Library of Congress's Blog, page 98

This Day in History: Wright Brothers Take Flight

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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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Free to Use and Reuse: Selections from the National Film Registry

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“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.”

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.

Pic of the Week: John Cena Thrills Young Readers

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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.

This Day in History: Mark Twain Debuts Iconic Style at Library of Congress

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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.

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.

Inquiring Minds: Songwriter Finds Inspiration in Library’s Digital Newspapers

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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.

New Acquisition: Extremely Rare Mesoamerican Manuscript

This is a guest post by Benny Seda-Galarza of the Office of Communications.

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The Library of Congress recently acquired the Codex Quetzalecatzin, one of the most important indigenous manuscripts from the earliest history of America to become available in the last century.

The Codex Quetzalecatzin, an extremely rare Mesoamerican manuscript acquired by the Library’s Geography and Map Division, explores the extent, the people and the history of northern Oaxaca and Southern Puebla in Mexico.

Held in private collections for more than 100 years, the codex has been digitally preserved by the Library and made available to the public online for the first time.

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The codex shows churches, Spanish place names, roads and other images suggesting a community adapting to Spanish rule.

Also known as the Mapa de Ecatepec-Huitziltepec, the codex is an example of manuscripts that were made largely by indigenous painters and scribes. The manuscript belongs to a larger group of interrelated pictographic documents, called the “Pinome Group.” The manuscripts include the Tecamachalco Canvas, Cuevas Codices and Fragmented Codex, which together represent the history of the region.

This codex dates from 1593, a time when many cartographic histories were being produced as part of a Spanish royal investigation into the human and community resources of the American colonies. As with many period manuscripts of the indigenous Nahua peoples, the Codex Quetzalecatzin depicts the local community at an important point in its history, and the iconography that makes up the map reflects Spanish influence.

“The codex shows graphically the kinds of cultural interactions taking place at an important moment in American history,” said John Hessler, curator of the Library’s Jay I. Kislak Collection of the culture and history of the early Americas. “In a sense, we see the birth of what would be the start of what we would come to know as the Americas.”

Due to the chronological system used in the manuscript, this document can be placed at the end of the 16th century. The periods in which each governor ruled are depicted with symbolic blue dots representing years and flags representing units of 20 years. This system is also applied in other Pinome Group documents.

The codex is divided into two halves. The left half, framed by representations of mountains in shades of green and blue, deals with the genealogy, land ownership and properties of the family line known as de Leon. With Aztec stylized graphics, the map illustrates the family’s descent from Lord-11 Quetzalecatzin, who in 1480 was the region’s major political leader. The genealogy of the rulers begins from above with the oldest pre-Hispanic rulers and goes to the bottom of the document to end with the latest of the 16th century.

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Lord-11 Quetzalecatzin (in red) sits in a jaguar fur chair with a gray scarf on his neck.

 

The right half shows a community adapting to Spanish law with churches and Spanish names. In the codex, certain features that point to indigenous authorship include pre-Hispanic stylistics, such as symbols for rivers, roads and pathways and hieroglyphic writing. The marginal notations with alphabetic writing using the Latin alphabet and the names of some of the indigenous elites, such as don Alonso and don Matheo, are clues to its colonial-era composition.

Nahuatl, known historically as Aztec, is a language or group of languages of the Uto-Aztecan language family. Varieties of Nahuatl are spoken by an estimated 1.5 million Nahua peoples, most of whom live in central Mexico. A large body of literature in Nahuatl, produced by the Aztecs, survives from the 16th century, recorded in an orthography that was introduced by Spanish priests. All Nahuan languages are indigenous to Mesoamerica.

The name Quetzalecatzin is composed of two indigenous words that come from the Nahuatl: “ecatl,” which means air, and “quetzal,” a bird of peculiar and beautiful plumage that inhabits the mountainous jungle in central-tropical zones. The quetzal played an important role during the period—kings and high priests adorned their heads with headdresses or crowns with its feathers. The Nahuas, like many primitive indigenous peoples, deified the elements.

The codex’s provenance is well documented. The Library acquired the manuscript from the collections of Charles Ratton and Guy Ladriere in France. From previous owners like William Randolph Hearst, who also owned the Jefferson Bible, to the first Viscount Cowdray, the codex can be traced into the 19th century.

Veterans History: Spell Checking the Vietnam Veterans Memorial

This is a guest post by Lee Ann Potter, director of educational outreach.

Thirty-five years ago this month, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., was dedicated. Three years later, in 1985, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund donated its records to the Library of Congress. But the National Archives actually plays a very important role in them—a role I was not aware of until I prepared a program this month for a group of high school students and their teachers.

I started by doing some research in the records, mostly to get a sense of their composition and arrangement in order to describe them to the students. I had scanned the finding aid and asked for six different boxes to be pulled. One that caught my eye was titled simply “spelling verification.”

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A page listing the names of service members who lost their lives in Southeast Asia.

