Wendell Cannon, a high school teacher from Illinois, toured Europe during his summer break in 1936. His journal, photographs, and other souvenirs capture familiar tourist activities such as a visit to Paris’s Arc de Triomphe as well as the unique experience of visiting Nazi Germany and witnessing Jesse Owens win gold in the 1936 Berlin Summer Olympics.
Benajah Jay Antrim’s journals and sketchbooks document an American artist’s journey across Mexico in 1849. As of January 29, 2025, you can volunteer to transcribe them as part of the “By the People” crowdsourcing project from the Library of Congress.
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.
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.
Physical aspects of a document, such as stains on a World War II-era telegram in the K. C. Emerson Papers, can sometimes add details to the story it tells, or leave you wondering.
Letters, diary entries, images, and publications held at the Library of Congress trace French and American feminists as they worked together to advance the rights of women and strengthen the tradition of French American cooperation.
In December 1889, an elaborate scientific expedition arrived on the coast of Angola to view a total solar eclipse. Its story vividly reveals intersections of science and militarism, scientific fieldwork and leisure travel, and holds important lessons about scientific failure as well.
Letters exchanged between two great women of medicine, Elizabeth Blackwell and Florence Nightingale, demonstrate differing perspectives on women’s roles in the medical profession in the nineteenth century.
Cornelia Bryce Pinchot visited Iran in 1949 and returned to the U.S. with a striking public health poster warning against the spread of the infectious eye disease, trachoma.