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Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
As I write this post on March 29th, Washington’s cherry trees have already bloomed . . . and gone . . . and another rite of spring has passed as well: baseball’s spring training! The 2012 Major League Baseball season commenced yesterday in Tokyo as the Seattle Mariners defeated the Oakland Athletics (who got their …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
We are still savoring the comments visitors to the National Book Festival offered last fall while viewing sample photographs from our collections. This visitor’s comments seem particularly apt as we continue to celebrate Women’s History Month. The commenter recognized the well-known subject of the photograph, educator and civil rights activist Mary McLeod Bethune. Bethune served …
Posted in: African American History, News & Events, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
One hundred years ago, the city of Tokyo sent Washington, D.C. a gift of friendship that continues to bloom today. Quite literally, in fact! Three thousand flowering cherry trees arrived in D.C. in 1912, and started what has become an annual spring tradition for residents of the D.C. area and thousands of tourists: going to …
Posted in: News & Events, Photographs, Prints
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
Start with a solid upbringing as the daughter of an artist father in late 19th-century Kansas; add a college education at a time when women were generally not college-bound; combine a heaping helping of five years in turn-of-the-century New York City with a dash of women’s rights. Then, fold in recovery in a Colorado sanitorium …
Posted in: Photographs, Women's History
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, Prints & Photographs Division. “You know the generals. Now meet the young men who made them famous.” That’s how Tom Liljenquist describes the special collection of rare portrait photographs that he continues to build at the Library of Congress to commemorate the American Civil War. …
Posted in: Acquisitions, Photographs, Portraits
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
When James Maxwell Pringle departed for Russia in November 1917, his intent was to visit the Petrograd (St. Petersburg) branch of his employer, National City Bank. His business trip turned into an unexpected window on the Bolshevik Revolution. Arriving in Petrograd in the days just after the October Revolution, when Bolshevik forces overthrew the Russian …
Posted in: Acquisitions, Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
“Meet an American soldier of production. … His uniform is a pair of overalls and a welder’s mask. Not reveille, but a battered alarm clock awakens him six days a week at 6 a.m. There are no service stripes on those welder’s sleeves he wears but his part in the winning of this war is …
Posted in: Photographs, Posters
Posted by: Barbara Orbach Natanson
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 …
Posted in: African American History, Photographs
Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
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 …
Posted in: Photographs