Top of page
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Library conservators have been carefully cleaning and restoring a small trove of papyrus writings from ancient Egypt. The writings are mostly decrees, contracts and other pragmatic records, but still offer a window into a world long gone by.
Posted in: African and Middle Eastern Division, LCM, Library Work and Employees, Manuscripts, Preservation and Conservation, Rare Book and Special Collections, Science
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Novelists and storytellers have for centuries sketched maps of their fictional worlds -- or the real world where their fictional characters resided -- as a means of expanding their creations and deepening the sense of a new world for readers. The Library preserves dozens of famous examples, from first editions of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.
Posted in: Geography and Map Division, Illustrated Books, LCM, Manuscripts, Maps, Writers
Posted by: Mark Hartsell
Stephen Sondheim put together "Send in the Clowns," his most famous song, in about 24 hours during rehearsals of "A Little Night Music." His lyric and music sheets chart the song's quick progression.
Posted in: LCM, Manuscripts, Music, Performing Arts, Songwriters, Theater
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Linnea Vegh was working at a large, well-lit workspace in the Conservation Division on a recent day, considering an unusual problem in an 1869 Persian-Arabic dictionary published in India: Snakeskin. Five thin, scaly pieces, all likely used as bookmarks that got left behind for more than a century. Welcome to the weird world of “inclusions,” an ecosystem known to archivists the world over in which they come across all sort of things readers have purposefully or inadvertently left between a book’s pages.
Posted in: African and Middle Eastern Division, Arab/Arab American, Library Work and Employees, Manuscripts, Preservation, Preservation and Conservation
Posted by: Neely Tucker
In 1849, a year after the end of the Mexican War, amateur American artist Benajah Jay Antrim and several others set out across Mexico. He recorded the journey in three diaries and two sketchbooks, creating a illustrated travelogue, a kind of time capsule that captured relatively undeveloped parts of rural Mexico, that's preserved at the Library.
Posted in: By the People, LCM, Manuscripts
Posted by: Neely Tucker
One year after the Civil War, the newly freed Montgomery family in Mississippi bought the huge plantations on which they had been enslaved -- those of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, and his brother, Joseph. The Montgomerys would go on to found Mound Bayou, the all-Black Black farming community that President Theodore Roosevelt dubbed "the jewel of the Delta." The family saga was one of the most unusual stories to arise from the ashes of the Confederacy and attempts during Reconstruction to create a democratic society in its wake.
Posted in: African American History, Civil War, Manuscripts, Maps, Uncategorized
Posted by: Neely Tucker
-Research by Micah Messenheimer in the Prints and Photographs Division and Jake Bozza, formerly of the Manuscript Division, contributed to this report. It turns out that William “Bill” Kennoch, one of the nation’s top counterfeit detectives in the chaotic post-Civil War era, didn’t have any nifty nicknames, such as “Dollar” or “Wild.” He was a rather …
Posted in: Civil War, Gilded Age, Manuscripts, Prints and Photographs Division
Posted by: Neely Tucker
In the spring of 1868, with the nation awash in loss and grief following the Civil War, veterans of the Union Army set May 30 as a day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” An instant success, it evolved into Memorial Day.
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Manuscripts, U.S. Presidents, Washington DC
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
A major new Library exhibition, “The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution,” uses original documents such as letters, diaries, maps, newspapers and political cartoons to shed light on striking likenesses between men long supposed to be polar opposites -- George Washington and King George III. The two opposed one another during the Revolutionary War, but actually shared many personal and leadership traits. The exhibit, a joint project between the Library of Congress and the Royal Archives, runs at the Library through next March. It is also online via the Library's website and in a companion book.
Posted in: American Revolution, Exhibitions, Gazette, George Washington, LCM, Libraries, Library Work and Employees, Manuscripts, Researcher Stories, Thomas Jefferson Building