Top of page

Category: History

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

Kluge Prize Recipient Danielle Allen Takes on the Hard Questions on Democracy and Public Life in Virtual Event Open to the Public

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

Join the John W. Kluge Center for a conversation with the new Kluge Prize recipient Danielle Allen, covering some of the difficult questions in public life today. The Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity is given biennially to a person whose career reflects the notion that ideas matter, that thought must inform public …

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

The First Woman Director and the Beginning of Cinema

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

Kim Tomadjoglou is an audio-visual curator-archivist specializing in rights clearances, preservation, collections management, and museum programming and has curated retrospectives at museums and festivals internationally. She has served as director of the American Film Institute’s National Collection and as principal liaison to the Library of Congress, where she was a 2019 Kluge Fellow. First, can …

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

Earthrise and the First Earth Day, 50 Years Later

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

The first Earth Day was celebrated 50 years ago, on April 22, 1970. On that day, millions of Americans participated in demonstrations and clean-up projects, calling for a new approach to protecting the environment. It was meant to be a teaching moment regarding the importance of our role as caretakers of the environment. It continues …

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

Writing African Americans into the Story

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

The following post was written by Wendi Maloney and originally appeared on the Library of Congress Blog. Jesse Holland wears a lot of different hats: he’s an award-winning political journalist, he’s a television host, he’s a professor and he’s a comics aficionado — he wrote the first novel about the Black Panther for Marvel in …

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

Did the Earliest Printers Know What Print Was? What a 15th Century Book from the Netherlands Can Tell Us About Culture and Innovation

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

This is a guest post by Kluge Fellow Anna Dlabacova, Assistant Professor and postdoctoral researcher at Leiden University. She is researching a project titled “Inspiring, Innovative, and Influential: The Role of Gerard Leeu’s Incunabula in Late Medieval Spirituality and Devotional Practice.” She hopes to advance study on the role that incunabula from the Netherlands played …

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

The Assyrians, Between the State and the Opposition

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

Alda Benjamen is a Kluge Fellow, and was most recently a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Pennsylvania Museum. She studies the Modern Middle East and Iraqi history, focusing on minoritization and pluralism in bilingual communities, as well as identity, memory and cultural heritage, and women and gender issues. Her current project is titled Negotiating …

Sweeping view from the floor of a great room, looking upwards past marble columns and arches to a grand golden-colored dome

Watch: A Celebration of Earthrise

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

The Earth, blue and luminous, seems to rise above the moon’s surface against the vast blackness of space in the now-iconic photo “Earthrise.” Taken on December 24, 1968, aboard Apollo 8 — the first crewed spacecraft to orbit the moon — the image almost immediately captured the world’s imagination. Since then, it has been credited …