This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan, a reference librarian in the History and Genealogy Section. A teenage girl filling a photograph album with the images of family and friends. Though the technology may change, the sentiment seems timeless. This girl was Margaret Virginia “Maggie” Thompson, who spent most of her life in Waynesburg, Pennsylvania, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The photographs were cartes de visite and cabinet cards, so popular in the 1870s and 1880s. We turn the album’s pages to see the girl become a woman and her social circle expand. Siblings, neighbor ..read more

This story also appears in the January-February 2024 issue of the LIbrary of Congress Magazine. Two Black seamstresses have left their mark on White House fashion history, as Elizabeth Keckley and Ann Lowe designed dresses for two of the nation’s most famous first ladies, Mary Todd Lincoln and Jacqueline Kennedy, respectively. Both designers developed their craft despite the brutal influences of slavery and Jim Crow segregation. Keckley (also spelled Keckly) was born into slavery in 1818 in rural Virginia until buying freedom for herself and her son in her mid-30s. Lowe, born in 1898 in Alabam ..read more

“Four score and seven years ago….” those six words, spilling out into the Pennysylvania air in 1863, marked the beginning of one of the greatest speeches in American history and a new era in the life of the nation. The 160th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address falls on Nov. 19. Thanks to some creative work by researcher Christopher Oakley, historians now have a bit more insight into exactly where the Civil War president stood when he called for a new birth of freedom in the country. Following a long career in animation — Oakley’s credits include “Dinosaur,” “Stuart Little 2 ..read more

Some of the most important works by Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, Frederick Douglass, Willa Cather, Zora Neale Hurston and Cesar Chavez will be the focus of a new television series being produced by C-SPAN and the Library. The 10-part series — “Books That Shaped America” — starts on Sept. 18 and will examine 10 books by American authors published over a span of nearly 250 years and that are still influential today. It will be hosted by Peter Slen, the longtime executive producer of C-SPAN’s BookTV. “The idea that C-SPAN, working with the Library of Congress, has is to just start talkin ..read more

This is a guest post by Candice Buchanan, writing with recently retired colleague Mark F. Hall. Both are/were reference librarians in the History and Genealogy Section. My career started in a graveyard. I still do volunteer work there. The graveyard in question is Green Mount, located on a hilltop on the outskirts of Waynesburg, Pennsylvania. This is in the far southwestern pocket of the state. My family has been there for several generations. As a teenager, I discovered my love of genealogy in no small part by walking past the rows of tombstones in this cemetery, fascinated by the shorthand a ..read more

Cheryl Regan is a veteran of the Library’s exhibits office, bringing the treasures of the world’s largest library to the public. Here, she answers a few questions about her work. Describe your work at the Library. I am a senior exhibition director in the Exhibits Office — the office charged with planning, developing and mounting Library of Congress exhibitions, both on-site and online. I began working at the Library in 1991, hired on as a picture researcher for the “City of Magnificent Distances: The Nation’s Capital” exhibition, and I never left. I have directed exhibitions, both national and ..read more

This story also appears in the July-August edition of the Library of Congress Magazine. First-time visitors to the Library of Congress campus often ask the same question: Where do I even begin? It’s easy to see why. For many, it’s awe of the historic Jefferson Building that stops them. One of the most beautiful spaces in America, the Jefferson is a head-spinning whirl of murals, marble, sculpture, stained glass and soaring architecture. For others, it’s the lure of the institution’s massive collections. The Library holds an endless array of fascinating things, more than 175 million items that ..read more

Novelist, short-story writer and essayist George Saunders was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction Saturday evening in one of the final sessions of the 2023 National Book Festival, conferring a lifetime honor on a versatile writer whose most famous book cast one of Washington’s most famous residents in a surreal light. “This year’s winner is George Saunders, and you might as well clap right now,” Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden told the enthusiastic crowd before giving the winner’s impressive resume. Saunders, the author of 12 books and a professor ..read more

—This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It appears in the May-June issue of the Liibrary of Congress Magazine. The nation will pause for a national holiday on Monday to mark Juneteenth, the anniversary of the day when enslaved people in Texas finally heard the news of emancipation at the end of the Civil War. The Library preserves the history of that day in many ways, including Ralph Ellison’s delirium-dream of a second novel, “Juneteenth,” in which he took a deep dive into the complexities of race and violence and the costs of transformation in America ..read more

In 1783, James Madison gave a locket with a portrait of himself to a young woman as a token of love and attached this braided lock of his hair to the back. Rare Book and Special Collections Division. This story also appears in the July-August 2022 edition of the Library of Congress Magazine. Of all the strange things in the Library’s collections, the most common strange thing is … hair. Lots of hair. We have locks of it, tresses, braids, clippings and strands. We have the hair of famous people, not so famous people, and unknown people who sent their hair to someone else. The Library holds ha ..read more