Library of Congress's Blog

—This is a guest post by Patrick Hastings, a specialist in the Rare Book and Special Collections Division. It also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, which focuses on America 250. 

The Library has within its collections two fascinating copies of “The Federalist” with deep personal ties to three Founding Fathers.

The Federalist Papers originally were published in New York newspapers as 85 stand-alone essays advocating for the ratification of the U.S. Constitution. These foundational texts appeared under the pseudonym “Publius” but were written by an authorial tag team of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison (with John Jay contributing only five essays due to illness).

In an incredible feat of writerly productivity, Hamilton and Madison published multiple essays each week, releasing an avalanche of arguments for why the proposed Constitution would ensure the new nation’s survival and prosperity.

These essays were first collected and bound together in spring 1788 in a two-volume edition titled “The Federalist: A Collection of Essays, Written in Favour of the New Constitution, as Agreed upon by the Federal Convention, September 17, 1787.” Archibald McLean, the printer of the first edition, complained about the project’s expanding size, saying, “When I engaged to do the work, it was to consist of twenty numbers, or at the most twenty-five.” So, instead of printing one volume of 200 pages, McLean’s Manhattan print shop ultimately was burdened with producing two volumes totaling 600 pages. Plus, the book didn’t sell. McLean was stuck with several hundred unsold copies.

The Library holds four copies from McLean’s edition, including one originally owned by Elizabeth Hamilton, wife of Alexander Hamilton. Eliza sent her copy as a gift to her sister, Angelica Schuyler Church, then living in London with her husband. The title page is inscribed, “For Mrs. Church from her Sister Elizabeth Hamilton.”

At this time, Angelica’s daughter was enrolled in the same French boarding school as Thomas Jefferson’s eldest daughter. During Jefferson’s time in Paris as the American minister to France, he and Angelica became friends and would exchange letters for years.

They apparently also exchanged books. The library Jefferson sold to the United States for the Library of Congress in 1815 included the Schuyler sisters’ copy of “The Federalist,” which Angelica had gifted to Jefferson.

Jefferson commented that “The Federalist” was “the best commentary on the principles of government which was ever written” — high praise from the author of the Declaration of Independence.

Guessing who had written which essay was a popular parlor game in the early American political class. Within his copy, Jefferson used the front flyleaf to identify the authors for each of Publius’ 85 essays. He attributed five to Jay, 30 to Madison and “the rest of the work by Alexander Hamilton.”

Thomas Jefferson used the flyleaf of his copy of “The Federalist” to note who he thought had written each essay. Rare Book and Special Collections Division. Photo: Shawn Miller.

When Hamilton died following his duel with Aaron Burr, he left behind a list of the authors for each essay. Within this list, Hamilton named himself as the author of a few essays that Madison himself claimed.

In Madison’s personal copy of “The Federalist,” also held by the Library, he sought to correct the record and noted in pencil the initials of each essay’s author. Furthermore, Madison’s copy contains his revisions for a “new edition” published in 1818.

Because McLean’s 1788 first edition was produced while Madison was away serving in Virginia’s state ratifying convention, his essays were published in “The Federalist” exactly as they had appeared in the newspapers. For the 1818 edition, Madison finally had the opportunity to correct errors and polish his prose.

Madison blushed at being labeled “The Father of the Constitution,” acknowledging instead “the work of many heads and many hands.” Just please get right whose hands wrote what.

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As the 2026 FIFA World Cup gets underway, billions of fans around the world are tuning in to watch the world’s most popular sporting event. The tournament, co-hosted by the United States, Mexico and Canada, likely will be the largest and most watched in history, with over 6.5 million fans filling stadiums across all three countries, according to the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the sport’s global governing body.

The began on June 11 in Mexico City and concludes with the final in New Jersey on July 19. A record 48 countries are playing this year, a 50% increase from the 32 teams usually competing.

To mark the occasion, the Library’s Hispanic Reading Room is showcasing a colorful display, “For the Love of the Game,” that explains the evolution and appeal of a sport that has become one of the world’s most influential cultural forces. The display complements a new World Cup LibGuide developed by the Library’s Latin American, Caribbean and European collections specialists.

Among the 15 items featured in the display are a rare photo album documenting the inaugural 1930 World Cup in Uruguay, memorabilia from later tournaments, a book titled “1283” about Brazilian global soccer icon Pelé — three-time World Cup champion and scorer of 1,283 goals — and another showcasing the legacy of the late Argentinian midfielder, Diego Maradona.

“When the World Cup started in 1930, it was kind of an unproven concept, but today it is clear that when you host the World Cup, you become the center of attention in the world,” said reference librarian Henry Widener, lead curator of the display. “We put together a display that explores nine decades of World Cup history and soccer’s growing popularity in American culture.”

He’s not kidding about that homegrown popularity. A 2025 survey published by The Economist found that 10 percent of Americans say soccer is their favorite sport — narrowly edging out baseball for third behind football and basketball. The U.S. is also the biggest foreign market for the four largest European leagues, according to the same survey.

Other display highlights include a newspaper image depicting Uruguay’s shocking upset of Brazil, 2-1, in the decisive game of the 1950 World Cup. And of course there’s a Panini collectible sticker album, now a tradition, that was introduced in 1970.

As any fan will happily tell you, soccer is about far more than the 90-minute drama on the field. For nearly a century, the game has helped shape national identities, triggered fierce rivalries and helped people bond over shared memories.

