from the Wrights’ 303 glass-plate photographic negatives in the custody of the Prints and Photographs Division. The original collection of Wright Papers is larger (approximately 32,250 items). The papers that were not digitized include some of the general correspondence, printed matter, genealogical material and the Marvin McFarland File. It contains material relating to the 1953 publication, “The Papers of Wilbur and Orville Wright,” edited by McFarland.
All of the Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers are available for research in the Manuscript Division Reading Room. The Manuscript Division has prepared a finding aid to assist researchers.
At the 2015 Library of Congress National Book Festival, NPR’s Melissa Block interviewed David McCullough about “The Wright Brothers.” Listen here.
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December 12, 2017
Free to Use and Reuse: Selections from the National Film Registry
“Duck and Cover” is a 1951 U.S. Office of Civil Defense film for schoolchildren highlighting what to do in the event of an attack by atomic or other weapons.
The Library of Congress is offering film lovers a special gift during the holiday season: Sixty-four motion pictures, named to the Library’s National Film Registry, are now available online. The collection, “Selections from the National Film Registry,” is also available on YouTube.
These films are among hundreds of titles that have been tapped for preservation because of their cultural, historical and aesthetic significance—each year, the National Film Registry selects 25 films showcasing the range and diversity of America’s film heritage.
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Legendary sailors Popeye and Sinbad battle in the 1936 film “Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor.”
All of the streaming films in the new online collection are in the public domain. They are also available as freely downloadable files with the exception of two titles. Additional films will be added periodically to the website.
“We are especially pleased to make high-resolution ProRes 422 .mov files freely available for download for practically every title in this digital collection,” said curator Mike Mashon, head of the Library’s Moving Image Section. “We think these films will be of particular educational and scholarly benefit as well as for reuse by the creative community.”
Highlights from “Selections from the National Film Registry” include
“Memphis Belle” (1944)—William Wyler’s remarkable World War II documentary about the crew of a B-17 “Flying Fortress” bomber
“The Hitch-Hiker” (1953)—a gritty film noir directed by actress Ida Lupino
“Trance and Dance in Bali” (1936–39)—Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson’s groundbreaking ethnographic documentary
“Modesta” (1956)—a Spanish-language film produced by Puerto Rico’s Division of Community Education
“Popeye the Sailor Meets Sindbad the Sailor” (1936)—a two-reel Technicolor cartoon
“The House I Live In” (1945)— a plea for religious tolerance starring Frank Sinatra that won an honorary Academy Award
“Master Hands” (1936)—a dazzling “mechanical ballet” shot on a General Motors automotive assembly line
“Duck and Cover” (1951)— a Cold War curio that features Bert the Turtle explaining to schoolchildren how best to survive a nuclear attack
Enjoy!
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The final mission of the B-17 bomber, Memphis Belle, is the subject of the 1944 documentary “The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress.”
December 11, 2017
Celebrating Film: ‘Dunkirk’ Director Advocates Film Preservation
This is a guest post by Mark Hartsell, publications editor in the Communications Office, in advance of the announcement this week of this year’s selection of motion pictures to be added to the National Film Registry. Director Christopher Nolan, the subject of this post, is a member of the National Film Preservation Board, which advises the Librarian of Congress regarding selections to the registry.
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Christopher Nolan discusses film preservation with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden at a November event in the Coolidge Auditorium. Photo by Shawn Miller.
Even in the digital age, films from the silent era still hold the power to inspire and teach today’s moviemakers.
Director Christopher Nolan is one of them. For his film “Dunkirk,” Nolan studied silent films to learn how early directors handled large crowds of extras—lessons he then applied to his epic story of a British Army trapped on a beach by the Germans during World War II.
Such a study, of course, carries an obvious prerequisite: Those silent classics must still exist. Institutions such as the Library of Congress must acquire and preserve those historical prints and make them accessible to the public.
