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Posted by: Mark Hartsell
The human voice is music’s only pure instrument, jazz singer Nina Simone once wrote – it has notes no other instrument possesses. “It’s like being between the keys of a piano,” Simone wrote in a draft of an unpublished autobiography recently discovered in a Library of Congress collection. “The notes are there, you can sing …
Posted in: Capitol Hill, Collections, Curators, Exhibitions, History, Music, Washington DC
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is a guest blog post written by Elizabeth Gettins, Library of Congress digital library specialist.) This month, the Rare Book of the Month is not actually a book but objects from the special collections within the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. In honor of Valentine’s Day, we take a peek into the …
Posted in: Collections, Curators, History, Photos, Rare Book of the Month
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is a guest post written by Anchi Hoh, a program specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division.) If you read last month’s Christmas-related blog post “An Armenian ‘Three Magi’ at the Library of Congress” by Levon Avdoyan, you may be wondering how the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division acquired some of …
Posted in: Books, Collections, Curators, Manuscripts
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is a guest post written by Helena Zinkham, chief of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division.) Join us for a “photo countdown” to January 16, which marks the 8th anniversary of the Flickr Commons. The theme is bridges, because the Commons has grown to connect historical and contemporary photographs from more …
Posted in: Collections, Curators, Photos, Social Media
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is a guest post by Levon Avdoyan, Armenian and Georgian area specialist in the African and Middle Eastern Division.) When I began working at the Library of Congress in 1992 as the Armenian and Georgian Area Specialist to the Near East Section of the African and Middle Eastern Division, it was as if …
Posted in: Collections, Curators, Exhibitions, History, Manuscripts
Posted by: Erin Allen
A camel walked into Mount Vernon … sounds like the beginning of a rather offbeat joke. However, such is not the case. On Dec. 29, 1787, our nation’s soon-to-be first president, at home on his estate in Alexandria, Virginia, played host to a rather exotic animal for the holidays. I first heard this story from …
Posted in: Collections, Curators, Events, History, Manuscripts
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is a guest blog post written by Elizabeth Gettins, Library of Congress digital library specialist.) You’ve heard of Jack Frost and most certainly St. Nicholas. But how about King Winter? “King Winter,” a rare German children’s book written by Gustav W. Seitz and published around 1859 in Hamburg, borrows from Germanic and Norse …
Posted in: Books, Collections, Curators, Rare Book of the Month
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is a post by Ann Brener, Hebraic area specialist in the Library’s African and Middle Eastern Division.) Imagine that some brightly plumed bird-of-paradise has flown in amongst your backyard warblers, and you’ll probably know how I felt upon discovering a beautifully illustrated book in the vaults of the Library of Congress. Nestled between …
Posted in: Books, Collections, Curators, Events, Jewish American History
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is an article written by Alison Kelly, science librarian and culinary specialist in the Library’s Science, Technology and Business Division, for the November/December 2015 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. You can read the issue in its entirety here.) Today’s popular food blogs are an outgrowth of recipe-sharing in America that …
Posted in: Books, Collections, Curators, History, LCM