The stormy affair of Josephine Baker and New York's splashy Stork Club in the fall of 1951 was a brief-but-infamous incident and a now fascinating part of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund's online collection at the Library. Baker's claim of racial discrimination by the club was correct (they served her drinks but not dinner) but she overplayed her hand when she said influential newspaper and radio columnist Walter Winchell saw the entire event and did not come to her aid. Winchell's ensuing vindictive campaign badly damaged her reputation.
"A Soldier's Journey," a new bronze statue, was recently unveiled at the World War I Memorial in Washington, D.C.'s Pershing Park. An excerpt from "The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak," a poem by former Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, adorns another wall at the park. Both mark a fitting tribute to the nation's fallen soldiers this Memorial Day.
Haruo Shimizu, a Japanese schoolteacher, survived the United States’ bombing of Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. One year later, he wrote down his memories of that horrific day for a friendly U.S. soldier stationed in Japan, who brought it home after his deployment. Today, it is one of the items featured in the new Treasures of the Library gallery.
When the San Francisco Opera debuted “Doctor Atomic,” an opera by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Adams based on physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer and the test of the first atomic bomb, its first lines contained a scientific error. Marvin L. Cohen, president of the American Physical Society, was in the audience and caught it immediately. Here's how he and Adams changed it.
Some of the U.S. military's best intelligence assets during both World Wars were Native American troops who used their own, unwritten languages as the basis for coded radio messages. These Code Talkers, particularly Navajo Marines, were invaluable in the Pacific theater of World War II. Twenty-nine Navajo Code Talkers were later awarded the Congressional Gold Medal. Many of these soldiers' personal stories are preserved in the LIbrary's Veterans History Project.
The stunningly complete, intellectually voracious files of J. Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, are preserved at the Library. The files fill more than 300 boxes that occupy a line of files that would stretch, if stacked end to end, more than 120 feet. That’s not including more than 70 boxes of research files compiled over 20 years by Martin J. Sherwin for his part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning biography, “American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer.” (Kai Bird shared the Pulitzer as a co-writer.) Those stretch another 27 feet. The files tell his epic life story in granular detail.
Madeleine Albright, the first female U.S. Secretary of State, died today in Washington at the age of 84. The cause was cancer, her family said.. Albright, who donated her papers to the Library in 2014, was a key figure in the administration of Bill Clinton, serving both as ambassador to the United Nations and then as Secretary of State during his second term. Outspoken to the end, she wrote an essay for the New York Times in late February warning about the effects of a Russian invasion of Ukraine. She included her notes from her first meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin, more than two decades ago: "Putin is small and pale...so cold as to be almost reptilian."
The Library kicks off Black History Month with a new By the People crowdsourcing project -- transcribing the papers in the William A. Gladstone Afro-American Military Collection.
David Breger, a successful freelance cartoonist, drafted into the Army in 1941, created the "Private Breger" cartoon during his off-duty hours at Camp Livingston. Once it caught on, the name (but little else) was changed to "G.I. Joe." From there, it became a cultural icon.
