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Category: United States

Three women pose smiling standing close to each other.

On Young Black Scholars Navigating Historically White Places 

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

This is a guest post by Shealyn Fraser. Fraser is a 2023 Kluge summer intern, where she worked with Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American History Tamika Y. Nunley on her projects examining Black women’s knowledge of the law and reproductive rights. She graduated with her Bachelor of Arts in American Studies …

A photograph of John Hope Franklin seated with pen and paper in hand while taking notes at the Archives Advisory Council Meeting.

Tom Cryer on How We Understand John Hope Franklin’s Legacy

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

Tom Cryer is a second-year PhD student at University College’s Institute of the Americas, where his research investigates race, memory, and nationhood through the life, scholarship, and advocacy of the historian John Hope Franklin (1915-2009). He is an Events Editor at U.S. Studies Online, a Graduate Representative for the Southern Historical Association, and a host …

A Movie Mystery at the Kluge Center

Posted by: Sophia Zahner

It started with a sneeze, or so we thought. Since the 1950s, film historians counted “The Sneeze” from 1894 as the earliest surviving film copyrighted in the United States. At this time, the film began being shown as a motion picture after being copied back to film from a photograph. Claudy Op den Kamp, a …

Image of Timothy Frye

Timothy Frye Appointed Library of Congress Chair in US-Russia Relations

Posted by: Sophia Zahner

The John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress is pleased to announce the appointment of Timothy Frye as the Library of Congress Chair in US-Russia Relations. Frye began his time at the Kluge Center in January. Frye is the Marshall D. Shulman Professor of Post-Soviet Foreign Policy in the Department of Political Science …

Image shows the Join In exhibit at the Library of Congress, featuring a model barn raising

Joining In at the Kluge Center

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

This is a post by Kevin Butterfield, Director of the John W. Kluge Center.  One of the more remarkable coincidences of my professional life happened on September 12, 2022, when I arrived for my first day of work at the Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress as the new Director of the John W. …

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

The Study of Mystical Traditions is Opening a Path Toward New Forms of Religious Thought and Practice

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

This is a guest post by Carrie Rosefsky Wickham. Wickham is the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the South at the Library of Congress and Professor of Middle Eastern Studies at Emory University. Can one be both a religious person and a humanist? If so, what kind of worldview might this entail? Together …

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

Equitable Infrastructure, Democracy, and Why Private Industry Can’t Address the Digital Divide

Posted by: Janna Deitz

Now, more than ever, vast amounts of digital information are instantly available to the public. And yet, accessing digital information and online services remains a challenge for those in areas without high-speed internet access. In this interview, Ann Eisenberg, Associate Professor of Law at the University of South Carolina and current Kluge Fellow, explained the …

Kluge Center's Dan Turello interviewing Gene Zubovich

How Liberal Protestants Shaped America, Part 2

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

This is part two of our interview with Gene Zubovich. For the first part, click here. What drew the attention of activist Protestants towards international affairs, and what impact did that have? In Before the Religious Right I discuss the work liberal Protestants were doing to fight racism, economic inequality, and to reshape American foreign …

Image of Kluge Director Brent Yacobucci interviewing Tamika Y. Nunley

Navigating Liberty’s Promise: Black Women in Washington, DC and the End of Slavery

Posted by: Andrew Breiner

Nineteenth-century Washington, DC was home to thousands of enslaved people, as well as a hotbed of abolitionist activism. Black women were subject to incredible levels of legal and social restriction, but found ways to make their own lives within that world. Historian Tamika Nunley’s latest book, At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting …