Library of Congress's Blog, page 99

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.

EverydayLOC: Holiday Inspiration from the Library of Congress

‘Tis the season to be jolly, be of good cheer and…be a thorough list-maker. Gift lists, grocery lists, invitation lists … there are so many things, and so little time that lists are essential to helping us make a bit more sense of it all.

The Library offers a lot of great resources that can (to borrow from our end-of-year giving campaign) inspire curiosity and spark conversation around the holidays. I have the great privilege of working here and sifting through the Library’s amazing offerings every day, but for someone new to the Library the volume might be overwhelming.

So, in the spirit of giving, I made a list for you. These are just a handful of ideas – 10, to be exact – for tapping into the Library during the holiday season in ways that can connect you with people, spark dinner-table conversation and just support the everyday life of those of us whose regular state of mind is “curious.”

We invite you to share comments or stories if you use any of these ideas. And even better if you have additional suggestions!

 

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Rosa Parks circa 1995, by Monica Morgan.

1. Make Rosa Parks feather-lite pancakes

Among the personal papers of civil rights icon Rosa Parks was this handwritten recipe for “featherlite pancakes.” I have made them for family and friends (and co-workers) now on many occasions and they are always a hit for two reasons – one, they are delicious; and two, it opens the door to interesting and unexpected conversation on an important individual in history.

 

2. Nominate a film for the National Film Registry

The 2017 additions will be announced Dec. 13, but you can get a head start on next year by nominating now. This is a great way to turn the “what’s your favorite movie” debate into action. Remember, films must be at least 10 years old. For good measure, watch a classic from the list.

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Cover image from Sweet Potatoes and Yams, 1918.

 

3. Learn the difference between sweet potatoes and yams

Settle this age-old question with this vintage post from one of the Library’s earliest web features, “Everyday Mysteries,” which continues to be one of our most sought out pages this time of year.

 

4. Record an oral history for the Veterans History Project

Since Congress created the Veterans History Project (VHP) at the Library of Congress in 2000, the Library has gathered oral histories and collections of more than 100,000 veterans of World War I through the present-day conflicts. This holiday season, sit down with a veteran (or veterans!) in your life and help preserve their stories for future generations. Learn how to participate in VHP.

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Great Lines of Literature Mug

 

5. Shop for your favorite bibliophile

The Library’s shop offers a range of items for book lovers, history lovers and others on your list. Some of my personal favorites are this reproduction Jefferson decanter set, a mug covered with great lines from literature and these socks inspired by “Where the Wild Things Are.”

6. Enroll a loved one in NLS

The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped offers free braille and talking book library services for people with temporary or permanent low vision, blindness, or a physical disability that prevents them from reading or holding the printed page. Give the gift of reading to a friend or loved one who would benefit from this service.

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Seeing With a Child’s Eyes by Jessie Willcox Smith, 1916.

 

7. Visit (virtually or in person!) our newly opened exhibit, “Drawn to Purpose”

The Library recently opened “Drawn to Purpose,” an exhibition of women cartoonists and illustrators spanning the late 1800s to the present. You don’t have to be in easy traveling distance of the Library to enjoy this thoughtful and wide-ranging selection of works from the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. Most items can be viewed online. Some of my personal favorites include this sweet watercolor by Jessie Willcox Smith for a 1916 edition of Charles Kingsley’s fairy tale “The Water Babies” and this relatable watercolor published in the October 2001 issue of Working Woman.

 

8. Read “A Visit from Saint Nicholas”

This retelling of “The Night Before Christmas” was published in 1862. The entire book and its charming illustrations can be viewed and shared with the kiddos.

 

9. Plan next year’s vacation

This collection of historical travel photos will give you a major case of wanderlust. And these charming roadside images by photographer John Margolies will make you want to rent a camper and drive across America. If an annual trip is on your family’s list, print out a few of these in color to kick off a planning session.

