History & Culture
Scidmore Book Titles at 1893 World’s Fair
Women’s History Month begins this week. The Center for the Book at the Library of Congress kicked things off things with a presentation March 2 on a new scholarly work, Right Here I See My Own Books. The book describes the woman’s library of 8,000 titles assembled for the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893 (officially the…
Read MoreCherry Tree Art at Library of Congress
With the 100th anniversary of Washington’s first cherry trees only six weeks away, on March 27, special exhibits and programs on sakura (cherry blossoms) are cropping up all over town. In late March, the Library of Congress will open an exhibition of 54 prints and art works from its collections depicting different scenes of cherry trees.…
Read MoreBooks: ‘You Need a Schoolhouse’
I’m heading up to Capitol Hill this evening for a presentation by Stephanie Deutsch, who’s launching her book on the so-called Rosenwald schools. The book, You Need a Schoolhouse, describes the unlikely partnership between educator and black leader Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald, the president of Sears, Roebuck. The two men collaborated in efforts…
Read MoreVideo: Scidmore’s Historic 1883 Trip to Glacier Bay
Of all I’ve learned about Eliza Scidmore so far, nothing has excited my imagination so much as her pioneering Alaska travel. She went for the first time in the summer of 1883, in a journey that became historic, as I show in the video below. Scidmore, then 26, was working at the time…
Read MoreLibrary of Congress Hosts Women’s History Forum
Today is the first Thursday of the month. That calls for packing my lunch so I can join the Women’s History Discussion Group at the Library of Congress. We all crowd into a small conference room and sit around sharing ideas about research avenues for our various projects. Some of the tips are things that…
Read MoreBooks: 4 Great Reads By or About Women
I love literature, and as an English major I’ve read a lot of fiction over the years. But these days it seems I read mostly nonfiction. Just finished dipping into an academic book I picked up in the Library of Congress’s gift shop, titled Daughters of the Union: Northern Women Fight the Civil War, by…
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