On October 3, 1863, President Abraham Lincoln issued a proclamation that declared “the last Thursday of November next as a Day of Thanksgiving and Praise.” Lincoln’s famous Thanksgiving Day proclamation was in large part undertaken at the urging of Sarah Josepha Hale—poet, novelist, editor of Godey’s Lady’s Book, and, lest we forget, author of the …
On Friday, one of our sister blogs, the Music Division’s In the Muse, marked the hundredth birthday of British composer Benjamin Britten. Highlighting some of Music Division’s important Britten holdings, the post references a recording of Britten’s collaborator Peter Pears reciting W. H. Auden’s sonnet “The Composer” as part of a 1980 program at the …
The following is a guest post from Samia Khan, who works as a classification assistant in the Library of Congress Office of Workforce Acquisitions. When Rob Casper asked me to write a post about my personal experience with poetry and literature, I was initially clueless. A History major in college, I hadn’t really read or …