Hampton Sides, the bestselling author of several books about daring expeditions, including “In the Kingdom of Ice” and “The Wide Wide Sea,” writes this guest essay, in which he argues that to explore is to be human. It's the concluding article in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, "Into the Unknown," about world-changing voyages and discoveries chronicled in the Library's collections.
In 1855, when Thomas Ayres published the first images of Yosemite Falls, the rest of the country was enchanted. His sketchwork of the Yosemite Valley predated the famous photographs by Carleton Watkins and the monumental paintings by Albert Bierstadt in the 1860s that would cement the valley’s reputation as the romantic dream of the American West incarnate. The Library recently acquired one of Ayres sketches, along with a companion lithograph, preserving them — and their moment in national history — for generations to come.
The Library's American Folklife Center and the Mellon Foundation have teamed up over the past several years to set up a series of grants that help preserve traditions that may otherwise be absent from the national record. For the most recent year, these include dances of the Nottawaseppi Huron Band of the Potawatomi, artistic creations of the Comanche Nation of Oklahoma and traditional Hawaiian music. These works are then preserved in Library collections for future generations.
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.
Wendy Red Star is a Native American visual artist whose work has received widespread acclaim and been awarded the MacArthur Fellowship, commonly called the "genius grant." Her work is also collected at the Library. In this short essay, she writes about a research trip to the Library and how the collections inform her work.
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 Library has worked for more than two decades to boost its holdings of modern Native American art and now has more than 200 prints and photographs by more than 50 contemporary Indigenous printmakers and photographers from the United States, Canada and Latin America. These include dazzling works by artists and photographers such as Wendy Red Star, Kay Walkingstick, Brian Adams, Zig Jackson and Rick Bartow.
The Library’s Free to Use and Reuse sets of photographs and prints are copyright-free, yours to use anyway you like. This set of winter photos offers a window in the worlds of lost arts of ice harvesting, snowshoe-making and finally, the society set of snowbirds in Palm Beach, Florida, in the 1950s.
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, …
