Top of page
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Jennifer “JJ” Harbster, culinary specialist and head of the Library’s Science Section, offers up a selection of 18th and 19th century punch recipes to lend a vintage touch to your holiday celebrations.
Posted in: Christmas, Drink, Library Work and Employees
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Former president Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. Carter, the nation's 39th president, served from 1977 to 1981. In addition to his international peacekeeping missions, spent much of his retirement with his wife, Rosalynn, helping to build houses for the disadvantaged with the charity Habitat for Humanity. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."
Posted in: Civil Rights, U.S. Presidents, Washington DC
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Chef Carla Hall, the bestselling author of “Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration" and co-host of the Emmy-winning “The Chew” for seven seasons, tells us about Christmas dinners at her grandparents' house.
Posted in: African American History, Christmas, Drink, LCM, Writers
Posted by: Neely Tucker
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” went without a song for years, from the tail end of the Depression through World War II and nearly until the midcentury before a musician named Johnny Marks began to consider it. Marks studied music in college in the 1920s, penned a good song or two for Guy Lombardo’s orchestra in …
Posted in: Christmas, Film, Kids, LCM, National Recording Registry, Performing Arts
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Cheers to a list of favorite holiday drinks from long-ago mixology books in Library collections as curated by J.J. Harbster, head of the Science Reference Section. You can try the Baltimore Egg Nog from 1862, but we'll opt for the bourbon-based Frosted Cocktail of 1910.
Posted in: Christmas, Curators, Drink, LCM, Library Work and Employees, Science
Posted by: Neely Tucker
In the winter of 1906, Mark Twain was a tired and grieving man. He was 71. The past dozen years had been brutal. He had gone bankrupt in the mid-1890s. Then his 24-year-old daughter died from spinal meningitis. Then his beloved wife, Olivia, suffered through years of heart trouble before dying at age 58 in …
Posted in: Copyright, Photos, Today in History, Uncategorized, Washington DC, Writers
Posted by: Neely Tucker
This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division. She most recently wrote about Ralph Ellison’s photography work. Two important collections of Native American heritage have been digitized and placed on the Library’s website, enabling readers and researchers to dig into histories that are not widely known. The first, …
Posted in: Gazette, Library Work and Employees, Manuscripts, Maps, Native Americans
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Sarah Josepha Hale was a prominent magazine editor, abolitionist and social activist throughout most of the 19th century, perhaps best known for composing the children's nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb." But her most long-lasting effort was her years-long campaign to get the federal government to designate Thanksgiving as a federal holiday. Her decisive tactic? A letter to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, LCM, Poetry, Thanksgiving
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Holidays are often defined by the foods cooked up in the kitchen, although those foods and how they're prepared change over time. Among the Library's collection of more than 40,000 cookbooks are plenty devoted to the craft of preparing those special occasion meals. But what might have been a great Thanksgiving dinner in 1920 certainly looked different than one in 1965, and Christmas foods are always changing. Different cultures have unique traditions for each holiday, making for an ever-evolving American smorgasbord.
Posted in: Christmas, Drink, Hispanic and Latino, Jewish American History, LCM, Thanksgiving