Recreating Thomas Jefferson's personal library, which became the DNA of the Library of Congress, has been a fascination for antiquarians since an 1851 fire burned about two thirds of his original books. But for 27 years, one of the Library’s most ardent projects has been to examine its own stacks, other libraries, rare book dealers and antiquarians from multiple countries to replace the burned and missing volumes with exact copies — the same edition, publisher and so on — to replicate the world view that led the author of the Declaration of Independence to pen such a world-changing set of ideas. That effort is now getting as close to complete as it is ever likely to get.
Because George Washington and King George III were on opposite sides of America’s war of independence from Britain, we have learned to think of them as opposites. Our research for an upcoming Library of Congress exhibition, “The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution,” however, has turned up something much more interesting: They were surprisingly alike in temperament, interests and, despite the obvious differences in their lives and experiences.
A family Bible in Washington, looted by a British soldier during the War of 1812 and kept in his family for generations, was eventually returned to the nation more than a century later. It is now preserved by the Library, an artifact of two nations of war and then in peace.
The personal world atlas of Louis XIV of France, the absolutist Sun King, was a doozy: a large two-volume set of more than 120 maps now held in the Library’s Geography and Map Division. It was the first world map to show the mythical Sea of the West, a supposed inland sea in the Pacific Northwest, and was the first world map in more than a century to show California as a peninsula, not an island. The creator of the map, Jean-Baptiste Nolin, was later successfully sued for plagiarizing its greatest cartographic innovations, but Louis never let go of his copy.
George Washington made his living as a land surveyor from ages 17 to 20, an enterprise that took him deep into the Blue Ridge Mountains in what is now Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. His diaries and surveying field notebooks are preserved at the Library, along with the rest of his papers, and are featured in a new exhibit, "The Two Georges."
Chef Carla Hall, the bestselling author of “Carla Hall’s Soul Food: Everyday and Celebration" and co-host of the Emmy-winning “The Chew” for seven seasons, tells us about Christmas dinners at her grandparents' house.
“Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” went without a song for years, from the tail end of the Depression through World War II and nearly until the midcentury before a musician named Johnny Marks began to consider it. Marks studied music in college in the 1920s, penned a good song or two for Guy Lombardo’s orchestra in …
Cheers to a list of favorite holiday drinks from long-ago mixology books in Library collections as curated by J.J. Harbster, head of the Science Reference Section. You can try the Baltimore Egg Nog from 1862, but we'll opt for the bourbon-based Frosted Cocktail of 1910.
Sarah Josepha Hale was a prominent magazine editor, abolitionist and social activist throughout most of the 19th century, perhaps best known for composing the children's nursery rhyme, "Mary Had a Little Lamb." But her most long-lasting effort was her years-long campaign to get the federal government to designate Thanksgiving as a federal holiday. Her decisive tactic? A letter to President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.
