Jimmy Buffett, whose iconic "Margaritaville" was inducted into the National Recording Registry this year, died yesterday at age 76. We interviewed him in March for the NRR. Here, we remember that conversation, his story of writing the song, his performance at the Library in 2008 and how his songs inspired the author long ago, even before Buffett was a star.
One of the largest maps in the Library is the Tokaido bunken-ezu, a 117-foot, 17th-century Japanese map painted on two scrolls. It shows, in pen-and-ink detail, the rivers, mountains, forests and towns on the 319-mile route from Edo (now known as Tokyo) to Kyoto.
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was 60 years ago today -- August 28, 1963. We look back at that historic day, both at how it developed and its aftermath, in an era when terrorism, violence and assassinations targeted civil rights volunteers, workers and organizers.
Cheryl Regan is a veteran of the Library's exhibits office, bringing the treasures of the world's largest library to the public. Here, she answers a few questions about her work with exhibitions such as "With Malice Towards None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition" and "American Treasures." The latter ran for 10 years.
Novelist, short-story writer and essayist George Saunders was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction Saturday evening in one of the final sessions of the 2023 National Book Festival, conferring a lifetime honor on a versatile writer whose most famous book cast one of Washington's most famous residents in a surreal light. Saunders' 2017 novel "Lincoln in the Bardo" took a fantastical look at the visit President Abraham Lincoln paid to his young son's tomb in a Georgetown cemetery one night in 1862.
Hannah Whitaker, interning this summer as a junior fellow in the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center, discusses her work in helping preserve live recordings from early in the 20th century, including performances by stars such as Bing Crosby, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday.
Nestled in the archives of the Daniel A.P. Murray Collection is a short, 1864 account of the remarkable life of Hannah Carson. “Glorying in Tribulation: A Brief Memoir of Hannah Carson, For Thirteen Years Deprived of the Use of All Her Limbs,” is testament to how a severely disabled Black woman became an inspiration to the Christian community, both white and black, in Philadelphia before and during the Civil War.
The Library's Free to Use and Reuse set of photographs are a copyright-free collection of photographs, posters and graphics that are available to everyone to use as they wish. Here, we look at three garden photographs with short essays on each. We begin with Frances Benjamin Johnston's famous "Blue Garden."
The National Library Service for the Blind and Print Disabled rolled out its Spanish-languague site earlier this year to wide readership and media attention. Readers have jumped at the chance to find the newest reading materials in Spanish-language audio and Braille.