“The value of these prints as physical objects to be preserved . . . is extremely, extremely important,” Nolan told a packed house in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium last month. “It’s history coming alive right in front of you.”
Nolan made his first feature, “Following,” in 1998, followed by “Memento” and “Insomnia.” Today, he is one of the world’s most acclaimed and successful filmmakers. In addition to “Dunkirk,” Nolan has directed such critically acclaimed hits as “The Dark Knight,” “Interstellar” and “Inception.”
Nolan came to the Library in his capacity as one of 44 members of the National Film Preservation Board, which works with the Library to ensure the survival, conservation and public availability of America’s film heritage. Advising the Librarian of Congress on the annual selection of 25 films for preservation in the registry is one of the board’s duties—and a process that inspires passionate debate among the board members about which films belong.
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Nolan examines “Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze,” a five-second-long motion picture that came to the Library in 1894 when it was registered with the Copyright Office. Because the copyright law did not yet protect motion pictures, it was registered as a series of still photographs. It is the earliest surviving motion picture deposited with a registration. With Nolan are, from left, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden; Helena Zinkham, chief of the Prints and Photographs Division; and Megan Halsband of the Serial and Government Publications Division. Photo by Shawn Miller.
Library studies have revealed the dire state of preservation of America’s movie-making heritage: About 70 percent of feature-length silent films, for example, have been completely lost over time. To address the problem, Congress in 1988 passed the National Film Preservation Act, establishing the board and the registry.
Preservation, Nolan said, is a complicated issue that’s been made more complicated, not less, by the introduction of digital technology—technology that for years, he said, was expected to take preservation issues off the table.
“We now, of course, know that digital technology is a moving target,” he said. “It improves every year, but it changes its characteristics. What I call the photographic background of the thing is the original elements—the negatives, the IPs [interpositives], the deposit prints. They have to be maintained. They have to be looked after very carefully.”
Preserving those original elements does more than just ensure a film’s survival and availability, as important as those are. It also, he said, preserves the filmmaker’s original intent.
Nolan noted that he’d recently finished transferring his films to DVD, Blu-ray and 4k ultra-high-resolution. Those are great formats for access, he said, but the reality is that each time you transfer a film you are reinterpreting it and creating something new and different.
“If you’re going to show a Picasso painting you can’t rephotograph it, put the print up and say that’s the same thing,” he said. “If an artist has made a film on 16 mm film to be projected, you have to get a 16 mm projector, you have to get a print of that film and show it or it’s not the same thing. It’s medium-specific. …
“There are a lot of filmmakers who are not with us anymore who can’t speak to this issue. I can and do about my own work and how I want to see it, what’s the authoritative version.”
Nolan is one of a diminishing number of directors who still shoot on film rather than digitally, who will leave behind a legacy of movie negatives. Film, he has said, is a reliable technology, proven over a century, and remains cheaper and better-looking than digital.
Those original film negatives, Nolan said, are objects that, when preserved, make history come alive – objects he likened to the items from Library collections he viewed when he visited the Library, including the Batman No. 1 comic book, a Frank Lloyd Wright rendering and boxing photos taken by Kubrick.
“If you’re lucky enough to see the objects I was looking at in the Library, the vibrancy and the life—you feel like you’re there in history,” he said. “It’s like a time machine. You’re right back there because these things are so well preserved.”
A webcast of Nolan’s discussion with the Librarian of Congress will soon be available on the Library’s website.
December 8, 2017
Pic of the Week: John Cena Thrills Young Readers
Photo by Shawn Miller.
World-champion wrestler John Cena (center) visited the Library on December 6 to talk about his latest endeavor: starring as the voice of the gentle bull Ferdinand in a soon-to-be-released 20th Century Fox Animation feature film based on “The Story of Ferdinand the Bull,” the beloved 1936 children’s book by Munro Leaf.
