(The following is a guest post by Kate Stewart, processing archivist in the American Folklife Center, who is principally responsible for organizing and making available collections with Civil Rights content in the division to researchers and the public.) For many Americans, the calls for racial equality and a more just society emanating from the steps of …
This Spring, basketball celebrates a milestone—the 75th anniversary of “March Madness,” the annual National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 basketball series. For both men’s and women’s basketball, these tournaments determine the national champions of college basketball. In 1938, Ohio State University coach Harold Olsen conceived the idea, and the following year the first tournament …
When I was a kid, my dad went to Hawaii for work and brought back grass skirts and shell necklaces for me and my sister. I can remember prancing about the house mimicking what I thought at the time was a hula dance, likely influenced by watching too much “Fantasy Island.” According to the International …
Today the Librarian of Congress named the 25 films that will comprise the National Film Registry’s entries for the year 2010. These are films that have cultural, historical or aesthetic significance that warrants their preservation for posterity. All in all, there are 550 films in the registry. Although there is great variety in this year’s …
This is a guest post by Sarah Rouse, a volunteer in the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division. “War experience just hypnotizes young men.” So said Victor Lundy, a World War II veteran who recorded many of his war memories through his sketchbooks, now donated to the Library of Congress. I interviewed Lundy for …
This is a guest post by Carl Fleischhauer, program officer with the Library’s National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program In 1975, Alan Jabbour and I began a project to document the fiddle playing of Senator Robert C. Byrd, who passed away a few days ago at the age of 92. Sen. Byrd was aware that …
The Librarian of Congress today named 25 new entries to the National Recording Registry, a designation given to recordings that are culturally, historically or aesthetically significant and at least 10 years old. This year’s entries bring the total to 300 and include recordings made famous by a range of artists from Tupac Shakur, Little Richard …
For the past 10 weeks, 47 college students have been digging through a variety of Library of Congress collections–finding amazing stuff so people like you can come here and get lost in it. Such as? Such as an ad for a patent medicine that figured in an 1898 murder case; a first edition in Russian …
Memorial Day is upon us again, a time to reflect on American veterans — men and women who sacrificed their lives for our nation. The Veterans History Project (VHP), an oral history program of the Library’s American Folklife Center, was created by Congress in 2000 to collect, preserve, and make accessible the first-hand recollections of …