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Stolzenfels Castle on the Rhine River in Germany, ca. 1890–1900. | Dog Bark Park, Route 95, Cottonwood, Idaho, 2004.

 

10. Play Auld Lang Syne from the original sheet music

This digitized original sheet music from 1820 can be downloaded and printed. Plus, it includes the lyrics for all the verses, so no more excuses for humming on New Year’s Eve. You can hear a recording of chimes playing the classic from 1904 or Frank C. Stanley singing it with an orchestra circa 1905 or, my favorite, the Peerless Quartet singing it in 1918. For the very ambitious, there is also this 19-page Auld Lang Syne flute solo.

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Auld Lang Syne, 1820.

Please let us know if you use any of these ideas. We’ll be posting these and other suggestions on social media with the #EverdayLOC hashtag. Join in the conversation!

This Day in History: Painstaking Assassination Investigation Uncovers Strange Side-Story

President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas 54 years ago today. Last month, to much anticipation, historians and the public awaited release by the National Archives of the government’s final records on the investigation into his murder—a law passed in 1992 set October 26, 2017, as the deadline for public disclosure of all assassination-related records.

The National Archives did indeed release thousands of records that day. But the president postponed making certain information public because of national security and other concerns raised by government agencies. The agencies now have until next spring to report on the reasons behind their request. So even though most of the records have been released—hundreds of thousands are available on the website of the National Archives—the saga continues.

The back-and-forth about the final records release reminded me of a column I wrote a few years ago. It recounts an odd tie to the government’s investigation into the assassination discovered in the records of the U.S. Copyright Office, which is part of the Library of Congress.

The President’s Commission on the Assassination of President Kennedy, known informally as the Warren Commission, investigated Kennedy’s assassination in 1963 and 1964, publishing an 889-page report. In the course of its investigation, the commission asked federal agencies to search their files for any information related to Lee Harvey Oswald, who assassinated President Kennedy, or Jack Ruby, who shot and killed Oswald.

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Copyright catalog cards related to Jack Ruby’s 1942 copyright registration. Photo by David Rice.

A search of the Copyright Office’s records turned up nothing on Oswald but identified a registration filed by Jack Rubenstein on January 16, 1942, for a color print titled “Remember Pearl Harbor.” The catalog card for the registration notes that Rubenstein was “doing business as Liberty Distributing Co.,” located in Chicago.

A biography of Jack Ruby in the Warren Commission’s report notes that Ruby was born in Chicago in 1911 and named Jacob Rubenstein by his parents, immigrants from Poland. He changed his name to Jack Ruby in 1947.

As a young man, Ruby engaged in assorted commercial ventures to support himself. In 1941, he and a friend established a small firm to sell novelty items. After the attack on Pearl Harbor in December of that year, they decided to sell plaques commemorating the “Day of Infamy.” The art Ruby registered with the Copyright Office in 1942 was for the plaque.

An earlier experience may have alerted Ruby to the benefits of copyright registration. For the Warren Commission inquiry, Bell P. Herndon, special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, interrogated Ruby on July 18, 1964, about Ruby’s life before the Kennedy assassination. “Have you ever served time in jail?” Herndon asked. Ruby admitted to serving 30 days for unauthorized sale of copyrighted sheet music “back in the old depression days” in Chicago.

“That 30 days embarrasses me,” Ruby testified. “It was something that I didn’t realize at the time there were copyrights on those songs.” He added that he “made a pretty good living at that time.”

Records indicate that the art Ruby deposited for his 1942 registration no longer exists in the Library’s holdings.

Spark a Lifelong Adventure of Learning: Your Gift Makes a Difference!

[image error]The following is a guest post by Sue Siegel, director of development for the Library.

The Library is one of the greatest gifts the United States Congress has given to the American people. Its support provides a foundation of excellence in collecting, preserving and providing access to knowledge. There is so much to discover, not only the nation’s memory, but the world’s—information from all corners of the earth, in more than 470 languages. With millions of items available online, you can access the Library’s treasures from anywhere.

