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Category: Washington DC

Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter posing with a family with an infant after he taught his Sunday School lesson at the Maranantha Baptist Church in the Carters' hometown of Plains, Georgia.

Jimmy Carter, Nation’s 39th President, Passes Away at 100

Posted by: Neely Tucker

Former president Jimmy Carter has died at the age of 100. Carter, the nation's 39th president, served from 1977 to 1981. In addition to his international peacekeeping missions, spent much of his retirement with his wife, Rosalynn, helping to build houses for the disadvantaged with the charity Habitat for Humanity. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2002 for his "decades of untiring effort to find peaceful solutions to international conflicts, to advance democracy and human rights, and to promote economic and social development."

A sepia-toned photograph from around 1900 of a black man wearing a three piece suit with a tie and a starched white collar.

Scott Joplin & the Magical “Maple Leaf Rag”

Posted by: Neely Tucker

Legendary ragtime composer Scott Joplin died in poverty at age 48 in 1917 and left few personal artifacts behind; only three photographs of him are known to exist. The song that made him famous was the spirited "Maple Leaf Rag" in 1899. So 125 years later, when the Library's music staff pulls the two copies of "Maple Leaf Rag" sheet music that Joplin and his music publisher mailed in for copyright registration, it can produce an audible gasp.

A huge white flying saucer style disc, supported by a single column, looms over a blue pool.

Unbuilt America: A Nation of the Imagination

Posted by: Neely Tucker

The Library has a fascinating collection of architectural drawings going back as far as the 1600s, many of which were never built. They offer a look into what could have been had the stars aligned. A futuristic different Ellis Island, a Gothic Library of Congress and a Lower Manhattan Expressway are just some of the elaborate designs that never came to be, by architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Mills and Paul Rudolph.

The illuminated Capitol Building, shown from a distance, with a blue-black sky in the background.

Inventing the Capitol Building

Posted by: Neely Tucker

The U.S. Capitol building, the worldwide symbol of American democracy, got its beginnings on a piece of paper on the Caribbean island of Tortola, sketched out by a temperamental doctor in his early 30s. William Thornton's "Tortola Scheme" sketch laid the groundwork for a building that has expanded with the nation, growing from the original bid for a modest 15-room brick building into a complex covering 1.5 million square feet with more than 600 rooms and miles of hallways over a ground area of about 4 acres.