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.
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.
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.
-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.
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.
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.
During the Revolutionary War, George Washington approved an audacious plan to kidnap King George's third son, Prince William, then in New York, and hold him hostage -- with all the greatest respect. The attempt was never made, for which the future King William IV was grateful when he later learned of the plot.
