This is a guest post by Sylvia Albro, a senior paper conservator in the Conservation Division. Earlier this month, the Library released online the Omar Ibn Said Collection, including Ibn Said’s autobiography, the only known extant autobiography written in Arabic by an enslaved person in the United States. A wealthy and educated man, Ibn Said …
This is a guest post by Adam Rothman, a professor of history at Georgetown University and an expert on the history of slavery and abolition in the Atlantic world. Last fall, he was a distinguished visiting scholar at the Library’s John W. Kluge Center. Here Rothman writes about the Omar Ibn Said Collection, which the …
This is a guest post by Julie Miller, a historian in the Manuscript Division, and Victoria Van Hyning, a senior innovation specialist in the division. This post coincides with National Handwriting Day. “That’s so beautiful, but what does it say?” This is what we often hear from visitors to the Library of Congress when they …
This is a guest post by Mary-Jane Deeb, chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division. In the summer of 2017, the African and Middle Eastern Division of the Library of Congress acquired a collection of unique documents, some dating back to the 1830s. Although the documents are not very old by Library standards — …
For more than 20 years now, Saundra Rose Maley has required her English composition students — first from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and now from nearby Montgomery College in Montgomery County, Maryland — to make a short trek to the Library of Congress. There, in the Manuscript Division, the students research primary sources, …
On Nov. 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered the Gettysburg Address in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Invited to give a “few appropriate remarks” to dedicate a cemetery for Union soldiers killed at the Battle of Gettysburg, Lincoln delivered — over the course of about two minutes — what has become one of the most widely recognized speeches in …
This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division. Students of the Civil War are fortunate that so many Americans of the era were literate, and during the war made good use of their ability to read and write. Soldiers wrote to loved ones with stirring sentiments of patriotism, observations …
This is a guest post by Lauren Algee, senior innovation specialist with the Library’s Digital Innovation Lab. What yet-unwritten stories lie within the pages of Clara Barton’s diaries, the writings of civil rights pioneer Mary Church Terrell or letters written by constituents, friends and colleagues to Abraham Lincoln? With the launch of crowd.loc.gov, the Library …
This is a guest post by Michelle Krowl, a historian in the Manuscript Division. “A diary, faithfully kept in such eventful times as these, must be interesting to our own children,” wrote Betty Herndon Maury on June 3, 1861, explaining her purpose in keeping a journal after Maury’s family chose to leave Washington, D.C., to …