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Category: History

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 …

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

Kluge Center Welcomes Rolena Adorno, Maya Jasanoff, and Melvin L. Rogers

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

The John W. Kluge Center is pleased to announce the arrival of three new scholars in residence at the Library of Congress. Rolena Adorno was appointed as Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South. Adorno is Sterling Professor of Spanish at Yale University and the author of Colonial Latin American LIterature: A Very …

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

Watch: Elaine Weiss in Conversation on “The Woman’s Hour”

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

On March 7, the Library of Congress marked the 100th anniversary of the passage of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Award-winning journalist Elaine Weiss joined Colleen Shogan, Assistant Deputy Librarian and the Library of Congress’s designee on the Women’s Suffrage Centennial Commission, at the Kluge Center for a conversation on Weiss’s book, The …

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

Conflict, Fortresses, and Threat Environments in the Ancient Maya World

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

Stephen Houston is the Library of Congress Kislak Chair for the Study of the History and Cultures of the Early Americas, as well as Dupee Family Professor of Social Science at Brown University. In the lead-up to Professor Houston’s April 25 event at the Library, titled “Flint, Shield, and Fire: Exploring Ancient Maya Warfare,” I …

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

Making Black History Accessible, Through the Library of Congress

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

Jesse J. Holland joined Adam Rothman, former Kluge Center Distinguished Visiting Scholar, for “African American Passages: Black Lives in the 19th Century,” hosted by the John W. Kluge Center in the Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress on February 21 this year. Holland and Rothman discussed their experiences using the Library’s collections to …

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

The Puzzle of Weak Parties and Strong Partisanship

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

The following is a guest post by Julia Azari, a professor in the Department of Political Science at the Marquette University and 2019 Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center. Partisanship shapes American politics, and, indeed, many parts of everyday life. Americans are increasingly negative about the possibility of their children marrying someone …