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Archive: January 2024 (4 Posts)

Photo of sheet of notebook paper in a three-ring binder with song lyrics and musical notation written in blue pen

“Feeling Good” About the Leslie Bricusse Collection

Posted by: Neely Tucker

On May 15, 1962, the British songwriting team of Leslie Bricusse and Anthony Newley were up-by-the-bootstraps types, just hitting their 30s, and would become big stars. On that day, they scratched out what would become perhaps their most influential hit, a deceptively simple song called "Feeling Good." Nina Simone would make it her anthem in 1965, and Michael Bublé would have a worldwide hit with it nearly three decades later. The Library's Bricusse collection preserves that moment of creation in one of his meticulously kept notebooks.

Family portrait on steps of a house with huge columns rising on both sides. All are well dressed; Orville Wright is the lone person standing, posed in the middle and behind the rest.

Historic Photos: The Wright Brothers, at Home and in the Air

Posted by: Neely Tucker

After Orville Wright's death in 1948, his estate donated a vast collection of his papers to the Library, including more than 300 glass plate and nitrate negatives of photographs taken (mostly) by the brothers between 1897 and 1928; images that provide an important and fascinating record of their home lives and of their attempts to fly. His "success house," Hawthorn Hill, is in many of these photos and is today a museum.

Program cover shows two hands holding a small globe, which is filled by a red atomic mushroom cloud

“Dr. Atomic,” The Oppenheimer Opera

Posted by: Neely Tucker

When the San Francisco Opera debuted “Doctor Atomic,” an opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams based on physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the test of the first atomic bomb, its first lines contained a scientific error. Marvin L. Cohen, president of the American Physical Society, was in the audience and caught it immediately. Here's how he and Adams changed it.

Football Forever!

Posted by: Neely Tucker

We're down to the college football national championship game next week and the NFL playoff are just around the corner. It's a perfect time to check in with "Football Nation" author Susan Reyburn as she chooses favorite items from the Library's collections. This article is slightly adapted from the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.