Macbeth

Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5, Scene 5

It overwhelms you with its fury and its phantom splendor.

Brooks Atkinson,
The New York Times,
quoted in the playbill
for the Bridgeport, Connecticut,
performance of Macbeth.

On July 25, 1936, after a five-night run, the audience at the Park Theatre in Bridgeport, Connecticut, applauded the closing night performance of Macbeth, produced by John Houseman and directed by Orson Welles for the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) of the Works Progress Administration (WPA). The FTP was one of five arts-related projects established during the first term of President Franklin D. Roosevelt to assist unemployed writers, actors, and artists during the Great Depression.

Costume Design from New York production of Macbeth (Sketch #1 (front)),

Costume Design from New York production of Macbeth (Sketch #2 (front)),

Costume Design from New York production of Macbeth (Sketch #3 (front)).
The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939

John Houseman came to the Federal Theatre Project from an already established career that included directing the avant-garde opera, Four Saints in Three Acts, by Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson, in New York.

Welles, just twenty-one years old at the time, began his theatrical career directing Shakespeare's Macbeth and Christopher Marlowe's Tragical History of Dr. Faustus for the Federal Theatre Project.

Welles' designs for the plays were characterized by the creative risk-taking that exemplified his dramatic work. His use of racially integrated casting and "alternative" settings for these masterpieces was an innovation.

For the former play, Welles cast African-American performers in all the roles, moved the play's setting from Scotland to the Caribbean, and changed the witches to Haitian witch doctors.

Photographic Print from New York production of Macbeth,

Photographic Print from New York production of Macbeth,

Photographic Print from New York production of Macbeth,

Photographic Print from New York production of Macbeth,
Production Photographs for the New York City Performance of Macbeth,
Directed by Orson Welles, New Lafayette Theatre, April 14-June 20, 1936.
The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939

Critics hailed the results as "startling," "splendid," and "colorful." After a series of sold-out performances in Harlem, Welles' "Voodoo Macbeth" took to the road, traveling to several cities on the East coast.

• The collection The New Deal Stage: Selections from the Federal Theatre Project, 1935-1939 features the production books, stage and costume designs, still photographs, and posters of three Federal Theatre Project productions: Macbeth, Dr. Faustus, and Power, a play written and performed by the Living Newspaper unit, an innovative FTP project.
• Read more about Orson Welles' production of Macbeth, in "The Play That Electrified Harlem," one of four illustrated articles presented along with the collection. The article, written by Wendy Smith, was originally published in Civilization magazine.
• Read Macbeth or browse the Complete Works of William Shakespeare online.

Pioneer Day

Brigham Young,
seated in [United States Capitol] rotunda,
Washington, D.C.
Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
circa 1920-1950.
Washington As It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

Completing a treacherous thousand-mile exodus, an ill and exhausted Brigham Young and fellow members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints arrived in Utah's Great Salt Lake Valley on July 24, 1847. The Mormon pioneers viewed their arrival as the founding of a Mormon homeland, hence Pioneer Day. The Mormons, as they were commonly known, left their settlement in Nauvoo, Illinois, and journeyed West seeking refuge from religious persecution. The final impetus for their trek was the murder of founder and prophet Joseph Smith on June 27, 1844.

Determined to settle in an isolated region, the pioneers made their way across the plains and over the Rocky Mountains to Utah. They lost many of their party to disease during the winter months. By the time that they reached Utah, the desolate valley was a welcome sight. Potatoes and turnips were soon planted, and a dam was built. With solemn ceremonies, the settlers consecrated the two-square-mile city, and sent back word that the "promised land" had been found. By the end of 1847, nearly 2,000 Mormons had settled in the Salt Lake Valley.

Salt Lake City, Utah,
H. Wellge, panoramic map artist,
1891.
Panoramic Maps

Mormon Temple Grounds,
Salt Lake City, Utah,
L. Hollard, photographer,
1912.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

July 24 is still celebrated as Pioneer Day in Utah and several other Western states. The bravery of the original settlers and their strength of character and physical endurance is commemorated with festivities including games and music, speeches, parades, rodeos, and picnics.

The following American Memory collections contain perspectives on the Mormon church:

• American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940 collection contains "The Mormon Church West of the Rio Grande" which recounts the settlement of Carson, New Mexico, by a band of Mormon pioneers.
• Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 links to diaries, maps, photos and illustrations, and published guides for immigrants that provide information on the pioneers who trekked westward across America to Utah, Montana, and the Pacific between 1847 and the meeting of the rails in 1869.
• Read A Child of the Sea and Life Among the Mormons, Elizabeth Whitney Williams' eyewitness account of James Jesse Strang's short-lived dissident Mormon monarchy on Beaver Island, Michigan. Williams' memoir is available through the collection Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910.
• Search on Mormon in History of the American West, 1860-1920: Photographs from the Collection of the Denver Public Library for a variety of photographs, primarily in Salt Lake City, as well as on Brigham Young.
• Search on Mormon in The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books and The Nineteenth Century in Print: Periodicals for a rich variety of materials including "Mormonism in Illinois" in the American Whig Review and The Mormons, or, Latter-day saints, in the valley of the Great salt lake….
• Publisher Samuel Bowles gives his impression of the Mormon community of Salt Lake City in the mid-1860s in Our New West. Access this text through the collection The Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920. Start reading on page 206.
• Search on Utah in Map Collections for early maps of the Utah territory.
• Search on Mormon, Brigham Young, or Joseph Smith in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog (PPOC) for a variety of images—including photographs and prints.
• Also consult Today in History:
  • Search the Today in History Archive on the names of states such as Minnesota, Kansas, or the Dakotas to learn more about settling the West.
  • Today in History features about Westward expansion include the opening of the Oregon Territory in 1848, the 1862 Homestead Act, the birthday of well-known pioneer, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and the first transcontinental railroad which the Mormons helped to build.
  • Search the Today in History Archive on the names of other religious groups to find features on significant events in the history of these groups in America, such as, the establishment of the first Jewish community and the first synagogue in America; William Penn's founding of the first Quaker colony in America; Roger Williams' championship of freedom of worship and his founding of the Rhode Island colony; and the charter of the Maryland colony, a refuge for Roman Catholics.

Ernest Hemingway

If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water.

Ernest Hemingway, Death in the Afternoon (New York: Scribner, 1932), 192.

Hemingway at His Writing Desk During His African Safari,
Earl Theisen, photographer,
1953.
Featured in Picturing Hemingway: A Writer in His Time,
The National Portrait Gallery
Original photograph from the Ernest Hemingway Collection,
John F. Kennedy Library

Ernest Hemingway,
drawing by Ralph Barton,
first published in Vanity Fair.
Caroline and Erwin Swann Collection of Caricature and Cartoon,
Prints and Photographs Division

On July 21, 1899, Dr. Clarence Hemingway stepped onto the porch of his Oak Park, Illinois, home and blew his cornet to announce the birth of his son, Ernest. During Ernest Hemingway's boyhood, his family spent much time at their cottage near Walloon Lake in northern Michigan where his father enjoyed hunting and other sports. The love for the great outdoors and the physically active life his father instilled in him remained with Hemingway for the rest of his life.

After graduating from high school, Hemingway worked briefly as a reporter for the Kansas City Star before volunteering for service in World War I. Excluded from regular military duty because of a defective eye, he worked as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross in Italy, where he was badly injured. Hemingway drew on his wartime experience of falling in love with his nurse while recuperating in a Milan hospital as background for his novel A Farewell to Arms (1929).

Hemingway returned to Europe after the war, working in Paris as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star. There, he became part of a group of expatriate American artists and writers who would come to be known as the "Lost Generation," a term coined by writer Gertrude Stein and used by Hemingway as an epigraph to his first novel, The Sun Also Rises (1926).

Hemingway developed a passion for Spain and for the country's national sport of bullfighting, and he worked there as a correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. As a reporter during World War II, Hemingway flew several missions with the Royal Air Force, crossed the English Channel with the American troops on D-Day, and participated in the liberation of Paris. His remarkable adventures found their way into books such as For Whom the Bell Tolls.

Is there any chance that we might send guys to the war not to write govt. publications or propaganda but so as to have something good written afterwards?…What do you think? Maybe I could be the accredited correspondent for the Library of Congress? Write me about it seriously will you?

The final paragraph of this 1943 letter includes an appeal to Hemingway's friend, Librarian of Congress Archibald MacLeish, the poet and dramatist who, at that time, was also serving as assistant director of the Office of War Information. Although MacLeish was unable to grant him accreditation, Hemingway did become a foreign correspondent during World War II. In the letter, Hemingway also writes of Ezra Pound's problems and makes suggestions as to how the poet's friends might help him.

Letter, Ernest Hemingway to Archibald MacLeish,
August 10, 1943.
Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years

Hemingway received a Pulitzer Prize in fiction for The Old Man and the Sea in 1953 and the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954. Suffering from anxiety and depression, Hemingway took his own life in 1961. His use of terse prose and dialogue, and short simple sentences stripped of emotional rhetoric, is perhaps the most frequently appropriated writing style of the twentieth century.

• Search the Today in History Archive on writer to find more features on American literary figures including Hemingway's friends and contemporaries, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, and Archibald MacLeish.
• Visit the Ernest Hemingway Foundation Oak Park Web site to learn more about Hemingway's life and work and to take a tour of his birthplace.
• Visit the National Portrait Gallery online exhibition Picturing Hemingway: A Writer In His Time to view remarkable images of Hemingway, his family and his friends. Included are a photo of Hemingway in the bull ring at Pamplona, his passport photo, and even a high school English paper.
• Read Hemingway's work, available at your local public library, and then see some of the classic films which were adapted from his stories and novels, such as The Sun Also Rises (1957), A Farewell to Arms (1957), The Snows of Kilimanjaro (1952), The Killers (1946), To Have and Have Not (1944), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), and A Farewell to Arms (1932). Hemingway was often vocal about his disdain for these adaptations which are viewed as film classics by less vitriolic critics. Screenplays of some of the adaptations were written by writers, such as Hemingway's friends Fitzgerald and Faulkner, who did not disdain earning extra cash by writing for Hollywood.

The First Battle of Bull Run

Battle field of Bull Run, Va. July 21st 1861, Showing the positions of both armies at 4 o'clock, P.M.,
Map Collections: Military Battles and Campaigns

On July 21, 1861, a dry summer Sunday, Union and Confederate troops clashed outside Manassas, Virginia, in the first major engagement of the Civil War, the First Battle of Bull Run.

Union General Irvin McDowell hoped to march his men across a small stream called Bull Run in the vicinity of Manassas, Virginia, which was well-guarded by a force of Confederates under General P. G. T. Beauregard. McDowell needed to find a way across the stream and through the Southern line that stretched for over six miles along the banks of Bull Run.

McDowell launched a small diversionary attack at the Stone Bridge while marching the bulk of his force north around the Confederates' left flank. The march was slow, but McDowell's army crossed the stream near Sudley Church and began to march south behind the Confederate line. Some of Beauregard's troops, recognizing that the attack at Stone Bridge was just a diversion, fell back just in time to meet McDowell's oncoming force.

First Battle of Bull Run- Bull Run, Virginia

Matthews' or the Stone House

Cub Run, with Destroyed Bridge
George N. Barnard, photographer,
March 1862.
Selected Civil War Photographs
These photographs of First Bull Run were not made at the time of the battle on July 21, 1861; the photographers had to wait until the Confederate Army evacuated Centreville and Manassas in March 1862. Their views of various landmarks of the previous summer are displayed here according to the direction of the Federal advance, a long-flanking movement along Sudley's Ford.

When Beauregard learned of the attack, he sent reinforcements to aid the small group of Southerners, but they were unable to hold back the oncoming tide of Union troops. As more Union soldiers joined the fray, the Southerners were slowly pushed back past the Stone House and up Henry Hill.

The battle raged for several hours around the home of Mrs. Judith Henry on top of Henry Hill, with each side taking control of the hill more than once. Slowly, more and more Southern men poured onto the field to support the Confederate defense, and Beauregard’s men pushed the Northerners back.

At this point in the battle, Confederate General Barnard Bee attempted to rally his weary men by pointing to Brigadier General Thomas Jackson, who proudly stood his ground in the face of the Union assault. Bee cried, "There stands Jackson like a stone wall!" From that moment on, Thomas Jackson was known as "Stonewall" Jackson.

As the day wore on, the strength of McDowell's troops was sapped by the continuous arrival of fresh Southern reinforcements. Eventually, the stubborn Confederates proved more than a match for McDowell's men, and the Northerners began to retreat across Bull Run.

The Union pullout began as an orderly movement. However, when the bridge over Cub Run was destroyed, cutting off the major route of retreat, it degenerated into a rout. The narrow roads and fords, clogged by the many carts, wagons, and buggies full of people who had driven out from Washington, D.C., to see the spectacle, hampered the withdrawal of the Union Army. The Southerners tried to launch a pursuit, but were too tired and disorganized from the day's fighting to be effective.

The morning of July 22 found most of the soldiers of the Union Army on their way back to Washington or already there. It was more than a year before the Northerners attempted once again to cross the small stream outside of Manassas named Bull Run.

"Beauregard Bull Run Quick Step"
J. A. Rosenberger, music,
1862.
Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920

• Search the collection Selected Civil War Photographs on Bull Run to find more photographs documenting both the First Battle of Bull Run and the Second Battle of Bull Run.
• View a manuscript map of the battlefield, executed a month after the first Battle of Bull Run. Through the use of a profile, the draftsman demonstrates that the height of the corn, the depth of the creek, and other features of the site influenced the course of the battle. This map is just one of numerous items related to the Civil War found in the online exhibition American Treasures of the Library of Congress.
• Search the collection of Civil War Maps on Bull Run or Manassas to find maps of the battlefield area including the New York Daily Tribune War Maps published on July 30, 1861 that include a list of those injured or killed in the battle.
• Civil War Treasures from the New-York Historical Society contains fifteen stereographs of Bull Run.
• Search on Manassas or Bull Run in Military Battles and Campaigns to find maps of the conflict.
• Search the following collections on Bull Run to find a wealth of nineteenth-century songs about the battle:
  • America Singing: Nineteenth-Century Song Sheets
  • Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920
  • "We'll Sing to Abe Our Song!": Sheet Music about Lincoln, Emancipation, and the Civil War from the Alfred Whital Stern Collection of Lincolniana
• View Primary Documents in American History: Civil War and Reconstruction, 1860-1877 for a look at some of the most important documents of the Civil War era.
• Search the Today in History Archive on Civil War battle to find more features on the war, including the Second Battle of Manassas which occurred a year after the First Battle of Bull Run; the Battle of Antietam, and Day One, Day Two, and Day Three of the Battle of Gettysburg.

Ty Cobb, the Georgia Peach

Hugh Jennings/Ty Cobb
Left: Hugh Jennings
Center: Ty Cobb Steals Third
Right: Ty Cobb, 1912.
Baseball Cards, 1887-1914

On July 18, 1927, Ty Cobb recorded his 4,000th career hit. Cobb finished out his Major League Baseball career in 1928 with a grand total of 4,191 hits. Cobb stood as the all-time hit leader until his total was surpassed by Pete Rose in 1985.

