The Christopher Columbus collection at the Library of Congress includes a rare and valuable copy from 1502 of a group of documents known collectively as the “Book of Privileges,” purchased by the Library in 1901. The larger collection also contains additional copies in various formats the Library acquired from the 1890s through the 1940s. Junior Fellow Molly Williams explores the history of these documents.
Joseph Ball’s mid-eighteenth century letters, written from his home near London to his family in Virginia, helped maintain connections between Britain and the American colonies. They also show how the institution of slavery operated in the world where George Washington was born.
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 …
George Washington is widely known to have had no biological children of his own. Less well known is his role in raising several of the children and grandchildren of Martha Washington’s marriage to her first husband, Daniel Parke Custis. In this informal conversation with Manuscript Division curator Julie Miller and archivist Kate Madison, Cassandra Good, …
"The queen of all hags.” This brief, bitter comment appears on the back of an 1829 letter to Albany, New York, bookseller W. C. Little, and was most likely written by him about its sender, author Anne Royall. What exactly did Royall do to Little to deserve a comment like this? Who was she?
Manuscript Division intern Maureen S. Thompson describes the experience of locating African Americans in the Blair Family Papers, and highlights some of the notable documents she discovered.