One summer night in the White House in 1862, John Nicolay, Lincoln's secretary, wrote his future wife a whimsical letter about how "all bugdom" was swarming his office, attracted by the light of gas lamp.
A conservator at the Library believes she has identified John Wood, an almost forgotten government photographer, as the man who took an iconic image of the first Lincoln inauguration.
Peggy Lundeen Johnson is the great-great-granddaughter of Samuel J. Gibson. He fought for the Union during the Civil War and was incarcerated in the Confederate military prison in Andersonville, Georgia, in 1864. While there, he kept a daily log of his experience. Johnson was unaware of the diary until she encountered it on the Library’s …
Two hundred years after his birth, Walt Whitman remains a towering figure. The Library of Congress, with the world's largest collection of Whitman's writings, marks the bicentennial with a flurry of events.
This is a guest post by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, digital reference specialist in the Library’s Researcher and Reference Services Division. Abraham Lincoln was fond of poetry: He wrote poems, read them, received them and was the subject of many. So states “Abraham Lincoln and Poetry,” a unique example of the numerous guides the Library makes …
This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division, and Victoria Van Hyning, a senior innovation specialist in the division. This post coincides with National Handwriting Day. “That’s so beautiful, but what does it say?” This is what we often hear from visitors to the Library of Congress when they …
On Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Invited to give a “few appropriate remarks” to dedicate a cemetery for Union soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln delivered — over the course of about two minutes — what has become one of the most widely recognized speeches in …