30 Years of Movies in 30 Days

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Film poster for "Casablanca" (1942)Film poster for "Duck Soup" (1933) Film poster for "King Kong" (1933)

Over on our “Now See Hear!” blog, we’ve been featuring a special series of posts celebrating the 30th anniversary of our National Film Registry. Each year since 1989, the Librarian of Congress has selected 25 films of cultural, historic and/or aesthetic importance that showcase the range and diversity of American film heritage to increase awareness for its preservation. We think this is a great opportunity to share stories behind these important films, one for each year that we’ve been adding to the Registry.

Our “30 Years of the National Film Registry” series launched with “Casablanca” (1942), [link]  which entered the Registry in its inaugural year, 1989. “Duck Soup” (1933) followed in 1990, and “King Kong” (1933) in 1991. Each blog post includes an in-depth essay on the importance of each of these classic films and why they are deserving of preservation. We keep the ball rolling today with “Detour” (1945), which was selected for the Registry in 1992.

You can subscribe to the “Now See Hear!” blog and keep up with this list of classics as we work through the years each day up through December 12, when Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden will announce the next 25 films to join the National Film Registry.

I Can’t Wait to Slow Down: Looking Forward to Tracy K. Smith on the Air

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The following guest post is by Jeff Shotts, executive editor at Graywolf Press, publisher in association with the Library of Congress of the anthology “American Journal: Fifty Poems for Our Time” by U.S. poet laureate Tracy K. Smith. Regular, daily poetry programming on the airwaves has not only been saved, it’s been revitalized. American Public […]

Inquiring Minds: A Prize-Winning Passion for Books

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This is a guest post by Ena Selimovic, a winner of this year’s National Collegiate Book Collecting Contest, which recognizes outstanding book collecting by college and university students. The Library co-sponsors the contest with the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America, the Fellowship of American Bibliographic Societies and the Grolier Club. Selimovic is working on a […]

New Finding Aid: Theodore Roosevelt’s Big-Game Library

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This is a guest post by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins. “In a civilized and cultivated country, wild animals only continue to exist at all when preserved by sportsmen.” —Theodore Roosevelt A new finding aid for the Theodore Roosevelt Hunting Library is now available from the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Roosevelt (1858–1919), a […]

Join Us for a Serendipity Run – No Sneakers Required

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And now for something completely different. On November 8, Jer Thorp, the Library of Congress Innovator-in-Residence, will take over the @LibraryCongress Twitter account to host a #SerendipityRun. What’s a #SerendipityRun? Let’s ask Jer: #SerendipityRun is an experiment in collaborative serendipity. During the run, we’ll see how far and wide we can range across the Library’s […]

New Online: A Civil War Marriage Confronts Illiteracy

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This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division. Students of the Civil War are fortunate that so many Americans of the era were literate, and during the war made good use of their ability to read and write. Soldiers wrote to loved ones with stirring sentiments of patriotism, observations […]

Explore, Transcribe and Tag at Crowd.loc.gov!

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This is a guest post by Lauren Algee, senior innovation specialist with the Library’s Digital Innovation Lab. What yet-unwritten stories lie within the pages of Clara Barton’s diaries, the writings of civil rights pioneer Mary Church Terrell or letters written by constituents, friends and colleagues to Abraham Lincoln? With the launch of crowd.loc.gov, the Library […]