The Library is strengthened by donations from people like you. Your gift supports free programs that enrich the lives of millions of people across the nation and around the world and continues a legacy of philanthropy.

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Transformative gifts like those from Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge, Gertrude Clarke Whittall, John W. Kluge,  Jay I. Kislak and David Woodley Packard and gifts of all sizes bring the Library to life with music, dance, film, sound, culture, scholarship, research, discussions and ideas. Your gift, no matter the size, will support diverse programs that make the Library’s treasures and services more accessible.

Why Give to the Library?

Your gift can help

Acquire and preserve rare and unique items that are important to our history.
Make the unique and universal collections of the Library accessible to the public through exhibitions, digitization and other means.
Develop scholars and grow new scholars.
Spark the imagination of people of all ages with programs that open the Library’s doors wide to as many people as possible.

At this time of the year, we would especially like to thank our generous donors for support that inspires curiosity, ignites conversations and illuminates minds.

The Library of Congress is your library, your gateway, to understanding the world. Please make your gift to spark a lifelong adventure of learning.

Pic of the Week: Tony Bennett Honored in Star-Studded Gershwin-Prize Tribute

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

Celebrated performer Tony Bennett salutes the crowd on November 15 after Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden and a delegation of Members of Congress presented him with the 2017 Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Members who joined Bennett on stage were Rep. Kevin Yoder, U.S. House of Representatives Chairman of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on the Legislative Branch; Rep. Gregg Harper, U.S. House of Representatives Chairman of the Committee on House Administration and Chairman of the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress; Rep. Nancy Pelosi, U.S. House of Representatives Democratic Leader; Sen. Patrick J. Leahy, U.S. Senate Member of the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress; and Rep. Kevin McCarthy, U.S. House of Representatives Majority Leader.

Earlier, during an evening concert in DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., some of the nation’s top artists paid homage to Bennett’s extraordinary gift as an interpreter of America’s songbook, showcasing some of his most memorable songs. Performing were Chris Botti, Michael Bublé, Gloria Estefan, Michael Feinstein, Savion Glover, Josh Groban, Wé McDonald, Brian Stokes Mitchell, Lukas Nelson, Vanessa Williams and Stevie Wonder—a former recipient of the Gershwin Prize—with a special presentation by Wynton Marsalis. Actor Bruce Willis hosted the evening’s festivities, concluded by a performance by Bennett of some of his favorite tunes.

The concert will air on PBS stations nationwide at 9 p.m. ET on Friday, January 12. The program will also be broadcast at a later date on the American Forces Network to the U.S. Department of Defense locations around the world.

Bestowed in honor of the legendary songwriting team of George and Ira Gershwin, the Gershwin Prize recognizes a living musical artist’s lifetime achievement in promoting the genre of song as a vehicle of cultural understanding, entertaining and informing audiences and inspiring new generations. Previous recipients are Paul Simon, Stevie Wonder, Sir Paul McCartney, songwriting duo Burt Bacharach and the late Hal David, Carole King, Billy Joel, Willie Nelson and Smokey Robinson.

Collecting Independent Comics and Cartoon Art

This is a guest post by Megan Halsband, a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division. It was first published in “Comics! An American History,” the September–October issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. The issue is available in its entirety online.

Through an agreement with the Small Press Expo, the Library collects and preserves independent comics and cartoon art.

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“Henni” by Miss Lasko-Gross (2015), drawing for a poster designed for the American Library Association. Small Press Expo Collection, Prints and Photographs Division.

Like Animals? Monsters? Robots? Superheroes? Autobiography? Noir? Science Fiction? History? The Small Press Expo Collection at the Library of Congress probably has a comic (or two) for you.

The nonprofit Small Press Expo was created in 1994 to promote artists and publishers who produce independent comics. The annual SPX festival in Bethesda, Md., hosts independent and small-press comic artists and publishers from around the world who come to the festival to present their wares, chat with fans and nerd out about comics (or comix, if you prefer).

