Civil War historian Elizabeth Leonard has written a number of books about the role of women on the battlefield and the social and political reverberations of Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. She's researched those books, including her soon-to-be-published title, “Benjamin Franklin Butler: A Noisy, Fearless Life,” in the Library’s Manuscript Division.
This researcher Q&A, part of an occasional series, catches up with Melissa Koch, who uses the Library's collection to write nonfiction books for children and young adults. As of late, she's been focused on suffragist leader Lucy Stone.
In this segment of a regular feature on authors who use the Library's collections, we interview Walter Stahr, a lawyer turned historian. His latest biography, published in 2022, is "Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival," a look at the influential treasury secretary and later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court during the mid 19th century.
Danielle Phillips-Cunningham teaches multicultural women’s and gender studies at Texas Woman’s University and writes about race and women’s labor history. She is writing a book about Nannie Helen Burroughs -- who founded the National Association of Wage Earners, a little-known but important Black women’s labor organization -- in the Library’s collection of Burrough's papers.
For years, artist Robert Schultz has made creative reuse of historical Civil War-era images, developing photographs from the Library's Liljenquist Family Collection of Civil War Portraits in the flesh of tree and plant leaves found on former battlefields. It turned out so well that the Library has acquired some of his art.
American Indians walked the land where the nation's capital city now stands long before Europeans arrived. Local historian Armand Lione shares that history when he talks about his research, much of which is conducted at the Library of Congress.
George Yu is an award-winning luthier based in Louisville, Kentucky, who models his handcrafted violins on rare Italian instruments, including a 1654 Amati violin at the Library.
Sybille Jagusch, chief of the Library's Literature Center, has just published "Japan and American Children's Books," a gorgeously illustrated volume that details how Japan and Japanese culture has been portrayed in American children's books over the past two centuries.
Author Nelson Johnson, a former lawyer and judge in New Jersey, used the Library's collections to inform his bestselling "Boardwalk Empire," turned into a hit HBO series; and his new historical novel about Clarence Darrow, "Darrow's Nightmare."
