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Posted by: Erin Allen
With Election Day upon us and votes soon to be counted, the nation waits with bated breath to see who our next president will be. Here in D.C., crowds gather in local bars and pubs, as if it were Monday Night Football, to catch the news of which candidate won what state and taking bets …
Posted in: Collections, History, News, Newspapers, Photos
Posted by: Erin Allen
According to the 1860 census, the population of the United States that year was 31,429,891. Of that number, 3,952, 838 were reported as enslaved. The 1860 census was the last time the federal government took a count of the Southern slave population. In 1861, the United States Coast Survey issued two maps of slavery based …
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Collections, Exhibitions, History, Maps
Posted by: Erin Allen
(This is the third in a series of posts featuring presidential campaign items from the Library’s collections. Read the others here and here.) Every election year, as candidates go head to head during their campaigns, a new wave of vocabulary is born. Political idioms that have found their way into our lexicon include POTUS, left-wing, …
Posted in: Collections, History, News, Newspapers
Posted by: Erin Allen
LeRoy Gresham (1847-1865) was a teenaged invalid who kept a diary for nearly every day of the Civil War, recording the news, his Confederate sympathies and perceptive details about life on the homefront as he experienced the conflict through newspapers, letters and personal visitors. The son of an attorney, judge, and plantation owner in Macon, …
Posted in: Civil War, Exhibitions, History, Manuscripts, Uncategorized
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is an article from the September-October 2012 issue of the Library’s new magazine, LCM, highlighting “first drafts” of important documents in American history.) O! say, can you see by the dawn’s early light …” These words are as American as, well, the American flag that inspired them. Francis Scott Key, a young …
Posted in: History, Manuscripts, Music, Uncategorized
Posted by: Erin Allen
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive …
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Collections, Exhibitions, History, Manuscripts
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is an article from the September-October 2012 issue of the Library’s new magazine, LCM, highlighting 100 years of Copyright law.) By Wendi A. Maloney A hundred years ago, a new category of work became subject to copyright protection: motion pictures. The Townsend Amendment to the U.S. copyright law took effect Aug. 24, 1912, …
Posted in: Collections, Copyright, Film, History
Posted by: Erin Allen
For some Union soldiers, their exposure to southern slavery profoundly altered their views on the institution, even before President Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation in September 1862. One such soldier, John P. Jones, wrote to his wife of his increasing sympathy for abolitionism after seeing the inhumanity with which slaves could be treated. He …
Posted in: Civil War, Collections, Exhibitions, History, Manuscripts
Posted by: Erin Allen
Fatalities during the Civil War were not limited to the battlefield, as both first families discovered. Both the Lincolns and the Davises lost young sons within a couple of years from each other. The Davises lost 5-year-old Joseph in 1864 when he fell to his death from their porch in Richmond, Va. According to one …
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Collections, Exhibitions, History, Manuscripts, Uncategorized