On February 1, 1960, four young men sat down at the Woolworth’s lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, and ordered coffee and doughnuts. More than fifty years later, this may not seem like a daring act, but it was. First the waitress and then the store manager explained that the lunch counter was reserved for …
The following is a guest post by Brett Carnell, Acting Head, Technical Services Section, Prints & Photographs Division. Here’s wishing you a happy Chinese New Year. We usher in the Year of the Dragon with a photo from 100 years ago showing two men toasting the new year in New York’s Chinatown. Running for fifteen …
Four years ago today we embarked on an experiment to post photographs from Library of Congress collections on the photosharing site, Flickr. We had done considerable planning, and we were quite clear on our aims: to share images with a community of picture lovers who may not have known that libraries collect pictures, and to …
As the previous “Words About Pictures” blog post demonstrated, street scenes can offer considerable matter for interpretation. Not only do they show exteriors, but they stir thoughts about interiors: what might be going on inside the buildings or the people depicted? Here’s an image that brings interior and exterior together in an interesting way and …
One hundred years ago, on December 14, 1911, Roald Amundsen and four members of his Norwegian expedition team arrived at the South Pole. Originally, Amundsen intended to be the first to reach the North Pole, but upon learning that Robert Peary and Frederick Cook had already achieved the feat, he made a historic change of …
Thanks to a recent initiative by Library of Congress and National Park Service staff, the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog has grown by nearly 400,000 records. Through a bit of technical wizardry, there is now a record for each digital image in one of our cornerstone collections: the Historic American Buildings Survey/ Historic American Engineering …
Historic news photographs offer an immediacy and perspective on past events that make them among the most popularly requested items in our collections. The Prints & Photographs Division’s New York World-Telegram & the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection is a case in point. Consisting of an estimated one million photographs that the newspaper assembled between …
In a previous post (“Still Feeling the Glow: Photo Guessing Game at the National Book Festival,” Oct. 26), we described how we brought copies of photographs from Prints & Photographs Division collections to the National Book Festival in September and asked visitors to participate in a “guessing game.” We showed the pictures first with no …
In honor of this most auspicious anniversary of Veterans Day, falling as it does on 11/11/11, our colleagues in the Serial and Government Publications Division have launched a new set of World War I rotogravures in War of the Nations, 1919 on the Library of Congress Flickr site. During the World War I era (1914-18), …