TITLE: Aeronautics at the Library of Congress: Forty Years of One User's Experience
SPEAKER: Tom Crouch
EVENT DATE: 10/24/2007
FORMAT: Video + Captions
RUNNING TIME: 48 minutes
TRANSCRIPT: View Transcript (link will open in a new window)
DESCRIPTION:
A nationally known aviation historian and biographer of the Wright brothers, Tom Crouch has been mining the treasures of the Library of Congress for more than four decades.
Crouch discussed the Library of Congress collections, and his many hours searching through materials, in a lecture titled "Aeronautics at the Library of Congress: Forty Years of One User's Experience" in a program sponsored by the Science, Technology and Business Division.
The occasion of the lecture was to celebrate the publication of a Library of Congress book titled "Aeronautical and Astronautical Resources of the Library of Congress: A Comprehensive Guide."
Speaker Biography: Tom Crouch, senior curator of the Division of Aeronautics at the National Air and Space Museum, is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and many articles for both magazines and scholarly journals. Most of his publications are based on research in the many divisions of the Library of Congress. Some of Crouch's books that draw most heavily on the Library's collections include "Rocketeers and Gentlemen Engineers: A History of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics and What Came Before" (2006); "The Bishop's Boys: A Life of Wilbur and Orville Wright" (1989); "The Eagle Aloft: Two Centuries of the Balloon in America" (1983); and "A Dream of Wings: Americans and the Airplane, 1875-1905" (1981). Since 1974, Crouch has served both the National Air and Space Museum and the National Museum of American History in a variety of curatorial and administrative posts. In the fall of 2000, President Clinton appointed him chairman of the First Flight Centennial Federal Advisory Board. Crouch holds a Ph.D. in American history from Ohio State University, and an honorary degree in Doctor of Humane Letters from Wright State University. He has won several major writing awards.
