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Posted by: Neely Tucker
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.
Posted in: Jewish American History, LCM, Manuscripts, Science
Posted by: Neely Tucker
—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 …
Posted in: Exhibitions, Manuscripts, Writers
Posted by: Neely Tucker
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.
Posted in: LCM, Manuscripts, Poetry, World War II
Posted by: Neely Tucker
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.
Posted in: By the People, Civil War, LGBTQ, Manuscripts, Poetry, Writers
Posted by: Neely Tucker
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.
Posted in: Manuscripts, News, Women's History
Posted by: Neely Tucker
We're down to the college football national championship game next week and the NFL playoff are just around the corner. It's a perfect time to check in with "Football Nation" author Susan Reyburn as she chooses favorite items from the Library's collections. This article is slightly adapted from the January-February issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.
Posted in: LCM, Library Work and Employees, Manuscripts, Music
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Here's a handy guide to holiday stories that readers frequently turn to at the Library. Favorites include the tale of who invented Christmas tree lights, how Truman Capote wrote "A Christmas Memory" (the Library has his handwritten first draft) and how a Central American flowering plant became the favorite Christmas flower around the world.
Posted in: Christmas, Hispanic and Latino, Manuscripts, Social Media, Writers
Posted by: Neely Tucker
Carl Sagan's dreams of space flight took root as a child as some of his enthusiastic artwork shows, particularly a drawing he called “The Evolution of Interstellar Flight.” It's in the Library's Seth MacFarlane Collection of the Carl Sagan and Ann Druyan Archive, composed of more than 595,000 items from throughout the astrophysicist's life.
Posted in: LCM, Manuscripts, Science, Writers
Posted by: Neely Tucker
The Wright Brothers collection in the Library is a marvel, a rare combination of significance and candor that details how Orville and Wilbur became the first to achieve powered flight and usher the world into a new age. The collection includes more than 31,000 items -- personal letters from family members, diaries, scrapbooks, engineering sketches -- and more than 300 historic glass-print negatives. You can chart the family’s entire odyssey here, from small-town Midwestern simplicity to worldwide fame, from youthful newspaper publishers to bicycle shop owners to builders of the world’s first airplanes.
Posted in: Collections, LCM, Manuscripts, Technology