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Posted by: Wendi Maloney
One hundred years ago this Sunday—on April 2, 1917—Jeannette Rankin was sworn into the 65th Congress as the first woman elected to serve. She took her seat more than two years before Congress passed the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women nationwide the right to vote. That alone is remarkable, but Rankin also made history in another …
Posted in: Congress, Events, History, Women's History
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by Stephen Leggett, a program coordinator of the National Film Preservation Board for the Library of Congress. On the eve of the Great Depression, there were movies, but they were as devoid of brilliant hues as the economy was about to be. But even as those dark clouds moved in, …
Posted in: Film, History, Preservation
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Hundreds of thousands of women marched on Washington, D.C., on inaugural weekend this year to voice their concerns about an array of issues. News outlets nationwide and overseas reported a massive turnout that exceeded all expectations. Crowd size aside, the march was not without precedent. More than a hundred years earlier, American women organized a …
Posted in: Collections, History, Washington DC, Women's History
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Designed to educate, amuse or advertise, pictorial maps were a clever and colorful component of print culture in the mid-20th century, often overlooked in studies of cartography. A new book published by the Library of Congress in association with the University of Chicago Press, “Picturing America: The Golden Age of Pictorial Maps,” by Stephen J. …
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Daniel Murray, a pioneer in the black history movement, worked at the Library of Congress for 52 years, from 1871 to 1922. He began as special assistant to Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Rand Spofford, later serving as a librarian and a bibliographer of works by African-Americans. In “The Original Black Elite: Daniel Murray and the …
Posted in: Civil Rights, Events, History, Researcher Stories
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following is a guest post by Rachel Telford, archivist with the Veterans History Project.) In 1917, Norvel Preston Clotfelter’s life was upended when he was drafted into the United States Army. He postponed his wedding, left his job as a school teacher in Mazie, Okla., and began his service at Camp Travis, Texas; he …
Posted in: Collections, Curators, Folksonomies, History, LC Web site, Manuscripts, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
(The following is a guest post by Elizabeth Gettins, Library of Congress digital library specialist.) “Roll up your sleeves, set your mind to making history.” —Carrie Chapman Catt March is Women’s History Month, so what better collection to highlight than the National American Woman Suffrage Association Collection? Formed in 1890, the National American Woman Suffrage …
Posted in: Collections, History, Women's History
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
(The following guest post was written by Stephen Wesson, an educational resources specialist in the Education Outreach Division.) The signatures of Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony and Lucy Stone appear on “A Petition for Universal Suffrage.” A photograph captures Eleanor Roosevelt as she takes her seat as chair of the United Nations Commission on …
Posted in: Collections, History, LC Web site, Women's History
Posted by: Erin Allen
(The following post is written by Ahmed Johnson, African American genealogy specialist in the Library’s Humanities and Social Sciences Division.) I’d like to begin with a story – a personal story. I remember being in a sociology class at Hampton University and discussing the government’s unfulfilled promise, in the aftermath of the Civil War, to …
Posted in: Books, Collections, Curators, Education, Exhibitions, History, Manuscripts