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Posted by: Jeff Bridgers
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court issued a decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, declaring that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” This decision was pivotal to the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States. A year later, in May 1955, Thomas O’Halloran, on assignment for U.S. News & …
Posted in: African American History, 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
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: 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: Kristi Finefield
From the most recent Library of Congress blog post for the Library intiative Of the People: Widening the Path, we learn about the work of visual artist Maya Freelon, and her visit to the Library of Congress to explore the collections for her current project, Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in …
Posted in: African American History, Photographs, Portraits
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
Read about collections that are newly available and ready for research from the Prints & Photographs Division, including color slides by American architect Paul M. Rudolph, color images of Idaho, Montana, Nevada, and Utah by photographer Carol M. Highsmith and letterpress posters by printmaker Amos Paul Kennedy, Jr.
Posted in: Architecture, Photographs, Posters, Prints, Ready for Research
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
The following is a guest post by Helena Zinkham, Chief, and Aliza Leventhal, Head, Technical Services, both of the Prints & Photographs Division. Every week our department organizes, houses, describes, and selectively digitizes a wide variety of pictures. Here are the highlights from the more than 125,000 items completed in the past six months. You …
Posted in: Hispanic American History, Photographs, Postcards, Prints, Ready for Research
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
More than 1,000 color photographs of wild, wonderful West Virginia recently joined the ever-growing Carol M. Highsmith Archive in the Prints and Photographs Division. Taken in 2015, these photos are part of Highsmith’s multi-year plan to photograph every state in the U.S., with the Library of Congress as the home for this modern survey of …
Posted in: Photographs
Posted by: Kristi Finefield
The following is a guest post for the Feast Your Eyes series by Arden Alexander, Cataloging Specialist, Prints and Photographs Division. Numerous photographs in the Prints and Photographs Division’s over 75,000 historical images of the Middle East show the people of the region harvesting, preparing, cooking, selling and enjoying food and drink. Included in these …
Posted in: Photographs, Series: Feast Your Eyes