The folklorist Sidney Robertson was one of the trailblazing American women of the 1930s and 1940s, the kind of life you’d associate with Martha Gellhorn, Dorothea Lange or Zora Neale Hurston. Her work directing the California Folk Music Project from 1938-40 is the subject "California Gold," a new book from the Library and the University of California Press.
The AIDS Memorial Quilt is often regarded as the largest folk art project ever created and the Library’s American Folklife Center has held the quilt’s archival collections since 2019. Parts of it are on display at the initial exhibit of the Library's Treasures Gallery, opening in June.
Some of the U.S. military's best intelligence assets during both World Wars were Native American troops who used their own, unwritten languages as the basis for coded radio messages. These Code Talkers, particularly Navajo Marines, were invaluable in the Pacific theater of World War II. Twenty-nine Navajo Code Talkers were later awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Many of these soldiers' personal stories are preserved in the LIbrary's Veterans History Project.
In World War II, the U.S. government enlisted American citizens to report what their neighbors, coworkers and classmates were saying about the war in a controversial "rumor control" project.
The Library's Free to Use and Reuse sets of copyright-free images from our vast collections of prints and photographs are endlessly entertaining, so why not check out the collection of Games for Fun and Relaxation?
Joy Harjo, the first Native American to serve as the U.S. Poet Laureate, will serve a third term in the office, the Librarian of Congress announced today.
Patrick Egan is a researcher and musician from Ireland, currently at the Library of Congress on a Fulbright Tech Impact scholarship, researching Irish traditional music.
