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Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It coincides with the centenary this month of the first Pan-African Congress. The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, author and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote in “To the Nations of the World,” …
Posted in: Civil Rights, Exhibitions
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, digital reference specialist in the Library’s Researcher and Reference Services Division. Abraham Lincoln was fond of poetry: He wrote poems, read them, received them and was the subject of many. So states “Abraham Lincoln and Poetry,” a unique example of the numerous guides the Library makes …
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Poetry
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins. It coincides with the posting of additional illustrations from the Library’s 1895 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” on the Library’s Pinterest site. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) spent his childhood in the cold and damp of Edinburgh, Scotland, his dedicated …
Posted in: Books, Rare Book of the Month
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
For going on a decade now, theater historian Ben West has been making regular trips from his home in New York City to the Library of Congress. His mission? To cull through unpublished manuscripts, personal papers of Broadway authors, copyright drama submissions and more to tell the story of the American musical. Last September, West’s …
Posted in: Collections, Manuscripts, Music, Researcher Stories
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, digital reference specialist in the Library’s Researcher and Reference Services Division. A few weeks ago, we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his work as an activist. Some 100 years before King’s powerful entry into the civil rights movement, however, the fight for civil rights …
Posted in: Civil Rights
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by Sylvia Albro, a senior paper conservator in the Conservation Division. Earlier this month, the Library released online the Omar Ibn Said Collection, including Ibn Said’s autobiography, the only known extant autobiography written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States. A wealthy and educated man, Ibn Said …
Posted in: Collections, Manuscripts, New Online, Preservation
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
In fall 2005, Joe Manning agreed to help his friend, author Elizabeth Winthrop, with a task that had become something of an obsession for her: discovering the story of a little girl staring intently out of a 1910 picture taken at a Vermont cotton mill. Winthrop had encountered the image in an exhibition of child-labor …
Posted in: Collections, Photos, Researcher Stories
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by Adam Rothman, a professor of history at Georgetown University and an expert on the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. Last fall, he was a distinguished visiting scholar at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center. Here Rothman writes about the Omar Ibn Said Collection, which the …
Posted in: Collections, Kluge Center, Manuscripts, New Online
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Barb Rosenstock writes children’s books about people who have changed history — Ben Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Joe DiMaggio and racing legend Louise Smith among them. “The Noisy Paint Box,” her story about the artist Kandinsky, was a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book. In 2013, she published “Thomas Jefferson Builds a Library” about Jefferson’s massive book collection, …
Posted in: Books, Education, Literacy, Researcher Stories