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Posted by: Carla D. Hayden
Asking intriguing questions can be a great way to encourage research and creative thinking. The answer to this particular question was at first disappointing. Two experts, a historian and a rare book librarian, both said that although Galileo wrote “The Starry Messenger,” he did not himself own the copy of the book now in the …
Posted in: Books, Manuscripts, Rare Book of the Month
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
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 …
Posted in: Collections, Manuscripts, New Online, Preservation
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
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 …
Posted in: Collections, Kluge Center, Manuscripts, New Online
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
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 …
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Civil War, Collections, Events, Literacy, Manuscripts, Social Media
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
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 — …
Posted in: Collections, Manuscripts, New Online