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By: Neely Tucker
When there’s a statue of your dad on Capitol Hill, it’s probably inevitable that you think about things like history and legacy and preservation, so Rosanne Cash was particularly moved when one of her albums was inducted into the National Recording Registry a few days ago. The singer-songwriter daughter of Johnny Cash — the musician …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
From the vast reaches of outer space to the depths of the Mariana Trench, the Library’s collections chronicle some of the Western world’s greatest voyages of discovery and exploration. These are journeys that crossed time and space, shattering the old realms of myth and superstition and revealing the known world, a place of maps and charts and taxonomic tables. Giants and dragons did not exist, it turned out, but a whole new universe filled with strange and wonderful things did.
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
Pvt. Robert Frazer was one of the members of the Lewis and Clark expedition and his hand-drawn map of their route was one of the first to be published. However, his plans to publish the (error filled) map and his journal of the trip never came to anything. Today, his map resides in the Geography and Map Division.
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
One year after the Civil War, the newly freed Montgomery family in Mississippi bought the huge plantations on which they had been enslaved -- those of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and his brother, Joseph. The Montgomerys would go on to found Mound Bayou, the all-Black Black farming community that President Theodore Roosevelt dubbed "the jewel of the Delta." The family saga was one of the most unusual stories to arise from the ashes of the Confederacy and attempts during Reconstruction to create a democratic society in its wake.
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
In the winter of 1906, Mark Twain was a tired and grieving man. He was 71. The past dozen years had been brutal. He had gone bankrupt in the mid-1890s. Then his 24-year-old daughter died from spinal meningitis. Then his beloved wife, Olivia, suffered through years of heart trouble before dying at age 58 in …
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
The Library's Free to Use and Reuse set of photographs are a copyright-free collection of photographs, posters and graphics that are available to everyone to use as they wish. Here, we look at three garden photographs with short essays on each. We begin with Frances Benjamin Johnston's famous "Blue Garden."
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
Midori, a classical violinist, made her debut with the New York Philharmonic at age 11. She plays the 1734 Guarnerius del Gesu "ex-Huberman."
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
It is midafternoon on a recent weekday and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis is driving across the Southwest, taking the call on speakerphone that his 1985 album, “Black Codes (From the Underground),” has been inducted into the 2023 class of the National Recording Registry. With endless desert spreading about behind and before him, he took a few minutes to talk about the album and its pointed political statement.
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
The Library's blogs have been redesigned, with everything from new headlines to new layouts to new ways that photographs are featured. It's been in the works for more than a year, and is meant to keep up with the blogs' popularity. Readership was up 18 percent last year, to some 5.5 million readers.
Posted in: Timeless
By: Neely Tucker
Some of the most sought-after materials in the Library's North Korean periodicals collection are now online. It's a slice of the Asian Division's holdings in what is one of the world's largest repositories of North Korean publications.
Posted in: Timeless