Bill Moyers, who died yesterday at the age of 91, was at the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium one night in the fall of 2023 to mark the preservation of more than 1,000 of his public television programs in The American Archive of Public Broadcasting. a collaboration between the Library and GBH, the public media production company in Boston. It was a crowning night to one of the most influential careers in American media.
Angela Napili is a senior research librarian at the Library's Congressional Research Service. In this Q&A, she says she's had a charmed life, inluding getting out of the Philippines after Ferdinand Marcos declared martial law and settling in San Francisco. An adventurous sort, she's an excellent photographer and National Park Service volunteer, often working at the Washington Monument. Ask her about her award-winning squirrel photo!
The Library's American Folklife Center and the Mellon Foundation have teamed up over the past several years to set up a series of grants that help preserve traditions that may otherwise be absent from the national record. For the most recent year, these include dances of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, artistic creations of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma and traditional Hawaiian music. These works are then preserved in Library collections for future generations.
Wendy Red Star is a Native American visual artist whose work has received widespread acclaim and been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly called the "genius grant." Her work is also collected at the Library. In this short essay, she writes about a research trip to the Library and how the collections inform her work.
Richard Morris Hunt was the iconic American architect of the Gilded Age,
designing estates that still have their own names – Biltmore, The Breakers, Marble House. His collection of more than 15,000 items is preserved at the Library. The collection is the subject of a new Library video as well as a six-month exhibit in Newport, Rhode Island, where he designed several palatial estates.
Chaeli Cantwell is a producer in the Multimedia Group, where she produces videos for the National Film and Recording registries, as well as reporting and producing videos from some of the the Library's most fascinating collections, including those of J. Robert Oppenheimer and George Gershwin.
The Library has worked for more than two decades to boost its holdings of modern Native American art and now has more than 200 prints and photographs by more than 50 contemporary Indigenous printmakers and photographers from the United States, Canada and Latin America. These include dazzling works by artists and photographers such as Wendy Red Star, Kay Walkingstick, Brian Adams, Zig Jackson and Rick Bartow.
Journalist, photographer and activist Raúl Ruiz was a driving force at La Raza, the newspaper and magazine devoted to the Chicano movement in the 1960s and '70s. The Library announced today that it has acquired his collection, some 17,500 photos by Ruiz and original page layouts for La Raza. It also has nearly 10,000 pages of manuscripts, which include original correspondence, the unpublished draft of Ruiz’s book on Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar and handwritten minutes from the staff meetings of La Raza. It's a major addition to the Library's holdings in modern Hispanic culture.
Ashley Dickerson is the acquisitions and cataloging librarian for Finland and the Baltic states. She tells us about her deep expertise with Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Republics, along with her love for new restaurants, archery and power lifting.
