“What beauty there is in words!” – Walt Whitman’s An American Primer
Walt Whitman’s handwritten draft of An American Primer reveals the poet not only as a prolific writer of words, but as a philosophizer of them as well.
“I Require No More of Them Than Others Do,” George Washington’s Weekly Productivity Reports and the Lives of the Enslaved
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”.
An Irishman, a U.S. President, and the First Hanging in the District of Columbia
The first man hanged in Washington, D.C., was an Irishman. His trial provides a unique lens on the early republic and its nascent national capital. The case drew national attention, particularly among Federalist newspaper editors, who used it to expose the threat of Irish immigrants and their hold over the sitting U.S. president, Thomas Jefferson.
Artistic Trio: Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz Letters to Henwar Rodakiewicz—A New By the People Crowdsourcing Transcription Campaign
A new crowdsourcing transcription campaign launched in celebration of Women’s History Month by the Library of Congress By the People program is now complete. It features letters written by acclaimed painter Georgia O’Keeffe and her husband, the photographer, fine arts impresario, and gallery manager Alfred Stieglitz to their mutual friend, filmmaker Henwar Rodakiewicz.
Race, Gender, and More in the AFL Records
“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.
Behind the Scenes: Scrapbooks of the National Woman’s Party
When the National Woman’s Party dissolved in December 2020, the organization donated all of its remaining records to the Library of Congress. Among these unique materials is a large and important collection of scrapbooks.
“Send us back home”: Early Black Nationalism in a Letter to President Woodrow Wilson
“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.
Finding Rats in the Barry Commoner Papers
In the late 1960s, Barry Commoner and the Center for the Biology of Natural Systems became involved in an ambitious, federally funded effort to understand the ecology of the sewer rat, and then kill it. That project’s failure at a moment of heightened political radicalism reveals how the rat-human relationship can highlight histories of economic injustice. With a major reprocessing of the Barry Commoner Papers now complete, those stories, and more, emerge with far greater clarity.
All Tomorrow’s Parties: Meg Greenfield and the Social World of Late 20th-Century Washington
When juxtaposed with her memoir, one discovers discordant, countervailing emotions regarding her adopted city in the correspondence of Washington Post editor Meg Greenfield that parallel the famous, sometimes dissident sound of the avant-garde New York band, The Velvet Underground.
Made at the Library: Bruce Ragsdale’s “Washington at the Plow”
Join us for a conversation between Kluge Staff Fellow and historian Julie Miller and historian Bruce Ragsdale, whose recent book on George Washington explores the first president’s relationship with farming and slavery and draws on the George Washington Papers held by the Manuscript Division.