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By: Wendi Maloney
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 …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Gayle Osterberg
‘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 …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Cait Miller
Thanksgiving is upon us, and across the country our readers are making plans and preparations for Turkey Day. What kind of Thanksgiving-related music can we find in the Music Division’s stacks? Out of curiosity, I visited our “subject files” in the office to see what sort of information our reference librarians collected back before the …
Posted in: In The Muse
By: Nathan Dorn
The Pic of the Week shows illustrations from the Hamburgisches Stradtrecht von 1497.
Posted in: In Custodia Legis
By: Wendi Maloney
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 …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Wendi Maloney
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 …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Wendi Maloney
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,” …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Jennifer Davis
This post describes the history of how Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands became part of the United States.
Posted in: In Custodia Legis
By: Wendi Maloney
Last week, the Library announced a new online presentation of Abraham Lincoln’s papers from his time as a lawyer, congressman and the 16th president. The refreshed digital collection follows a multiyear project to update the Library’s previous presentation with additional features, full-color images and new material. To celebrate, we’re highlighting items from the Library’s vast …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Peter Armenti
On November 8, 1894, a poem by Robert Lee Frost, then a 20-year-old grammar school teacher in Salem, New Hampshire, appeared on the front page of the New York newspaper The Independent. The poem, titled “My Butterfly: An Elegy,” was the first poem Frost ever sold, and his first professionally published poem. Readers of Frost’s …
Posted in: From the Catbird Seat