Journalist, author and historian Clay Risen spent six years working on “Red Scare: Blacklists, McCarthyism and the Making of Modern America,” a narrative history of the anti-Communist panic that consumed the country in the decade after World War II. He'll be discussing the book at the National Book Festival on Sept. 6, but we caught up with him for a conversation beforehand.
The National Book Festival’s 25th edition returns to D.C. on September 6 with a stellar list of novelists, historians, poets, young-adult and childrens authors, more than 90 in all. You’ll see novelists such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Scott Turow and Jess Walter; non-fiction authors such as Ron Chernow, Jill Lepore and Geraldine Brooks; and Academy …
In the spring of 1868, with the nation awash in loss and grief following the Civil War, veterans of the Union Army set May 30 as a day “for the purpose of strewing with flowers or otherwise decorating the graves of comrades who died in defense of their country during the late rebellion.” An instant success, it evolved into Memorial Day.
From saplings to centenarians, the fabled cherry blossom trees of Washington, D.C., entice more than 1.5 million visitors to the capital each spring. The initial 1912 gift of 3,020 cherry trees from the city of Tokyo to Washington launched such treasured and enduring traditions as the National Cherry Blossom Festival, which officially began in 1927. We look at some of the marvelous festival posters that have advertised and celebrated the festival.
Recreating Thomas Jefferson's personal library, which became the DNA of the Library of Congress, has been a fascination for antiquarians since an 1851 fire burned about two thirds of his original books. But for 27 years, one of the Library’s most ardent projects has been to examine its own stacks, other libraries, rare book dealers and antiquarians from multiple countries to replace the burned and missing volumes with exact copies — the same edition, publisher and so on — to replicate the world view that led the author of the Declaration of Independence to pen such a world-changing set of ideas. That effort is now getting as close to complete as it is ever likely to get.
Because George Washington and King George III were on opposite sides of America’s war of independence from Britain, we have learned to think of them as opposites. Our research for an upcoming Library of Congress exhibition, “The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution,” however, has turned up something much more interesting: They were surprisingly alike in temperament, interests and, despite the obvious differences in their lives and experiences.
A family Bible in Washington, looted by a British soldier during the War of 1812 and kept in his family for generations, was eventually returned to the nation more than a century later. It is now preserved by the Library, an artifact of two nations of war and then in peace.