Ty Cobb, Detroit, and Joe Jackson, Cleveland,
circa 1913.
Jackie Robinson and Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s

Cobb began his professional career at the age of eighteen with the Detroit Tigers with which he played twenty-two of his twenty-four seasons. Like the careers of baseball greats Pete Rose and "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, Cobb's was marred by scandal. He was allowed to resign in 1926 in lieu of being banned for alleged gambling violations. However, Cobb was subsequently exonerated and reinstated by baseball's first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Cobb, born on December 18, 1886, in Narrows, Georgia, and nicknamed "The Georgia Peach," was known for his temper as well as for his outstanding athletic ability. He stole home fifty-four times—fifty times with the Detroit Tigers and four times with the Philadelphia Athletics, won twelve batting average titles, and managed the Detroit Tigers for six seasons while also playing center field. His lifetime batting average was .367. Cobb made use of his reputation as an aggressive (often dirty) base runner to intimidate infielders, stealing 892 bases during his professional career. Ty Cobb was one of the first five players elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1936, along with Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, Babe Ruth, and Honus Wagner.

Chas. O'Leary and Tyrus Cobb,
1912.
Baseball Cards, 1887-1914
This baseball card featuring Chas O'Leary and Tyrus Cobb, produced by the American Tobacco Company in 1912, shows Cobb sliding into third base. Click on the back of the card to read a description of Cobb's base running statistics.

For more about baseball and its legendary players, search the following American Memory collections:

• Search on Ty Cobb or browse the collection, Baseball Cards, 1887-1914 to see historic baseball cards and the special presentation Tinkers to Evers to Chance!
• See the special presentation Baseball Beginnings to learn about the early history of the game. Learn about the color barrier that existed in the major leagues until 1947 in Jackie Robinson and Baseball Highlights, 1860s-1960s.
• A search on Ty Cobb in Photographs from the Chicago Daily News yields thirty-four images of the man. Search on baseball for photographs of other players.
• Search the Today in History Archive on baseball for more events in baseball history, such as the first game of the World Series and for the stories of legendary players such as Jackie Robinson, Walter Johnson, Cy Young, and Satchel Paige.

John Paul Jones

John Paul Jones,
photograph of an engraving,
between 1895 and 1915.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

John Paul Jones, naval hero of the American Revolution, died in Paris on July 18, 1792. Born John Paul in Scotland on July 6, 1747, he apprenticed at age thirteen to a shipowner and sailed to Barbados. Owing to problems on another voyage to the West Indies (in 1773 he killed a sailor during a mutiny in Tobago, claiming self-defense), he fled to Virginia and changed his name—first to John Jones, and later to John Paul Jones.

Jones was commissioned a first lieutenant in the Continental Navy in December 1775 and the following year was commissioned a captain. His achievements at sea during the war were spectacular. Jones distinguished himself in action in the Atlantic Ocean during 1776 and 1777 in command of the naval ships the Alfred, the Providence, and the Ranger, taking many British ships as prizes.

John Paul Jones' home in Fredericksburg, Virginia,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer, circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

On September 23, 1779, Jones achieved his most famous victory off the coast of England. With his flagship the Bonhomme Richard, which he had renamed in honor of his patron Benjamin Franklin, and accompanied by four other vessels, Jones engaged the British merchant fleet led by the Serapis in heavy combat for over three-and-one-half hours. During the battle, Jones answered the enemy's demand that he surrender with the immortal words, "I have not yet begun to fight!"

After heavy losses of life on both sides, the British surrendered. Jones and his crew left their sinking ship and transferred to the captured Serapis. Congress passed a resolution thanking Jones and he received a sword and the Order of the Military Merit from King Louis XVI of France.

John Paul Jones held no further appointments in the United States Navy, but he served as rear admiral in the Russian Navy under Empress Catherine II of Russia from 1788-90. After his discharge, he resided in Paris in obscurity until his death and was buried in an unmarked grave. More than a hundred years later, the remains of the Navy's first hero—lionized for his brilliant naval career, were identified and brought back to the United States with a full naval escort. His body is interred in a marble crypt, modeled on Napoleon's tomb, in the chapel of the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland.

Statue of John Paul Jones,
Washington, D.C.,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer, circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

• For more images, search on John Paul Jones in the following collections:
  • Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959
  • Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920
• Search on John Paul Jones or naval academy in Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historical American Engineering Record, 1933-Present for more images of the crypt and the U.S. Naval Academy.
• View the August 1785 letter from Jones to John Jay, minister of foreign affairs, alerting Jay that Algeria had declared war against the United States included in Documents from the Continental Congress and the Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789.
• The following collections contain primary source material related to John Paul Jones and the American Revolution:
  • A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875
  • The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress
  • George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, 1741-1799
• Read a yarn about a seafaring ghost who claimed to be a friend of John Paul Jones in the American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940 interview "Forty Fathoms."
• Search the Today in History Archive on navy to read about events in United States naval history such as the purchase of the first submarine and about naval heroes such as Commodore George Dewey and Admiral David Farragut.

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Walker Evans,
Edwin Locke, photographer,
February 1937.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945

On July 16, 1936, photographer Walker Evans (1903-75) took a leave of absence from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to accept a summer assignment with Fortune magazine. Evans, who had begun working as a photographer in 1928, had developed a modest reputation by the time that he was hired in October 1935 by Roy Stryker, then leader of the FSA photographic section. Stryker agreed to grant him leave for the magazine assignment on the condition that his photographs remained government property.

Washstand in the dog run and kitchen of Floyd Burroughs' cabin,
Hale County, Alabama,
Walker Evans, photographer,
circa 1935-1936.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945

Evans and the writer James Agee spent several weeks among sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama. The article they produced documented in words and images the lives of poor Southern farmers afflicted by the Great Depression; their work, however, did not meet Fortune's expectations and was rejected for publication.

Evans' desire to produce photographs that were "pure record not propaganda" did not harmonize with Stryker's emphasis on the use of the image to promote social activism. Soon after the Alabama series was completed, Evans returned to New York. There Evans and Agee reworked their material and searched for another publisher. In 1941, the expanded version of their story was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, now recognized as a masterpiece of the art of photojournalism.

Walker Evans went on to exhibit and publish his work (he was a staff photographer at Fortune, 1945-65) and to teach at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture. James Agee became one of America's most influential film critics as well as a poet, novelist, and screenwriter. James Agee died in 1955; Walker Evans died in 1975.

• For more information on Walker Evans' life and another example of a photographic series representative of his work, select the photographic essay New York City Block in the special presentation Documenting America: Photographers on Assignment within the American Memory collection: America from the Great Depression to World War II: Black and White Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945. Search on Hale County in this collection to view one hundred photographs taken by Evans in Hale County, Alabama, which furnished material for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

Hale County, Alabama

Floyd Burroughs, cotton sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama

Sharecropper Bud Fields and his family at home, Hale County, Alabama
Walker Evans, photographer,
circa 1935-1936.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945

• Walker Evans' colleagues at the FSA included other leading American photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott. Photographs of the photographers, many taken by one another, are collected in Portrait Sampler of FSA Photographers. Photographic essays on the photographers and their work are available in the presentation Documenting America: Photographers on Assignment.
• View fifteen of the most frequently requested images from America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945, as well as fifteen favorites selected by the curators of the collection in another online presentation.
• A complementary collection, Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941, documents the everyday life of residents in the FSA's migrant work camps in central California during 1940 and 1941. Many of the individuals whose stories and songs are gathered in this collection shared both the socioeconomic and historic experience of the individuals documented by James Agee and Walker Evans.
• Search on depression in American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940 for depression-era stories. Also search on New Deal for stories relating to that program.

A Capital City

Washington, D.C. views. Panoramic View of Washington, including U.S Capitol,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

On July 16, 1790, the Residence Act, which stipulated that the president select a site on the Potomac River as the permanent capital of the United States following a ten-year temporary residence in Philadelphia, was signed into law. In a proclamation issued on January 24, 1791, President George Washington announced the permanent location of the new capital, an area of land at the confluence of the Potomac and Eastern Branch (Anacostia) rivers that would eventually become the District of Columbia. Soon after, Washington commissioned French engineer Pierre-Charles L'Enfant to create a plan for the city.

Plan of the City Intended for the Permanent Seat of the Government,
by Pierre Charles L'Enfant,
Manuscript map on paper, 1791.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

L'Enfant arrived in Georgetown on March 9, 1791, and submitted his report and plan to the president in August. It is believed that this plan is the one preserved in the Library of Congress.

L'Enfant's plan was greatly influenced by the traditions of Baroque landscape architecture and his projections of a future city population of 800,000. Its scheme of broad radiating avenues connecting significant focal points, its open spaces, and its grid pattern of streets oriented north, south, east, and west is still the gold standard against which all modern land use proposals for the Nation's capital are considered.

The glorious vistas and dramatic landscape of today's Washington are a result of L'Enfant's careful planning. From the steps of the U.S. Capitol one can gaze down the mall to the Washington Monument and on to the Lincoln Memorial.

• Learn more about the capital city's attractions by searching the Today in History Archive on Washington, D.C. or District of Columbia. Featured institutions and sights include the White House, Arlington National Cemetery, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the famous cherry trees, and the Washington Monument.
• The Library's online exhibition Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation gives a detailed account of the architectural development of the city and the Capitol building.

  
  View of Washington City
  Washington, D.C., 1871.
  Panoramic Maps

• For a wealth of images of our Nation's Capital, visit the online collection Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959. Photographer Theodor Horydczak's collection includes thousands of photographs documenting the architecture and social life of the Washington metropolitan area from the 1920s through the 1950s.
• Among the most prized items on display in the American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition are L'Enfant's 1791 plan for the city of Washington and Benjamin Henry Latrobe's plan for the transformation of the White House into the symbol of power we know today.
• Discover many images, documents, and several motion pictures of Washington, D.C., in American Memory; search the collections individually on the names of monuments and federal institutions. For example, America’s First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864 includes an 1846 photograph of the Capitol.
• Search the papers of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson at the Library of Congress to find many documents concerning the selection and creation of Washington, D.C.
• A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation contains a wide variety of congressional information associated with the early history of Washington, D.C.  Search in the 1st Congress using the phrase seat of government to find congressional materials related to the Residence Act.
• Map Collections contains more than one hundred maps of the District of Columbia throughout its history.

Owen Wister and Cowboy Culture

Cowboy on Cattle Ranch near Spur, Texas,
Russell Lee, photographer, May 1939.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945

Whatever he did, he did with his might. The bread that he earned was earned hard, the wages that he squandered were squandered hard….If he gave his word, he kept it.

Owen Wister, The Virginian, 1902

Novelist Owen Wister was born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, on July 14, 1860. His 1902 novel The Virginian helped create the myth of the American cowboy. Reared and educated on the east coast, Wister first visited the West in 1885. Set in Medicine Bow, Wyoming, The Virginian's tender romance between a refined Eastern schoolteacher and a rough-and-tumble cowhand, with its climactic pistol gunfight, introduced themes now standard to the American Western.

The Virginian from America's First Western Novel Written by Owen Wister,
Everett Henry, illustrator,
Cleveland: Harris-Intertype, 1962.
Geography & Map Division
From the exhibition
Language of the Land: Journeys into Literary America
This literary map shows key scenes from Wister's novel against the backdrop of a map of the novel's "landscape."

A popular fascination with the disappearing frontier laid the foundation of the Western's success. Former Indian scout Buffalo Bill Cody capitalized on this interest when he brought the Wild West east in 1883. With a cast of 100 cowboys and Indians, sharpshooter Annie Oakley, and a menagerie of wild animals, Buffalo Bill's Wild West paraded and played for packed audiences into the twentieth century.

From the outset, the cowboy was a stock character of the motion picture industry. The American Variety Stage: Vaudeville and Popular Entertainment, 1870-1920 features two early movies with cowboy motifs. A Frontier Flirtation (1903) presents the cowboy as a questionable character, unsuited to court a lady, while the no-nonsense gunslinger of Alphonse and Gaston cuts short the lead characters' exaggerated civilities.

The Great Train Robbery (1903), included in the collection Inventing Entertainment: The Early Motion Pictures and Sound Recordings of the Edison Companies, was shot in the Edison New York studio and in New Jersey at Essex County Park and at the Lackawanna Railway. The bandit leader was played by Justus D. Barnes, and G. M. Anderson, later better-known as Bronco Billy, played a variety of roles. In 1905, Edison parodied The Great Train Robbery in The Little Train Robbery, employing a cast of child actors.

Buckaroo Theodore Brown Parts a Cow from the Herd,
Ninety-Six Ranch, Paradise Valley, Nevada,
recorded by Margaret Purser and Carl Fleischhauer, October 10, 1979.
Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982

Real cowboy culture faded, just as the popular image of the American cowboy became more sharply defined in films, songs, and inexpensive "pulp" Western magazines. From 1978 to 1982, the Library of Congress American Folklife Center employed a team of researchers to document what remained of traditional life on the range. The project focused on Nevada cattle ranching and the work of "buckaroos," as cowboys commonly are called in that region.

Hat, Neckerchief, and Boots,
Alfred Harrell, photographer,
October 1980.
Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982

Learn more about cowboys and the Wild West in American Memory:

• Visit the Library of Congress American Folklife Center's online collection Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982, which includes photographs, motion pictures, and sound recordings documenting the life of the cowboys on the Ninety-Six Ranch in Paradise Valley, Nevada. Browse the subject list or index of topics to explore this chronicle of twentieth-century cowboy life.
• To locate additional pictures, recollections, songs, and stories about real and imaginary cowboys, search on cowboy in the following collections:
  • History of the American West, 1860-1920: Photographs from the Collection of the Denver Public Library
  • Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991
  • American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940
  • Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip
  • America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945
  • California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell
  • Voices from the Dust Bowl: the Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941
  • Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier: The Henry Reed Collection
• Search on Buffalo Bill or Annie Oakley in American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940 to find personal recollections of the Buffalo Bill's Wild West Parade.
• Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years contains a letter illustrating Owen Wister's friendship with artist Frederick Remington. Wister's papers are held by the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress.
• Explore the Library of Congress' collection of literary maps, such as the map of Owen Wister's The Virginian shown above, available online in the exhibition, Language of the Land: Journeys into Literary America.

"The Cowboy's Lament,"
E. A. Briggs, performer,
Medina, Texas, May 5, 1939.
Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip

Real Audio Format

MP3 Format

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"Home on the Range,"
James Richardson, performer,
Raiford, Florida, June 3, 1939.
Southern Mosaic: The John and Ruby Lomax 1939 Southern States Recording Trip

Real Audio Format

MP3 Format

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The Battle of Gettysburg, Day 2

They say the noise was incessant as the sound
Of all wolves howling, when that attack came on.
They say, when the guns all spoke, that the solid ground
Of the rocky ridges trembled like a sick child.

Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 299-300.

