The 2023 class of the National Recording Registry adds music from Mariah Carey, Queen Latifah, Daddy Yankee, the Eurythmics, Jimmy Buffett, Wynton Marsalis, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and several others. The 25 additions range from 1908 to 2012 and includes early blues and Mariachi music, along with radio broadcasts from the 1930s. A highlights video, with interviews with several of the artists, is included.
Elizabeth Brown is a reference librarian in the Researcher and Reference Services Division. This article appears in the Library of Congress Magzine, Nov.-Dec. 2022. Perhaps the most beloved Christmas film of all time got its start during a morning shave. Philip Van Doren Stern, while getting ready for work one day in 1938, had an …
U.S. politician and diplomat Joel R. Poinsett was also an amateur botanist. In 1828, he brought back a bright red plant from a posting in Mexico, grew it in his South Carolina greenhouses and was so identified with its popularity that it was soon named after him -- the poinsettia, the ever-popular holiday decoration.
Judy Garland insisted that the original gloomy lyrics of "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas" be rewritten to a warm, wistful tone in what is now a holiday standard. Garland debuted the song in the 1944 musical, "Meet Me in St. Louis."
"A Christmas Memory," Truman Capote's bittersweet short story about his small-town Alabama childhood with his eccentric elderly cousin, has been one of the nation's most beloved tales in the holiday canon since it was first published in 1956. The Library has Capote's handwritten draft of the story, which reveals much about the young Capote.
Popular renditions of Santa Claus have varied greatly since Clement Clarke Moore's characterization of him as soot-covered elf in 1823's "A Visit from St. Nicholas."
