Join us on November 30 for a “Live! at the Library” commemoration of the fiftieth anniversary of home rule in Washington, D.C., with a panel discussion on the legacy of home rule moderated by Kojo Nnamdi and featuring journalist Tom Sherwood; The Drum and Spear Bookstore co-founder, Eyes on the Prize documentarian and civil rights activist Judy Richardson; and historians G. Derek Musgrove and Kyla Sommers. A performance by the D.C. Go-Go band Mambo Sauce will follow the panel discussion.
A new By the People crowdsourced transcription campaign, “American Federation of Labor Records: Letters in the Progressive Era,” launched in late April. By taking part in the campaign, volunteers will discover how the labor union engaged with issues of race, class, and gender during the early twentieth century.
Forty years ago, Patricia Roberts Harris went down in defeat to Marion Barry in the 1982 mayoral election in the District of Columbia, yet, her campaign correspondence with legal scholar, feminist, civil rights activist, and unofficial political advisor Pauli Murray reveals the impact of gender on the outcome, the role of intersectionality in the lives of Black women, and the way defeats can lead to future victories.
Archivists describe the initial steps taken to add another million items to the largest collection held by the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Records.
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”.
"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.
“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.
Lanai Huddleston, Archives History and Heritage Advanced Internship intern in the Manuscript Division, winter 2021, discusses the history of sororities and debutante balls in the African American community found in the Dupree African American Pentecostal Collection and materials in it derived from the Alpha Kappa Alpha, Alpha Theta Omega Chapter of Raleigh, North Carolina, a sorority that includes Kamala Harris, Maya Angelou, Rosa Parks, and many other outstanding Black women.