Panorama of 2nd Day's Battle,
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, copyright 1909.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

On July 2, 1863, the lines of the Battle of Gettysburg, now in its second day, were drawn in two sweeping parallel arcs. The Confederate and Union armies faced each other a mile apart. The Union forces extending along Cemetery Ridge to Culp's Hill, formed the shape of a fish-hook, and the Confederate forces were spread along Seminary Ridge.

The men who fought there
Were the tired fighters, the hammered, the weather-beaten,
The very hard-dying men.
They came and died
And came again and died and stood there and died,
Till at last the angle was crumpled and broken in…
Wheatfield and orchard bloody and trampled and taken,
And Hood's tall Texans sweeping on toward the Round Tops…

Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 300.

Big Round Top and Little Round Top,
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

General Robert E. Lee ordered General James Longstreet to attack the Union's southern flank, aiming for the hills at the southernmost end of Cemetery Ridge. These hills, known as the Little Round Top and Big Round Top had been left unoccupied and would have afforded the Confederates a good vantage point from which to ravage the Union line.

General Longstreet, disagreeing with Lee's orders, and hoping that the cavalry under the command of General J. E. B. Stuart would soon come up with the army to participate in the attack, was slow to advance on the hills.

While Longstreet's soldiers broke through to the base of Little Round Top, Union General G. K. Warren perceived the Confederate plan in time to rouse his men to take the strategic hill, fending off the Confederate attack.

General Lee had also commanded General R. S. Ewell to attack the northernmost flank of the Union Army. On one occasion Ewell's troops took possession of a slope of Culp's Hill, but the Union remained entrenched both there and on Cemetery Ridge, where General Meade was headquartered. The following day this battle, tragic for both sides, ended with a Union victory.

The crest is three times taken and then retaken
In fierce wolf-flurries of combat, in gasping Iliads
Too rapid to note or remember, too obscure to freeze in a song.
But at last, when the round sun drops…
The Union still holds the Round Tops and the two hard keys of war.

Night falls. The blood drips in the rocks of the Devil's Den.
The murmur begins to rise from the thirsty ground
Where the twenty thousand dead and wounded lie.
Such was Longstreet's war, and such the Union defence,
The deaths and the woundings, the victory and defeat
At the end of the fish-hook shank.

Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1928), 300-1.

Gettysburg, Pa. Dead Confederate soldiers in the "slaughter pen" at the foot of Little Round Top,
Gettysburg, Pennsylvania,
Alexander Gardner, photographer,
July 1863.
Selected Civil War Photographs

• Search on the keyword Gettysburg in the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress to read items such as Donn Piatt's July 2, 1863 telegram to Abraham Lincoln concerning news from Gettysburg.
• See the Today in History features for the first and last days of the Battle of Gettysburg.
• Search the Today in History Archive on the keyword Gettysburg or the names of other Civil War battles to find related pages.
• To find more images of the Battle of Gettysburg, search the collection Selected Civil War Photographs on the term Gettysburg. This collection also includes a Timeline of the Civil War.
• For more recent photographs, search on Gettysburg in the following American Memory collections:
  • Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920
  • Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959
  • Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991
• Read more of Stephen Vincent Benet's epic poem of the Civil War, John Brown's Body, available at a public library near you.
• Browse Civil War Maps by subject, place, creator, or title for views of more than 2,600 Civil War maps and charts as well as atlases and sketchbooks.

Garfield Assassinated!

In the President's madness he has wrecked the grand old Republican party, and for this he dies.

Comment of Charles Guiteau, eighteen days before shooting President Garfield,
quoted from evidence given at Guiteau's trial, in John K. Porter's closing speech to the jury, January 23, 1882. ¹

Washington, D.C.—The attack on the President's life—Scene in the ladies' room of the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad depot—The arrest of the assassin; from sketches by our special artist's [sic] A. Berghaus and C. Upham,
illustration in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
July 16, 1881.
By Popular Demand: Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present

On July 2, 1881, Charles J. Guiteau shot and fatally wounded the newly inaugurated U.S. President James A. Garfield in the lobby of the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad Depot in Washington, D.C., as he yelled, "I am a stalwart and Arthur is now President of the United States!" ² Guiteau blamed the president for not selecting him for a job at the U.S. Consulate in Paris.

Charles Guiteau likely suffered from mental illness, as many reports of his behavior would attest. Born in Illinois, he lived an erratic life, attempting several unsuccessful careers before turning to the practice of law in Chicago. His wife, to whom he was reportedly abusive, divorced him in 1874 after five years of marriage. In the early 1860s, Guiteau was affiliated with the utopian Oneida Community in upstate New York. He returned to religion with renewed fervor in the late 1870s, styling himself a preacher and theologian, and publishing several sermons as well as The Truth: A Companion to the Bible, which was largely plagiarized from the writings of Oneida founder John Humphrey Noyes.

Guiteau was next inspired by national politics, and in 1880 he published a speech in support of Garfield's candidacy. When, following the election, he failed in his attempts to gain a diplomatic appointment from Garfield, he took advantage of factionalism within the Republican Party to switch his allegiance to the more conservative "Stalwart" cause. By the spring of 1881, Guiteau had what he called a divine inspiration to take the president's life, in order to heal the party and save the nation. He even purchased a pearl-handled revolver for the act, because he thought that it would look good in a museum afterwards. Suffering from such high-minded delusions, Guiteau was later surprised to discover that his actions were deplored by Garfield's political opponents and supporters alike.

In spite of Guiteau's manifest insanity at his trial, his attorneys were unable to gain an acquittal on that basis—it was, however, one of the first uses of the modern insanity defense in a criminal court. After a six-month trial that sparked great public interest, Guiteau was found guilty and hanged on June 30, 1882.

Mulley, A. E. Frew,
Charles Julius Guiteau, The Assassin. Being a Copious and Correct Phrenological Delineation of his Character,
title page,
New York: Gardner & Co., [1881].

President Garfield did not die immediately, but lingered for eleven weeks, during which time surgeons repeatedly attempted to find the bullet that had lodged in his back. In spite of Joseph Lister's discoveries regarding the use of antiseptics in surgery, the practice of sterilization had not caught on, and Garfield's wound was probed by many unwashed fingers. The resulting infection, not the bullet, caused Garfield's eventual death.

The Discovery of the Location of One Bullet by Means of Professor Bell's Induction-Balance [detail],
Skinkle, William A., artist,
illustration in Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper,
August 20, 1881.
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

Alexander Graham Bell had been experimenting with the design of a metal detector based on a device that corrected interference on telephone lines. Hoping to locate the bullet and save Garfield's life, Bell constructed a metal detector derived from an induction balance invented by his friend David Hughes, and traveled to Washington, D.C. in mid-July to attempt its use. To Bell's great disappointment, and despite trials over several weeks, the device failed to pinpoint the location of the bullet, which was apparently too deeply lodged to be detected.

On September 6, Garfield was sent to the New Jersey shore in an attempt to aid his recovery. Despite initial signs of improvement, he died two weeks later on September 19. Vice president Chester A. Arthur became president of the United States on September 20, 1881. Garfield's funeral was held in Evansville Indiana six days later. 

Garfield's incapacitation sparked a constitutional crisis, as the Cabinet was divided over whether the vice president should assume the office of the incapacitated president or merely act in his stead. It was not until 1967, with the passage of the Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution, that the question of the succession of power was fully addressed. Today, the vice president assumes the office of president in the event that a sitting president is "unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office."

Twenty years after Garfield's assassination, on September 6, 1901, anarchist Leon Czolgosz shot and fatally wounded President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York. McKinley's assassination was the third such national tragedy in thirty-seven years.

The Martyred Presidents,
Thomas A. Edison, Inc.,
paper print film, 1901.
The Last Days of a President: Films of McKinley and The Pan-American Exposition, 1901

• Presidents McKinley, Lincoln and Garfield are memorialized in the 1901 film The Martyred Presidents, produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company for distribution with films of McKinley's funeral.  Search those names across American Memory to learn more about each of them.
• The Charles Guiteau Collection is in the custody of the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. Visit the online collection Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years, to view the New Year's greeting from presidential assassin Charles Julius Guiteau to his jailer, 31 December 1881 and read a longer biography of Guiteau.
• Search American Memory sheet music collections on the names Guiteau and Garfield to learn how the assassination was portrayed in popular culture. See, for example, Guiteau's March to Hades and President Garfield's Funeral March.
• Search The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress on Garfield to find letters between Bell and his wife concerning Bell's attempts to detect the bullet lodged in President Garfield's back.

1. Porter, John K., Guiteau Trial. Closing Speech to the Jury of John K. Porter, of New York, in the Case of Charles J. Guiteau, the Assassin of President Garfield, Washington, January 23, 1882 (New York: J. Polhemus, 1882), 6. (Return to text)
2. Hayes, H. G. and C. J., A Complete History of the Life and Trial of Charles Julius Guiteau, Assassin of President Garfield (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1882), 194. (Return to text)

Paul Laurence Dunbar

Paul Laurence Dunbar,
circa 1890.
The African-American Experience in Ohio: Selections from the Ohio Historical Society

Paul Laurence Dunbar was born on June 27, 1872, in Dayton, Ohio. Although he died when he was only thirty-three, Dunbar had achieved international acclaim as a poet, short story writer, novelist, dramatist, and lyricist.

Dunbar was the child of former slaves. His father escaped bondage, fled to Canada, and returned to the U.S. to fight in the Civil War as a member of the Massachusetts 55th Regiment. At the time Dunbar's mother escaped enslavement via the Underground Railroad, emancipation was declared. His parents met years later and married in Dayton, Ohio, where Paul was born. From his mother's many stories of the South, young Dunbar acquired an understanding of Southern life and came to speak both Southern dialect and standard American English.

The Dayton area was a center of black religious activity. Dunbar attended the Eaker Street A.M.E. Church where he gave his very first poetry recitals. Nearby Wilburforce College boasted prominent African Americans such as W. E. B. DuBois among its faculty members.

Although he was the only African American in his middle and high schools, Dunbar was accepted by his classmates and served as editor of his high school paper and president of the literary club. He counted classmate Orville Wright as one of his best friends. Together, the two boys briefly published a newspaper, the Dayton Tattler; their money ran out after just three issues.

Parade Ground and Campus, Soldiers' Home,
Dayton, Ohio,
William Henry Jackson, photographer,
circa 1902.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

Dunbar's parents separated when he was a child and his father lived for years at the Soldiers' Home. In 1891, Dunbar graduated from Central High School. Central was demolished in 1894 and a new school, Steele, was constructed at the southeast corner of North Main Street and Monument Avenue.

Steele High School and Soldiers' Monument,
Dayton, Ohio,
circa 1900-1906.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

Main Street,
Dayton, Ohio,
copyright 1904.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

Dunbar worked as an elevator operator in the Callahan Building (spired building, above) on Main Street. In 1892, Dunbar published a volume of his own poetry entitled Oak and Ivy, which he sold to his elevator passengers.

In 1893, Dunbar went to Chicago with plans to write about the Century of Progress Columbia Exposition where he met Frederick Douglass, then commissioner of the fair's Haitian Pavilion. Douglass invited Dunbar to work as his personal assistant and to share the podium, supporting the young poet's efforts. During the fair Dunbar met a number of his peers and future literary lights including James Weldon Johnson, Richard B. Harrison, and Will Marion Cook, with whom he later wrote the theatrical piece Clorinda: The Origin of the Cake Walk. (See the two 1903 films Cake Walk and Comedy Cake Walk documenting this dance featuring fancy strutting, named after the prize awarded in the original contests.)

After the publication of Majors and Minors (1895) and Lyrics of a Lowly Life (1896), Dunbar's name became internationally recognized. During a trip to England, Dunbar met the African-British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. The two men collaborated on a collection of choral pieces entitled Seven African Romances and the opera Dream Lovers.

Returning from abroad, Dunbar settled in Washington, D.C., and accepted a position as a library assistant at the Library of Congress. He found the work tiresome, however, and it is believed that the Library's dust contributed to his worsening case of tuberculosis. He worked there for only a year before quitting to write and recite from his works full time.

Letter from Paul Laurence Dunbar to Booker T. Washington,
January 23, 1902,
Booker T. Washington Papers, Manuscript Division.
African American Odyssey
Courtesy of the Ohio Historical Society, Paul Laurence Dunbar House State Memorial

In 1902, Booker T. Washington commissioned Dunbar to write the school song for the Tuskegee Institute. Dunbar wrote lyrics to the tune of "Fair Harvard." Washington was not pleased with the "Tuskegee Song." He objected to Dunbar's emphasis on "the industrial idea," and the exclusion of biblical references. In this letter to Washington, Dunbar defends his work.

"The Tuskegee Song,"
Nathaniel Clark Smith, music,
Paul Laurence Dunbar, words,
Tuskegee Institute Press,
Tuskegee, Alabama.
African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: Selected from the Collections of Brown University

By the turn of the century, Paul Laurence Dunbar was the most celebrated black writer in America. He wrote for the broadest possible audience, yet his reputation rested on his mastery of dialect verse which employed colloquial vocabulary and spellings that were, for the most part, African American. In his use of vernacular speech, Dunbar has been compared to Mark Twain and James Whitcomb Riley.

Dunbar published twenty-two books and numerous articles and poems before his death in 1906—likely the result of a combination of factors including tuberculosis, exhaustion in the wake of pneumonia, and alcoholism.

Lay me down beneaf de willers in de grass,
Whah de branch go a-singin' as to pass;
an' w'en I's a-layin' low,
I kin hyeah it as it go,
Singin', "Sleep, my honey; tek yo res' at las'."

Inscription on the grave of Paul Laurence Dunbar

• Search on the name Paul Laurence Dunbar in the collection The African-American Experience in Ohio: Selections from the Ohio Historical Society to read numerous contemporary newspaper articles about him. This collection is comprised of a selection of manuscript and printed text and images drawn from the collections of the Ohio Historical Society illuminates the history of black Ohio from 1850 to 1920, a story of slavery and freedom, segregation and integration, religion and politics, migrations and restrictions, harmony and discord, and struggles and successes.
• See the Today in History features on Dunbar contemporaries including W. C. Handy, Mary Church Terrell, and Booker T. Washington. Also search the Today in History Archive on Ohio to learn about other events and people connected with the Buckeye State.
• See the online exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, which explores black America's quest for equality from the early national period through the twentieth century.
• Search on the names James Weldon Johnson, Will Marion Cook, or Paul Laurence Dunbar in Historic American Sheet Music: 1850-1920 and in African-American Sheet Music, 1850-1920: Selected from the Collections of Brown University for tunes or lyrics composed by these men around the turn of the century.
• Another Library of Congress employee, Daniel A. P. Murray (1852-1925) contributed a great deal to the preservation of African-American culture. Murray gathered books and pamphlets for the Exhibit of Negro Authors at the 1900 Paris Exposition, a collection that forms the nucleus of African American Perspectives: Pamphlets from the Daniel A. P. Murray Collection, 1818-1907.
• The famous photographer William Henry Jackson took many photos of Dayton in the early 1900s. Search Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920 using the term Dayton AND Jackson to see them.
• For a brief description of Chicago's 1893 Century of Progress Columbia Exposition pageant O Sing a New Song in which thousands of African-American talents participated, read "Philosophy of Negro Laborers," an interview in the collection American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940.

