Top of page

Category: European Reading Room

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

The Art of Reading Runes

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, …

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

19th-Century Slovenian Primers and Readers

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 …

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

Queen Christina of Sweden (1626-89)

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 …

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

Atuagagdliutit: The First Inuit Newspaper Published in Greenland (Kalâtdlit-Nunât)

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 …

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

“Lions and Tigers and Bears”: Natural History Illustration and Ephemera in the Library of Congress Yudin Collection

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 …

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

Art & War: Responses to World War I in France

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 …

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

Soviet-Era Children’s Books: The Oleg Grushnikov Collection at the Library of Congress

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following post is by Taru Spiegel, Reference Specialist, European Division. It is based on an article by Barbara L. Dash, Rare Materials Section, published in “Slavic and East European Information Resources,” 11:2-3 (2010): [110]-119.) The Grushnikov Collection of more than 6,000 Soviet-era children’s books published between the 1920s and the 1990s is a treasure …

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

Bastille Day, July 14th

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Erika Spencer, Reference Specialist for France, European Division.) Many Americans view the month of July as a time to celebrate America’s Declaration of Independence and subsequent victory over the British. But July also marks the French national holiday, known as Bastille Day, which is celebrated on July 14. Not …

Large metal hollow globe on a metal frame with metal orbit trails surrounding it

Becoming Jacob Riis

Posted by: Anchi Hoh

(The following is a post by Taru Spiegel, Reference Specialist, European Division.) The Library of Congress exhibit Jacob Riis: Revealing ‘How the Other Half Lives’ explores the work of a pioneering Danish-American photojournalist and social reformer. The Library’s Jacob A. Riis (1849-1914) papers and Riis’s photographs from the Museum of the City of New York …