Civil War historian Elizabeth Leonard has written a number of books about the role of women on the battlefield and the social and political reverberations of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. She's researched those books, including her soon-to-be-published title, “Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life,” in the Library’s Manuscript Division.
This is a guest post by Guy Lamolinara of the Library’s Center for the Book. The loss of the incomparable writer Toni Morrison leaves a gaping hole in the literary landscape. Fortunately for us, before she died on Monday, she filled the world with prose that touched millions of readers worldwide. Through her novels, children’s …
Aisha Karefa-Smart, James Baldwin’s niece, reads from a recently released edition of “Little Man, Little Man: A Story of Childhood,” the only children’s book Baldwin wrote, at a Library of Congress panel discussion on Feb. 28, 2019. Karefa-Smart, a D.C.-based author, wrote the book’s afterword. The book was originally written in 1971, when Baldwin was …
This post is republished from the January–February issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. The entire issue is available online. In his classic novel “Native Son,” Richard Wright tells the story of a poverty-stricken young black man who takes a job as a chauffeur to a white family in Chicago, accidentally kills the daughter …
This is a guest post by digital library specialist Elizabeth Gettins. It coincides with the posting of additional illustrations from the Library’s 1895 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Child’s Garden of Verses” on the Library’s Pinterest site. Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–94) spent his childhood in the cold and damp of Edinburgh, Scotland, his dedicated …
Barb Rosenstock writes children’s books about people who have changed history — Ben Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Joe DiMaggio and racing legend Louise Smith among them. “The Noisy Paint Box,” her story about the artist Kandinsky, was a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book. In 2013, she published “Thomas Jefferson Builds a Library” about Jefferson’s massive book collection, …
This interview with Ann Sullivan was first published in the September–October issue of LCM, the Library of Congress magazine. The issue is available in its entirety online. After reading the interview, make sure to take the quiz that follows! How would you describe your work? I catalog children’s books at the Library of Congress. This …
This is a guest blog post by Sukanya Barman. She was an 11th-grade student at White Station High School in Memphis when she became a winner of the 2017–18 Letters About Literature contest, a reading and writing competition for students in grades four through 12 that involves reading a work and writing to its author …