The Smithsonian Institution

Smithsonian Institution,
Exterior of Smithsonian Institution Building, Washington, D.C.,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer, circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

British scientist James Smithson died on June 27, 1829. He left an endowment "to the United States of America, to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men." Some regarded his bequest as a trifle eccentric, considering Smithson had neither traveled to nor corresponded with anyone in America.

A fellow of the venerable Royal Society of London from the age of twenty-two, Smithson published numerous scientific papers on mineralogy, geology, and chemistry. He proved that zinc carbonates were true carbonate minerals, not zinc oxides; one calamine (a type of zinc carbonate) was renamed "smithsonite" posthumously in his honor.

An act of Congress signed by President James K. Polk on August 10, 1846, established the Smithsonian Institution. After considering a series of recommendations, which included the creation of a national university, a public library, or an astronomical observatory, Congress agreed that the $508,318 bequest would support the creation of a museum, a library, and a program of research, publication, educational outreach, and collection in the natural and applied sciences, arts, and history.

Natural History Museum,
Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer, circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

The collections and libraries of the Smithsonian have continued to grow through donations and purchases. Today, the Institution comprises 19 museums, 144 affiliate museums,  and 9 research centers throughout the United States and the world. The original Smithsonian Institution Building is popularly known as the Castle. Visitors to Washington, D.C., can frequent a variety of Smithsonian institutions including the National Museum of Natural History, which houses the natural science collections, the National Zoological Park, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the National Portrait Gallery.

The National Air & Space Museum, which exhibits marvels of aviation history such as the Wright brothers' 1903 Flyer and Charles Lindbergh's airplane, the Spirit of St. Louis, has the distinction of being the most visited museum in the world.

• Visit the Smithsonian Institution Web site to learn more about this American treasure trove and to find a complete listing of all Smithsonian museums and research centers. To see highlighted items from the Smithsonian collection linked to historical themes visit HistoryWired.
• Search on the term museum in American Landscape and Architectural Design, 1850-1920: a Study Collection from the Harvard Graduate School of Design to see a variety of images of museums including an exterior view of the Old Art Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, or a perspective drawing of the Natural History Museum in New York City.

  
  Costumes of Presidents' Wives Exhibit (detail),
  Smithsonian Institution,
  Washington, D.C.,
  Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
  circa 1920-1950.
  Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

• Search on Smithsonian in Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959 for more photographs of the museum buildings and exhibits.
• A search on Smithsonian Institution in A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation: U.S. Congressional Documents and Debates, 1774-1875 yields a wide variety of historical documents relating to the institution including resolutions and statutes on its establishment and funding.
• In 1877 Frederick Douglass delivered an address entitled "Lecture on Our National Capital." That address was reprinted in 1978 by the Smithsonian Institution's Anacostia Neighborhood Museum. Search on the keyword Frederick Douglass in the collection The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, 1600-1925 to locate that item as well as Douglass' autobiography.
• Alexander Graham Bell was elected a regent of the Smithsonian Institution in 1898. Search on the keywords Smithsonian or museum in the collection The Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers at the Library of Congress to find a number of items related to Bell's involvement with the institution. See, for example, the "Proceedings of [the] Regents Meeting" held in January 1892, which highlighted Bell's donation to the Smithsonian's Astrophysical Observatory.
• Search on the term museum in The Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606-1827 to learn more about Jefferson's concern for the preservation of artifacts both cultural and natural. See, for example, Jefferson's copy of the 1786 pamphlet by Mademoiselle Leroux du Cloteau, Plan for a Women's Museum; or Jefferson's 1825 letter to General William Clark, requesting a donation to the new University of Virginia, "not of money…but for chrystals minerals small Indian worthy and other curiosities which might be easily transported and preserved."
• Search on museum in Photos, Prints in American Memory collections to see a wide variety of additional images.

Custer's Last Stand

Sitting Bull (detail),
David Frances Barry, photographer, copyright 1885.
Prints and Photographs Online Catalog

George Armstrong Custer, Officer of the Federal Army,
Brady National Photographic Art Gallery, between 1860 and 1865.
Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865

On June 25, 1876, George Armstrong Custer and the 265 men under his command lost their lives in the Battle of Little Big Horn, often referred to as Custer's Last Stand.

Educated at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, Custer proved his brilliance and daring as a cavalry officer of the Union Army in the Civil War. Major General George McClellan appointed the twenty-three-year-old Custer as brigadier general in charge of a Michigan cavalry brigade. By 1864, Custer was leading the Third Cavalry Division in General Philip Sheridan's Shenandoah Valley campaign. Throughout the fall, the Union Army moved across the valley—burning homes, mills, and fields of crops.

[View of a Cheyenne village at Big Timbers, in present-day Colorado, with four large tipis standing at the edge of a wooded area. Frame with pemmican or hides hanging at the right; two figures, facing camera, standing to the left of center].
A daguerreotype by Solomon Carvalho, probably copied by Mathew Brady's studio, between 1853 and 1860.
America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864

This daguerreotype of an Indian village in Kansas Territory, taken during the Frémont Expedition in 1853, is one of the Library's oldest images of the Plains Indians of the American West. Click on the image for a much sharper view of four large tipis (variant of teepees) standing at the edge of a wooded area.

Custer's Division Retiring from Mount Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley,
October 7, 1864,
Alfred Waud, artist.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

This sketch of Custer's division retiring from Mount Jackson in the Shenandoah Valley on October 7, 1864, is by Alfred Waud, a Civil War sketch artist who documented the war for the press. Sketch artists provided the public's only glimpse of battle at a time when the shutter speed of cameras was not fast enough to capture action. Waud routinely ventured dangerously close to the fighting, portraying more intimately than any other artist, the drama and horror of the Civil War.

Tapped to pursue General Robert E. Lee's army as it fled from Richmond, Custer himself received the Confederate flag of truce when Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. At the end of the Civil War, he was commissioned to the western frontier as part of an army campaign to impress and intimidate hostile Plains Indians with a show of U.S. military might.

After gold was discovered in the Black Hills in 1874, white miners flocked into territory ceded to the Sioux less than ten years earlier. Although the second Treaty of Fort Laramie (1868) clearly granted the tribe exclusive use of the Black Hills, in the winter of 1875, the U.S. ordered the Sioux to return to their reservation by the end of January. With many Indians out of the range of communication and many others hostile to the order, the U.S. Army prepared for battle.

On May 17, 1876, Lieutenant Colonel Custer led the 750 men of the 7th United States Cavalry Regiment out of Fort Abraham Lincoln, Dakota Territory. Commanded by Brigadier General Alfred H. Terry, Custer's division was part of an expedition intended to locate and rout tribes organized for resistance under Chief Sitting Bull. Hoping to entrap Sitting Bull in the Little Big Horn area, Terry ordered Custer to follow the Rosebud River while he brought the majority of the men down the Yellowstone River. After meeting at the mouth of the Little Big Horn, they planned to force the Lakota Sioux and the Cheyenne back to their reservations.

Custer found Sitting Bull encamped on the Little Bighorn River in Montana. Instead of waiting for Terry, the lieutenant colonel chose to wage an immediate attack. He divided his forces into several groups and headed out. Quickly encircled by their enemy, the five companies under Custer's immediate command were slaughtered in less than an hour. Over the next two days, the remnants of the 7th Cavalry fought for their lives as they waited in vain for Custer to relieve them.

On June 27, the Indians retreated as reinforcements arrived. Expecting to meet Custer and prepare for battle, General Terry discovered the bodies of Custer and his men. Nearly a third of the men of the 7th Cavalry, including Custer and his brother, died at Little Big Horn. A stunning but short-lived victory for Native Americans, the Battle of Little Big Horn galvanized the public against the Indians. In response, federal troops poured into the Black Hills.

A Little Fresh Meat for the Indians
Taken Before the Opening of the Rosebud Reservation,
near Winner, South Dakota, 1880.
The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920: Photographs from the Fred Hultstrand and F.A. Pazandak Photograph Collections

While many Native Americans surrendered to federal authorities, Sitting Bull sought refuge in Canada in 1877. Four years later, with his supporters on the brink of starvation, Sitting Bull returned to the U.S. at Standing Rock Agency in North Dakota. There, he fought the sale of tribal lands under the Dawes Severalty Act and participated in the Ghost Dance Movement—a cultural and religious revitalization among Native Americans. Threatened by a religious awakening that promised the end of white dominance, federal authorities attempted to take custody of Sitting Bull in 1890. He was killed in the affray sparked by the attempted arrest.

"Custer's Last Charge"
Warde Ford, unaccompanied vocals, recorded by Sidney Robertson Cowell,
Central Valley, California, December 26, 1938.
Textual Transcript
California Gold: Northern California Folk Music from the Thirties Collected by Sidney Robertson Cowell

Real Audio format

wav format, 11.7 Mb

Learn more about relationships between Native Americans and European Americans in American history:

• Relevant Today in History pages include features on Tecumseh and the Revolutionary War, the Creek War, Cherokee Chief John Ross, Nez Percé Chief Joseph, and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924.
• Search on Sioux or Cheyenne in American Life Histories, 1936-1940 to access texts of recollections of encounters between European Americans and the Plains Indians. After retrieving a list of hits, go to any item and use the BEST MATCH link in the page header to jump to the segment of the piece pertaining to the query. Read the American Life Histories, 1936-1940 interview "History of a Buffalo Hunter," in which Don Manuel Jesus Vasques of Taos, New Mexico, recalls an 1877 hunt.
• Search on Custer in Selected Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865 and in the Prints & Photographs Online Catalog to locate additional photographs and depictions of him from that time.
• Although he was soundly defeated, Custer quickly was elevated to the status of hero. Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 contains "Gen. Custer's Military March" (1878) and " Custer's Last March" (1879), both immortalizing him in song.
• Fort Leavenworth is the oldest active army post west of the Mississippi River. Visit the U.S. Army Combined Arms Center's Fort Leavenworth Web site to learn about Custer's 1867 court martial.
• Learn more about The Battle of Little Big Horn by analyzing the painting created by Kicking Bear from New Mexico CultureNet.

Lindbergh Honored

Charles Lindbergh on podium on Washington Monument grounds during his Wash., D.C. reception; Army band in foreground (detail),
June 11, 1927.
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

On June 11, 1927, Charles Lindbergh received the first Distinguished Flying Cross ever awarded. Since 1927, aviators honored with this medal have included World War II pilots President George Bush, Senator George McGovern, and astronaut Virgil "Gus" Grissom who flew one hundred missions during the Korean War.

Lindbergh's nonstop solo flight across the Atlantic on May 20-21, 1927, made aeronautical history. The stunt-flyer-turned-airmail-pilot's flight was underwritten by a group of St. Louis businessmen. Flying his monoplane, Spirit of St. Louis, Lindbergh captured the $25,000 prize offered for the first flight between New York and Paris.

"Lucky Lindy's" arrival in Paris after thirty-three-and-one-half hours in the air was celebrated on both sides of the Atlantic. At the award ceremony in Washington, D.C., President Calvin Coolidge remarked:

On a morning just three weeks ago yesterday, this wholesome, earnest, fearless, courageous product of America rose into the air from Long Island in a monoplane christened "The Spirit of St. Louis" in honor of his home and that of his supporters. It was no haphazard adventure. After months of most careful preparation, supported by a valiant character, driven by an unconquerable will and inspired by the imagination and the spirit of his Viking ancestors, this reserve officer set wing across the dangerous stretches of the North Atlantic. He was alone. His destination was Paris. Thirty-three hours and thirty minutes later, in the evening of the second day, he landed at his destination on the French flying field at Le Bourget. He had traveled over 3,600 miles and established a new and remarkable record. The execution of his project was a perfect exhibition of art.

Calvin Coolidge
"Address…Bestowing Upon Colonel Charles A. Lindbergh the Distinguished Flying Cross,"
Washington, D.C., June 11, 1927.
Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929

Spirit of St. Louis,
Smithsonian Institution Building, Washington, D.C.,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959

Charles Lindbergh with His Mother, President and Mrs. Calvin Coolidge (detail),
Washington, D.C.,
June 12, 1927.
Prosperity and Thrift: The Coolidge Era and the Consumer Economy, 1921-1929

Coolidge went on to commend Lindbergh's "absence of self-acclaim, [his] refusal to become commercialized, which has marked the conduct of this sincere and genuine exemplar of fine and noble virtues."

From Washington, Lindbergh traveled to New York City where he was honored with a ticker tape parade. Over the next several months Lindbergh and the Spirit of St. Louis visited eighty-two cities in forty-eight states. Hailed as a national hero, Lindbergh became an influential spokesperson for the emerging aviation industry.

Following his record-breaking flight, Lindbergh married Anne Spencer  Morrow in 1929; she became a well-known author. Their life together was marked in its early years by the avid attention of the public and the press and by the notorious kidnapping and murder of their son, Charles Augustus Jr. in 1932.

Later in his life, Lindbergh was a consultant to commercial airline companies and became a wildlife conservationist. He worked for both the U.S. Department of Defense and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. His Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Spirit of St. Louis (1953), describes his historic flight. Charles Lindbergh died on August 26, 1974. Today, Lindbergh's plane is displayed at the National Air and Space Museum.

• See more photographs of the man and his plane. Search the collection Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959 on Lindbergh and Spirit of St. Louis.
• Search on the name Lindbergh in the collections: History of the American West, 1860-1920: Photographs from the Collection of the Denver Public Library and Photographs from the Chicago Daily News, 1902-1933 to find related images.
• Learn more about the early years of flight by exploring The Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers at the Library of Congress.
• Known as "Lady Lindy," Amelia Earhart made her solo flight across the Atlantic on May 20-21, 1932. In 1935, she became the first person to complete the even longer flight from Hawaii to California. Palmist Nellie Simmons Meie prepared an Earhart palm print and character analysis in June 1933. This unusual document is available through the collection Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years. To find an image of Earhart, search on the name Amelia Earhart in the collection Photographs from the Chicago Daily News, 1902-1933.

Lindbergh Day,
Springfield, Vermont, July 26, 1927.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

Guantánamo Bay

Havana, Showing the Entrance to the Harbor and Inner Harbor;
Taken from Cabanas Fortress Showing Morro Castle on the Extreme Right-Hand,
Havana, Cuba, copyright 1898.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

Hoisting the Flag at Guantánamo,
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,
Edward H. Hart, photographer,
June 12, 1898.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs by the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

On June 10, 1898, U.S. Marines landed at Guantánamo Bay. For the next month, American troops fought a land war in Cuba that resulted in the end of Spanish colonial rule in the Western Hemisphere. Cuban rebels had gained the sympathy of the American public while the explosion and sinking of the U.S.S. Maine, widely blamed on the Spanish despite the absence of conclusive evidence, further boosted American nationalistic fervor.

