Bill Moyers, who died yesterday at the age of 91, was at the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium one night in the fall of 2023 to mark the preservation of more than 1,000 of his public television programs in The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. a collaboration between the Library and GBH, the public media production company in Boston. It was a crowning night to one of the most influential careers in American media.
If that haunting music in the season finale of "Severance" on Apple TV+ sounded familiar, that's because "The Windmills of Your Mind" has been around for 57 years, won an Oscar and has been recorded by more than 300 artists the world over. Lyricists Alan and Marilyn Bergman, the husband-and-wife duo, wrote "Windmills" with composer Michel Legrand. In a legendary career, they won three Oscars and were finalists another 16 times, not to mention their four Emmys and two Grammys. In the Library's collections, we look at their lyrics sheets and interviews to see how they and Legrand combined to put together "Windmills."
-Research by Micah Messenheimer in the Prints and Photographs Division and Jake Bozza, formerly of the Manuscript Division, contributed to this report. It turns out that William “Bill” Kennoch, one of the nation’s top counterfeit detectives in the chaotic post-Civil War era, didn’t have any nifty nicknames, such as “Dollar” or “Wild.” He was a rather …
Angela Napili is a senior research librarian at the Library's Congressional Research Service. In this Q&A, she says she's had a charmed life, inluding getting out of the Philippines after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and settling in San Francisco. An adventurous sort, she's an excellent photographer and National Park Service volunteer, often working at the Washington Monument. Ask her about her award-winning squirrel photo!
The Library's American Folklife Center and the Mellon Foundation have teamed up over the past several years to set up a series of grants that help preserve traditions that may otherwise be absent from the national record. For the most recent year, these include dances of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, artistic creations of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma and traditional Hawaiian music. These works are then preserved in Library collections for future generations.
Sir Francis Drake was the swashbuckling man of action in 16th-century England. He circled the globe, made England rich, raided Spanish ships and ports with wild abandon, claimed California for the queen and rescued the first British settlers in North America on Roanoke Island. The Library's stunning collection of contemporary Drake material brings the Elizabethan age back to breathing life.
Wendy Red Star is a Native American visual artist whose work has received widespread acclaim and been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly called the "genius grant." Her work is also collected at the Library. In this short essay, she writes about a research trip to the Library and how the collections inform her work.
Richard Morris Hunt was the iconic American architect of the Gilded Age,
designing estates that still have their own names – Biltmore, The Breakers, Marble House. His collection of more than 15,000 items is preserved at the Library. The collection is the subject of a new Library video as well as a six-month exhibit in Newport, Rhode Island, where he designed several palatial estates.
