The Library recently put online some 230 histortic manuscripts, some of them more than a thousand years old, in Hebrew and similar languages, such as Judeo-Arabic, Judeo-Persian and Yiddish. The collection, available online for researchers and the public for the first time, includes a 14th-century collection of responsa, or rabbinic decisions and commentary, by Solomon ibn Adret of Barcelona, considered one of the most prominent authorities on Jewish law.
It is midafternoon on a recent weekday and jazz legend Wynton Marsalis is driving across the Southwest, taking the call on speakerphone that his 1985 album, “Black Codes (From the Underground),” has been inducted into the 2023 class of the National Recording Registry. With endless desert spreading about behind and before him, he took a few minutes to talk about the album and its pointed political statement.
Meg Medina, a writer whose work explores how culture and identity intersect through the eyes of children and young adults, today was named as the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature for 2023-2024, the Library of Congress and Every Child a Reader announced. Medina, a Cuban-American, is the eighth author to hold the position and the first …
This is a guest post by Polina Lopez, Widening the Path intern in the Library’s Publishing Office. Can one detective successfully solve kidnapping, espionage and murder cases, uncover social poseurs and secret love affairs, all while maintaining the guise of psychic powers? In the newest addition to the Library of Congress Crime Classics series, Gelett Burgess’ Astro the …
The Thomas Jefferson Building of the Library of Congress celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2022. This post describes the remarkable history of the building's planning, construction and final grand opening in 1897.
The Kislak Family Foundation is donating $10 million to create a new exhibition at the Library that will share a fuller history of the early Americas, featuring the Jay I. Kislak Collection of artifacts, paintings, maps, rare books and documents, the Library announced today. The new Kislak Gallery will be part of a reimagined visitor …
Leslie Jordan died of an apparent medical emergency this morning while driving in Los Angeles. His beloved BMW crashed into the wall of a building. He was pronounced dead at the scene. No one else was hurt. He was 67. Adorable, generous and hilarious to the very end, one of his last public appearances was …
Every institution has its institutions, and one of the Library’s is John Hessler, who will retire from the Geography and Map Division at the end of this month. He holds many titles, official and unofficial. One of the official ones is curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology & History of the …
