Alan Gevinson will retire this spring as special assistant to the chief of the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. Here, he shares some of his best memories at the Library, including moments with Rep. John Lewis, Bill Moyers ... and his future wife.
From 1961 to 1976, Ed Beach hosted “Just Jazz” on WRVR-FM in New York City. Beach played jazz — soloists, bands, traditional, modern — ranging from the early 1920s to the 1970s. He featured artists who achieved great fame — Charles Mingus, Duke Ellington, Max Roach — along with musicians new to his audience. The show is now preserved online by the American Archive of Public Broadcasting, a joint project of the Library of Congress and the Boston public broadcaster GBH.
Jesse Holland wears a lot of different hats: he’s an award-winning political journalist, he’s a television host, he’s a professor and he’s a comics aficionado — he wrote the first novel about the Black Panther for Marvel in 2018. African American history is yet another of his passions — in particular documenting long-overlooked contributions of …
This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It coincides with the centenary this month of the first Pan-African Congress. The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color line, author and civil rights pioneer W.E.B. DuBois famously wrote in “To the Nations of the World,” …
This is a guest post by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, digital reference specialist in the Library’s Researcher and Reference Services Division. A few weeks ago, we celebrated Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and his work as an activist. Some 100 years before King’s powerful entry into the civil rights movement, however, the fight for civil rights …
This is a guest post by Lavonda Kay Broadnax, digital reference specialist in the Library’s Research and Reference Services Division. December is a month of holidays and festivities that bring families and friends together to celebrate their good fortune and look forward to the year ahead. For the enslaved couple William and Ellen Craft, the …
This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division, to mark the 100th anniversary of the signing of the armistice ending World War I. “Everything for which America has fought has been accomplished,” wrote President Woodrow Wilson on Nov. 11, 1918, in a statement addressed to his “fellow countrymen.” The …
This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. The post celebrates both National Hispanic Heritage Month and the Library’s ongoing exhibition Baseball Americana. “I remember traveling to Lake Elsinore, which was a long way in those days. … [T]he only ride we could get was from a friend who …
Ndaba Mandela, the grandson of South African leader and humanitarian Nelson Mandela, spoke in the Coolidge Auditorium of the Library of Congress on June 27 with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden about his recently published memoir, “Going to the Mountain: Life Lessons from My Grandfather.” Drawing on the memoir, Mandela talked about growing up under …