Of the Library’s many Pride Month events is Pride Night Online, in which Megan Metcalf, the Women’s Gender and LGBTQIA+ studies librarian and collection specialist, will conduct a free online workshop to researching LGBTQ material in our collections.
Ninety years ago, a Texas grocer named Lorenzo D. Buchanan stepped forward with one of the great hoaxes of 20th-century American pop-culture life, a genealogical fabrication that continues to resonate today. The Great Buchanan Inheritance Hoax rocked American life from 1931-1936 with his false tale of an $85 million inheritance that was available to anyone who could prove a family connection.
The military order that led to the federal holiday of Juneteenth was not regarded as important national news when it was issued in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865.
The photographs of Bernard Gotfryd, now free for anyone to use from the Library’s collections, are a remarkable resource of late 20th-century American pop-culture and political life, as he was a Newsweek staff photographer based in New York for three decades. He was also a Holocaust survivor who wrote about the experience with grace and courage.
The Library’s reading rooms are beginning to reopen to researchers for the first time since the COVID-19 pandemic began more than 14 months ago.
German cartographer Martin Waldseemuller’s 1507 world map was the first to name the New World as “America,” for the Italian-born explorer, Amerigo Vespucci. The Library holds the only copy of the map known to still exist.
Jason Reynolds, the National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature, devotes his June newsletter to the mysteries of doing the laundry.
A 529-year-old Jewish religious text is discovered in the Library’s collections, just in time for Eric Lander, the new director of the White House Office of Science and Technology, to use it in his swearing-in ceremony.
Mark Twain made his name on the lecture circuit with a talk about his work as a newspaper correspondent in Hawaii, then known as the Sandwich Islands.
All 23 sets of presidential papers held by the Library, a total of more than 3.3 million images, now are available and searchable online, an accomplishment more than two decades in the making.