Join us in person for a “Made at the Library” film screening of “Outsider. Freud” (2025) and conversation with filmmaker Yair Qedar. Qedar takes the viewer on a journey into the life and work of Sigmund Freud, set in four acts and combining animation, dreams, and insights from leading psychoanalysts incorporating the Library’s Sigmund Freud Papers and other collections.
William W. Coblentz was an Ohio farm boy turned physicist. His investigations into psychic phenomena in the early twentieth century created plenty of documentation. But does it prove anything?
Join Dawn Day Biehler as she discusses her recent book, Animating Central Park: A Multispecies History, with Manuscript Division historians Josh Levy and Barbara Bair.
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.
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 …
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.