Popular demand for intervention in the Cuban-Spanish conflict led Congress to pass resolutions demanding the withdrawal of Spanish armed forces from Cuba, authorizing U.S. aid to effect this, and promising American support for Cuban self-rule. Spain declared war against the United States on April 24, 1898, and the United States promptly replied with a counter-declaration.

Spanish Prisoners,
Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,
Edward H. Hart, photographer,
June 14, 1898.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920

While Spain was unprepared to sustain a war in its distant territories, America was ready and eager to show off its military strength. The navy, under Admiral George Dewey's command, easily broke Spanish control of the Philippine Islands in an engagement at Manila Bay on May 1. American attention then turned to the liberation of Cuba.

On July 17, just five weeks after the landing at Guantánamo Bay, the Spanish forces under Admiral Pascual Cervera surrendered at Santiago. In the Treaty of Paris, the United States gained sovereignty of Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Spain lost its colonial empire, and the United States emerged with greater influence in international affairs and an increased sense of national pride.

Learn more about the Spanish-American War in American Memory:

• Search the Today in History Archive on the term Spanish American War to find other important dates in the chronology of the war including February 15, April 25, July 1, and October 18.
• The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures, 1898-1901 contains sixty-eight films of the first war in which the motion picture played a role. The films, which consist of actualities and reenactments, may be viewed chronologically in The Motion Picture Camera Goes to War: The Spanish-American War and the Philippine Revolution. This special presentation features brief essays that provide an historical context for the making of the films.
• The World of 1898, presented by the Hispanic Division, Library of Congress, provides resources and documents about the Spanish-American War, including an overview essay and a chronology of the war.
• Search on Guantanamo in Touring Turn-of-the-Century America: Photographs from the Detroit Publishing Company, 1880-1920 for more photographs of the 1898 conflict. Aboard the U.S.S. Texas, for example, see a Spanish mine taken up in Guantanamo Bay.
• Search on Guantanamo in Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991 to view pictures of the U.S. Marines, still encamped at Guantánamo Bay in 1911.
• Search the collection The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures, 1898-1901 to find a number of sound recordings of skits, music, and speeches about the war. For example, on April 20, 1889, just before war was declared, Buffalo Bill recorded a speech entitled "Sentiments on the Cuban Question" which urged U.S. intervention in Cuba.

Troops Making Military Road in front of Santiago,
Thomas A. Edison, Inc., copyright 1898.
The Spanish-American War in Motion Pictures

New York's Finest

Police Parade, New York, New York,
Thomas A. Edison, Inc., June 1, 1899.
Life of a City: New York, 1898-1906

The annual parade of "New York's Finest" was filmed on June 1, 1899, in Union Square. At the turn of the century, the New York City Police Department (NYPD) was still recovering from scandals and allegations of corruption that tarnished its reputation in the 1890s. Four years earlier, the New York State Senate created a committee to investigate the department. The Lexow Committee issued a scathing report detailing serious criminal activity within the organization.

Group of Policemen in Front of Police Station (detail),
Copyright W. O. Lewin,
1909.
Prints and Photographs Division

The New York Municipal Police was founded in 1845 with an initial force of 900 men. Nearly 400,000 people lived in New York City (NYC) around that time. The municipality was overwhelmed by expanding slums, a high rate of crime, and frequent rioting. Looking toward London for solutions to its policing problems, the city adopted reforms similar to those that Sir Robert Peel had instituted in 1829. In 1845, uniformed officers operating under a chain of command, replaced the outdated constable system the Dutch had established in seventeenth-century Manhattan.

However, immense challenges remained. Police officers served only one- or two-year tours of duty, and order and continuity suffered accordingly. Jobs as police officers, like almost all public service work in nineteenth-century New York, were awarded based on cronyism and political patronage. Meanwhile, the social problems that prompted the 1845 reforms increased as the population swelled past the one million mark in the 1870s.

With public disapproval of the force running high, the annual police parade was cancelled in 1895. That same year, Theodore Roosevelt was appointed president of the Police Commission. He initiated strict and effective reform measures that helped restore public confidence in the department. During his two-year tenure, Roosevelt recruited some 1,600 officers based on their ability to serve rather than their political loyalties. In addition, he opened admission to the department for ethnic minorities and hired the first woman ever to work at NYC's police headquarters.

Today, the NYPD is one of the largest municipal police departments in the United States. Its jurisdiction encompasses New York City's five boroughs, and covers an area of about 320 square miles. More than 37,000 uniformed officers work to keep the "City that never sleeps" safe.

Officer Richard Perry Practices Basic Spanish (detail),
Dick DeMarsico, photographer,
1958.
Prints and Photographs Division

Use American Memory and other Library of Congress resources to learn more about the NYPD and the City they serve:

• Explore forty-five films of turn-of-the-century New York City. Browse the title list of the collection Life of a City: Early Films of New York, 1898-1906. Move On and New York Harbor Police Boat Patrol document the police in action.
• Learn the comic song "The Finest Police in the World!" Search the collection Music for the Nation: American Sheet Music, 1870-1885 on police to find this tongue-in-check air.
• Take a virtual tour of New York City through time. Search across the American Memory collections of prints and photographs on New York City to view images of the metropolis.
• View specially delegated New York City mounted police guards in 1919 at Theodore Roosevelt's Funeral in Oyster Bay, New York. This film is from Theodore Roosevelt: His Life and Times. To see more, search this collection on the keywords police or New York and find, for example, Teddy Roosevelt in 1917 as he Reviews and Addresses Troops and Rides in an Auto Parade.
• Search the Today in History Archive on Theodore Roosevelt to read about his political and personal life.

On September 11, 2001, New York City, the NYPD, New York City Fire Department (FDNY), and other emergency response teams faced unprecedented challenges from a devastating terrorist attack. In response to this and other acts of terrorism on that day, the Library of Congress initiated a massive effort to record and gather for posterity an extensive array of materials documenting these events as well as responses and reactions worldwide. Access to these materials through several online collections provides the opportunity to experience the resolve and emotions of those who were directly involved and those who watched events unfold.

• The online exhibition, Witness and Response: September 11 Acquisitions at the Library of Congress provides an overview of the materials collected. One item highlighted in the exhibition is the cover of a comic book issue devoted to September 11. 
• The American Memory collection, September 11, 2001: Documentary Project contains materials in all formats including an audio interview with NYPD transit officer Carol Paukner.
• The Library's Prints & Photographs online catalog includes over one million images. A search on September 11 2001, returns a selection of photos, drawings, posters, comic book art, and other items.

The Internet played a significant part in all of the events related to this tragedy.

• Web sites created by a variety of sources tracked daily events. These ever-changing sites were captured through collaborative efforts and are accessible through the September 11 Web Archive.
• People expressed themselves in a variety of ways including born-digital works such as e-mails, images, and online diaries. These items were submitted via the Internet to The September 11 Digital Archive, another collaborative project.

Orator of Liberty

Patrick Henry,
photograph of a painting by George B. Matthews in the United States Capitol, copyright 1904.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920.

Patrick Henry was born on May 29, 1736, in Studley, Virginia. He was a brilliant orator and an influential leader in the opposition to British government. As a young lawyer, he astonished his courtroom audience in 1763 with an eloquent defense based on the doctrine of natural rights—the political theory that man is born with certain inalienable rights.

On his twenty-ninth birthday, as a new member of Virginia's House of Burgesses, Henry presented a series of resolutions—the Stamp Act Resolves—which opposed Britain's Stamp Act. The Resolves were adopted on May 30, 1765. He concluded his introduction of the Resolves with the fiery words "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the First his Cromwell, and George the Third—" when, it is reported, voices cried out, "Treason! treason!" He continued, "—and George the Third may profit by their example! If this be treason make the most of it."

Henry went on to serve as a member of the first Virginia Committee of Correspondence, which facilitated inter-colonial cooperation, and as a delegate to the Continental Congresses of 1774 and 1775. At the second Virginia Convention, on March 23, 1775, in St. John's Church, Richmond, he delivered his most famous speech. As war with Great Britain appeared inevitable, Henry proclaimed:

Gentlemen may cry, Peace, Peace —
but there is no peace. The war is actually begun!
The next gale that sweeps from the north will bring to our ears the clash of resounding arms! Our brethren are
already in the field! Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear,
or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take but as for me,
give me liberty or give me death!

"Give me liberty, or give me death!"
Currier & Ives, c. 1876.
Prints & Photographs Online Catalog

Henry was the first elected governor of the state of Virginia, serving five one-year terms in this office from 1776-79 and again from 1784-86, alternating with terms as a member of the state legislature. Throughout his public career, Henry retained his leadership role, having a profound influence on the development of the new nation.

In 1788 Henry opposed Virginia's ratification of the new U.S. Constitution because of his concern that the rights of individuals and of states were inadequately protected. After the Constitution was adopted, he continued to work for the addition of the first ten amendments guaranteeing the freedoms that came to be known as the Bill of Rights. His last speech before he died in 1799 was a plea for American unity in response to early arguments favoring primacy of states' rights.

• Search on Patrick Henry to find correspondence, memoranda, and other items of interest relating to this American patriot in the following document collections:
  • George Washington Papers, 1741-1799
  • The Thomas Jefferson Papers, 1606-1827
  • A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, 1774-1875
  • Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789
• Creating a Constitution, part of the Special Presentation To Form A More Perfect Union, provides an overview of the events leading up to ratification and an introduction to the documents in the Continental Congress and Constitutional Convention, 1774-1789 collection. Search the collection on Virginia AND Constitution, to find more documents pertaining to ratification by Virginia.
• Learn more about the Constitution by visiting THOMAS: Legislative Information on the Internet.

Wisconsin

Crystal Lake, Wisconsin, copyright 1913.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

Wisconsin is a beautiful land… by reason of its wooded hills and the multitude of its beautiful little lakes. I had imagined it to be less well settled; for although one finds the borders of civilization so near at hand that in hunting one often encounters Indians, yet the southern half of the state is developing into a great, blooming, densely populated agricultural district.

Carl Schurz to Margarethe Meyer Schurz,
Letter of October 9, 1854,
Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841-1869, 139.
Pioneering the Upper Midwest, ca. 1820-1910

On May 29, 1848, Wisconsin became the thirtieth state admitted to the Union. The "Badger State" was the last state formed in its entirety from the Northwest Territory. Textured with beautiful landscapes and abundant natural resources, Wisconsin has a rich legacy of concern regarding their conservation. Tourist sites include the Wisconsin Dells and Devil's Lake.

The Winnebago, Menominee, Potowatomi, Dakota (Sioux), and Ojibwa (Cherokee) were among the Native American tribes to reside in the area. Among the first Europeans in this region were Jean Nicolet, who started a profitable fur trade between France and the native population, and Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, Catholic priests who first explored the upper Mississippi territory.

The first permanent European settlement in this area was established in 1717, but only after the War of 1812 did the number of settlers increase notably. In 1832, the Sauk and Fox, under Chief Black Hawk, sought to regain their lands in the Illinois and Wisconsin territory but, after their defeat, settlers rapidly moved in. Miners poured into the southwestern sector of Wisconsin early. Lumberjacks came to the northern and central portions of the state. Farmers found abundant fresh water sources and rich land. Factory workers populated the southeastern industrial belt along Lake Michigan.

Panoramic View of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, copyright 1898.
Panoramic Maps 1847-1929

Last evening I went with my parents to a summer refreshment place near the city, which was opened last Sunday with a great bowling contest. In such places things are conducted with much cheerfulness and wholly in the German style. The arrangement of the garden and all the grounds, and the predominance of the German language, would almost make you feel that you were in the fatherland if you did not hear the most varied German dialects and here and there a couple of Americans talking. At another place near the town, in the woods, there is target shooting on Sunday, and when the setting sun ends the work of the marksman a piano in the hall invites the young people to dance.

Carl Schurz to Margarethe Meyer Schurz,
Letter of August 12, 1855,
Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841-1869, 147.
Pioneering the Upper Midwest, ca. 1820-1910

Political refugees from Germany found a haven in Wisconsin during the mid-nineteenth century, especially around Milwaukee. German immigrants contributed their social idealism to community life and German influence was also seen in the development of music, theater, and leisure activities. The Progressive Movement of the early 1900s, which introduced innovative ideas in education and government, found a particular resonance in the state, resulting in legislation that made Wisconsin a leader in the social reform of industry and government.

Weimar Manner Gesang Vereine, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, copyright 1907.
Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

A singing society [Gesangverein] has been organized which has already given a very successful concert. A lot of balls were given during the winter, and an amateur theatre is organizing. Of course all this is only a beginning, but it is something. It is a sign that spiritual needs are strongly making themselves felt….

Carl Schurz to Margarethe Meyer Schurz,
Letter of March 4, 1855,
Intimate Letters of Carl Schurz, 1841-1869, 143.
Pioneering the Upper Midwest, ca. 1820-1910

• Search the following collections using the keyword Wisconsin or the names of Wisconsin localities for more images of the state:
  • Taking the Long View: Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991
  • Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920
  • FSA/OWI Photographs
• View the Today in History feature on Carl Schurz, a German-American conservationist and politician. Read more of Carl Schurz's correspondence in Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910. Discover other first-person accounts and historical documents from the state of Wisconsin in the same collection. Also featured is the special presentation The History of the Upper Midwest: An Overview.
• WPA Life Histories from Wisconsin, in American Life Histories, provides other stories of those who have lived in this state.
• View a manuscript map of Indian lands of eastern Wisconsin annotated by Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, ca. 1831, in the collection, Words and Deeds in American History.
• Map Collections has early maps of a number of Wisconsin cities. In the Cities and Towns section, search on Wisconsin. See, for example, Appleton in 1867, River Falls in 1880, or Menomonee Falls in 1886. Zoom in to see houses, parks, factories, railroad trains, and more in fine detail.

Opening of the Golden Gate Bridge

Golden Gate Bridge,
Photograph 43: General View, Looking North, Showing the 'Bay' Side of the Structure,
San Francisco, California,
Jet Lowe, photographer, 1984.
Built in America: HABS/HAER, 1933-Present

On May 27, 1937, San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge was opened to the public for the first time for "Pedestrian Day," marking the start of the weeklong "Golden Gate Bridge Fiesta" held to celebrate its completion. More than 200,000 people paid twenty-five cents each to walk the bridge. The following day at noon President Franklin Roosevelt, from across the continent at the White House, pressed a telegraph key and the Golden Gate Bridge was officially opened for vehicular use. A compilation of raw film footage of both day's events is available as part of the Prelinger Archive, acquired by the Library of Congress in 2002.

Completed just six months after its neighbor, the San Francisco Oakland Bay Bridge, the Golden Gate Bridge is painted a striking hue known as international orange, a reddish color that was chosen to compliment the bridge's natural surroundings. Like the George Washington, Brooklyn, and Williamsburg bridges in New York City, the Golden Gate is a suspension bridge, held up by massive steel cables strung between towers. Its central span, at 4,200 feet, remained the longest in the world until 1964 when the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, also in New York, was completed. (As of 2007, the Akashi-Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, at 1,991 meters—about 6,532 feet—has the longest single span of any suspension bridge.)

