Archive for June 2017 (20 posts)

Pic of the Week: Cajun Music from Louisiana

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Photo by Shawn Miller

The BeauSoleil Quartet performed the lively and soulful music of Louisiana Cajuns on June 28 in the Coolidge Auditorium as part of the Library’s Homegrown Concert Series. For four decades now, the quartet has been taking traditional ingredients—waltzes, two-steps, Cajun French lyrics, hot fiddle licks and irresistible accordion—and spicing them up with eclectic percussion, acoustic guitar and an open and creative attitude toward music. In 1998, BeauSoleil became the first Cajun band to win a Grammy Award, and it added a second in 2008. In 2011, it was inducted into the Louisiana Music Hall of Fame.

History’s Greatest Birthday Card: The Polish Declarations

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This is a guest post by Sahr Conway-Lanz, a historian in the Manuscript Division. Former Librarian of Congress James Billington once called the Polish Declarations of Admiration and Friendship for the United States “possibly the largest expression of affection one nation ever made to another.” In 1926, for the 150th anniversary of the birth of […]

New Online: Margaret Bayard Smith Papers

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This is the first of two related guest posts by Cassandra Good, associate editor of the Papers of James Monroe and author of “Founding Friendships: Friendships Between Men and Women in the Early American Republic” (2015), and Susan Holbrook Perdue, director of digital strategies at the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and adviser to a […]

May It Please the Court: “Drawing Justice: The Art of Courtroom Illustration”

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(The following is an excerpt from an article by Sara W. Duke from the May/June 2017 issue of LCM, the Library of Congress Magazine. Duke, curator of popular and applied graphic art, writes about how courtroom illustrations capture the styles of the times in which cases are heard. Read the entire May/June issue here.) “Drawing Justice: […]

Serving with Pride: LGBTQ+ Veterans’ Oral History Workshop

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This is a guest post by Meg Metcalf, women’s, gender and LGBTQ+ studies librarian in the Main Reading Room. Why are oral histories important to collect? What unique perspectives might we gain from oral histories that other formats don’t offer? What does “empowering the narrator” really look like? What ethical concerns and obligations do we […]

2017 Main Stage Authors Announced!

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(The following is a repost from the National Book Festival blog. The author is Lola Pyne of the Library’s Office of Communications.) Earlier this week, Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden made an exciting video announcement detailing the stellar authors who will headline this year’s Library of Congress National Book Festival. She was joined in front of a […]

This Day in History: Statue of Liberty

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The Statue of Liberty arrived at its permanent home on Bedloe’s Island in New York Harbor at 1 p.m. on June 19, 1885, “snugly packed in the hold of the French transport Isère,” according to a New York Times report the following day. Multiple delegations of dignitaries, 20,000 citizens, and “every species of craft known […]

Pic of the Week: Wonder Woman Visits the Library

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Lynda Carter (right), the famed actress known for her role as Wonder Woman, talked comics with Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden on June 14 in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium. From June 14 through 17, the Library is celebrating the world of comics with its “Library of Awesome” pop-up exhibit and other programming being presented in […]

Remix, Slang and Memes: A New Collection Documents Web Culture

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This is a guest post by Nicole Saylor, head of archives at the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress. The Library of Congress just announced the release of the Web Cultures Web Archive Collection, a representative sampling of websites documenting the creation and sharing of emergent cultural traditions on the web. Why is […]