Small Press Expo executive director Warren Bernard approached the Library in 2010 about establishing a collection to preserve the artistic output of the creators who come to SPX, as well as the history of the yearly SPX festival. This agreement provided a unique opportunity for the Library to collect materials for both its comic book and original art collections.

With as many different subjects and genres as there are artists at the festival, the collection is a fantastic representation of the wide variety of comics and comic books currently being published outside the mainstream press.

Every September since 2011, a number of Library curators attend the festival and seek donations from artists and publishers. Through their generosity, the Library has been able to develop these contemporary and relevant enhancements to its graphic arts and serials collections.

From a few dozen items at the start of the agreement, the collection has grown to several thousand. Material in the SPX collection ranges from tiny accordion-fold pages of doodles and poignant memoirs to oversize newsprint issues and original artwork and posters.

Annually since 1997, the Small Press Expo has awarded the Ignatz Award for outstanding achievement in comics and cartooning. The nominees and winners of the awards in nine categories form a key component of the overall collection. In addition, the collection includes online content—webcomics and the Small Press Expo website itself —which the Library harvested through its web archiving program. The new SPX web archive went live this fall.

The Library also hosts an annual lecture series that has featured artists such as Dean Haspiel and Box Brown, publishers Gary Groth and Locust Moon Press and writer-editor Heidi MacDonald. The lectures, held the Friday before the SPX festival, are open to the public and are archived on the Library’s website.

Scroll down to listen to Dean Haspiel’s 2012 presentation—the first in the series—and Gary Groth’s talk from 2016.

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New Online: Abraham Lincoln Papers

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

Regular visitors to the Library of Congress website may be scratching their heads right now, thinking, “Aren’t the Abraham Lincoln Papers already online?” It is true that the bulk of the Abraham Lincoln Papers have long been available through the Library’s American Memory portal. But to paraphrase an Oldsmobile advertisement from the 1980s, “This is not your father’s Abraham Lincoln Papers.”

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The new portal to the Abraham Lincoln Papers has an updated look and offers new and enhanced features.

The Abraham Lincoln Papers first became available online in 2001. The images in that initial American Memory presentation were scanned from the microfilm edition of the Abraham Lincoln Papers. They included only materials from series 1–3 of the Lincoln Papers, and the site did not provide distinct URL addresses that retained the connection of the individual image to the rest of the document or to its bibliographic information. For those interested in Abraham Lincoln, however, the American Memory images and over 10,000 transcriptions provided by the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill., opened up a whole new world of Lincoln-related documents previously available only to those with access to the microfilm edition.

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Gold medal presented to Mary Lincoln by the people of France in 1866, commemorating the life of her late husband.

 

 

 

In connection with the 2009 bicentennial of Abraham Lincoln’s birth and the 2011 start of the Civil War sesquicentennial, the Library of Congress, as part of a cooperative project, began scanning in high-resolution color the more than 20,000 original documents in the Library’s Abraham Lincoln Papers, including documents not previously captured on microfilm.

Now available for the first time on the updated Abraham Lincoln Papers site are the reading copy of Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address; the autobiographical statement Lincoln provided to Jesse Fell in 1859, now reunited with its cover letter; the gold medal (with its purple presentation box) presented to Mary Lincoln on behalf of the people of France in 1866 to commemorate her husband’s life, along with the letter written to Mrs. Lincoln by the medal committee; and a cigar box label from the 1860 presidential campaign advertising Abraham Lincoln with his “Honest Old Abe” nickname rendered in phonetic Spanish.

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Cigar box label featuring Abraham Lincoln, 1860.

The color images on the updated Lincoln website represent the highest-resolution scans available at the Library of Congress for manuscript material and can be downloaded in several different file formats (gif, jpeg, tiff). Each item (or grouping of items) is associated with a unique digital ID. Each individual image now offers a specific URL that not only features that image, but also retains the bibliographic information about the item and allows the user to explore other pages of the item. Images now can be rotated online for easier viewing of text written in multiple directions. The transcriptions prepared by the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College for the American Memory presentation can be viewed as a complementary text box, or opened as a downloadable PDF file suitable for printing.

