Ainsworth Rand Spofford (1825-1908) was one of the longest-serving Librarians of Congress. But in 1861 he was uncertain about living in Washington, and busily covering the Civil War as a journalist. His letters home tell the tale.
This is the first in an occasional series in which we share items that have caught our eye. This unusual item from the papers of stage and film director Rouben Mamoulian (1897-1987) is a memento from the first movie he ever directed, Applause (1929). Mamoulian saved the back of his director’s chair that had been […]
The Manuscript Division has been following the lives of people and organizations who shape American history and culture into digital spaces, acquiring dozens of collections with an ever-growing accumulation of digital content. But you don’t have to be a computer wizard to do research in them.
The year 2022 marks the bicentennial of the birth of landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903). With this in mind, historian Barbara Bair discusses the By the People crowdsourcing transcription project featuring the Subject File in the Frederick Law Olmsted Papers and the Library’s upcoming plans to celebrate Olmsted and his contributions to American life.
Unlike the standard archival boxes that researchers see in the Manuscript Reading Room, the containers that hold manuscripts when they first arrive in the Manuscript Division’s Preparation Section can range from file cabinets and storage containers to liquor boxes and trash cans.
Exploring the jurisprudence of John Paul Stevens during his first nine terms as a Supreme Court justice.
On the last day of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 Benjamin Franklin made a remark that we still quote today. But did he really say it? And who was the woman he said it to? A diary in the Manuscript Division holds the evidence.
As the year draws to a close, it seems like a good time to look back and highlight some of the political, social, cultural, military, and scientific manuscript collections and resource guides that the Manuscript Division has recently made available for researchers to explore. We’re already hard at work acquiring, arranging, and describing the historical […]
Season’s greetings from the Library of Congress Manuscript Division!
The holiday cards of Mary Marvin Breckinridge Patterson convey more than season’s greetings, providing insight into her career as a photographer in the 1930s and her life as the spouse of a U.S. foreign service officer from 1940 to 1958.