Cena read the story to a packed audience of students from Washington, D.C., and Virginia schools in the Coolidge Auditorium while students from Maryland, New Jersey and Vermont listened via livestream on the Library’s YouTube page. Afterward, Cena answered the students’ questions about his life and the book’s message of acceptance and nonviolence.
Here Cena poses after the event with students wearing Ferdinand horns.
December 7, 2017
This Day in History: Mark Twain Debuts Iconic Style at Library of Congress
Mark Twain. Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1906.
Mark Twain impersonators routinely don a white suit to evoke the persona of the famous author. But Twain himself did not make a habit of wearing white at all times of the year until very late in his life. He unveiled his signature style on December 7, 1906, at age 71, when he testified about a copyright reform bill before the Congressional Joint Committee on Patents. The hearing took place in the Congressional Reading Room of the Library of Congress.
“In spite of the keen December wind blowing outside, he burst into view, garbed in a cream-colored suit of light summer flannel,” wrote the Washington Post in “Twain’s Fancy Suit” on December 8, 1906. “The effect was decidedly startling; it fairly made one shiver to look at him.”
“Nothing could have been more dramatic than the gesture with which he flung off his long loose overcoat, and stood forth in white from his feet to the crown of his silvery head,” wrote William Dean Howells, Twain’s close friend, in “My Mark Twain.” “It was a magnificent coup, and he dearly loved a coup.”
“I have reached the age where dark clothes have a depressing effect on me,” the Post quotes Twain as explaining. “I prefer light clothing, colors, like those worn by the ladies at the opera.”
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A copyright catalog card records that Twain renewed the copyright to “Innocents Abroad” in 1897. First published in 1869, the book recounts Twain’s travels in Europe and the Holy Land. Photograph by Charles Gibbons.
Whatever his reason for wearing white, it helped to call attention to his testimony. Twain was a strong promoter of copyright reform, both domestic and international. He had lost substantial income in past decades from overseas piracy of his work, especially in Canada and Britain. In the 1870s, he started traveling to Canada upon publishing a new work to apply for a Canadian copyright, which protected his works throughout the British Empire. He enthusiastically welcomed passage of the International Copyright Act of 1891, which extended copyright protection to works of foreign authors whose countries offered similar protection to works of U.S. nationals.
Twain, who was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens, wanted copyright protection to last in perpetuity. But he testified in 1906 in favor of the bill then before Congress extending protection to the life of an author plus 50 years. At the time, the term was 28 years with the privilege of renewal for another 14 years.
Twain expressed his view with characteristic wit: “I like that extension from the present limit of copyright life of 42 years to the author’s life and 50 years after,” he testified. “I think that will satisfy any reasonable author, because it will take care of his children. Let the grandchildren take care of themselves.”
The 1906 bill did not pass, and the term Twain argued for didn’t become law until 1978, when the 1976 Copyright Act was implemented. Today, the term for most works is the life of the author plus 70 years.
While in Washington in 1906, Twain visited the studio of Frances Benjamin Johnston on 1332 V Street, NW. One of the first American women to achieve prominence as a photographer, she had already taken pictures of many famous people, including Theodore Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony and John Philip Sousa. On December 11, 1906, Twain sat for Johnston in his white suit, documenting for posterity his soon-to-be-iconic look.
The Library houses the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, consisting of thousands of photographic prints and glass and film negatives, and personal papers of Johnston’s, including correspondence, diaries and writings.
This post draws on “Dressing the Part: Mark Twain’s White Suit, Copyright Reform and the Camera,” by Annelise K. Madsen, published in 2009 in the Journal of American Culture.
December 6, 2017
My Job at the Library: The Library’s First Official Historian
This post is reprinted from the November–December issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. The entire issue is available on the Library’s website.
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John Cole. Photo by Shealah Craighead.
John Cole has enjoyed a remarkable 51-year career at the Library, culminating with his most recent appointment as the first official Library of Congress historian.
