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Posted by: Neely Tucker
This is a guest post by Anne McLean, a music specialist in the Music Division. On Sept. 28 — that’s Wednesday — the Music Division partners with Dance Theatre of Harlem and Washington Performing Arts to present a special event saluting a pathbreaking Black artist: “Celebrating Hazel Scott: Pianist, Singer, Actress and Activist.” The evening …
Posted in: African American History, Events, LCM, Music, Women's History
Posted by: Neely Tucker
One of the Library's most unusual holdings is hair -- lots of it. The Library has locks and tresses and strands from people in the arts such as Ludwig van Beethoven, Walt Whitman and Edna St. Vincent Millay; presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Madison and Ulysses S. Grant; and any number of famous women, including Lucy Webb Hayes (first lady and spouse of President Rutherford B. Hayes); Confederate spy Antonia Ford Willard; Clare Boothe Luce and unidentified hair from Clara Barton’s diary. Nearly all of the hair stems from the 18th and 19th centuries, in the era before photographs were common and lockets of hair were seen as tokens that could be anything from romantic to momentous.
Posted in: Civil War, LCM, Manuscripts, Preservation and Conservation, Thomas Jefferson, U.S. Presidents
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Writer, scholar and activist W.E.B. Du Bois recognized the need for young African Americans to see themselves and their concerns reflected in print. The Brownies' Book, a monthly magazine for the "Children of the Sun ... designed for all children, but especially for ours," was his response. Du Bois aimed to instill and reinforce pride in Black youth and to help Black families as they raised children in a segregated and prejudiced world. The Library has digitical copies of each magazine online.
Posted in: African American History, Kids, LCM
Posted by: Neely Tucker
The Library of Congress has unexpected items in its vast collections -- the contents of Lincoln's pockets when he was assassinated; cocaine used in a groundbreaking 19th-century surgery; a lock of Beethoven's hair; 3,000 year old cuneiform tablets from modern-day Iraq; Mesoamerican incense burners that are more than 2,000 years old; and a piece of Tom Thumb's wedding cake, now nearly 160 years old.
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Geography and Maps Division, Jay I. Kislak Collection, LCM, Preservation and Conservation, U.S. Presidents, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Jelly Roll Morton's 1938 concerts at the Library's Coolidge auditorium became a landmark jazz recording and the basis for his biography, "Mister Jelly Roll."
Posted in: African American History, LCM, Music