The moon always has been an object of fascination for mankind, but once President John F. Kennedy pledged in 1961 that the U.S. would send a manned spacecraft there within a decade, one of the first questions was entirely practical: Where would they land? An extraordinary map, the USAF Lunar Wall Mosaic, produced the year after Kennedy's speech, helped provide the answer. The 1969 Apollo 11 mission landed safely in an area called the Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility). Today, a copy of the map is preserved at the Library as one of the most important -- and practical -- maps in human history.
Only traces remain of Salomon August Andrée’s 1897 attempt to reach the North Pole. From a base on the Svalbard archipelago, the engineer and his two companions had hoped to float a hydrogen balloon gracefully over the pole, drop a Swedish flag and claim the glory of first discovery. Their friends never saw them alive again. Their remains were found in 1930 on a small island in the Arctic Ocean and the story became internationally famous. The Library preserves several artifacts from the expedition, including fabric samples from the construction of the balloon.
One of the most famous creations of Caspar Vopel, the German mathematician and geographer, is a armillary sphere, consisting of a terrestrial globe only 3 inches in diameter, bearing a hand-drawn map with names of regions written in red and the location of important cities marked with red dots. Constructed in 1543, the globe is contained within 11 interlocking armillary rings that illustrate the rotation of the sun, moon and stars in the Ptolemaic tradition, with the Earth at the center of the universe. It's preserved in the Library's Geography and Map Division.
Novelists and storytellers have for centuries sketched maps of their fictional worlds -- or the real world where their fictional characters resided -- as a means of expanding their creations and deepening the sense of a new world for readers. The Library preserves dozens of famous examples, from first editions of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" to William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County.
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.
Sir Francis Drake was the swashbuckling man of action in 16th-century England. He circled the globe, made England rich, raided Spanish ships and ports with wild abandon, claimed California for the queen and rescued the first British settlers in North America on Roanoke Island. The Library's stunning collection of contemporary Drake material brings the Elizabethan age back to breathing life.
The Battle of Sierra Blanca was a 1787 fight between Comanche and Apache forces in New Mexico, as Spanish colonists convinced the Comanches to go to war against Apache raiding parties. An unnamed warrior drew a pictograph depicting the battle action and gave it to a Spanish officer. Today, it’s a rare chronicle of Native history, held in the Library’s collections.
The elaborately engraved powder horn was the prized possession of any gunman in colonial America, the elegant solution for hunters and soldiers who (literally) needed to keep their powder dry. The Library preserves 10 of these relics of the era, with etchings depicting everything from military victories to cityscapes to elaborate personal motifs.
When the Library of Congress began in 1800, it had 152 works in 740 volumes. Also, there were three maps. Today, as its 225th birthday arrives, the Library has amassed more than 181 million items from around the world, forming what is widely considered to be the greatest collection of knowledge ever assembled. How did it happen? This story walks readers through the Library's fascinating history.
