The earliest known English-language work on magic was published in England in 1635, containing how-tos for many tricks, including an on-stage decapitation. It's the forerunner of the "saw the assistant in half" trick, performed for ages. The Library's copy of this influential book comes from the library of Harry Houdini, the master magician and escape artist of the early 20th century, who donated his collection to the Library.
Sybille Jagusch, chief of the Library's Literature Center, has just published "Japan and American Children's Books," a gorgeously illustrated volume that details how Japan and Japanese culture has been portrayed in American children's books over the past two centuries.
Medgar Evers, the famed civil rights activist, was born 96 years ago this month in a small town in Mississippi. He was assassinated by a white supremacist in 1963, but his legacy has only grown in the decades since his death.
Novelist, short-story and essayist Joy Williams, known for books such as "State of Grace" and "The Quick and the Dead," has won the 2021 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction.
During Pride Month, the U.S. Copyright Office offers guidance and encouragement to drag performers to register their creative work for copyright protection.
Of the Library's many Pride Month events is Pride Night Online, in which Megan Metcalf, the Women's Gender and LGBTQIA+ studies librarian and collection specialist, will conduct a free online workshop to researching LGBTQ material in our collections.
Ninety years ago, a Texas grocer named Lorenzo D. Buchanan stepped forward with one of the great hoaxes of 20th-century American pop-culture life, a genealogical fabrication that continues to resonate today. The Great Buchanan Inheritance Hoax rocked American life from 1931-1936 with his false tale of an $85 million inheritance that was available to anyone who could prove a family connection.
The military order that led to the federal holiday of Juneteenth was not regarded as important national news when it was issued in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865.
The photographs of Bernard Gotfryd, now free for anyone to use from the Library's collections, are a remarkable resource of late 20th-century American pop-culture and political life, as he was a Newsweek staff photographer based in New York for three decades. He was also a Holocaust survivor who wrote about the experience with grace and courage.