New Hannah Arendt By the People Crowdsourcing Transcription Campaign Launched for Jewish American Heritage Month
A new crowdsourcing transcription campaign features the Manuscript Division’s Hannah Arendt Papers.
Archive for 2022 (34 posts)
“My Hamilton”: Philip Schuyler, Alexander Hamilton, and Yellow Fever
Philip Schuyler’s letters about yellow fever in the Alexander Hamilton Papers reveal a complicated and many-sided character responding to a dangerous and frightening moment in American history.
Library of Congress Exhibit Charts Olmsted History
A new exhibit at the Library of Congress looks at Frederick Law Olmsted’s experience as a social observer and public planner.
Made at the Library: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress
Join us on May 4 for a conversation with authors Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink about their new biography of Congresswoman Patsy Takemoto Mink.
The Book Delivery System at the Library of Congress
This is a guest post by Cheryl Fox, Library of Congress Archives and Library History Collections Specialist in the Manuscript Division. Congress began in 1873 to plan a separate building for the Library of Congress, which had outgrown its space in the U.S. Capitol Building. It took more than sixteen years to decide on the […]
Trading on the Waterfront in Early America: The Manuscript Division Acquires Business Records of Two Quaker Merchants
The business records of two early American Quaker merchants, recently acquired by the Library’s Manuscript Division, show trade with the Lenape Indians, recovery after the devastation of the Revolutionary War, and two American cities coming into their own.
The Artistry of Learning Math: The Ellerton-Clements Cyphering Book Collection
Before the modern textbook, Western school-age children learned mathematical concepts through what was called the “cyphering tradition” and created textbooks of their very own. The volumes in the recently processed Ellerton-Clements Cyphering Book Collection will certainly be of interest to those who study math and early modern education, but many also possess a unique kind of artistry.
“What beauty there is in words!” – Walt Whitman’s An American Primer
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.
“I Require No More of Them Than Others Do,” George Washington’s Weekly Productivity Reports and the Lives of the Enslaved
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”.
An Irishman, a U.S. President, and the First Hanging in the District of Columbia
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.