The area known as the Golden Gate is the narrow channel formed at the mouth of San Francisco Bay, where a gap in the line of low mountains opens to meet the Pacific Ocean. Although topographical engineer John C. Frémont first named these rocky straights the "Chrysopylae or Golden Gate" in his report to Congress in 1848, evidence suggests that the term was in use at least a few years earlier. Fremont's designation, which also appeared on his accompanying map of the region, caught the popular imagination when gold was discovered in California soon after.

Birdseye View of San Francisco and Surrounding Country,
G. H. Goddard, perspective map, 1876.
Map Collections

The idea of bridging the mile-wide Golden Gate channel was proposed as early as the 1870s, but it was not until the San Francisco Call Bulletin began an editorial campaign in 1916 that the plan received popular backing. Rocky terrain and difficult weather conditions made the task appear impossible. Following feasibility studies, however, in 1923 the California legislature passed the Golden Gate Bridge and Highway District Act; the District itself was formed six years later. Voters, despite financial uncertainty following the 1929 stock market crash, approved a $35 million construction bond in November 1930.

Bridge designer Joseph Baermann Strauss, a long-time advocate for the project, was selected as the Golden Gate's chief engineer. Important design contributions were made by engineers Charles Ellis and Leon Moissieff and by architect Irving Foster Morrow. Construction began on January 15, 1933. Strauss instituted unprecedented safety measures including an early version of the hard hat and a safety net that stretched end-to-end under the bridge. While eleven workers died during the course of the project, nineteen others whose falls were broken by the net became known as the "Half-Way-to-Hell Club."

Golden Gate Bridge,
Photograph 34: Detail View Showing Connection of Suspender to Floorbeam, San Francisco, California,
Jet Lowe, photographer, 1984.
Built in America: HABS/HAER, 1933-Present

The Golden Gate Bridge links San Francisco to the south with Marin County to the north. It connects a host of natural wonders ranging from Seal Rock to Mt. Tamalpais and the Muir Woods old growth forest; and to architectural achievements from San Francisco's early modern Hallidie Building to Marin County's Civic Center designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

Like New York Harbor's Statue of Liberty, the Golden Gate Bridge has become an icon for San Francisco. In May 1987, to celebrate the bridge's fiftieth anniversary, some 300,000 individuals walked the bridge in an event dubbed "Bridgewalk '87." Two years later, on October 17, 1989, the gracefully suspended bridge withstood the 7.1-magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake without incident.

• San Francisco and Marin Counties lie along the San Andreas Fault and have experienced many earthquakes, the most seismographically powerful occurring in 1838, 1865, 1906, and 1989. To see motion pictures of San Francisco prior to and just after the 1906 earthquake, search on the term San Francisco in Early Motion Pictures, 1897-1920.
• Learn about the Golden Gate before there was a bridge. View the early film Panoramic View of the Golden Gate and read about San Francisco by the Sea. Search the collection "California as I Saw It:" First-Person Narratives of California's Early Years, 1849-1900 on Golden Gate for descriptions and stories and to understand the area's importance to early Californians.
• Search on Seal Rocks in Evolution of the Conservation Movement, 1850-1920 to learn about Congressional legislation of the mid-1880s "to grant certain Seal Rocks to the city and county of San Francisco…in trust for the people of the United States." It was intended to "keep said rocks free from encroachment by man, and…preserve from molestation the seals and other animals now accustomed to resort there" and is an early example of Congressional wildlife protection accomplished by means of a grant to a local authority.
• HABS/HAER Highlights is a sampling of the records in the Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) and the Historic American Engineering Record (HAER) collections, among the largest and most heavily-used in the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division. Explore this preview, designed to represent the depth and breadth of the collections, or search the full online collection titled Built in America: Historic American Buildings Survey/Historic American Engineering Record, 1933-Present. Browse the collection by place to find other San Francisco structures or search on the term bridge to see many different types of bridges from across the United States.

Wild Bill Hickok

Deadwood, South Dakota, copyright 1900.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

Frontiersman, lawman, army scout, gambler, and legendary marksman James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok was born on May 27, 1837, in Troy Grove, Illinois.

As a youth, Hickok became acquainted with the risks incurred by those willing to take a stand against slavery. His father frequently assisted escaped slaves as they made their way north through Illinois and young Hickok joined in the adventure. Hickok left home in 1856, moved to Kansas to farm, and became involved in the Free State movement.

In July 1861, near the outset of the Civil War, Hickok crossed paths with Southern sympathizer David McCanles at Rock Creek, Nebraska Territory. In a 1938 American Life Histories, 1936-1940 interview conducted in Wilbur, Nebraska, the Hickok-McCanles encounter was recounted by F. J. Elliot (based on an earlier 1882 history of the event). As Elliot told the tale, McCanles "came to Wild Bill and tried to persuade him to join" a company he was raising to assist the South. He also tried to force Hickok to turn over the stock he was tending for his employer, the Ben Holiday State Company at Rock Creek station. "On [Hickok's] refusal," Elliot continued:

McCanles threatened to kill him and take the stock. That afternoon McCanles returned with three other men and started to enter the house. Wild Bill shot him. Two of the other men were killed, one got away. At Wild Bill's trial, which was held in Beatrice, no one appeared against him. His plea was self-defence [sic] and he was cleared.

"F. J. Elliott," Wilbur, Nebraska,
George Hartman, interviewer, November 26, 1938, 2.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

His reputation as a marksman was assured after the McCanles incident, but Hickok remained loyal to the North, working as a teamster, scout, and spy for the Union.

Hickok next held a number of positions in law enforcement: as village constable in Monticello, Kansas; a deputy U.S. marshal; sheriff of Hays City (1869); and marshal of Abilene (1871).

"Wild Bill" Hickok was shot and killed by a drunken stranger at a poker table in Nuttall & Mann's Saloon No. 10 in Deadwood on August 2, 1876. Hickok had come to the Black Hills to explore the gold fields there, leaving his wife in Cincinnati. The story of his death is recounted in American Life Histories, 1936-1940 interview, "Ed Grantham."

Buffalo Bill's Wild West Parade,
American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, photographed April 1, 1901.
Early Motion Pictures, 1897-1920

• After Abilene, Hickock travelled with William Frederick "Buffalo Bill" Cody and his company from 1873-74. After Cody created his touring Buffalo Bill's Wild West show in 1883, other actors played Hickok in stage roles for the show. While Hickock did not live to see the dawn of the film industry, members of the show's cast did and were recorded by Edison and Biograph company cameramen. A search on Buffalo Bill in the American Memory Motion Picture collections features elements of Bill Cody's Wild West show including Native American Indian dancers, in scenes that constitute the American Indian's first appearance before a motion-picture camera.
• A search on Bill Cody in History of the American West 1860-1920 yields 100 photographs.
• To read more stories about the legendary Hickok, search on Wild Bill Hickok in American Life Histories, 1936-1940.
• See the Today in History feature on author Owen Wister whose novel The Virginian helped establish the American cowboy as a mythic and heroic figure. Search the Today in History Archive on cowboy for additional features.
• The collection Buckaroos in Paradise: Ranching Culture in Northern Nevada, 1945-1982 provides a look at U.S. cattle ranching and its traditions. See the Special Presentation Buckaroo: Views of a Western Way of Life, an essay by Howard W. Marshall, to learn more about the working life of the modern cowboy. Also, search on Native American or Paiute to find more about Northern Paiute Indians from the Fort McDermitt Reservation who have worked the ranch from its earliest days.

Montana

B.E. view, Helena, Mont.
c 1908.
Panoramic Photographs, 1851-1991

On May 26, 1864, President Lincoln signed an enabling act creating the Territory of Montana. Twenty-five years later, on November 8, 1889, Montana became the forty-first state.

Map of the territory of Montana with portions of the adjoining territories [Detail of Legend],
Drawn by W. W. de Lacy for the use of the first legislature of Montana,
St. Louis, Mo: Jul. Hutawa, lithr., 1865.
Map Collections

Numerous Native American tribes originally inhabited the Montana Territory. Today, Montana's Indian reservations maintain the heritage and culture of many of these tribes including the Crow, Northern Cheyenne, Assiniboine, Gros Ventre or Atsina, Blackfeet, Kootenai, Salish, Chippewa, and Cree. Meriwether Lewis, William Clark, and the members of their expedition were the first explorers to document a journey through Montana and the lands of the Louisiana Purchase. Soon, forts were established to facilitate regular fur trading with Native American tribes. Missionaries and trailblazers followed.

The discovery of gold in the early 1860s sped the creation of the Montana Territory. As settlers and gold prospectors entered Montana in the 1860s and 1870s conflicts with the Indians arose. Perhaps the most famous clash between Native Americans and the United States military occurred in Montana on June 25, 1876. On that day, Sioux and Cheyenne defeated Lieutenant Colonel George Armstrong Custer's 7th United States Cavalry regiment at the Battle of the Little Bighorn, also known as Custer's Last Stand. A year later, Nez Percé Chief Joseph surrendered in the Bear Paw Mountains of Montana after traveling over 1,000 miles across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Montana, trying to elude the U.S. Army and reach safe haven in Canada.

Bands of sheep on the Gravelly Range at the foot of Black Butte, Madison County, Montana,
Russell Lee, photographer, August 1942.
FSA/OWI Color Photographs, 1938-1944

Lured by gold in the 1860s and copper in the 1880s, mining brought many settlers to Montana. Rich grazing lands for cattle and sheep attracted other pioneers. Irene Binderies recalls her memories of moving to Superior, Montana as a young girl:

My family came to Superior from Missoula in 1898, when I was about 14. My father had been editor of several of the larger Montana papers, among them the Butte Miner. Our former environment had been so different from the one we found here that the mining atmosphere made quite an…impression on my brothers and sisters and me, at first mainly of shock.

"Social Life in and about Superior," Superior, Montana,
Mabel Olson, interviewer, between 1936 and 1940.
American Life Histories, 1936-1940

Learn more about Montana in American Memory:

• Read more accounts of pioneer life in Montana. Search the collection American Life Histories, 1936-1940 on pioneer, homestead, Montana, or click on a state in the WPA Life Histories' map to browse a list of interviews conducted in that state. Trails to Utah and the Pacific: Diaries and Letters, 1846-1869 includes personal diaries and journals such as Trip to Montana by wagon train, 1865 April 14- November 9.
• Search the American Memory Photos/Prints collections on Montana to view additional Montana scenes including Glacier National Park.
• Several American Memory collections focus on Native American History. Search on Montana or the names of individual Indian tribes to find a wide array of materials.  In particular, American Indians of the Pacific Northwest provides access to important written documentation found in Annual Reports of the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to the Secretary of the Interior. Reports include information from the Montana agencies such as the Flathead Agency, Blackfeet Agency, Crow Agency, and others.
• Examine bird's-eye view maps of Montana towns through the collection Panoramic Maps, 1847-1929. Follow the instructions presented with the map, and zoom in on an area of the map to see houses, churches, horse drawn carts, and much more in fine and accurate detail. See, for example, Helena in 1875, Miles City in 1883, or Butte about 1884.

Reverdy Johnson

Zachary Taylor and His Cabinet, All Seated Except President Taylor (detail),
Mathew Brady's studio, 1849.
America's First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864
In this detail of President Zachary Taylor with his cabinet, Reverdy Johnson, attorney general, is seated at the far right. Click on the thumbnail for an enlargement showing the entire group portrait.

On May 21, 1796, attorney and statesman Reverdy Johnson was born in Annapolis, Maryland. Johnson represented Maryland, a slaveholding state south of the Mason-Dixon line, as a Whig, in the U.S. Senate from 1845-49 and again following the Civil War as a Democrat from 1863-68. Under President Zachary Taylor, he served as attorney general from 1849 until Taylor's death in 1850. Johnson was considered a brilliant constitutional lawyer and won an 1854 Supreme Court decision in favor of a patent for the McCormick reaper.

Men binding grain being cut by McCormick's horse-drawn reaper, invented in 1831,
Photo by McCormick Company.
Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

Although he personally opposed slavery and emancipated slaves inherited from his father, Johnson represented the slave-owning defendant in the 1857 Dred Scott case in which the U.S. Supreme Court decided that slaves could not be citizens of the United States. The court's decision intensified antislavery sentiment in the North and fed the antagonism that sparked the Civil War. In 1865, the ruling was made obsolete with the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment prohibiting slavery.

Contemporary condemnation of the Dred Scott decision can be found in the the minutes and sermon of the Second Presbyterian and Congregational Convention held in Philadelphia in 1858:

…it was Resolved, That the recent decision of the Supreme Court of the United States in the case of Dred Scott, the evident design of which is, to degrade and rob the free people of color of civil and political rights, to perpetuate Slavery, and dishearten true philanthropy in the United States: is alike a sin against God, and a crime against humanity; and that Judges Curtis and McLean, who dissented from the infamous decision, are worthy of all praise.

Motion of Rev. E. P. Rogers
The minutes and sermon of the Second Presbyterian and Congregational Convention, held in the Central Presbyterian Church, Lombard Street, Philadelphia, on October 28, 1858.
African-American Perspectives, 1818-1907

This map depicts free states in pink and slave states in dark green. The light green area in the West was composed of a number of territories at that time.

Reynold's Political Map of the United States…,
[New York]: William C. Reynolds, 1856.
The African American Odyssey

During the Civil War, Reverdy Johnson strove to keep Maryland in the Union as exemplified in a major address to a Unionist meeting in January 1861. He maintained a close relationship with the Lincoln administration by serving as a member of the failed Washington Peace Conference that met in February 1861. Two years later, he was sent by President Lincoln to New Orleans to investigate complaints about the Union occupation of the city. Lincoln's suspension of the writ of habeas corpus was supported by Johnson as evidenced in this meeting between the two in April 1861.

Johnson was moderate in his attitude toward post-Civil War reconstruction of the rebellious Southern states. When impeachment proceedings were brought against Andrew Johnson, largely for his lenient treatment of the South, Reverdy Johnson was instrumental in securing the president's acquittal.

Following a two-year appointment as minister to Great Britain from 1868-69, Johnson returned to his law practice in Annapolis where he died in 1876 as a result of a fall.

To learn more about the historical events in which Reverdy Johnson played a pivotal role:

Supreme Court Room,inside the Capitol, Washington, D.C.,
William Henry Jackson, photographer, circa 1902.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

• See the Special Presentation on the impeachment trial of President Andrew Johnson included in A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, 1774-1875.
• The Library's Manuscript Division holds the largest collection of Reverdy Johnson papers with correspondence relating to his early law career, Congressional terms, the 1862 investigation of General Benjamin Franklin Butler, and service as U.S. Minister to the Court of St. James.
• Search on Dred Scott as a phrase, in the full text search box in African American Perspectives, 1818-1907 and in Words and Deeds in American History. Read, for example, Minutes and Sermon of the Second Presbyterian and Congregational Convention from October 1858, which includes a condemnation of the recent Dred Scott decision.
• Read a series of sixty-eight letters between Johnson, Abraham Lincoln, and others in the Abraham Lincoln Papers.
• Visit the online exhibition African American Odyssey which explores black America's quest for equality from the early national period through the twentieth century. Also available is The African-American Mosaic, the first Library-wide resource guide to the institution's African-American collections including books, periodicals, prints, photographs, music, film, and recorded sound covering 500 years of history.
• Search on keyword Dred Scott in Slaves and the Courts, 1740-1860 to read more about this famous law case. Read, for example, The Case of Dred Scott in the United States Supreme Court.
• See the presentation titled "The Dred Scott Case" mounted by the National Park Service in conjunction with The Museum of Westward Expansion. This complex, part of the national park system, includes the Old Courthouse where the first two trials of the Dred Scott case were held.

