Etiquette. We love to make fun of it – from the character Rose Maybud in Gilbert & Sullivan’s “Ruddigore” who is constantly consulting her tiny etiquette book (“It’s manners out-of-joint, to point!”) to Vincent Price lecturing his creation “Edward Scissorhands” in the movie of the same name: “Etiquette tells us just what is …
(The following is a guest article written by my colleague Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library’s staff newsletter, The Gazette, about today’s opening of a new exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the institution’s Hebraic collection.) A simple label inside thousands of rare books bears witness to the origins of one of the great collections …
LeRoy Gresham (1847-1865) was a teenaged invalid who kept a diary for nearly every day of the Civil War, recording the news, his Confederate sympathies and perceptive details about life on the homefront as he experienced the conflict through newspapers, letters and personal visitors. The son of an attorney, judge, and plantation owner in Macon, …
(The following is an article from the September-October 2012 issue of the Library’s new magazine, LCM, highlighting “first drafts” of important documents in American history.) O! say, can you see by the dawn’s early light …” These words are as American as, well, the American flag that inspired them. Francis Scott Key, a young …
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive …
For some Union soldiers, their exposure to southern slavery profoundly altered their views on the institution, even before President Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. One such soldier, John P. Jones, wrote to his wife of his increasing sympathy for abolitionism after seeing the inhumanity with which slaves could be treated. He …
Fatalities during the Civil War were not limited to the battlefield, as both first families discovered. Both the Lincolns and the Davises lost young sons within a couple of years from each other. The Davises lost 5-year-old Joseph in 1864 when he fell to his death from their porch in Richmond, Va. According to one …
(The following is an article from the September-October 2012 issue of the Library’s new magazine, LCM, highlighting a “page from the past” of the publication’s humble beginnings.) With the debut of its new magazine, the Library bids a fond farewell to its predecessor, the Library of Congress Information Bulletin, which began publication 70 years ago. …
(The following is a guest article written by my colleague Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library’s staff newsletter, The Gazette, about a two-year project to bring together a Rachmaninoff archive.) The Library of Congress and a Moscow museum recently completed a project that, for the first time, brings together the original music manuscripts of one …
Today, on what would have been Amelia Earhart’s 115th birthday, news reports are trending about a recent expedition to discover what truly happened to the famed aviator on July 2, 1937, when she and Fred Noonan mysteriously disappeared over the Pacific Ocean. A $2.2 million expedition that hoped to find wreckage from the famed aviator’s …