During World War II, the Office of War Information recorded news and American propaganda onto 16-inch discs which were then broadcast domestically and overseas. The Library acquired tens of thousands of these discs after the war and has been working to preserve them ever since. Colin Hochstetler, a Library Junior Fellow, talks about his work with these time-capsule discs in this question-and-anwer session.
Should your boyfriend save your beloved cat or a drowning stranger? Your stepdad has Alzheimer's and now your mom wants to date. Is this okay? Kwame Anthony Appiah, the author of The Ethicist column for the New York Times Magazine and 2024 winner of the Library’s John W. Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity, took on these and other quandries in a fun Live! At the Library event.
The photographer John Margolies chronicled the weird and wonderful ways American businesses advertised themselves along the nation's roadways in the latter half of the 20th century. He felt dinosaur-shaped gas stations and a giant gunslinging shrimp advertising a restaurant weren't just roadside kitsch but a genuine expression of the national identity. The Library preserves more than 11,000 of his images.
In 1849, a year after the end of the Mexican War, amateur American artist Benajah Jay Antrim and several others set out across Mexico. He recorded the journey in three diaries and two sketchbooks, creating a illustrated travelogue, a kind of time capsule that captured relatively undeveloped parts of rural Mexico, that's preserved at the Library.
The beloved hymn “Amazing Grace,” written by John Newton, is one of the most recorded songs in history. But it didn't particularly stand out when it was published in the "Olney Hymns" collection in 1779. It's not even called "Amazing Grace," just numbered "Hymn 41." The hymn book was huge, containing 280 hymns by Newton and 68 by William Cowper, a poet and Newton's friend. The volume also contains Cowper's “Light Shining Out of Darkness,” which coined the maxim still in use today, “God moves in mysterious ways.”
Almost forgotten now, Kay Aldridge was the "The Serial Queen" in the 1940s, turning up in popular cliffhanger serials that were shown on Saturday afternoon matinees just before the main feature. She was also one of the “ten most photographed girls in the world," appearing on the cover of at least 44 major magazines, in hundreds of advertising ad campaigns and in 25 films -- all in just 9 years. She left Hollywood for a happy second life, mostly on the coast of Maine. After she died in 1995, her daughter put together a wonderful scrapbook, now preserved at the Library, that narrates a small-town girl’s ascent to fame. And a little bit of fortune.
One year after the Civil War, the newly freed Montgomery family in Mississippi bought the huge plantations on which they had been enslaved -- those of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and his brother, Joseph. The Montgomerys would go on to found Mound Bayou, the all-Black Black farming community that President Theodore Roosevelt dubbed "the jewel of the Delta." The family saga was one of the most unusual stories to arise from the ashes of the Confederacy and attempts during Reconstruction to create a democratic society in its wake.
The National Book Festival’s 25th edition returns to D.C. on September 6 with a stellar list of novelists, historians, poets, young-adult and childrens authors, more than 90 in all. You’ll see novelists such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Scott Turow and Jess Walter; non-fiction authors such as Ron Chernow, Jill Lepore and Geraldine Brooks; and Academy …
