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Posted by: Mark Hartsell
For decades at the National Press Club, America got acquainted with the men and women who made history: presidents and premiers, rising stars and old heroes, allies and enemies, establishment figures and revolutionaries – all hoping to explain themselves, over lunch, to the public. “I am not afraid of any questions for one reason: I …
Posted in: Audiovisual, Collections, History, News, Washington DC
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
The Library of Congress is working to preserve the nation’s historical broadcasts When Wilt Chamberlain smashed an NBA record in 1962 by scoring 100 points in a single game, a radio broadcast provided the only real-time account of the Stilt’s incredible feat. When Charles Lindbergh flew the Atlantic, Franklin D. Roosevelt addressed the nation in …
Posted in: Audiovisual, Collections, LCM, Preservation, Technology
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
As a hospital chaplain during the Civil War, William Oland Bourne collected the names of the wounded soldiers he tended and, in doing so, noticed a terrible trend: Many soldiers used their left hands to sign his autograph book because their right arms were missing. How, Bourne wondered, could these grievously wounded men adapt – …
Posted in: Civil War, Collections, Curators, History, LC Web site, Manuscripts, New Online
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
Before he boarded the ship carrying prisoners of war across the ocean to a forced-labor camp, George Washington Pearcy divided his diary and gave the pieces to two comrades staying behind. If he didn’t survive the journey, Pearcy hoped, his story somehow would. Pearcy, a POW held by the Japanese during World War II, never …
Posted in: American Folklife Center, Collections, History, Manuscripts, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
Half the world, journalist Jacob Riis once said, doesn’t know how the other half lives, and it doesn’t know because it doesn’t care. Riis, a social reformer, author and newspaper reporter, used his work to make society take notice, exposing the squalid living and working conditions in late 19th-century New York during the height of …
Posted in: Collections, Curators, Events, Exhibitions, History, Photos
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
Basketball, unique among major sports, has a clear creation story: We know when, where, why and how the game was invented, and by whom. Now, some 125 years after the first game was played in a Massachusetts school gymnasium, we know something new: the sound of the creator’s voice. A researcher recently discovered in the Library …
Posted in: Audiovisual, Collections, History, Researcher Stories
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
The human voice is music’s only pure instrument, jazz singer Nina Simone once wrote – it has notes no other instrument possesses. “It’s like being between the keys of a piano,” Simone wrote in a draft of an unpublished autobiography recently discovered in a Library of Congress collection. “The notes are there, you can sing …
Posted in: Capitol Hill, Collections, Curators, Exhibitions, History, Music, Washington DC
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
New Hampshire long has been a place where presidential hopes are born, revived and, sometimes, die. New Hampshire is where Edmund Muskie famously cried, Ronald Reagan let everyone know who paid for that microphone, Bill Clinton declared himself the “Comeback Kid” and John McCain rode his “Straight Talk Express” into electoral contention. As voters there …
Posted in: Audiovisual, Collections
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
There’s something special, author Gene Luen Yang says, about the first time a reader encounters a literary character that shares the same cultural background. In his case, the character was Jubilation Lee, an X-Men comic-book figure who, like Yang, was a Chinese-American with immigrant parents but who, unlike Yang, could release explosive plasmoids and detonate …