In summer 1861, William J. Rhees, chief clerk of the Smithsonian Institution, wrote to his wife about Professor Thaddeus Lowe’s balloon experiments on the National Mall . . . including the reason one ascent never got off the ground. Because (almost) nothing in Washington happens without first securing a purchase order or an appropriation.
Manuscript Division staff speak with Kelsey Henry, a postdoctoral fellow at Princeton University and former research fellow with the Consortium for History of Science, Technology, and Medicine (CHSTM), about her research in the Manuscript Division.
After nearly a decade of planning, a new exhibition, “The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution,” opened at the Library of Congress on March 28, 2025. The exhibit features the papers of George Washington from the Manuscript Division and the papers of Britain’s King George III from the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle.
Join historian Catherine McNeur as she discusses her recent book, Mischievous Creatures: The Forgotten Sisters Who Transformed Early American Science, with Manuscript Division historians Josh Levy and Elizabeth A. Novara.
This is a guest post by Onur Ayaz, formerly a Junior Fellow in the Manuscript Division. When does entrepreneurship become innovative, and when does innovation become invention? Are activists, educators, scientists, and laborers also innovators? Are they entrepreneurs? In 1918 Carter G. Woodson, an African American historian who also collected manuscripts, ephemera, and other materials …
The photographs in the Library of Congress Archives provide a look into the Library throughout the twentieth century. They document visits from authors, politicians, and celebrities as well as Library staff and their work.
Join us on October 23 as Manuscript Division historian Josh Levy and reference librarian Loretta Deaver interview Cheryl Krasnick Warsh about her new biography of pharmacologist Frances Oldham Kelsey and her pioneering battle against the life-threatening prescription drug thalidomide.
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, …
William Wilgus was one of the most accomplished civil engineers of his time. Today two manuscript collections document his sweeping career, one at the New York Public Library and another at the Library of Congress, which opened for research in 2023. Documenting incidents such as a fatal 1907 train accident in the Bronx and the 1915 flooding of New York’s massive Ashokan Reservoir, the two collections tell a story of progress and loss, and of memory and honor.
