This is a guest post by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins. September is traditionally known as the month that all children return to school after summer vacation. To mark this tradition, the Rare Book and Special Collection Division’s book(s) of the month are two hornbooks: a wood hornbook and an ivory hornbook. Today’s children would likely […]
This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. By 1910, nearly a third of the United States’ 92 million residents were either born abroad or the progeny of parents who immigrated to America. The idea of “hyphenated Americans”—citizens who identified as Polish-American or Italian-American, for example—discomforted many native-born citizens. […]
Did you know that today is National Comic Book Day? To celebrate, we are sharing a contribution by Michael Cavna of the Washington Post to the September–October issue of LCM, the Library of Congress magazine. The entire issue, available here, showcases the Library’s collection of some 140,000 comic books. Cavna, an Eisner Award-nominated columnist and […]
The Library of Congress and the U.S. military service academies signed a cooperative agreement this week to provide researchers with enhanced access to the institutions’ collections and grow representation of service members in the Library’s collections—including the Veterans History Project. The three-year agreement, which took effect on September 18, provides greater access for Library researchers […]
This is a guest post by Julie Stoner, a reference librarian in the Geography and Map Division. It was first published on “Picture This,” the Prints and Photographs Division’s blog. We’re highlighting the subject of Stoner’s post—Civil War drawings by Adolph Metzner—in our “free to use and reuse” feature on the Library’s home page. The […]
This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division. “Twelve months ago this day, a very important conversation took place in Cabinet between myself and Mr. Buchanan on the Oregon question. This conversation was of so important a character, that I deemed it proper on the same evening to reduce […]
This week, thousands of people from around the country will gather in the vast Washington, D.C., Convention Center to take part in a decades’ old tradition: the annual legislative conference of the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) Foundation. From September 20 to 24, participants will hear from approximately 100 hundred speakers, including many members of Congress, […]
Ross Davies has been a regular in the Library’s Manuscript Division for about two decades now. He has worked with papers of Supreme Court justices, consulted collections on the federal courts and introduced his students to the Library—a “treasure hunt” he assigns requires them to find resources in the Manuscript Division and the Law Library. […]
This is a guest post by Margaret M. Wood, legal reference librarian in the Law Library. Two years ago, in honor of Constitution Day—celebrated annually on September 17—I wrote a post about the publication “Constitution of the United States: Analysis and Interpretation,” also referred to as the “Constitution Annotated.” Along with the U.S. Code, it […]
Tracy K. Smith took the stage in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on Wednesday night, September 13, for her inaugural reading as the 22nd Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry. She read from each of her published works, concluding with poems from her forthcoming collection, “Wade in the Water.” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden hosted the […]