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Lincoln’s attempt to record the farewell remarks he had just given in his hometown of Springfield, Ill., show the effects of trying to write on a moving train.

 

The new Abraham Lincoln Papers site contains an expanded essay on “Abraham Lincoln and Emancipation” and a complementary timeline of emancipation, both of which feature hyperlinks to relevant online material. A new timeline of Abraham Lincoln’s life also offers similar hyperlinks to associated documents and images. The related resources section has been expanded to include more recent scholarship on Abraham Lincoln and online sources not available when the American Memory site was created.

New to the updated Abraham Lincoln Papers site is a page listing frequently requested documents that provides quick links to many of the most-requested documents in the collection, including both the Nicolay and Hay copies of the Gettysburg Address, the final versions of Lincoln’s first and second inaugural addresses, his 1861 farewell remarks to Springfield, Ill., the preliminary draft of the Emancipation Proclamation Lincoln read to his cabinet on July 22, 1862, the July 14, 1863, letter Lincoln did not send to General George G. Meade, the “blind memorandum” of August 23, 1864, and Queen Victoria’s 1865 condolence letter to Mary Lincoln.

Another change to the updated Abraham Lincoln Papers site is the new thumbnail image that serves as the icon for the collection.

[image error] Look for the Abraham Lincoln image above to identify quickly the updated and expanded online Abraham Lincoln Papers among the digital collections available on the Library of Congress website!

Inquiring Minds: Shining a Light on a Folk Music Original

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Author Jean Freedman (left) with folk icon Peggy Seeger outside Seeger’s childhood home in Chevy Chase, Md. Photo courtesy of Jean Freedman.

Born into one of folk music’s foremost families, Peggy Seeger has been a leading voice of the Anglo-American folk revival for more than 60 years. As a singer, songwriter, instrumentalist and political activist, Seeger is viewed as having forged an unconventional and artistically vibrant path.

In “Peggy Seeger: A Life of Music, Love and Politics,” published in March, Jean Freedman writes about Seeger’s life and career, detailing her contributions as a performer, songwriter and activist.

Freedman is a folklorist and author whose work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Journal of American Folklore and other publications. Her first book, “Whistling in the Dark: Memory and Culture in Wartime London,” analyzes popular culture and political ideology in London during World War II. Freedman teaches at George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and Montgomery College in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Freedman spoke about her book on Peggy Seeger at the Library on September 7 in a Benjamin A. Botkin Lecture, touching on research she carried out in the Library’s collections. Her presentation will be available online soon. Here, Freedman answers a few questions about the book and her research for it.

Tell us how you met Peggy Seeger.

We first met in autumn 1979. It was quite by chance. I was spending my junior year in college studying theater in London. One October evening, I went to the Singers Club, a folk club that Peggy and her husband, Ewan MacColl, had helped run since the early 1960s. I have loved folk music virtually all my life, and Peggy’s beautiful, intelligent renderings of folk songs captivated me from the start. I had only been in England for a few weeks, and it was a comfort to hear an American voice singing the songs I knew. I introduced myself to her after the performance and thanked her for “taking me home.” We became friendly and kept in touch after I returned to the United States.

How did you end up writing Seeger’s biography?

In 1995, I received my Ph.D. in folklore and ethnomusicology from Indiana University. Folk songs and the folk revival were among my specialties. In winter 2008, I was writing a book review for the Journal of American Folklore. The book was about Peggy’s mother, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and I had some questions about it, so Peggy and I spoke on the telephone. During the course of our conversation, she asked if I knew of anyone who was interested in writing her biography. I suggested myself. Our collaboration began the following summer, when she visited my home in Montgomery County, Maryland, only a few miles from where she grew up.

Which collections did you use at the Library of Congress?

