Archive for the Pinterest Category (10 posts)

Featured Item: Let’s Go Sledding!

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An 1887 advertisement for Star Toboggans, showing people sledding at night.

To celebrate the season, we’re highlighting a historical advertisement for Star Toboggans on our home page this month. The colorful sledding scene is part of the Library’s Popular Graphic Arts Collection, which contains more than 15,000 historical prints published between 1700 and 1900.

The prints depict images from everyday life, historical events, celebrities, popular destinations and more. Some, like the Star Toboggans piece, advertise products—in this case bobsleds.

American printmakers created most of the prints in the collection—the well-known printmaker Currier & Ives is well represented, for example. But publishers from many other countries are included as well.

The Library acquired the Star Toboggan ad in 1887, when the Phoenix Lithographic Company of Chicago deposited the art with a registration submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office. Many of the prints in the collection were acquired in this way.

For more scenes of the season, check out our Winter Wonderland Pinterest board!

Rare Book of the Month: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Brownies

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(This is a guest post by Elizabeth Gettins of the Library’s Digital Conversion Team.) This month’s rare book honors William Edward Burghardt (W.E.B.) Du Bois, born Feb. 23, 1868. It features one of his most beloved creations, The Brownies’ Book, a serial published in 1920 and 1921. It is digitally presented here—22 back-to-back chronological issues. […]

Congas, Sambas and Falling Plaster

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I was 15 years old, sitting cross-legged next to my friend Mascha on a cork-tile floor at Mammoth Gardens, a roller-skating rink built in 1910. Plaster, occasionally, was falling from the ceiling – because the band on the stage that night was the drum-heavy Santana, which had just released its 1970 album “Abraxas.” That’s the […]

Rare Book of the Month: A Suffragist “In the Kitchen”

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(The following is a guest blog post written by Elizabeth Gettins, Library of Congress digital library specialist.)  It’s the time of year when one’s thoughts turn to hearth and home in preparation for Thanksgiving. In honor of this quintessential American holiday, “In the Kitchen,” by Elizabeth Smith Miller, is the Rare Book of the Month. […]

Inquiring Minds: How a New Walt Whitman Poem was Found at the Library of Congress

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(The following is a post written by Peter Armenti from the Poetry and Literature Center’s blog, From the Catbird Seat. Armenti spoke with a researcher who discovered a new Walt Whitman poem in the Library’s collections.) Walt Whitman enthusiasts were treated to a surprise last December when news broke that Wendy Katz, an associate professor […]

We’ve Got Style

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Every year, top fashion designers, style bloggers and journalists, celebrities and other movers and shakers gather in chic cities across the globe to showcase and check out the latest styles in clothing, accessories, hair and even makeup. Fashion shows for Autumn/Winter womenswear is usually held in February, with the Spring/Summer looks being exhibited in September. […]

Celebrating Women: Women’s History on Pinterest

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(The following blog post is by Jennifer Harbster, a science research specialist and blogger for the Library’s Science, Technology, and Busines blog, “Inside Adams.” Harbster also helped create the Library of Congress Women’s History Month board on Pinterest.) March is designated as Women’s History Month and this year the National Women’s History Project has selected […]