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Posted by: Josh Levy
Walt Whitman's handwritten draft of An American Primer reveals the poet not only as a prolific writer of words, but as a philosophizer of them as well.
Posted in: Literature Culture & the Arts
Posted by: Ryan Reft
George Washington’s farm reports provide us precise details about the lives of the hundreds of workers, free and enslaved, on the president’s Mount Vernon estate, including the amount of time that the enslaved were sick or in “child bed”.
Posted in: African American History, Early America, Politics
Posted by: Josh Levy
The first man hanged in Washington, D.C., was an Irishman. His trial provides a unique lens on the early republic and its nascent national capital. The case drew national attention, particularly among Federalist newspaper editors, who used it to expose the threat of Irish immigrants and their hold over the sitting U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson.
Posted in: Early America, Holidays, Politics
Posted by: Josh Levy
A new crowdsourcing transcription campaign launched in celebration of Women’s History Month by the Library of Congress By the People program is now complete. It features letters written by acclaimed painter Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer, fine arts impresario, and gallery manager Alfred Stieglitz to their mutual friend, filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz.
Posted in: Digital Collections, Literature Culture & the Arts, Women's & Gender History
Posted by: Ryan Reft
"Comprised of more than 172,000 items, the AFL collection is a potential treasure trove, yet the work has only just begun. The field of labor history has much to gain by continuing to analyze these records through an intersectional lens," writes Mills Pennebaker, a fall 2021 Archives, History, and Heritage Advanced intern, who discusses her experience researching issues of race, gender, regionalism, and class in the recently digitized American Federation of Labor Records.
Posted in: African American History, Labor, Women's & Gender History
Posted by: Elizabeth Novara
When the National Woman's Party dissolved in December 2020, the organization donated all of its remaining records to the Library of Congress. Among these unique materials is a large and important collection of scrapbooks.
Posted in: Behind the Scenes, Women's & Gender History
Posted by: Ryan Reft
“Something must be done. We are producing educated and refined representatives, what for? They are denied their ambitions simply because of color. So I say let us gracefully go home where we can sit in any room we choose," Elizabeth Sykes wrote to Woodrow Wilson in 1913. Her letter discussed by 2021 Archives History and Heritage Advanced Internship (AHHA) intern, Sarah Shepherd offers a window into Black Nationalism of the early-20th century and an example of the kind of issues and themes explored by participants of the Library of Congress AHHA program.
Posted in: African American History