I spent a lot of time at the Music Division. It houses the papers of Peggy’s parents, Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger—a treasure trove of unpublished materials: letters, manuscripts and miscellaneous papers about the Seeger family. This collection helped me understand Peggy’s family, her parents’ accomplishments in both classical and folk music and the milieu in which she grew up. The Music Division also has many recordings of Peggy’s music, which were invaluable in showing me her growth and development as a musician and the diversity of her work. The division also has journals and periodicals—both scholarly and popular—about folk music, which helped inform my analysis of Peggy’s music.

I also spent a good deal of time at the American Folklife Center. It houses unpublished materials about Peggy and other members of the Seeger family, scholarly journals devoted to folklore and ethnomusicology and popular folk music magazines. These materials gave me information I needed for the biography and deepened my understanding of Peggy’s music and the context in which it developed.

Because a biography is a historical work, I used the Newspaper and Current Periodical Reading Room to provide precise information about historical events. And because I needed many books about many different subjects—some of them obscure or out-of-print—I frequented the Main Reading Room as well.

What is Seeger’s importance to American folk music?

In a sense, my entire book is an answer to that question. Peggy was one of the first major figures in the American folk revival, which began in the early 1950s. Because of her skill as a musician and because of her immense knowledge of folk music, she became an inspiration to many other performers and caused folk music to reach a wide audience. When she moved to England in the late 1950s, she made American folk music popular in Britain while also encouraging British musicians to explore their own music.

Peggy is a link between the two sides of the folk revival: the traditional and the contemporary. She sings traditional American songs in a manner similar to their traditional style and frequently accompanies these songs with traditional American instruments, such as guitar, banjo and Appalachian dulcimer. In this way, she keeps American folk music and performance practice alive.

She is also a highly skilled songwriter who uses aspects of traditional Anglo-American folk music to create songs about contemporary concerns. In this way, she interweaves the traditional and the contemporary. For example, she has written a song about abortion—not a subject found in traditional American folk song—called “The Judge’s Chair.” Though the subject matter is contemporary, the song is written in the style of a traditional Anglo-American ballad. It has a clear story that focuses on a single person, and it uses many of the formal features found in traditional ballads: four-line stanzas, a simple melody and language that is both poetic and understated.

Seeger comes from a famous musical family. How did that influence her?

Peggy’s parents were conservatory-trained musicians who championed folk music. Both used folk music in their own compositions, and both believed that folk music could be used to promote progressive political causes. Previously, most people thought that folk music was inherently conservative, that it was predominantly rural and that it was dying out—or already dead. But Charles and Ruth Crawford Seeger said that folk music was constantly being created anew—in the cities, among immigrants and migrants, anywhere that people took the music they knew and altered it to express their own ideas. Ruth Crawford Seeger also published three folk-song anthologies to be used in schools, because she believed that American children should begin their musical education with American music.

Peggy’s elder brother Pete probably did more to popularize American folk music than any other single individual. He sang traditional folk songs, and he also sang and wrote new songs in the folk idiom. His songs reflected his own progressive politics, and he made folk music popular throughout the country, particularly in urban areas. By contrast, Peggy’s brother Mike concentrated on the old-time music of the rural South; he was a virtuoso performer of traditional music in its traditional style.

All of this informed Peggy’s own perspective. As an American, she specializes in American music. As a political person, she uses this music to express progressive political ideas. When she writes and sings new songs, she uses formal features and performance practices rooted in traditional style. Sometimes, her songs are so close to their traditional models that it is hard to tell the difference. At other times, she introduces new features that reflect her perspective as a formally trained musician and a woman of the 20th and 21st centuries—complex melody lines, unusual harmonies, subject matter not found in traditional music and a distinctly feminist point of view.

How would you describe your experience working at the Library?

I loved working at the Library. The collection is vast, yet brilliantly organized, and the staff are immensely knowledgeable and helpful. I had the sense that whatever I was looking for could be found at the Library. And I think that the Jefferson Building is the most beautiful building in the country.