Literacy Partners, a 52-year-old New York City nonprofit that works with families, both parents and children, won the top prize in the 2025 Library of Congress Literacy Awards, taking home the $150,000 David M. Rubenstein Prize. Since 2013, the Literacy Awards have handed out 247 prizes, totaling more than $4.3 million, all from philanthropic donations. More than 200 organizations from 42 countries have been recognized for their work.
Cassandra Gardner started working for the Library while still in high school. She never left and, forty years later, is retiring this month. Next year, she says, she'll look for a parttime job "for travel and casino money" because "life is too short not to enjoy yourself."
The Library’s Jefferson Building was the largest library building in the world when it opened in 1897; today, it’s still one of the world’s most beautiful libraries. Want some inside advice about what to see? Check out some favorite spots from the Library's visitor engagement staff.
How well do you understand your dog? Probaly not quite as well as you think. Alexandra Horowitz is the author of "Inside of a Dog: What Dogs See, Smell and Know," which was No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list when it was published in 2009. An updated version of the book has just been released and she'll be at the National Book Festival on Sept. 6 to discuss her work. We caught up with her for a few questions beforehand.
Journalist, author and historian Clay Risen spent six years working on “Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America,” a narrative history of the anti-Communist panic that consumed the country in the decade after World War II. He'll be discussing the book at the National Book Festival on Sept. 6, but we caught up with him for a conversation beforehand.
We're talking today with David Baron, author of “The Martians: The True Story of an Alien Craze that Captured Turn-of-the-Century America,” who will be at this year’s National Book Festival on Sept. 6. It’s about the public fascination between 1890-1910 with what looked to be the very real possibility of life of Mars. The main cultural artifact of this belief might be H.G. Wells’ 1898 novel, “The War of the Worlds,” which imagined hostile Martians invading Earth in spectacular fashion. But as Baron writes, most of the views were utopian, picturing Martians as a far advanced, heroic people.
The police mug shot -- that staple of tabloid life -- was in its infancy in the late 19th century. The U.S. Secret Service, charged with investigating counterfeiting rings but lacking photo equipment, took their arrested suspects to formal portrait studios to have photos taken and then added to their case files. The Library preserves more than 1,200 of these. They offer a marvelous glimpse at how we lived and looked in days gone by.
In 1791, President George Washington entrusted French-born American architect Pierre Charles L’Enfant with designing a plan for the nation’s capital. L'Enfant's map became the blueprint for the nation's distinctive capital city, with most of its features still evident today.
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.
