This is a guest blog by Barbara Bair, historian of Literature, Culture, and the Arts in the Manuscript Division. In 1990, author Oscar Hijuelos (1951-2013) became the first Hispanic American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his novel The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love (1989). He later received the Hispanic Heritage Award …
Join us on September 17, the anniversary of the 1862 battle of Antietam, as Manuscript Division historian Michelle Krowl and reference librarian Lara Szypszak interview historian George C. Rable about his new book Conflict of Command: George McClellan, Abraham Lincoln, and the Politics of War, which reevaluates the command relationship between General McClellan and President Lincoln during the Civil War.
Filed with the correspondence in the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress are six printed copies of an agreement to boycott British goods that Washington, then a Virginia burgess representing Fairfax County, brought to his constituents to sign. The agreement, crafted by the colony’s House of Burgesses (the lower house of Virginia’s colonial …
When President Richard M. Nixon resigned on August 9, 1974, he departed for an exile in San Clemente, California, that began with depression and anxiety, but ended with a presidential pardon, a hospitalization, and eventually political renewal.
This post is coauthored by Morgan Black, librarian at the United States Naval Observatory, and Josh Levy, historian of science and technology at the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. When Maria Mitchell spotted a telescopic comet from the roof of her Nantucket home in 1847, a historic feat that helped make her a national celebrity, …
Find out what kind of military duty Civil War soldier Private William M. Phile of the 27th Regiment Connecticut Infantry found to be particularly rough on his pants.
As the 2024 Summer Olympics kicks off this month, we take a look at the intersection of three remarkable American lives at the Stockholm Olympics in 1912.
The newly opened papers of sex therapist and talk show host Ruth Westheimer contain thousands of letters sent by listeners of her radio program and viewers of her television show, providing insight into the sexual frustrations and obsessions of the 1980s. They also document the dynamic rise in popularity of “Dr. Ruth.”
