-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 …
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.
The stormy affair of Josephine Baker and New York's splashy Stork Club in the fall of 1951 was a brief-but-infamous incident and a now fascinating part of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's online collection at the Library. Baker's claim of racial discrimination by the club was correct (they served her drinks but not dinner) but she overplayed her hand when she said influential newspaper and radio columnist Walter Winchell saw the entire event and did not come to her aid. Winchell's ensuing vindictive campaign badly damaged her reputation.
Because George Washington and King George III were on opposite sides of America’s war of independence from Britain, we have learned to think of them as opposites. Our research for an upcoming Library of Congress exhibition, “The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution,” however, has turned up something much more interesting: They were surprisingly alike in temperament, interests and, despite the obvious differences in their lives and experiences.
