-This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan and Wanda Whitney in the History and Genealogy Section. Buchanan wrote the first entry; Whitney, the second. Lucy Lazear, the valedictorian of her 1853 graduating class at Waynesburg Female Seminary in Pennsylvania, paused her commencement speech to thank Margaret Bell, a key member of the faculty. “That …
Maya Freelon’s immersive exhibition “Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in the United States” at Historic Stagville in Durham, North Carolina, drew on Library materials to a new lens on the lives of enslaved children at a former plantation.
The Arthur Singleton and Jessie Lockett collections are the Veterans History Project’s first from African American veterans of World War I, and their letters, journals and photographs offer glimpses into the adversity and resilience that characterize the African American experience of that war. They are small time capsules into another era of American life.
The stormy affair of Josephine Baker and New York's splashy Stork Club in the fall of 1951 was a brief-but-infamous incident and a now fascinating part of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's online collection at the Library. Baker's claim of racial discrimination by the club was correct (they served her drinks but not dinner) but she overplayed her hand when she said influential newspaper and radio columnist Walter Winchell saw the entire event and did not come to her aid. Winchell's ensuing vindictive campaign badly damaged her reputation.
At times laughing and tossing back her long sisterlocks, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson engaged in a lively discussion with U.S. District Court Judge Carlton W. Reeves in the Coolidge Auditorium last week. She talked about her youth and life experiences, all included in her memoir, "Lovely One."
Chef Carla Hall, the bestselling author of “Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration" and co-host of the Emmy-winning “The Chew” for seven seasons, tells us about Christmas dinners at her grandparents' house.
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.
For a brief time before the success of “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison worked as a freelance photographer. He took portraits for publishers and covered events for newspapers. Even after he became celebrated as a novelist, he still took photography seriously, sometimes collaborating with landmark photographer Gordon Parks. His photographs are preserved at the Library alongside his literary works.
The U.S. Capitol building, the worldwide symbol of American democracy, got its beginnings on a piece of paper on the Caribbean island of Tortola, sketched out by a temperamental doctor in his early 30s. William Thornton's "Tortola Scheme" sketch laid the groundwork for a building that has expanded with the nation, growing from the original bid for a modest 15-room brick building into a complex covering 1.5 million square feet with more than 600 rooms and miles of hallways over a ground area of about 4 acres.