Grant At Vicksburg

On May 19, 1863, General Ulysses S. Grant attempted to take the Confederate stronghold at Vicksburg, Mississippi. After making a daring run past Confederate batteries, Union naval forces joined troops several miles down river. Working together, they detained Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston in Jackson, preventing him from assisting General John C. Pemberton at Vicksburg.

Siege of Vicksburg (detail),
Kurz & Allison, copyright 1888.
Prints and Photographs Division

Levee and Steamboats, Vicksburg, Mississippi,
William R Pywell, photographer, February, 1864.
Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865

When Grant's direct assaults failed to overwhelm the city, on this date and again on May 22, he settled down to a six-week siege. Twelve miles of Northern entrenchments paralleled Confederate earthworks. At some points, soldiers held their separate lines within shouting distance. By mid-June, nearly 80,000 Union troops were massed at the city on the Mississippi River bluffs.

With Union gunboats on the river and enemy trenches surrounding the city, the citizens and soldiers of Vicksburg were sealed off from supplies. In addition to dwindling food stores, they weathered nearly constant bombardment by land and naval forces. To escape the shells, Vicksburg residents abandoned their homes for caves carved into the city's hills. Weeks passed and starving denizens of "Prairie Dog Village," as Union soldiers dubbed the maze of dugouts, still hoped for salvation at the hands of General Johnston.

By day forty-four of the siege, the editor of Vicksburg's Daily Citizen was reduced to printing on wallpaper. Still, he managed to quip:

[T]he great Ulysses—the Yankee Generalissimo, surnamed Grant—has expressed his intention of dining in Vicksburg on Saturday next, and celebrating the 4th of July by a grand dinner and so forth. When asked if he would invite Gen. Jo Johnston to join he said. 'No! for fear there will be a row at the table.' Ulysses must get into the city before he dines in it. The way to cook rabbit is 'first catch the rabbit.' &c.

The Daily Citizen, Vicksburg, Mississippi, J. M. Swords, proprietor, Thursday, July 2, 1863.
An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera

Unbeknownst to the writer, the ordeal was drawing to a close. Pemberton and his 30,000 men surrendered on July 4, 1863. When Northern forces entered the city that day, they found the Citizen ready for the press. The issue was printed by Grant's men and distributed with this addendum:

Two days bring about great changes, The banner of the Union floats over Vicksburg, Gen. Grant has 'caught the rabbit;' he has dined in Vicksburg, and he did bring his dinner with him. The 'Citizen' lives to see it. For the last time it appears on 'Wall-paper.' No more will it eulogize the luxury of mule-meat and fricasseed kitten—urge Southern warriors to such diet never-more.

The Daily Citizen, Vicksburg, Mississippi, J. M. Swords, proprietor, Thursday, July 2, 1863.
An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera

The Daily Citizen, Vicksburg, Mississippi, J. M. Swords, proprietor,
Thursday, July 2, 1863.
An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera

The Daily Citizen, (Reverse side) Vicksburg, Mississippi, J. M. Swords, proprietor,
Thursday, July 2, 1863.
An American Time Capsule: Three Centuries of Broadsides and Other Printed Ephemera

A major turning point in the Civil War, Grant's victory returned control of the Mississippi River to the Union and geographically divided the Confederacy. Coming just a day after Northern triumph at Gettysburg, the capture of Vicksburg restored faith in Union victory and dispirited the South.

Use American Memory to learn more about the Civil War:

"Never Surrender Quick Step" (detail),
"Composed and Dedicated to the Defenders of Glorious Vicksburg,"
Edward W. Eaton, music, 1863.
Historic American Sheet Music, 1850-1920

• Civil War Photographs, 1861-1865 contains seven photographs pertaining to the Vicksburg campaign.
• From the libraries at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Documenting the American South is a collection of sources on Southern history, literature and culture from the colonial period through the first decades of the twentieth century. Search this collection on Vicksburg to retrieve over fifty documents referencing the struggle over the Confederate seat on the Mississippi.
• Words and Deeds in American History: Selected Documents Celebrating the Manuscript Division's First 100 Years contains 12 Watercolors of Civil War ironclads by Ensign D. M. N. Stouffer. The vessels in these ca. 1864-65 paintings were part of the Mississippi Squadron under the command of Admiral David Dixon Porter and many played important parts in the conflict at Vicksburg.
• Search the Today in History Archive on Civil War to locate features highlighting:
  • General Lee's evacuation of Richmond;
  • Military engagements at Bull Run, Nashville, and Antietam;
  • Key figures from the Civil War era such as Jefferson Davis and Stonewall Jackson as well as Civil War era events including Abraham Lincoln's Gettysburg Address and the execution of Andersonville Prison's Henry Wirz.
• Search on the term Vicksburg in Map Collections (1500-Present) to see a variety of interesting items, including an 1863 panoramic View of Vicksburg and Plan of the Canal, Fortifications & Vicinity.

Mr. Johns Hopkins

Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, Maryland, between 1890 and 1910.
Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920

Johns Hopkins was born on May 19, 1795, in Anne Arundel County, Maryland, to a Quaker family. Convinced that slavery was morally wrong, his parents freed their slaves. As a result, Johns had to leave school at age twelve to work in the family tobacco fields. Hopkins regretted that his formal education ended so early. Ambitious and hardworking, he abandoned farming, and, at his mother’s urging, became an apprentice in his uncle's wholesale grocery business when he was seventeen. Within a decade, he had created his own Baltimore-based mercantile operation. Hopkins single-mindedly pursued his business ventures. He never married, lived frugally, and retired a rich man at age fifty. A series of wise investments over the next two decades—he was the largest individual stockholder in the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad, for example—further increased his wealth. He used his fortune to found The Johns Hopkins University and Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, incorporating them in 1867.

Hopkins died in 1873. His will divided $7 million equally between the hospital and the university. At the time, the gift was the largest philanthropic bequest in U.S. history. Hopkins also endowed an orphanage for African-American children.

Hopkins,
Bristow Adams, artist, copyright 1905.
Prints and Photographs Division

Johns Hopkins University opened February 22, 1876. Hopkins' President Daniel Coit Gilman set a new standard for higher education by focusing on ground-breaking research and advanced study. The research university system he introduced continues to characterize American higher education today. Johns Hopkins Hospital opened in 1889, and the medical school opened four years later. Here too, rigorous academic standards and an emphasis on scientific research profoundly influenced medical practice in the United States.

• Search on Johns Hopkins in Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920 to view early-twentieth-century photographs of the Baltimore hospital and university.
• A search on Johns Hopkins in FSA-OWI Photographs, 1935-1945 provides images of an operating room and student nurses.
• Hopkins' first president, Daniel Coit Gilman, describes meeting young Helen Keller at Alexander Graham Bell's house in a document available through the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers.
• William Penn, Lucretia Coffin Mott, and Alice Paul are Quaker social reformers featured in Today in History.

The Kindergarten

Kindergarten in a Vegetable Garden, Washington, D.C.
Frances Benjamin Johnston, photographer, [1899?].
Prints & Photographs Division Online Catalog

Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the educator who opened the first English-language kindergarten in the United States, was born on May 16, 1804, in Billerica, Massachusetts. Long before most educators, Peabody embraced the premise that children's play has intrinsic developmental and educational value.

Peabody was a teacher, writer, and prominent figure in the Transcendental movement, editing The Dial, the chief literary publication of the movement, for two years, beginning in 1841. From 1834-36, she worked as assistant teacher to Bronson Alcott at his experimental Temple School in Boston.

After the school closed, Peabody published Record of a School, outlining the plan of the school and Alcott's philosophy of early childhood education, which had drawn on German models. When she opened her kindergarten in 1860—the first formally organized kindergarten in the United States, the concept of providing formal schooling for children younger than six was largely confined to German practice.

Through her own kindergarten, and as editor of the Kindergarten Messenger (1873-77), Peabody helped establish kindergarten as an accepted institution in U.S. education. She also wrote numerous books in support of the cause.

The extent of her influence is apparent in a statement submitted to Congress on February 12, 1897, in support of free kindergartens:

The advantage to the community in utilizing the age from 4 to 6 in training the hand and eye; in developing the habits of cleanliness, politeness, self-control, urbanity, industry; in training the mind to understand numbers and geometric forms, to invent combinations of figures and shapes, and to represent them with the pencil—these and other valuable lessons…will, I think, ultimately prevail in securing to us the establishment of this beneficent institution in all the city school systems of our country.

Hon. William Harris, Commissioner of Education,
"Free Kindergartens," circa 1897.
African American Perspectives, 1818-1907

Woodmere Academy Kindergarten, Woodmere, New York,
Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., photographer, December 9, 1946.
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955

Kindergarten in Greenhills School, Greenhills, Ohio,
John Vachon, photographer, October 1938.
FSA/OWI Photographs, 1935-1945

Kindergarten Play, St. Vincent de Paul Institute, Tarrytown, New York,
Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., photographer, June 2, 1947.
Architecture and Interior Design for 20th Century America, 1935-1955

After Peabody, other educators, such as Wisconsin-born Mary Davison Bradford (1856-1943), pioneered local kindergarten programs. In her Memoirs, Mary Bradford recollects beginning her teaching career at age sixteen, dressed in a "brown and white striped calico dress" and armed with "the ability to put [her]self in the child's place, and sense his point of view."

Bradford started teaching in a small rural school in a district run jointly by Kenosha and Racine counties. Along the way to becoming Kenosha's Superintendent of Schools, she instituted kindergartens, vocational training programs, breakfast programs for needy children, and a wide range of school reforms. Her memoirs, part of the American Memory collection Pioneering the Upper Midwest, circa 1820-1910, chronicle the development of Wisconsin's public school system.

Learn more about kindergartens and schools in American Memory:

• Search the collection The Nineteenth Century in Print: Books on Elizabeth Peabody to retrieve the full text of Peabody's books, Record of Mr. Alcott's School, Exemplifying the Principles and Methods of Moral Culture (1835) and Guide to the Kindergarten and Intermediate Class(1877), published in one volume with Mary Mann's Moral Culture of Infancy. Search the collection on education to retrieve many works expounding the educational theories and practices of the nineteenth century.
• Search on kindergarten in American Life Histories, 1936-1940 to explore Americans' recollections of kindergarten days. After retrieving a list of hits, select any item and use the BEST MATCH link in the page header to jump to the segment of the piece pertaining to the subject of interest.
• The Prints and Photographs Online Catalog contains many photographs of kindergartens in the United States.
• At the same time that many school systems began to adopt formal kindergartens, many Americans living in rural regions continued to attend one-room schoolhouses. The Northern Great Plains, 1880-1920 features several memorable photographs of these once commonplace schools; to find them, search the collection on school children.
• Search on school in the collection Buckaroos in Paradise, 1945-1982 for a variety of school images from Paradise Valley, Nevada.
• Music for the Nation consists of more than 47,000 musical compositions registered for copyright during the years 1870 to 1879. The collection is easy to search and includes among its many titles the "Kindergarten Waltz."
• Read from some of the books that shaped the culture of religious instruction in America between 1815 and 1865. Search on a keyword such as advice in Sunday School Books: Shaping the Values of Youth in Nineteenth-Century America to see items such as Little Verses for Good Children.
• Search the Today in History Archive on educator or teacher to find other features on such people as Alexander Graham Bell, Mary Church Terrell, Patrick Francis Healy, Bronson Alcott, Mary McLeod Bethune, and John Scopes.

The Andrew Johnson Impeachment

The Senate as a Court of Impeachment for the Trial of Andrew Johnson (detail),
Theodore R. Davis, artist,
illustration in Harper's Weekly, April 11, 1868.
Portraits of the Presidents and First Ladies, 1789-Present

On May 16, 1868, the U.S. Senate voted 35 to 19, one vote short of the two-thirds majority needed to convict President Andrew Johnson of "high crimes and misdemeanors," as he was charged under the eleventh article of impeachment.  Ten days later, on May 26, the Senate also failed by the same margin (35 to 19) to convict Johnson on articles two and three. At this point the Senate voted to adjourn the impeachment trial without considering the remaining articles. When Johnson received the news, he broke into tears.

Johnson, a Southern Democrat, assumed the presidency after Lincoln's assassination. He issued a plan allowing former Confederate states to return representatives to Congress as soon as they repealed the ordinances of secession, repudiated Confederate debts, abolished slavery, and ratified the Thirteenth Amendment. Lacking the personal and political sagacity of President Lincoln, however, Johnson was unable to bring about the transition smoothly and what ensued was a cataclysmic encounter between the executive and legislative branches.

In 1865, Johnson took advantage of a long Congressional recess to recognize a Reconstruction government in all former Confederate states, except Texas. The states then took advantage of his conciliatory policy to pass "Black Codes" limiting freedmen's rights. When the 39th Congress reconvened in December 1865, the Republican majority in Congress refused to seat the newly elected Southern members of Congress.  In early 1866, angry congressmen, led by men such as Charles Sumner and Thaddeus Stevens, passed the Freedmen's Bureau and Civil Rights bills to empower those the codes repressed. Johnson vetoed both bills, but Congress overrode the veto of the Civil Rights Act on April 9, 1866, the first major piece of legislation to pass over a presidential veto in U.S. history.

George T. Brown, Sergeant-at-Arms, Serving the Summons on President Johnson (detail),
Theodore R. Davis, artist,
illustration in Harper's Weekly, March 28,1868.
Prints and Photographs Division

Clearly at cross-purposes, Congress approved the Fourteenth Amendment, while Johnson recommended that the states refuse to ratify it. Congress responded with its own militant reconstruction program and passed the Army Appropriations Act to thwart the president's power as commander in chief, insisting that his orders all be communicated through an intermediary. Congress also repassed the Freedmen's Bureau Act and overrode Johnson's veto.

Passage of the Tenure of Office Act only heightened the antagonism between Johnson and the Congress. The Act forbid the president from removing office-holders, including Cabinet members, without the Senate's approval. Formulated in language akin to that used in the Constitution to describe grounds for impeachment, the Act made the removal of office-holders without Senate approval a "high misdemeanor."

Johnson defied Congress by suspending Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton on August 12, 1867, and appointing Ulysses Grant secretary of war ad interim. Grant resigned this post on January 14, 1868, after the Senate refused to agree to Stanton's dismissal. Next, Johnson appointed Lorenzo Thomas as secretary of war on February 21, 1868 but this time Stanton, who had actually been working with radicals in Congress, barricaded himself inside his office.

