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Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Thomas Edison, inventor of the first successful practical light bulb, created the very first strand of electric lights. During Christmas 1880, strands of lights were strung outside his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory, giving railroad passengers traveling by their first look at an electrical light display. But it would take almost 40 years for electric …
Posted in: Photos, Technology
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Mark Twain impersonators routinely don a white suit to evoke the persona of the famous author. But Twain himself did not make a habit of wearing white at all times of the year until very late in his life. He unveiled his signature style on December 7, 1906, at age 71, when he testified about …
Posted in: Collections, Copyright, Photos
Posted by: Gayle Osterberg
‘Tis the season to be jolly, be of good cheer and…be a thorough list-maker. Gift lists, grocery lists, invitation lists … there are so many things, and so little time that lists are essential to helping us make a bit more sense of it all. The Library offers a lot of great resources that can …
Posted in: Audiovisual, Collections, History, LC Web site, Music, Photos, Science, Veterans History Project
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, chief of the Prints and Photographs Division, about “American Libraries 1730–1950,” published this fall by W.W. Norton and Company in association with the Library of Congress. You can find libraries at the heart of many different communities, from the center of a town or a college …
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Library of Congress conservators use enzymes and small hand tools to gently remove the cloth backing from the verso of a giant poster created to advertise a 19th-century circus. The treatment is part of an effort to preserve the poster, the earliest surviving one in the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division. Titled “Five Celebrated Clowns …
Posted in: Photos, Pic of the Week
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by Kristi Finefield, a reference librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division. An earlier version was published on “Picture This,” the division’s blog. Can you take a photograph of a ghost? Will a spirit pose for your camera? Looking at “spirit photographs” from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, you …
Posted in: Abraham Lincoln, Photos
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
A love of travel inspires so many photos. A stunning group of images we’re featuring now in our “free to use and reuse” feature on the Library’s home page will take you on a century-old “grand tour” of the world. Our Photochrom Print Collection shows, in color, Europe, the Middle East, Canada, Asia and the …
Posted in: Collections, Free to Use and Reuse, Photos
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
This is a guest post by Kristi Finefield, a reference librarian in the Prints and Photographs Division. It was first published on “Picture This,” the division’s blog. “Thousands of residents stood with necks craned and peered wide-eyed through smudged glass as the moon sped between the sun and earth, gradually shutting off the bright morning …
Posted by: Wendi Maloney
Robert Hanshew, a photo curator for the U.S. Navy, visits the Library’s Prints and Photographs Division almost every Friday to research images related to naval history. Some of his discoveries from the Library’s collections are featured in a major outdoor public history exhibit that opened this summer. Titled “Behind These Walls,” the exhibit consists of …
Posted in: Photos, Pic of the Week, Researcher Stories, Washington DC