Bestselling author Louis Bayard has written nine historical novels over the past two decades and has researched them all at the Library, poring over maps, sorting through personal love letters, consulting societal details of the lost worlds that he brings to life. His latest novel, “The Wildes,” a fictionalized account of Oscar Wilde and his …
For a brief time before the success of “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison worked as a freelance photographer. He took portraits for publishers and covered events for newspapers. Even after he became celebrated as a novelist, he still took photography seriously, sometimes collaborating with landmark photographer Gordon Parks. His photographs are preserved at the Library alongside his literary works.
The U.S. Capitol building, the worldwide symbol of American democracy, got its beginnings on a piece of paper on the Caribbean island of Tortola, sketched out by a temperamental doctor in his early 30s. William Thornton's "Tortola Scheme" sketch laid the groundwork for a building that has expanded with the nation, growing from the original bid for a modest 15-room brick building into a complex covering 1.5 million square feet with more than 600 rooms and miles of hallways over a ground area of about 4 acres.
The Library has six letters that Albert Einstein wrote to Margarita Konenkova, a Russian national with whom he had a passionate, late-in-life affair while he was at Princeton. Einstein was a widower, Konekova was married to a famous Russian sculptor. The affair was not revealed until 1994. The letters, our staff experts write, mix Einstein’s humanity with his genius.
—This is a guest post by Meg McAleer, a former historian in the Manuscript Division. Sigmund Freud returned again and again to the problem of memory as he formulated his theories of psychoanalysis during the 1890s, as the Library’s significant collection of his papers show. “What is essentially new about my theory,” Freud wrote in …
Haruo Shimizu, a Japanese schoolteacher, survived the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. One year later, he wrote down his memories of that horrific day for a friendly U.S. soldier stationed in Japan, who brought it home after his deployment. Today, it is one of the items featured in the new Treasures of the Library gallery.
Volunteers have been working over the past five years to transcribe the Library’s manuscripts of Walt Whitman, one of the nation’s most iconic poets, from three major collections. Can you help proofread the final 4,000 pages? This June, the Library is hoping you'll do just that as we celebrate Pride month.
President Thomas Jefferson devised two versions of a unique cipher for the Lewis and Clark expedition across the unknown Louisiana Territory so that the explorers could relay sensitive information to him. They were never used, but the Library has preserved both ciphers as curious relics of a bold mission across a wild continent.
A major portion of the papers of Supreme Court Associate Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, consisting of approximately 600 containers, opened for research use this week. Housed in the Manuscript Division, the collection documents the trajectory of O’Connor’s life in politics and law in Arizona and, later, as the U.S. Supreme Court’s first woman justice.
