The Library recently acquired a rare surviving copy of the complete run of a Civil War regimental newspaper, the Soldier's Letter of the 2nd Colorado Cavalry of the American military. More than a hundred regiments on both sides of the conflict printed at least one edition of a camp newspaper, but few survive and a complete run of one paper is even harder fo find today. The four-page Soldier's Letter, staunchly against slavery and the Confederacy, ran for 50 editions between 1864 until after the war ended in 1865. Though mostly concerned with the regiment's history and daily details of camp life, the paper shows that soldiers were more concerned about warring Native American tribes than they were Confederate units, and they would eventually form a military bridge between the Civil War and the Indian Wars that followed.
Elizabeth Brown is a reference librarian in the Researcher and Reference Services Division. This article appears in the Library of Congress Magzine, Nov.-Dec. 2022. Perhaps the most beloved Christmas film of all time got its start during a morning shave. Philip Van Doren Stern, while getting ready for work one day in 1938, had an …
Theft, fraud, harassment, withholding of payment — courts around the world hear these charges all the time. Yet, they’re far from modern. The Library’s newly acquired San Salvador Huejotzingo Codex, for example, documents a legal proceeding from 1571 in which Indigenous Nahuatl officials in central Mexico accused their village’s Spanish administrator of these very same …
Marvel Studios President Kevin Feige was excited, explaining why he and his filmmaking team were thrilled that their cornerstone feature, 2008’s “Iron Man,” was being inducted into cinematic Valhalla, the Library’s National Film Registry, in the class of 2022. “All of our favorite movies are the ones that we watch over and over again, and …
