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 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.
The personal world atlas of Louis XIV of France, the absolutist Sun King, was a doozy: a large two-volume set of more than 120 maps now held in the Library’s Geography and Map Division. It was the first world map to show the mythical Sea of the West, a supposed inland sea in the Pacific Northwest, and was the first world map in more than a century to show California as a peninsula, not an island. The creator of the map, Jean-Baptiste Nolin, was later successfully sued for plagiarizing its greatest cartographic innovations, but Louis never let go of his copy.
George Washington made his living as a land surveyor from ages 17 to 20, an enterprise that took him deep into the Blue Ridge Mountains in what is now Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia. His diaries and surveying field notebooks are preserved at the Library, along with the rest of his papers, and are featured in a new exhibit, "The Two Georges."
This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division. She most recently wrote about Ralph Ellison’s photography work. Two important collections of Native American heritage have been digitized and placed on the Library’s website, enabling readers and researchers to dig into histories that are not widely known. The first, …
One of the largest maps in the Library is the Tokaido bunken-ezu, a 117-foot, 17th-century Japanese map painted on two scrolls. It shows, in pen-and-ink detail, the rivers, mountains, forests and towns on the 319-mile route from Edo (now known as Tokyo) to Kyoto.
The Library's 2023 Innovator in Residence, Jeffrey Yoo Warren, is building another doorway to the past with his project, "Seeing Lost Enclaves: Relational Reconstructions of Erased Historic Neighborhoods of Color." Using 3D modeling techniques and insights from the collections, Yoo Warren is developing a virtual reconstruction of the once-bustling Chinatown district in Providence, Rhode Island. A vibrant enclave 100 years ago, the Chinatown of Providence largely has been erased from historical memory.
Theft, fraud, harassment, withholding of payment — courts around the world hear these charges all the time. Yet, they’re far from modern. The Library’s newly acquired San Salvador Huejotzingo Codex, for example, documents a legal proceeding from 1571 in which Indigenous Nahuatl officials in central Mexico accused their village’s Spanish administrator of these very same …