The Last Speech on Impeachment—Thaddeus Stevens Closing the Debate in the House, March 2 (detail),
Theodore R. Davis, artist,
Illustration in Harper's Weekly, March 21, 1868.
Prints and Photographs Division

This deadlock culminated in the first presidential impeachment proceedings in U.S. history. In February 1869, the House voted articles of impeachment and seven House managers, including former Civil War Majors General Benjamin F. Butler and John A. Logan, prepared Johnson's trial. Lincoln appointee Salmon P. Chase, chief justice of the Supreme Court, presided. Ten of eleven articles concerned the Tenure and Army Appropriations Acts; the last article claimed that Johnson had attempted to undermine the Congress. Johnson did not attend the trial.

Learn more about impeachment in American Memory:

• Read a transcript of the 1869 Johnson trial on articles of impeachment. See the Supplement to the Congressional Globe Containing the Proceedings of the Senate Sitting for the Trial of Andrew Johnson, a special presentation within the American Memory collection A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation, 1774-1875.
• Find personal accounts of the turbulent Reconstruction Era. Search on reconstruction or carpetbagger in American Life Histories, 1936-1940. Of particular interest are the interviews with Alexander W. Matheson and Mr. C. S. Bradley.
• For additional relevant documents, search on reconstruction or freedmen in African American Perspectives, 1818-1907. The latter search will retrieve a document entitled Equality before the Law Protected by National Statute, which includes speeches and debates by and involving Charles Sumner as he proposed amending the 1866 Civil Rights Act. In it Sumner discusses race, the separate but equal doctrine, slavery, and citizenship with Southern senators.
• Another site, Finding Precedent: The Impeachment of Andrew Johnson provides excerpts from over 200 articles from Harper's Weekly during the period 1865-69.

The Impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton

The second trial of a U.S. president on articles of impeachment occurred in January and February of 1999. The Report of the Independent Counsel including all appendices and supplemental material are available through the Government Printing Office (GPO). Additional materials related to Clinton's impeachment are available on THOMAS, including the enrolled version of House Resolution 611, impeaching William Jefferson Clinton, President of the United States, for high crimes and misdemeanors, as well as House Report 105-830 of the House Judiciary Committee. The record of roll call votes on the two articles adopted — Article 1: "willfully provided perjurious, false and misleading testimony" and Article II: "prevented, obstructed, and impeded the administration of justice" — and the two that were rejected are maintained by the Office of the Clerk of the House.

The proceedings of the Senate trial are available as part of the Congressional Record for the Senate beginning on January 20, 1999. Browse successive issues of the Record for the complete trial or see Miscellaneous Senate Publications Related to the Impeachment of President William Jefferson Clinton maintained by GPO. The two Senate roll call votes of February 12, 1999, for Article I and Article II finding the president not guilty are available as maintained by the Senate Bill Clerk under the direction of the Secretary of the Senate.

L. Frank Baum

"Come along, Toto," she said.
"We will go to the Emerald City and ask the Great Oz how to get back to Kansas again."

L. Frank Baum,
The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
Chapter 3,
Rare Book & Special Collections edition.

L. Frank Baum, Three-Quarter-Length Portrait (detail), copyright 1908.
Prints and Photographs Division

Lyman Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York. The son of a successful entrepreneur, Baum embarked on many careers before beginning to write for children. In his youth, he ran a small printing press to produce a monthly magazine for family and friends. As an adult, his creative work as an actor, playwright, and journalist was interspersed with commercial pursuits including poultry farming, store keeping, and window dressing.

Baum's career as a children's author began with the 1897 publication of Mother Goose in Prose. The book sold well, and Baum followed it in 1899 with the poetry collection Father Goose: His Book. Although Father Goose was the children's bestseller of the year, it was soon overshadowed by The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900). The demand for additional stories about Dorothy and her friends was so great that Baum wrote thirteen more Oz books. Other fictional works created for boys and girls were published by Baum under the pen names "Floyd Akers" and "Edith Van Dyne." After Baum's death in 1919, a new generation of authors continued the Oz series as well as several of Baum's other story lines.

Oz As Allegory

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz,
Chicago and New York: G. M. Hill, 1900.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress

Is the Wonderful Wizard of Oz a political allegory of the turbulent 1890s? In a 1964 American Quarterly article, Henry M. Littlefield suggested this wonderful American fairy tale spoke to the political and economic climate that produced the Populist movement. "Wizard of Oz: Parable On Populism" noted Baum's years as a journalist in drought ravaged rural South Dakota, and his residence in Chicago during the Democratic convention that nominated William Jennings Bryan for the presidency in 1896. According to Littlefield, signs of Baum's time are obvious throughout the first Oz book. For example, Dorothy hails from the Populist hotbed of Kansas, and she travels a yellow brick road symbolic of the gold standard. Yet, it is her silver slippers—representing the free coinage of silver championed by the People's Party—that ultimately save her. Political commentary serves the story, Littlefield maintains, but fortunately, Baum never allows it to overwhelm the fantasy.

The Wizard of Oz debuted on stage long before the famous 1939 MGM film. On June 16, 1902, The Wizard of Oz opened at the Grand Opera House in Chicago. Produced by Fred Hamlin, written by Baum, with music by Paul Tietjens, the play was a hit. After its January 1903 Broadway premiere, the production tallied over 290 performances. It was the longest running show of the decade. The musical focused on the Tin Woodsman and Scarecrow, rather than Dorothy, advancing the careers of David Montgomery and Fred Stone—the vaudeville team tapped for the roles. Throughout the 1910s, traveling road companies brought the The Wizard of Oz to cities and towns across the country. In fact, the play was so successful and so well known that subsequent editions of the The Wonderful Wizard of Oz were retitled The Wizard of Oz to reflect the popularity of the stage production.

The Scarecrow and Company,
Fred R. Hamlin's Musical Extravaganza
The Wizard of Oz, 1903.
The Wizard of Oz: An American
Fairy Tale

The Tin Man,
Fred R. Hamlin's Musical Extravaganza
The Wizard of Oz, 1903.
The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairy Tale

Attempts to capture The Wizard of Oz on film date to 1910, when the Selig Polyscope Company created four one-reel silent movies based on the Wizard and other Oz books. In 1914, L. Frank Baum founded his own Hollywood film company. Its five silent features and several shorts based on Baum's stories were not successful — Baum sold the studio to Universal in 1915. In 1925, yet another silent film version also disappointed at the box office.

The 1939 MGM production starring Judy Garland as Dorothy was an immediate success. With its brilliant use of Technicolor, talented cast, and respectful editing of Baum's story, The Wizard of Oz quickly became a classic. Shown again and again on television, the film has been seen by millions of viewers and in 2006 was heralded by the American Film Institute as the third favorite Greatest Movie Musical of all time.

Learn more about the Yellow Brick Road on a trip down American Memory lane:

• Visit The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairy Tale — the online companion to the Library of Congress exhibition celebrating the 100th anniversary of this timeless American classic.
• Examine a playbill from one of the early Wizard of Oz stage productions. Search the collection American Variety Stage on Wizard of Oz to retrieve several playbills from musical productions of the book.
• Watch the actors who played the Tin Woodsman and the Scarecrow battle it out. Dancing Boxing Match shows the vaudeville team of David Montgomery and Fred Stone at work. To view the film, search the collection American Variety Stage on Montgomery and Stone.
• The text of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz and other Oz tales are available through The Online Literature Library.

Ruby Slippers
Original costume from The Wizard of Oz, 1939.
Silk, leather, sequins, and rhinestones.
Courtesy of Philip Samuels, St. Louis, Missouri.
The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairy Tale
Baum's Dorothy wore silver slippers (see above). Because silver contrasted poorly with the yellow brick road, Judy Garland sported ruby slippers.

Wizard of Oz Monopoly® Game, Hasbro, 1999.
Courtesy of Warner Brothers.
The Wizard of Oz: An American Fairy Tale
The first Oz novelties — brass jewel boxes with tiny Cowardly Lions mounted on the lids — were presented to ladies in the audience of the 100th performance of The Wizard of Oz musical. The 1939 movie version has inspired thousands of such products.

Wild West

[View of San Francisco Harbor].
[1850 or 1851].
America’s First Look into the Camera

On May 15, 1856, residents of San Francisco organized a Committee of Vigilance to combat crime in their rapidly growing town. Like other gold rush boomtowns, San Francisco's population explosion raised crime levels and left residents feeling insecure. Although the Committee of Vigilance turned alleged criminals over to law enforcement officials, it is known to have taken matters into its own hands more than once.

Led by Republican businessmen, the eight-thousand-member committee attempted to clean up politics as well as the streets. Perhaps coincidentally, targets of these rehabilitation efforts tended to be Democrats.

Edward McGowan, a former Pennsylvania legislator and police superintendent whose political dealings earned him the nickname "the ballot box stuffer," was among the Democratic politicians run out of town by the second committee. He told his side of the story in Narrative of Edward McGowan. The account includes a description of his getaway:

Forward to the Reprint Edition,
Narrative of Edward McGowan…, 1857.
California As I Saw It: First Person Narratives, 1849-1900

My arrangements to leave were all made, and I lay down on the bed, awaiting the arrival of my friends. Presently they came, four in number. I immediately put on a covered California hat, and accompanied them into the street, and high time it was that I did so. The bloodhounds had struck the scent, and were on my track. As I afterward learned, fifteen minutes after I left, the neighborhood was surrounded, and some ten or fifteen braves entered and searched the premises. They were armed with sabers and pistols, and ransacked every hole, nook, and corner, making a terrible to-do and clatter among pots, pans, and kettles, but the bird had flown.

Narrative of Edward McGowan, Part 1, 25, 26.
California As I Saw It: First Person Narratives, 1849-1900

Although popular among residents, the Committee of 1856 disbanded after a few months. Hardly unique, the San Francisco Vigilance Committee is just one example of efforts to tame the Wild West.

• Learn more about the vigilance committees. See Letter, California vigilante committee to John Stephens, 5 September 1856, featured in Words and Deeds in American History.
• Search the full text of California As I Saw It: First-Person Narratives, 1849-1900 on vigilance committee to find more recollections of this chapter of San Francisco history.
• The Chinese in California, 1850-1925 has several documents relating to vigilance committees in San Francisco.
• The history of the American West was often marked by violence. Read Today in History features on Jesse James, the First Train Robbery, and the Rock Springs Massacre to learn more about crime in the American West.

Jamestown

On May 14, 1607, English settlers arriving under the authority of the Virginia Company of London chartered by King James I established the first permanent British settlement in North America at a place they named Jamestown, Virginia."We landed all our men," George Percy wrote in his account of the event, "which were set to worke about [i.e., on] the fortification, and others some to watch and ward as it was convenient."¹

Virginia Discovered and Discribed by Captayn John Smith, 1606, (detail showing Jamestown),
William Hole, engraver, London, 1624.
Discovery and Exploration
Map Collections

The Jamestown colonists struggled with leadership and survival from the beginning. Captain John Smith spent his first months in Virginia exploring in the Chesapeake region, undergoing capture by the regional Algonquian "great emperor," Powhatan, with whom he subsequently developed a mutually wary and respectful relationship. In 1608 Smith was chosen to be president of Jamestown’s governing council and proved to be an able leader. Yet Smith returned to England in 1609, and only 60 of the 214 colonists survived the "Starving Time" of the ensuing harsh winter. The arrival of fresh supplies from England in the spring fortified the colony and enabled it to endure.

Virginia Discovered and Discribed by Captayn John Smith, 1606, (detail showing Powhatan chief),
William Hole, engraver, London, 1624.
Discovery and Exploration
Map Collections

On July 30, 1619, under the provisions of the Virginia Company Charter, the House of Burgesses met in Jamestown "to establish …one uniform government over all Virginia," thereby becoming the first representative legislative assembly of European Americans in the Western Hemisphere. (Tradition dates the formation of the Iroquois Confederacy of five Indian tribes in upper New York state between 1570 and 1600.) Jamestown was also the site of the Americas' first Anglican church. ²

Another event of momentous consequence took place in August 1619 when a Dutch ship exchanged a cargo of some twenty captive Africans for food. Although the Africans' legal status in these early years was probably closer to indentured servitude than to the full-fledged slavery that hardened in Virginia by the end of the century, this event represented both the founding African presence and the foundation of slavery in British North America.

Despite the success represented by the colony's survival and political organization, relations with the Algonquians were unstable and at times violent. In March 1622, more than three hundred colonists were killed by the Algonquians just outside Jamestown and more than twice that number died in an epidemic the next December. Following these events, King James revoked the Virginia Company's charter in 1624, in 1625 his son King Charles I made Virginia a royal colony.

Learn more about Jamestown and related subjects in American Memory:

• See a timeline of early Virginia history in The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress.
• Explore the Virginia Records, 1606-1737 within The Thomas Jefferson Papers at the Library of Congress. The Virginia Records volumes were part of Jefferson's personal library. These volumes were very fragile when Jefferson first collected them, can only be handled with the greatest care, and are generally not made available for researchers except in microfilm format. Their presentation online makes this unacknowledged treasure widely available to the public for the first time in an easily accessible format.

  
  Old Church (detail), Jamestown, Virginia,
  William Henry Jackson, photographer, copyright circa 1902.
  Touring Turn-of-the-Century America, 1880-1920
  This 1639 church tower was one of the few remnants of the Jamestown Settlement visible in the 1890s, when the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities began excavating the site.

• Read John Smith's Generall Historie of Virginia, Edward Maria Wingfield's Discourse of Virginia, and Ralph Hamor's True Discourse of the Present Estate of Virginia in The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925. Browse this collection's subject, author, or title lists to find other works concerning early Virginia.
• See Early Settlement of Virginia and Virginiola… in African American Perspectives, 1818-1907 for an historical account from English sources and letters about Jamestown and the Virginia Company, including an alleged long-lost poem on Virginia by Shakespeare.
• The exhibition African-American Mosaic contains an historical map that makes reference to the introduction of slavery to the colonies in Jamestown.
• Search across the American Memory collections of photographs and prints on Anglican churches to see several buildings from the colonial era, including Christ Church in Alexandria, Virginia, completed in 1773, Pohick Church in Fairfax County, completed in 1774, and St. John's Church in Richmond, completed in 1741.
• See Today in History for December 4 to learn about another English settlement in Virginia near Jamestown; and Today in History for September 10 to learn more about John Smith's leadership.

1. The words of George Percy are quoted in A Timeline of Events and References Leading up to and through the Founding of Jamestown, compiled by Nick Luccketti for the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities. It should be noted that because of the then-ten-day difference between the "Old Style" (Julian) calendar used by Englishmen until 1752, and the "New Style" (Gregorian) calendar in use since 1752, the date when settlement began was actually May 24 in modern terms.
2. A Brief History of Jamestown, provided online by the Association for the Preservation of Virginia Antiquities.