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Posted by: Valerie Haeder
The flags decorating the theater box where President Abraham Lincoln was assassinated were almost an afterthought, but they became central to the legend and lore surrounding his assassination. On April 14, 1865, just hours before the President arrived at Ford’s, John Ford, the proprietor of the theater, thought it appropriate to adorn the box where …
Posted in: Holidays, Mystery, Newspapers
Posted by: Arlene Balkansky
In 1860, the 3rd edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass received a wildly varying reception in newspapers. At opposite ends of the spectrum, it was advertised as “America’s First Distinctive Poem” and reviewed as “armless, witless, pointless.” The advertisement was from the volume’s …
Posted in: Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers, Walt Whitman
Posted by: Amber Paranick
Cyclist Marshall W. “Major” Taylor was the fastest man on earth. He won thousands of dollars as a bicycle racer and became the most famous African-American in the United States. This was the golden age of cycling, and bicycle racing was a premier sporting event. Thousands of fans packed indoor velodromes to watch races and many …
Posted in: African American History, Biography, Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers, Sports
Posted by: Heather Thomas
Monkeys and woodchucks and cats, oh my! Discover all the critters great and small who made their contribution to the history of aeronautics. A gray tabby named Kiddo was the first cat to attempt to cross the Atlantic in 1910. The cat stowed away in a lifeboat on the airship America before takeoff, leading to the …
Posted in: Animals, Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers
Posted by: Valerie Haeder
The picture of May Day with merry lads and lasses dancing around the May Pole stands in stark contrast to the May Day parades held in the former Soviet Union when the top brass brought out their nuclear warheads to the (forced) delight of the comrades. How did the bucolic rites of changing seasons become …
Posted in: Digitized Newspapers, Holidays, Newspapers
Posted by: Heather Thomas
Don’t take candy from strangers. Little Charley Ross, the first missing child to make national headlines, made that mistake. During the summer of 1874, two men in a horse-drawn buggy pulled into an affluent neighborhood in Philadelphia and befriended two little boys who were playing in front of their stately home. For five days in …
Posted in: Crime, Digitized Newspapers, Mystery, Newspapers
Posted by: Amber Paranick
A digital collection called The General News on the Internet, a free archive of online-only news sites collected from the web, is now available. The Library of Congress began preserving these sites in June 2014. How are these news-based sites captured? The Library uses a hybrid approach of weekly captures of the websites, augmented with …
Posted in: Newspapers, Web Archives
Posted by: Heather Thomas
They dug up the body in the dead of night. Men armed with shovels and pickaxes extracted the coffin and fled into the October darkness. Authorities gave chase until the body snatchers’ wagon raced over King’s Bridge and into Manhattan. Thus began the saga of the remains of Thomas Paine. At the end of the …
Posted in: Digitized Newspapers, Mystery, Newspapers
Posted by: Megan Halsband
This is a guest post by Valerie Haeder, a reference librarian in the Serial and Government Publications Division. South Dakota’s Gladys Pyle was the first woman elected to the South Dakota House and South Dakota’s first female U.S. Senator. But she wouldn’t have cared about such distinctions as much as she did about getting things …
Posted in: Biography, Digitized Newspapers, Newspapers, Women's History