Virtual Exhibits

Many Library of Congress Online Exhibits feature documents from Manuscript Division collections:

The African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture
Marks the publication of The African-American Mosaic: A Library of Congress Resource Guide for the Study of Black History and Culture. The exhibit explores four topics from the book: colonization, abolition, migrations, and the Works Progress Administration.

The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
Showcases the Library’s incomparable African American collections. The largest black history exhibit held at the Library includes books, documents, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings.

American Treasures of the Library of Congress
Drawing on the special and general collections from throughout the Library’s holdings, this broadly interdisciplinary exhibition provides unique insight into various aspects of American history and culture. Objects displayed are organized according to the three categories that Thomas Jefferson used for his historic library: memory, reason, and imagination.

The American Colony in Jerusalem
Offers a glimpse into the remarkable history and work of the American Colony in Jerusalem. A utopian community formed in the Holy Land by a group of American Christians in 1881, the eclectic American Colony evolved as empires and nation-states shifted around it.

Benjamin Franklin: In His Own Words
The depth and breadth of Benjamin Franklin's public, professional, and scientific accomplishments are highlighted through documents, letters, books, broadsides, and cartoons from throughout his life and career.

Bob Hope and American Variety
Explores variety entertainment through the lens of Bob Hope’s long and rich career, in which he continued to practice the variety traditions he learned on the vaudeville stage. Includes comedic scripts from Manuscript Division collections.

Hope for America: Peformers, Politics and Pop Culture
A look at politics and popular entertainment during the lifetime of the legendary humorist Bob Hope, as well as Hope's legacy within the field of American political humor.

A Century of Creativity: The MacDowell Colony 1907-2007
Provides a unique interdisciplinary opportunity to appreciate the MacDowell Colony experience and success, from its earliest fellows to the most recent, including writers, poets, artists, playwrights, and composers.

Churchill and the Great Republic
Presents the life of Winston Churchill, his career, and his connection with the United States, a country he called “The Great Republic.” A unique interactive presentation is a featured part of the exhibit.

Creating the United States
Offers insights into how the nation’s founding documents were forged and the role that cooperation, compromise, and creativity played in the unprecedented act of forming a self-governing country. On physical display at the Library of Congress beginning April 2008.

Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents
A preview of American Treasures presentations on the founding documents of the United States, including pictorial images as well as texts.

The Dream of Flight
Honors the achievement of Orville and Wilbur Wright, using the Library’s rare and manuscript materials and photographs to explore their invention and career, as well as the notion that flight, whether fanciful or actual, has inspired and occupied a central place in most cultures.

For European Recovery: The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Marshall Plan
Marks the fiftieth anniversary of Secretary of State George Marshall’s speech proposing a solution to the hunger, unemployment, and housing shortages that faced Europeans in the aftermath of World War II and examines the ways his plan benefited Europe and the U.S.

Exploring the Early Americas
Examines indigenous cultures, the drama of the encounters between Native Americans and Europeans, and the changes caused by the meeting of the two worlds. It features artifacts, books, and documents from the Jay I. Kislak Collection and related maps and manuscripts.

From Haven to Home: 350 Years of Jewish Life in America
Features more than two hundred treasures of American Judaica from the collections of the Library of Congress, augmented by a selection of important loans from other cooperating cultural institutions.

The Gettysburg Address
Shows the Library’s two copies of the famous address. President Lincoln gave a copy to each of his two private secretaries, John Nicolay and John Hay. The Nicolay copy is believed to be the earliest copy that exists

I Do Solemnly Swear... Inaugural Materials from the Collections of the Library of Congress
Offers a glimpse into the history of American presidential inaugurations. Eighteen presidents are featured in the display, from George Washington to John F. Kennedy.

In the Beginning Was the Word: Russian Church and Native Alaskan Cultures
Presents objects from a relatively unknown archive of significant documents. The exhibit explores the moving human exchanges that took place between the Russian Orthodox Church in Alaska and Native Alaskans between 1794 and about 1915.

