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Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Harold M. Leich, Russian Area Specialist, European Division.) Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944), an innovator in the field of color photography, was commissioned by Tsar Nicholas II to document the vast Russian Empire between the years 1909 and 1915. The Library of Congress’ Prokudin-Gorskii Collection of color photographs featuring the …
Posted in: European Reading Room
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Taru Spiegel, Reference Specialist, European Division.) “Aesop’s Fables” have been known for well over two millennia, and have been published in numerous languages and various configurations. Expressions such as “sour grapes,” “birds of a feather flock together,” “familiarity breeds contempt,” and “slow and steady wins the race,” have their …
Posted in: European Reading Room
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(This is the second in a series featuring literary and other artistic “Responses to World War I” in the Library of Congress collections. This post is by Marianna Stell, Reference Assistant in the Rare Book & Special Collections Division.) Before the outbreak of World War I, French novelist Roland Dorgelès (1886-1973) was best known among …
Posted in: European Reading Room, Rare Books and Special Collections, World War I
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Taru Spiegel, Reference Specialist, European Division.) Many students in today’s globalized world learn more than one script in order to prepare for the future. However, not too many immerse themselves in writing systems of the past. Things were different for 19th-century school children in Sweden. Claës Johan Ljungström’s “Rúna-list, …
Posted in: European Reading Room
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Helen Fedor, Reference Specialist, European Division.) Slovenian children in the 19th-century commonly learned to read using primers, or ABC-books, and then graduated to readers — books composed specially for practice in reading gradually-more-difficult texts. Texts for readers are selected, or written, for a specific level of reading ability, and …
Posted in: European Reading Room
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Taru Spiegel, Reference Specialist, European Division.) A colorful figure and the subject of much fascination, and scandalized conjecture over the years, Sweden’s Queen Christina (in Swedish, Kristina) was born in Stockholm in December 1626. She was educated as befitted a royal male since, as an only child, she was …
Posted in: European Reading Room
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Taru Spiegel, Area Specialist, European Division.) Among the many fascinating items found in the Library of Congress collections is a volume consisting of the first 45 issues of Atuagagdliutit, the Inuit-language (Kalâtdlisut) newspaper from the years 1861 to 1864. Published in Greenland under difficult conditions where paper occasionally froze …
Posted in: European Reading Room
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(The following is a post by Bethany Wages, 2016 Junior Fellow, with Barbara Dash, Rare Book Cataloger.) The Library of Congress acquired the Yudin Collection from the Siberian bibliophile Gennadii Yudin (1840-1912) in 1906. It represents the largest personal Russian library in the United States and is the foundation of the Library’s Russian-language collections. This …
Posted in: European Reading Room, Rare Books and Special Collections
Posted by: Anchi Hoh
(This is the first in a series featuring literary and other artistic “Responses to World War I” in the Library of Congress collections. This post is by Marianna Stell, who interns for both the European Division and the Rare Book & Special Collections Division.) Upon hearing the term “avant-garde,” most of us probably think of …
Posted in: European Reading Room, Rare Books and Special Collections, World War I