For going on a decade now, theater historian Ben West has been making regular trips from his home in New York City to the Library of Congress. His mission? To cull through unpublished manuscripts, personal papers of Broadway authors, copyright drama submissions and more to tell the story of the American musical. Last September, West’s …
In fall 2005, Joe Manning agreed to help his friend, author Elizabeth Winthrop, with a task that had become something of an obsession for her: discovering the story of a little girl staring intently out of a 1910 picture taken at a Vermont cotton mill. Winthrop had encountered the image in an exhibition of child-labor …
Barb Rosenstock writes children’s books about people who have changed history — Ben Franklin, Theodore Roosevelt, Joe DiMaggio and racing legend Louise Smith among them. “The Noisy Paint Box,” her story about the artist Kandinsky, was a 2015 Caldecott Honor Book. In 2013, she published “Thomas Jefferson Builds a Library” about Jefferson’s massive book collection, …
For more than 20 years now, Saundra Rose Maley has required her English composition students — first from George Washington University in Washington, D.C., and now from nearby Montgomery College in Montgomery County, Maryland — to make a short trek to the Library of Congress. There, in the Manuscript Division, the students research primary sources, …
The following is a guest post by theater historian Jennifer Ashley Tepper, the creative and programming director at Feinstein’s/54 Below, a Broadway supper club in New York City. From October 9 to 14, the club will present “The Jonathan Larson Project,” a concert of previously unheard work by the late composer and playwright. Tepper, who …
A little more than a year ago, Hurricane Harvey hit the Texas coast as a category 4 storm, bringing damaging rain and flooding. Less than a month later, Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico with heavy downpours and sustained winds of 155 miles an hour – only two miles an hour shy of a category 5 …
This is a guest post by Rosemary Ryan, an archaeological research fellow at the Library. She is a student at Towson University specializing in forensic anthropology and archaeology. Her research at the Library supports the “Exploring the Early Americas” exhibit and the Jay I. Kislak Collection, made up of more than 3,000 items related to …
Fourteen million pictures have the power to document a nation as diverse as the United States – but such a collection seems almost too vast to comprehend. This year, audiences in Los Angeles were offered a unique look at a cross section of the photography collection at the Library of Congress. L.A.’s Annenberg Space for …
To mark the centennial of Leonard Bernstein’s birth—he was born on August 25, 1918—we’re republishing a column by his daughter Jamie Bernstein from the May–June issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine, in which she reflects on her famous dad’s legacy and on the Leonard Bernstein Collection at the Library of Congress. Issues of …