Throughout his long tenure at the Library of Congress, John Y. Cole has worked to increase public understanding of the key role that the Library has played in American history and now plays in American society. His latest position, as official historian of the Librarian of Congress, is a new focus of a lifelong interest.
“As an undergraduate at the University of Washington in the late 1950s, I was pondering an uncertain future,” he said. “I was a book-loving history major but didn’t want to teach history. When I was a senior, a library school professor persuaded me to take her course on the history of books and libraries as an enticement to enroll in the graduate school of librarianship the following year.”
It worked. “I postponed my ROTC-required service for a year and got my library degree. As a result of that degree, when I showed up for duty, I was assigned to replace the civilian head of the library at the U.S. Army Intelligence School. I stocked my little foreign-intelligence library via the Library of Congress surplus books program.”
Cole finished another master’s degree while still in the service and was hired into a special recruitment program at the Library of Congress in 1966. “That’s when I really fell in love with the Library and its history, thanks in part to David C. Mearns, a historian and chief of the Manuscript Division.”
The deal was further sealed when Cole chose as the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation Ainsworth Rand Spofford, the transformative Librarian of Congress who guided the institution from a small reference library for Congress to a national institution serving the American public.
Cole began writing articles about the Library, one of which brought him to the attention of Daniel Boorstin, who began his tenure as Librarian of Congress in 1975. Based on his historical knowledge, Cole found himself heading Boorstin’s yearlong task force on goals, organization and planning.
He thought he’d end up in a new planning office, but Boorstin had other ideas. “‘You’re going to be head of the Center for the Book,’ he told me, and it turned out the center was his personal recommendation to the task force.”
Created by federal law in 1977, the Center for the Book was charged with implementing programs, awards and prizes to nurture a culture of reading. Cole spent nearly four decades leading the center, which drove the Library’s literacy efforts via affiliated centers in 50 states, a national public-service announcement campaign (“Read More About It”), Letters about Literature, the National Book Festival, the Young Readers Center and the Library of Congress Literacy Awards.
Simultaneously, he kept writing about the Library in its various roles, including the books “Jefferson’s Legacy” and “On These Walls,” plus dozens of articles.
“But somewhere along the line, [former Deputy Librarian] David Mao noticed that the Library had no official historian. I had always been kind of an unofficial historian, but David thought it was time to change that.” The new appointment came just last year. Coincidentally, Cole had begun work on a new image-heavy update of a Library chronology originally published in 1979. The new book will be out soon.
And he’s not stopping there. He has encouraged a colleague, Jane Aiken, to write a new scholarly history of the Library. Also in the works is a book profiling Library of Congress staff who have made important contributions in their various fields, from librarianship to history to preservation science and more.
In more than 50 years of service at the Library, Cole has come full circle, first as a history major who found his love in libraries, now returning as full-time historian to the world’s greatest library.
“Don’t let anybody tell you that a library degree won’t get you anywhere.”
Visit the Library’s website for more information about Library of Congress history.
December 5, 2017
Inquiring Minds: Songwriter Finds Inspiration in Library’s Digital Newspapers
Rob Williams. Photo by Vivian Wang.
Rob Williams first used the Library’s digital newspaper collections more than a decade ago as a high-school teacher of U.S. history in Powhatan County, Virginia, near Richmond. Today, he’s a recording artist—he released his third album, “An Hour Before Daylight,” in October. But he still draws inspiration from the same online resources that captivated his history students.
Williams learned about the Library’s digital collections while attending a professional conference. A Library educational resources specialist there spoke about primary sources the Library was making available to teachers online. Williams was hooked.
He began digging through the collections, especially “Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers,” selecting resources to help his students grasp the stories and circumstances of historical Americans—not the just powerful people often highlighted in textbooks, but also everyday citizens.
Williams earned a PhD in educational leadership while teaching and eventually became a curriculum specialist for Hanover County Public Schools in Virginia. As his career transitioned, Williams revisited songwriting and performing, something he began as a teenager but set aside to pursue teaching.
