—This is a guest post by Adam M. Silvia, a curator in the Prints and Photographs Division. As a photojournalist, Taro Yamasaki photographed at-risk children in the United States and around the world — Nicaragua, Bosnia, Rwanda, the Middle East. The Prints and Photographs Division recently acquired three collections that document such work by the …
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.
In the winter of 1906, Mark Twain was a tired and grieving man. He was 71. The past dozen years had been brutal. He had gone bankrupt in the mid-1890s. Then his 24-year-old daughter died from spinal meningitis. Then his beloved wife, Olivia, suffered through years of heart trouble before dying at age 58 in …
"A Soldier's Journey," a new bronze statue, was recently unveiled at the World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C.'s Pershing Park. An excerpt from "The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak," a poem by former Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, adorns another wall at the park. Both mark a fitting tribute to the nation's fallen soldiers this Memorial Day.
For a brief time before the success of “Invisible Man,” Ralph Ellison worked as a freelance photographer. He took portraits for publishers and covered events for newspapers. Even after he became celebrated as a novelist, he still took photography seriously, sometimes collaborating with landmark photographer Gordon Parks. His photographs are preserved at the Library alongside his literary works.
This is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, chief of the Prints and Photographs Division. It also appears in the July-August issue of Library of Congress Magazine. Greetings from Washington, D.C.! And from Gordon, Nebraska; Black River Falls, Wisconsin; San Francisco, California; and countless other big cities and tiny hamlets spread across the vastness of …
"The Exhibit of American Negroes" was a display of hundreds of photographs, charts and graphs detailing the lives of Black Americans at the 1900 Paris Exposition, or world's fair. It was put together by W.E.B. Du Bois, Thomas Calloway and Daniel A.P. Murray, three major activists and educators of the era (Murray worked for the Library). Here, we look at three photographs of women that Du Bois selected for the exhibition.
After Orville Wright's death in 1948, his estate donated a vast collection of his papers to the Library, including more than 300 glass plate and nitrate negatives of photographs taken (mostly) by the brothers between 1897 and 1928; images that provide an important and fascinating record of their home lives and of their attempts to fly. His "success house," Hawthorn Hill, is in many of these photos and is today a museum.
Since 2006, the Library’s Teaching with Primary Sources program has been empowering educators to make use of the Library’s digitized collections in a vast array of subjects. Lee Ann Potter, the Library's director of educational outreach, writes about several schools that use historical documents, photographs, maps and other resources to help students gain an understanding of the past.
