The anticipation in the small room in Culpeper, Virginia, was palpable as the stylus touched down on a rare 100-year-old wax cylinder recording. Chin in hand, film producer Daniel Golding sat while his son, Nate, stood behind him, hands in pocket. A scratchy sound emerged, followed by a man’s voice, which Golding identified as his great-grandfather’s. He was singing a deer song in the language of the Quechans, a Native American tribe indigenous to an area along the Mexico border in Arizona and California. “My great-grandfather was the last one to sing these songs,” Golding said. “There’s nobod ..read more

This is a guest post by Nathan Cross, an archivist in the American Folklife Center. It also appears in slightly different form in the November-December issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. Before radio communications could be encrypted through technological means, the U.S. military struggled to find fast and effective means to send secure messages. Perhaps the best method they found was to employ Native American troops as Code Talkers — radio operators who communicated to each other using their native languages. Native American languages were rarely written and almost entirely unknown to ..read more

The Soldier’s Letter, issue No. 15. Photo: Shawn Miller. Oliver V. Wallace was neither a great soldier of the Civil War nor an imposing man of his era. He was a private in the 2nd Colorado Cavalry and spent most of the conflict on the third floor of the Union Hotel in Kansas City. Still, he found a place in history. It was from that perch that he created, edited and wrote much of the Soldier’s Letter, the unofficial newspaper of his regiment, that ran for 50 editions between 1864 and 1865. The four-page paper, printed on notebook-sized pulp, formed a loose diary of Union soldiers who were ..read more

This drawing from the San Salvador Codex shows the portraits and names of Indigenous workers next to the amount in pesos (red circles) they were underpaid. Geography and Maps Division. Theft, fraud, harassment, withholding of payment — courts around the world hear these charges all the time. Yet, they’re far from modern. The Library’s newly acquired San Salvador Huejotzingo Codex, for example, documents a legal proceeding from 1571 in which Indigenous Nahuatl officials in central Mexico accused their village’s Spanish administrator of these very same crimes. The Library purchased the rare co ..read more

Detail from the Lakota winter count. Manuscript Division. The “winter counts” created by some Native American peoples chronicle centuries of their history in pictures: battles fought, treaties struck, buffalo hunts, meteor showers, droughts, famines, epidemics. The counts — painted mostly on buffalo hides until the species was hunted to near-extinction in the late 19th century — served as a way for tribes of the Great Plains to document significant events and pass a record of them from generation to generation. Each year, a band’s elders would choose the most important event in the life of t ..read more

Joy Harjo walks onstage for a performance of poetry and music at the Library. Photo: Shawn Miller. The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums has presented one of its most significant awards to the Library and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo for “Living Nations, Living Words,” Harjo’s signature project during her 2019 to 2022 term. Harjo, the first Native American to hold the nation’s poet laureate position, was honored with the ATALM’s Outstanding Project/Non-Native Organization Award for her work that shows the dynamic, living poetry being written and performed by Nativ ..read more

An artist’s sketh of part of the new Kislak exhibition. The Kislak Family Foundation is donating $10 million to create a new exhibition at the Library that will share a fuller history of the early Americas, featuring the Jay I. Kislak Collection of artifacts, paintings, maps, rare books and documents, the Library announced today. The new Kislak Gallery will be part of a reimagined visitor experience at the national library in the years ahead. The gift will both develop the exhibition gallery and establish a permanent endowment for its maintence and renewal over time.  The announcement o ..read more

John Hessler.  Photo: Courtesy of John Hessler. Every institution has its institutions, and one of the Library’s is John Hessler, who will retire from the Geography and Map Division at the end of this month. He holds many titles, official and unofficial. One of the official ones is curator of the Jay I. Kislak Collection of the Archaeology & History of the Early Americas; one of the unofficial ones, playfully given to him by Librarian Carla Hayden, is the “Indiana Jones of the Library of Congress.” We will miss his erudition, energy and endless curiousity. Tell us about your backgro ..read more

Children dressed for Ecuadorian National Day, in New York City, 2021. Photo: Camilo Vergara. This is a guest post by Giselle Aviles, a reference librarian in the Hispanic Reading Room of the Latin American, Caribbean and European Division. The Hispanic Reading Room has a new research guide, Interconnecting Worlds: Weaving Community Narratives, Andean Histories & the Library’s Collections. This guide, with resources in English, Spanish and Quechua, facilitates research about Andean peoples through language, literature, visual arts and music. We used video interviews to connect with Indige ..read more

The U.S. Mint quarters saluting women trailblazers for 2022. This is a guest post by Maria Peña, a public relations strategist in the Library’s Office of Communications. Maya Angelou broke ground as a multifaceted author, poet, actress, recording artist and civil rights activist, while Adelina “Nina” Otero-Warren left an indelible mark in New Mexico’s suffrage movement. This year, both are among five trailblazing women to appear on the U.S. quarter — on the flip side from George Washington — for the first time, so keep an eye on your pocket change and get your coin collector boards ready! An ..read more