The Library's new exhibit, “The Declaration’s Promise: A Revolutionary Idea," charts the history of the country in its attempts to create a more perfect union over the past 250 years, as measured against the lofty promises made in the Declaration of Independence.
The Library has two fascinating copies of “The Federalist,” the influential collection of newspaper essays that urged the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. These copies have deep personal ties to three Founding Fathers. One was owned by Elizabeth Hamilton, the wife of Alexander Hamilton (who wrote most of the 85 essays that composed the volume). She gave her copy to her sister, Angelica, who in turn gave it to Thomas Jefferson, her friend. Jefferson put it in his personal library, which became the foundation of the Library of Congress. The other copy belonged to James Madison, who wrote more than two dozen "Federalist" essays, and, like Jefferson, served as President of the new nation.
Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man" created a stir when it was published in 1952 and is still regarded as a masterpiece of American literature. Here, you can see some of his edits to the famous opening lines. The Library preserves Ellison's papers, including manuscript copies and drafts of the novel.
The Library observes both Jewish American Heritage Month and the nation's approaching 250th birthday this year by focusing on a little-remembered aspect of the Revolution: the Jewish merchants in the tiny Caribbean island of St. Eustatius who shipped in supplies to American troops around the British blockade. The Dutch-controlled shipping outpost, just 8 square miles, was the first foreign entity to recognize the newly founded United States after the signing of the Declaration of Independence.
The Batak peoples of Sumatra once kept some of their most potent incantations in a book written on bark pages with a cover made of heavy wood. "Instructions for Magical Protection" is one of four Batak manuscripts preserved -- and now ditgitized -- at the Library.
Only traces remain of Salomon August Andrée’s 1897 attempt to reach the North Pole. From a base on the Svalbard archipelago, the engineer and his two companions had hoped to float a hydrogen balloon gracefully over the pole, drop a Swedish flag and claim the glory of first discovery. Their friends never saw them alive again. Their remains were found in 1930 on a small island in the Arctic Ocean and the story became internationally famous. The Library preserves several artifacts from the expedition, including fabric samples from the construction of the balloon.
From the vast reaches of outer space to the depths of the Mariana Trench, the Library’s collections chronicle some of the Western world’s greatest voyages of discovery and exploration. These are journeys that crossed time and space, shattering the old realms of myth and superstition and revealing the known world, a place of maps and charts and taxonomic tables. Giants and dragons did not exist, it turned out, but a whole new universe filled with strange and wonderful things did.
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.
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.