I suspected the files in that particular box would have something to do with how the spelling of the thousands of names to be engraved on the memorial wall would be checked for accuracy. I was right. The box contained a sobering collection of printed and hand-written names of America’s fallen soldiers, sailors and airmen and women. Page after page contained checkmarks or corrections in red ink.

The box also contained a few pieces of correspondence related to the importance of accuracy. One letter, written by Robert Doubek, the memorial’s project director, to Major Gary Allord, the head of the Casualty Section of the U.S. Marine Corps explained:

As you know, a major element of the memorial design is the inscription of the names of all 57,709 Americans who died and/or remain unaccounted for. The VVMF [Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund] has been supplied with a list of these names by the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense, which assures us that it is inclusive and accurate. Nevertheless, because the names will be inscribed in granite forever, and because a man’s name is sacred to his memory and family, we perceive a responsibility to independently verify to the best of our ability, that our list is complete and accurate as possible.

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Files related to the spelling verification project.

Another letter from Doubek read in part:

Paul, your agreement to undertake this task is a substantial realization of our responsibility to insure that the name of a man or woman who died in Vietnam is as accurate as we can make it before inscribing it for history. I of course know that the actual checking process will be a tedious one for those who actually do the work, and I would hope that you can impress on them also the historical significance of what they are doing.”

The “Paul” mentioned in this note of appreciation was Paul D. Gray, the assistant director for military records at the National Personnel Records Center in St. Louis. In all capital letters, another page in the file read “EMPLOYEES WITH SIGNIFICANT INVOLVEMENT IN VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL PROJECT.” It then listed all the names of the National Archives employees who did the historically significant work. In addition to Gray, they included:

Betty Anthony

Rosalyn Armstead

Christine Bates

Faye Chowning

Peggy Cox

Judi Gockel

Carolyn Graham

Barbara Harris

Deborah Haverman

Judy Headley

Maryann Hickman

Donna Kraft

Mary LaFever

Teresa Manning

Booker Moore

Richard Schrader

Ed Wynne

As we commemorate the memorial’s anniversary this month, we will remember and honor the sacrifices of those whose names are inscribed on the wall. Let’s also appreciate the efforts of these National Archives employees who made sure the names were accurate, the staff of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund who saved the records and colleagues at the Library of Congress who preserve and make the records available for researchers today and for future generations.

Native American Heritage Month: Preserving Songs and Stories of the Past

Judith Gray joined the staff of the American Folklife Center in 1983 with a goal in mind: she wanted to work on the Federal Cylinder Project. The Folklife Center launched the project four years earlier to preserve early field recordings of the sung and spoken traditions of Native American communities. Ethnographers had made the recordings on wax cylinders—the recording medium of the day—in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Library houses the country’s largest collection of these recordings.

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Judith Gray rehouses wax cylinder recordings in archival boxes to help preserve them. Photo by Nicole Saylor.

Beyond preservation, the Federal Cylinder Project has also made copies of recordings available to tribal archives. Some recordings document traditions that had disappeared from communities, or that existed only in the memories of elders. But in some cases, the recordings also confirm the continuity of traditions—contemporary people have recognized songs a century old as being part of their unique heritage.

Gray’s passion for the project arose from her academic training: she studied ethnomusicology at Wesleyan University with David McAllester, a pioneer in the field and an expert in Navajo musical traditions.

Today, she heads references services for the Folklife Center and continues to work with the Federal Cylinder Project recordings. Last fall, she received the prestigious Honored One Award from the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums for her support of Native American communities and cultural institutions.

Here Gray answers a few questions about the Federal Cylinder Project.

What motivated ethnographers at the turn of the 20th century to document Native American cultural traditions?

Partly, they were continuing an established practice. From their earliest arrivals in the Americas, Europeans who encountered Native Americans often documented what they perceived of tribal communities, practices, rituals and material culture, sending that information back to their sponsors, sometimes to further specific goals. So, for example, the Jesuit priests who lived in indigenous communities along the St. Lawrence River in the mid-1600s gathered information on languages and kinship structure, the better to translate the Bible and hymns into Native languages and to convert people to Christianity.

In the early 1800s, the new United States government operated trading posts in Indian country; correspondence between the agents, territorial governors, geographical surveyors and various government offices related not only to commerce but also to other affairs, documenting many aspects of Native life.

By the latter half of the 19th century, many Native people had been confined to reservations, many children were being sent to nontribal boarding schools and treaties were no longer being signed. Congressmen like Henry Dawes were speaking in terms of “civilizing” Native people by allotting tribal lands to individuals as private property—of turning “Indians into farmers.” Correspondingly, the general presumption among Euroamericans of that day was that traditional indigenous lifeways were disappearing. This “myth of the vanishing Indian” was definitely one impetus for much cultural documentation, including recordings made on wax cylinders.

How did the Library come to house the largest collection of these early field recordings in the U.S.?

In 1879, Congress created the Bureau of Ethnology within the Smithsonian Institution to house archival materials on tribal populations. It was renamed the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE) in 1897 and soon became the home for much of the anthropological fieldwork of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including much of the aural documentation on wax cylinders.

