Archive for the Washington DC Category (285 posts)

Pic of the Week: Bringing the Navy’s History to Life Through Photos

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Photo by Shawn Miller.

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 nine-by-seven-foot panels mounted along the historical perimeter of the Washington, D.C., Navy Yard. The panels offer quick, easy lessons for passersby on uses of the Navy Yard since its establishment in 1799.

The 1864 photo shown here depicts six marines holding bayonets at the Navy Yard. It belongs to a group of photographs from 1861 to 1865 that relate to the federal navy and its seaborne expeditions against the Confederacy.

For more details, check out a blog post we published earlier this week in which Hanshew answers questions about his research at the Library.

New Online: Anna Maria Brodeau Thornton Papers

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This is the second of two related guest posts by Cassandra Good, associate editor of the Papers of James Monroe and author of “Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic” (2015), and Susan Holbrook Perdue, director of digital strategies at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and adviser to a […]

New Online: Margaret Bayard Smith Papers

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This is the first of two related guest posts by Cassandra Good, associate editor of the Papers of James Monroe and author of “Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic” (2015), and Susan Holbrook Perdue, director of digital strategies at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and adviser to a […]

World War I: The Library of Congress Memorial Tree

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This is a guest post by Cheryl Fox, Library of Congress archives specialist in the Manuscript Division. The Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building is bordered by a number of impressive trees. One of them, a Japanese elm at the southwest corner of the building, was planted on Dec. 17, 1921, in memory of four Library of […]

Celebrating Women’s History: Women on the March

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Hundreds of thousands of women marched on Washington, D.C., on inaugural weekend this year to voice their concerns about an array of issues. News outlets nationwide and overseas reported a massive turnout that exceeded all expectations. Crowd size aside, the march was not without precedent. More than a hundred years earlier, American women organized a […]

Pic of the Week: Dance Battle!

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A performer competes in a “dance battle” in the Coolidge Auditorium on February 22 during a Homegrown Concert Series event of the American Folklife Center. Dance battles are an urban dance tradition that celebrate individual talent while helping to keep diverse forms of urban musical and dance expressions alive. In the Coolidge, pairs of dancers […]

Pic of the Week: Saturdays at the Young Readers Center

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The Young Readers Center in the Library of Congress hosted a series of events Jan. 28 to celebrate its new Saturday hours of operation, 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The center, which opened in October 2009, will offer more young people and their families the opportunity to experience the wonders and resources of the nation’s library. “It […]

Curator’s Picks: Surrogate First Ladies

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(The following article is featured in the January/February 2017 issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, LCM. You can read the issue in its entirety here.) Manuscript Division specialists Julie Miller, Barbara Bair and Michelle Krowl discuss some non-spousal first ladies. Martha Jefferson Randolph Because Thomas Jefferson was a widower when he became president, Dolley Madison, […]

Pic of the Week: Presidential Inauguration Treasures

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The Library is highlighting presidential inauguration history in a temporary display on view through Saturday, Feb. 4 in the rooms known as Mahogany Row, LJ-110 to LJ-113, on the first floor of the Thomas Jefferson Building. Presidential treasures like the handwritten speeches of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln are featured along with collections on […]