As a songwriter, he continues to search “Chronicling America” from time to time—but now for creative ideas. His album “An Hour Before Daylight” features a song about a Montana mining town based on a January 1, 1886, article Williams found in The Butte Daily Miner.
Here Williams answers a few questions about his career and his use of the collections.
What period of U.S. history did you teach?
I taught a survey course that covered the span from European colonization to the present. The curriculum focused on a traditional overview of major movements and events, and I liked to add in as much color and contrast as I could to broaden the story and make it more interesting and engaging. For example, my students read historians like Howard Zinn to get a different perspective than that offered by the traditional curriculum, and I would use articles from the Library’s digital collection to draw examples from real-life, everyday people.
How do you approach searching the digital collections?
It takes time. There’s no way around that. I use the digital newspaper collection. In terms of process, I’ll start with a broad search and read through some of the returns. Typically, there will be one article—maybe even one unrelated to my original search—that catches my eye and leads to additional searches. Not every search yields useable ideas, but that’s part of the creative process.
What kind of stories resonated the most with your students?
History, as it’s taught in schools, tends to be a neatly organized collection of oversimplified vignettes that are sometimes, but not always, related to one another. Even high school students can appreciate that life isn’t always so simple. One topic I remember students reacting to concerned Virginia’s secession from the Union in 1861. Exploring articles from various Virginia newspapers arguing against secession in 1861 made an impression on students, because it helped them better understand and make meaning of this complex issue. Digging a little deeper into the collection, students discovered that newspapers in the eastern part of the state tended to support secession, while those in the western counties opposed. This led to some nice “aha” moments that students discovered themselves. Teaching history is as much about teaching students how to discover and interpret information as it is teaching them what happened. The Library’s digital collection is a rich source for helping students practice those skills.
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Page from the January 1, 1886, issue of The Butte Daily Miner describing the “work of the coroner.”
As a songwriter, how and why do you use the collections?
As a songwriter, I’m always looking for interesting stories and characters. Newspapers, which are typically intended for local audiences, are filled with colorful characters and certain biases and perspectives. Featuring more than a century’s worth of newspapers, Chronicling America has a treasure chest of characters and stories from across time and place.
What about the story from Butte, Montana, sparked your imagination?
I was looking for a story about the American West—cowboys, cattle drives, gunfighters, whatever I could find—so I searched Chronicling America for stories from the 1880s. When I came across the Butte, Montana, story I was intrigued by the attempt to portray Butte as a safe frontier mining town by detailing all of the suspicious deaths from the prior year. And there were plenty of them! Basically, the article was a recap of the coroner’s report of homicides, suicides, mining accidents (never the fault of the mining company) and unsolved mysterious deaths from 1885. The characters had names like “Fat Jack” and “Opium Jim.” My imagination just took off.
Is there cross-over for you between teaching history and songwriting?
They are similar in the sense that they both involve storytelling, and both allow audiences (students, listeners) to interpret and draw meaning for themselves. Both are creative pursuits. Songwriting has fewer rules, and although you can’t completely ignore your audience when you’re writing, you also don’t necessarily have them in mind. The writing process doesn’t involve thinking about what people want to hear, or at least it shouldn’t. In the end, songwriting is about trying to be original, honest and open. Teaching, on the other hand, necessarily involves the needs of students. Good teachers are also creative, but planning instruction is more restrictive because the audience is always front and center in the mind of teachers.
Do you have any suggestions for others who might want to make use of the collections?
For teachers, I would say not to be discouraged by the volume of resources available. Set aside some time and just begin reading through the collection without necessarily having a goal of coming away with anything tangible right away. If you’re using the digital newspaper collection, like I do, then read the articles like you would read any newspaper article. Find one that interests you, and if you’re anything like me, you’ll start to look at the same or similar historical events through the eyes of different newspaper accounts. From there, I’ll bet you come up with ideas for using these primary sources with students.
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