John Bull and Uncle Sam: Four Centuries of British and American Relations
Brings together for the first time treasures from the two greatest libraries in the English-speaking world—the British Library and the Library of Congress—in order to illuminate the relationship between the two countries.

Madison’s Treasures
Examines documents related to two seminal events in which James Madison played a major role: the drafting and ratification of the U.S. Constitution and the introduction of the amendments that became the Bill of Rights.

Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture
Documents Mead’s life, her career as an anthropologist, and the critical reception of her work by drawing upon the 500,000–item Mead Collection, one of the Library’s largest collections for a single individual.

The Red Book of Carl Jung: Its Origins and Influence
Features the preeminent psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung’s famous Red Book, which records the creation of the seminal theories that Jung developed after his 1913 split with Sigmund Freud, and explores its place in Jung’s work through related items from the Library’s collections.

Religion and the Founding of the American Republic
Documents the role that religion played in the shaping of early American life and in the formation of the American republic.

Revising Himself: Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass
Traces the different occupations and preparations that led Whitman to become the author of Leaves of Grass, as well as his subsequent evolution as a poet.

Rivers, Edens, Empires: Lewis & Clark and the Revealing of America
Features the Library’s rich collections of exploration material documenting the mid-eighteenth to mid–nineteenth century quest to connect the East and the West by means of a waterway passage.

Roger L. Stevens Presents
Examines Stevens’s career through the great number of stage productions that he presented or fostered indirectly, his involvment with the National Endowent for the Arts, and his role as in creating the John F. Kennedy Center.

Sigmund Freud: Conflict and Culture
Examines Freud’s life, his key ideas, and their impact on the twentieth century. The exhibit includes photographs, prints, manuscripts, first editions, home movies, and materials from newspapers, magazines and comic books.

Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation
Presents the story of building the nation’s Capitol and the symbolic, aesthetic, and pragmatic issues that surrounded the creation of America’s most important public building.

Thomas Jefferson
Draws on the Library’s Thomas Jefferson materials to examine the influence Jefferson’s thoughts and interests had on his own life, the American republic, and the world.

With an Even Hand: Brown v. Board at Fifty
Commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark judicial case, which declared that “separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.” This decision was pivotal to the struggle for racial desegregation in the United States.

With Malice Towards None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition
Commemorates the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the nation’s revered sixteenth president. More than a chronological account of the life of Abraham Lincoln, the exhibition reveals Lincoln the man, whose thoughts, words, and actions were deeply affected by personal experiences and pivotal historic events. A companion volume containing original essays about favorite Lincoln documents, In Lincoln's hand: His Original Manuscripts With Commentary by Distinguished Americans, is available for sale through the Library of Congress Gift Shop. See also the Opening Reception of "With Malice Toward None" Lincoln Exhibition (webcast)

The physical exhibition closed at the Library of Congress May 10, 2009. The exhibit is travelling to a series of venues around the country into 2011. See it at the California Museum for History in Sacramento (summer 2009); the Newberry Library in Chicago (fall 2009); the Indiana State Museum in Indianapolis (winter/spring 2010); the Atlanta History Center in Atlanta (fall 2010); and the Durham Western Heritage Museum in Omaha, Neb. (winter 2011). Please visit the Web sites of those institutions for more information.

Women Come to the Front: Journalists, Photographers, and Broadcasters During WWII
Features women journalists who were chosen because of the strength and variety of their collections in the Library. Like their male counterparts, the women followed various paths to their wartime assignments.

The Work of Charles and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention
Explores how this famous couple shaped America’s culture in the twentieth century. Charles and Ray Eames’s work represented defining moments in American history, such as the economy’s shift from making goods to producing information.

World Treasures of the Library of Congress: Beginnings
Looks at how various cultures explained the beginning of the world, depicted the first human beings, and defined the heavens and the earth by drawing upon unique items from the Library’s international collections in more than 450 languages.