Baseball, basketball, football, blues, jazz, rock, Hollywood, Broadway, comic books — what would the planet look like without the great spewing fountain of American pop culture? As celebrations for A250, the country's 250th birthday, get underway, the Library's vast holdings document the global impact of American films, television, theater, music, comic books and even fast food. That impact can’t be quantified — but much of it can be catalogued.
The Library has two fascinating copies of “The Federalist,” the influential collection of newspaper essays that urged the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. These copies have deep personal ties to three Founding Fathers. One was owned by Elizabeth Hamilton, the wife of Alexander Hamilton (who wrote most of the 85 essays that composed the volume). She gave her copy to her sister, Angelica, who in turn gave it to Thomas Jefferson, her friend. Jefferson put it in his personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress. The other copy belonged to James Madison, who wrote more than two dozen "Federalist" essays, and, like Jefferson, served as President of the new nation.
In 1864, while America was in the depths of the Civil War, photographers Nelson and Roswell Moore set out to photograph what they believed were the last surviving men who had fought in the American Revolution. The men were all over 100 years old. The photographs spawned a popular book, "The Last Men of the Revolution," and the Library today preserves the photographs of those last survivors.
The moon always has been an object of fascination for mankind, but once President John F. Kennedy pledged in 1961 that the U.S. would send a manned spacecraft there within a decade, one of the first questions was entirely practical: Where would they land? An extraordinary map, the USAF Lunar Wall Mosaic, produced the year after Kennedy's speech, helped provide the answer. The 1969 Apollo 11 mission landed safely in an area called the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility). Today, a copy of the map is preserved at the Library as one of the most important -- and practical -- maps in human history.
Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" created a stir when it was published in 1952 and is still regarded as a masterpiece of American literature. Here, you can see some of his edits to the famous opening lines. The Library preserves Ellison's papers, including manuscript copies and drafts of the novel.
The Library invites you to join "It's Your Story," our ongoing celebration of the nation's 250th birthday this year. It's anchored by a new exhibition called “The Declaration’s Promise,” which opens on July 3, just before the Fourth of July official birthday.
The reading room of the African and Middle Eastern Division — also known as the Pavilion of the Seals — transports visitors across time and continents, immersing them in the late 19th-century United States, classical Greece and Rome and societies that emerged across the globe.
Hampton Sides, the bestselling author of several books about daring expeditions, including “In the Kingdom of Ice” and “The Wide Wide Sea,” writes this guest essay, in which he argues that to explore is to be human. It's the concluding article in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, "Into the Unknown," about world-changing voyages and discoveries chronicled in the Library's collections.
Only traces remain of Salomon August Andrée’s 1897 attempt to reach the North Pole. From a base on the Svalbard archipelago, the engineer and his two companions had hoped to float a hydrogen balloon gracefully over the pole, drop a Swedish flag and claim the glory of first discovery. Their friends never saw them alive again. Their remains were found in 1930 on a small island in the Arctic Ocean and the story became internationally famous. The Library preserves several artifacts from the expedition, including fabric samples from the construction of the balloon.
