This is a post in advance of the announcement this week of this year’s selection of motion pictures to be added to the National Film Registry. Director Christopher Nolan, the subject of this post, is a member of the National Film Preservation Board, which advises the Librarian of Congress regarding selections to the registry. Even in the …
This post first appeared in “Veterans on the Homefront,” the November–December issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. The entire issue is available online. The Library preserves recordings and sheet music of thousands of tunes from World War I. The Great War inspired thousands of songs, music that a century later still evokes a …
This post first appeared in the September–October issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. The issue is titled “Comics: An American History!” and is available in its entirety online. Two new online collections capture contemporary culture as it is consumed, via the web. The millions of items in Library of Congress collections chronicle human …
The culture of working is a big part of what makes America America—men and women on the job, growing our food, teaching our children, burying our loved ones, building our homes, doing the things that make our society possible. Over the past seven years, the American Folklife Center (AFC) has collected the stories of working …
The Library of Congress’s presidential papers tell the American story in the words of those who helped write it: through war and peace, prosperity and hard times, from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge. The Library is currently conducting a years-long project to digitize the …
For these journalists, the assignment was like no other: Create newspapers to tell the story of their own families being forced from their homes, to chronicle the hardships and heartaches of life behind barbed wire for Japanese-Americans held in World War II internment camps. “These are not normal times nor is this an ordinary community,” …
As a surgeon with the U.S. 6th Marines in France, Joel T. Boone saw the cost of World War I up close—comrades mutilated, amputations performed by candlelight, the frightful loss of life. “My heart has bled by the things I have seen,” wrote Boone, who earned the Medal of Honor for heroism under fire in 1918. …