Rick Atkinson, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author whose books include "An Army at Dawn," The Day of Battle," "The Guns at Last Light," and "Battle of the Bulge," writes about the lasting impact of World War II on American society.
Tune in on Instagram and Twitter to learn 19 stories you may not know from the Library of Congress, Smithsonian and National Archives. Every weekday from August 3 through Women's Equality Day, August 26, we're counting down from 19 to 1 with a new story each day on our Instagram and Twitter feeds.
A Nazi commemorative atlas of Operations Barbarossa was captured by U.S. troops after the fall of Berlin in World War II. The only one known to exist, it is housed in the Geography and Maps Division.
Thomas Jefferson, future president, designed a macaroni-making machine, one of his many inventions drawn and described in his papers at the Library of Congress.
Alan Gephardt is a ranger at the James A. Garfield National Historic Site of the U.S. National Park Service in Mentor, Ohio. Here, he writes about what his job entails.
The Library of Congress recently acquired one of the most famous Black Ship scrolls -- "Kinkai kikan" ("Strange View off the Coast of Kanagawa") by Otsuki Bankei, a Japanese artist and scholar -- that depicts the arrival of U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry and his fleet of steamships in Edo Bay in 1854. The gunboat diplomacy established American relations with Japan.
Keshad "Ife" Adeniyi, an intern in the Library's Manuscript Division through the Archives, is a Howard University Ph.D. candidate who is researching the history of escaped slaves known as "contrabands."