The Veterans History Project was founded by Congress in 2000. Since then, it has grown into an archive of stories from over 121,000 U.S. military veterans. The service records, letters, diaries, photographs and other memorabilia spans generations and gives a unique, moving view of what it means to serve in the U.S. military.
Remember your mom's homemade chocolate chip cookies? Sure her "homemade" recipe wasn't actually the one on the back of every bag of Nestle Toll House chocolate chips? Which was really the homemade recipe of Ruth Graves Wakefield, the creator of the chocolate chip cookie?
Charles Fox was always exciting and new -- the composer was a hit-making wonder in the 1970s and 1980s, writing themes for television shows such as “The Love Boat,” “Happy Days,” “Laverne and Shirley,” “Wonder Woman" and “Monday Night Football.” He also composed classic hits such as "Killing Me Softly with His Song" and "I Got a Name." A trove of his papers are now at the Library.
One of the most famous creations of Caspar Vopel, the German mathematician and geographer, is a armillary sphere, consisting of a terrestrial globe only 3 inches in diameter, bearing a hand-drawn map with names of regions written in red and the location of important cities marked with red dots. Constructed in 1543, the globe is contained within 11 interlocking armillary rings that illustrate the rotation of the sun, moon and stars in the Ptolemaic tradition, with the Earth at the center of the universe. It's preserved in the Library's Geography and Map Division.
