This is a guest post by Sahar Kazmi, a writer-editor in the Office of the Chief Communications Officer. It also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. The Library boasts many ways history-lovers can immerse themselves with its treasures from afar. They can explore online collections, tune in to virtual lectures, discover extraordinary tales on our blogs. Now, 2023 Innovator in Residence Jeffrey Yoo Warren is building another doorway to the past with his project, “Seeing Lost Enclaves: Relational Reconstructions of Erased Historic Neighborhoods of Color.” Using 3D ..read more

Congressional portrait of U.S. Rep. Patsy Takemoto Mink, 1994. Prints and Photographs Division. Judy Tzu-Chun Wu and Gwendolyn Mink co-wrote “Fierce and Fearless: Patsy Takemoto Mink, First Woman of Color in Congress,” published this month. Wu is a professor of Asian American studies at the University of California, Irvine. Mink is a scholar and writer, who with her father donated her mother’s papers to the Library in 2007. Their biography is the first to delve into the life of the trailblazing legislator and champion of Title IX.  How did the two of you decide to collaborate? Wu: When I ..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! Ange ..read more

{mediaObjectId:'D30EBFAE824DD7DBE053CAE7938C6914',playerSize:'mediumWide'} The National Film Registry’s 2021 class is the most diverse in the program’s 33-year history, including blockbusters such as “Return of the Jedi,” “Selena” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring,” but also the ’70s midnight-movie favorite “Pink Flamingos” and a 1926 film featuring Black pilots in the daring new world of aviation, “The Flying Ace.” The 2021 selections, announced today, include movies dating back nearly 120 years and represent the work of Hollywood studios, independent filmmakers, document ..read more

  Jade Snow Wong, in a 1965 San Francisco Examiner article. Asian Division. Photo of original: Shawn Miller. Jade Snow Wong published “Fifth Chinese Daughter” in 1950, and it has been part of American literature ever since. The memoir of a young Chinese American woman coming of age in San Francisco’s Chinatown, torn between her family traditions and her American ambitions, it has lived several lives in the intervening three-quarters of a century. “I wrote with the purpose of creating better understanding of the Chinese culture on the part of Americans,” she wrote later, a sentiment she wo ..read more

“Japan and American Children’s Books,” by Sybille Jagusch. Published by the Library and Rutgers University Press. As children, books are one of our first ways of experiencing the wider world. They’re often our first exposure to new and different people, places and cultures. They’re written by adults, though, so in a looking-through-the-other-end-of-the-telescope way, they also tell us a lot about the older generation that writes, illustrates and publishes them. That’s the brilliant manner in which Sybille Jagusch, chief of the Library’s Children’s Literature Center, views the relationship betw ..read more

Chinese miners in Tuolumne County, California, 1866. Photo: Lawrence & Houseworth. Prints and Photographs Division. The fight began in a coal mine on the morning of Sept. 2, 1885, in Rock Springs, a rough-hewn village in the Wyoming Territory that lay along the Union Pacific Railroad. White and Chinese miners, already at odds about wages, argued about who was going to work a rich vein of coal. A Chinese worker was killed in the ensuing fight, setting off the Rock Springs Massacre. That afternoon, a mob of at least 100 white men and women carrying rifles, shotguns, pistols, axes and knives ..read more

Perry’s ships arrive Edo Bay, as seen in “Kinkai kikan.” Photo by Shawn Miller. The Black Ship scrolls are a genre of Japanese paintings that captured the historic meeting of two alien cultures: That 1854 moment when U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry barged into Edo Bay with four American steamships, guns at the ready, to negotiate a treaty with a Japanese government that had been almost completely isolated for two centuries. It was an astonishing moment. Perry insisted he was bringing “civilization” to “heathens” who had expelled Christian missionaries early in the 17th century. To the Japanese, P ..read more

This is a guest post by Ryan Reft, a historian in the Manuscript Division. In recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, he explores the role of baseball in the nation’s Japanese-American community. For more about baseball, check out our blog series counting down the weeks until the June 29 opening of “Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition. Japanese-Americans play baseball in Nyssa, Oregon, in 1942. Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Japanese-Americans were forcibly evacuated from their homes and sent to government-run camps. Me ..read more

Welcome to week three of our blog series for “Baseball Americana,” a major new Library of Congress exhibition opening June 29. This is the third of nine posts – we’re publishing one each Thursday leading up to the opening. This week, in recognition of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month, we’re highlighting Library collections that document baseball as played by Japanese-Americans incarcerated in World War II internment camps. Observers watch a baseball game underway at the Manzanar War Relocation Center in 1943. Photo by Ansel Adams. In 1943, Ansel Adams, America’s most-renowned photographer ..read more