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Cylinders being organized into shelf-list order. Photo by Nicole Saylor.

In 1948, the BAE collection of thousands of ethnographic wax cylinder recordings was transferred to the Library of Congress, after being housed briefly by the National Archives. One of the principal BAE cylinder collectors, Frances Densmore, pushed for the move because she knew the Library had a recording lab to facilitate public access to the recordings, something she believed was essential. The Library by that time also had other field-recorded collections of North, Central and South American tribal songs and some spoken-word examples (as well as recordings of indigenous people from other parts of the world)—some on cylinders, others on wire or disc recordings and soon thereafter on tape recordings.

Once the Federal Cylinder Project was created in the late 1970s, more cylinder collections came to the Library, not only from federal agencies but also from museums, historical societies and individuals. The Library now has over 8,800 actual field-recorded cylinders, together with disc copies of hundreds of additional cylinders—and we still occasionally receive some small collections of them that people discover in homes and offices. Probably 80 percent or more of the Library’s field-recorded cylinders are of Native American songs and spoken word.

How has the Folklife Center approached dissemination of the recordings, and what are the challenges?

The goals of the Federal Cylinder Project were to preserve, document and then disseminate copies of the early recordings to their communities of origin. To help us set the ground rules for such a process, the Folklife Center in the 1980s requested the advice of tribal representatives active in museums and other cultural institutions. Based on their recommendations, Cylinder Project staff members then contacted tribal governments, requesting that they place us in touch with cultural heritage committees, elders groups and so on—people knowledgeable about the traditions and song genres represented on the recordings from their communities. After making such connections and consulting with the designated contacts—and if we were then invited—project staff often visited the communities, formally returning copies of the recordings, sometimes at large tribal events, sometimes at tribal council meetings, sometimes at school assemblies or senior centers—whatever the community asked of us.

The challenges have to do both with the medium itself and with the contents. Not all recordists were equally proficient in using the cylinder recorder, so sometimes the recordings were simply not well made. Over the course of time, others have deteriorated; fragile ones have cracked and broken. Consequently, the recordings are not always easy to decipher. Some take repeated listening before the ear learns to ignore the surface noise and focus on the recorded voice itself. For some collections, listening is definitely hard work.

And the contents can be problematic for contemporary community members. In some cases, for example, descendants of someone recorded back in the 1910s or 1920s are uncomfortable with the fact that it was their ancestor who “gave songs away” to an outsider ethnologist. In other cases, the recordings are of songs belonging to a specific ceremony, songs that should be heard only in that context, only by members of certain societies or only during certain parts of the year. Such recordings are an issue for community members who then need to sort out who should be able to have access to them under what circumstances. Sometimes the recordings are decidedly a mixed blessing.

How have communities responded to the project?

The responses are as different as the communities themselves. We’ve heard that cylinder recordings have been used to help revive a specific dance in one location. We know that at least one community for a while gave copies of century-old recordings to their high-school graduates to remind the young people of their heritage. At this year’s conference of the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries and Museums, I encountered a person I had met on a dissemination visit in 1985 who told me that the cassette copies I had left in his community had since been digitized, and the recordings were still in use. Other recordings delivered during the dissemination phase in the 1980s disappeared soon thereafter, we were told, probably due to issues related to the contents and conflicting senses of who should be able to access them.

But the early recordings remain a source of great interest. They are frequently sought in the Folklife Center’s reading room by visiting members of tribal communities and requested via email by participants in tribal language-preservation activities and so on. We do outreach to tribal communities whenever possible in order to spread the word about the existence of the early recordings, but the uses (or nonuses) of the recordings are in the hands of their communities of origin. The recordings are their intellectual property, and we respect their wishes.

How have the Library’s efforts toward preserving the recordings evolved?

When the BAE cylinders first came to the Library in 1948, the preservation technique of the day was to copy the recordings on to aluminum discs. Then in the late 1960s and early 1970s, many of those discs were in turn copied on to 10-inch preservation tapes. We used those tapes in the 1980s to make the dissemination cassettes (the most accessible and requested format within tribal communities at that time).

Interestingly, in the 1980s and 1990s, listening to a reference-tape copy of a 10-inch preservation tape of a disc copy of a wax cylinder was often better than listening to a newly accessioned actual cylinder being played. The tape copies were based on recordings that had first been transferred in the 1940s, when the cylinders were decades younger and in somewhat better condition. Cylinders being transferred for the first time in the 1990s were apt to be in worse shape.

Now, however, the Library has several new cylinder transports, or playback machines, that allow us to digitize the recordings in the process of transferring the actual cylinders anew. These devices by themselves or in conjunction with audio-restoration software are helping us pull even more sound from the early recordings, in some cases almost bringing the original singer “to life” and sometimes allowing us to decipher an additional helpful word in a recorded announcement. Digitizing cylinders is a time-consuming process, however—it can easily take more than an hour to digitize a single cylinder holding about two minutes of material—so for the moment we still are principally using the preservation-tape copies for listening and dissemination, while looking forward to hearing the new transfers as those become available.