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Posted by: Mark Hartsell
As a surgeon with the U.S. 6th Marines in France, Joel T. Boone saw the cost of World War I up close—comrades mutilated, amputations performed by candlelight, the frightful loss of life. “My heart has bled by the things I have seen,” wrote Boone, who earned the Medal of Honor for heroism under fire in 1918. …
Posted in: Exhibitions, History
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
For decades at the National Press Club, America got acquainted with the men and women who made history: presidents and premiers, rising stars and old heroes, allies and enemies, establishment figures and revolutionaries – all hoping to explain themselves, over lunch, to the public. “I am not afraid of any questions for one reason: I …
Posted in: Audiovisual, Collections, History, News, Washington DC
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
As a hospital chaplain during the Civil War, William Oland Bourne collected the names of the wounded soldiers he tended and, in doing so, noticed a terrible trend: Many soldiers used their left hands to sign his autograph book because their right arms were missing. How, Bourne wondered, could these grievously wounded men adapt – …
Posted in: Civil War, Collections, Curators, History, LC Web site, Manuscripts, New Online
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
Before he boarded the ship carrying prisoners of war across the ocean to a forced-labor camp, George Washington Pearcy divided his diary and gave the pieces to two comrades staying behind. If he didn’t survive the journey, Pearcy hoped, his story somehow would. Pearcy, a POW held by the Japanese during World War II, never …
Posted in: American Folklife Center, Collections, History, Manuscripts, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
Half the world, journalist Jacob Riis once said, doesn’t know how the other half lives, and it doesn’t know because it doesn’t care. Riis, a social reformer, author and newspaper reporter, used his work to make society take notice, exposing the squalid living and working conditions in late 19th-century New York during the height of …
Posted in: Collections, Curators, Events, Exhibitions, History, Photos
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
Basketball, unique among major sports, has a clear creation story: We know when, where, why and how the game was invented, and by whom. Now, some 125 years after the first game was played in a Massachusetts school gymnasium, we know something new: the sound of the creator’s voice. A researcher recently discovered in the Library …
Posted in: Audiovisual, Collections, History, Researcher Stories
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: Mark Hartsell
A missing Air Crew Report, author Dennis Okerstrom says, provides plenty of facts about losses in air combat: type of aircraft, names and ranks of crew members, a flight plan. Those facts can’t, however, reveal war’s human dimension – what it’s like to actually get shot down in combat. “It cannot begin to convey the …
Posted in: American Folklife Center, Audiovisual, Capitol Hill, Collections, History, Researcher Stories, Veterans History Project