According to the 1860 census, the population of the United States that year was 31,429,891. Of that number, 3,952, 838 were reported as enslaved. The 1860 census was the last time the federal government took a count of the Southern slave population. In 1861, the United States Coast Survey issued two maps of slavery based …
(The following is an article from the September-October 2012 issue of the Library’s new magazine, LCM, discussing how the Library acquires its collections.) By Audrey Fischer Beginning with a purchase of 740 books by Congress in 1800, the Library of Congress collection has grown to nearly 152 million items. But purchase is just one acquisition …
(This is the third in a series of posts featuring presidential campaign items from the Library’s collections. Read the others here and here.) Every election year, as candidates go head to head during their campaigns, a new wave of vocabulary is born. Political idioms that have found their way into our lexicon include POTUS, left-wing, …
(The following is a guest article written by my colleague Mark Hartsell, editor of the Library’s staff newsletter, The Gazette, about today’s opening of a new exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of the institution’s Hebraic collection.) A simple label inside thousands of rare books bears witness to the origins of one of the great collections …
LeRoy Gresham (1847-1865) was a teenaged invalid who kept a diary for nearly every day of the Civil War, recording the news, his Confederate sympathies and perceptive details about life on the homefront as he experienced the conflict through newspapers, letters and personal visitors. The son of an attorney, judge, and plantation owner in Macon, …
Old newspapers have acquired an iffy reputation over the years. We bemoan the trees that had to die to bring them into existence for their one day of glory; we dub them “mullet-wrappers” or note, as they do in the British Isles, that “Yesterday’s news is tomorrow’s fish-and-chip paper.” But old newspapers can be addictive! …
(The following is an article from the September-October 2012 issue of the Library’s new magazine, LCM, highlighting “first drafts” of important documents in American history.) O! say, can you see by the dawn’s early light …” These words are as American as, well, the American flag that inspired them. Francis Scott Key, a young …
With the announcement of the new Library website, congress.gov (you can read more about it here and here), media outlets in September were all over the story. The Washington Post’s Ideas & Innovations column called the site’s design a “boon” for mobile users, allowing those pages to expand or contract based on screen size. Other …
“That on the first day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three, all persons held as slaves within any State or designated part of a State, the people whereof shall then be in rebellion against the United States, shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free; and the Executive …
(The Library of Congress is not solely our collections. It’s also our people. Often our blog showcases the treasures. Now we’ll also showcase the minds. The following is a guest post by Jason Steinhauer, a program specialist in the Library’s John W. Kluge Center, to debut a new blog series, “Inquiring Minds.” We start with …