The 2024 National Film Registry includes 25 films selected for their cultural, historical or aesthetic importance to the nation's history. This year's entries include major hits such as "The Social Network," "No Country for Old Men," and "Beverly Hills Cop"; indie classics such as "My Own Private Idaho" and "Powwow Highway"; the family film "Spy Kids" and the horror movie classic, "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre."
“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 …
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.
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 …
The Library of Congress has released a groundbreaking online collection of the National AIDS Memorial Quilt Records, making one of the most poignant symbols of the AIDS epidemic in the United States available to a global audience.
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, …
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.
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.
Legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin died in poverty at age 48 in 1917 and left few personal artifacts behind; only three photographs of him are known to exist. The song that made him famous was the spirited "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899. So 125 years later, when the Library's music staff pulls the two copies of "Maple Leaf Rag" sheet music that Joplin and his music publisher mailed in for copyright registration, it can produce an audible gasp.