 

An original ad from the first World Cup, held in Uruguay in 1930, is part of the display. Prints and Photographs Division. Photo of the ad: Shawn Miller.

Widener was born in Texas and is torn between Mexico and Brazil as his pick for winning this year’s World Cup.

“As someone who has traveled a lot and talked to people from different places … if I mention the World Cup, people talk about it like it’s the most important thing in the world to them,” he said. “It really does bring people together.”

While football-like games have been played for more than 2,000 years around the world, the modern version traces its roots to England in 1863. Once the rules were codified, the game spread across trade routes and, by the time of that initial 1930 World Cup, soccer had become an international phenomenon.

The United States first hosted the World Cup in 1994, introducing millions of Americans to soccer’s four-year craze and helping to fuel the sport’s amateur and professional growth.

As fans gather in stadiums and around their TVs and watch parties over the next month, Library visitors can discover how this simple game — with its prolonged shout of “Gooooooaaal!” — became a global language.

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-This article also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

The palm-sized photographs capture their weathered faces: six men with flowing silver hair and deeply etched wrinkles, clutching canes for support — the last survivors, perhaps, of the Revolutionary War.

Beginning in the early 1800s, the U.S. government established a pension system for veterans of the Revolution. As the years passed, federal budget reports showed an ever-dwindling number of them to be still alive and receiving payments.

By 1864, eight decades after the Revolution’s end, only a dozen or so veterans survived. That realization sparked another: The time to record the firsthand stories of these men was now, before they, like their comrades, passed into history.

So, two Connecticut brothers — photographers Nelson and Roswell Moore — tracked down the known survivors, by that time down to six: William Hutchings, Daniel Waldo, Adam Link, Alexander Millener, Lemuel Cook and Samuel Downing.

“The Last Men of the Revolution” is the handwritten title for this collection of photographs of all six men who, in 1864, were believed to be the last surviving soldiers of the Revolutionary War. Photo: Roswell A. Moore. Prints and Photographs Division.

The Moore brothers captured their portraits as cartes de visite, small albumen prints mounted on cards intended for wide distribution. The Moores didn’t, however, record the veterans’ stories. Enter Elias Brewster Hillard, a Connecticut clergyman who set out to interview the six men and publish a book recounting their wartime experiences.

The results weren’t precise history. Hillard was neither journalist nor author, as historian Don Hagist noted, and the veterans he interviewed all were at least 100 years old, with fuzzy memories of long-ago exploits. Still, the publication of Hillard’s book, “The Last Men of the Revolution,” in 1864 made the veterans minor celebrities — boosted by the inclusion of the Moores’ striking photographs.

As it turned out, the six weren’t quite the last men of the Revolution. The publicity, Hagist found, drew other veterans into the public eye — one of whom, Daniel Frederick Bakeman, outlived all the others on the pension rolls.

Today, the six veterans in those photographs live on at the Library: The Rare Book and Special Collections Division holds Hillard’s book, and the cartes de visite are preserved in the Prints and Photographs Division.

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Geraldine Brooks remembered the day her father took her to see the newspapers.

This was in her native Australia. She was little, maybe 8. He was a proofreader at the paper, an American who settled in Down Under after a singing career, and he took her to the pressroom floor, where the heavy linotype machines whirred and clanged and the noise was unbelievable.

“The foreman hit the button for the afternoon edition and this paper’s just spinning across the room and the newspapers start landing on the conveyor belt and Dad reached out and got one and handed it to me and it was … hot off the press,” she laughed. “I looked down on those big black headlines and I thought, ‘I am the first one that knows what’s going on in this city right now.’ And I just wanted that.”

Reader, she got it.

Some six decades, 10 books and many an international byline later, she recounted this origin story to a delighted crowd in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium on a recent night.

Brooks, the 2025 recipient of the Library’s Prize for American Fiction, has been a foreign correspondent for The Wall Street Journal; then a mom who wrote novels since she couldn’t travel so much (and won a Pulitzer Prize); and, most recently, a memoirist looking back at the shock and grief left behind after her husband, journalist and author (and fellow Pulitzer winner) Tony Horwitz, died seven years ago.

Horwitz collapsed due to heart failure — he was 60 and in apparent great health — on Memorial Day, 2019, during a book tour. The aftermath provided the soul-scraping work of “Memorial Days,” her most recent book.

Both in the book and in her talk she explained importance of persevering with one’s craft through the canyons of grief, summed up in advice she attributed to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, the late Supreme Court associate justice: “Do your work. It might not be your best work, but it will be good work, and it will be what saves you.”

It was a draining period. She retreated for a time to Flinders Island, a small dot in the ocean between Australia and its southern state of Tasmania. Fewer than 1,000 people live there. And there, far from the United States where her husband died but close to home, she found the place she could set down the aching grief she had for the future life she and Horwitz would have had together.

“At home now, I make more time for the beauty,” she writes. “I make it a point to notice the trees, in all their various seasonal personalities. To be with the critters that share my space. A nest of baby rabbits, a coin-sized painted turtle hatchling, a fluffy mallard duckling out for its first swim — these encounters, more than almost anything else, have the power to elevate me out of sadness.”

Ron Charles in conversation with Geraldine Brooks in the Library’s Coolidge Auditorium. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Brooks was in conversation with book critic Ron Charles, who worked for years at The Washington Post and is now on Substack. He asked about the transition from writing high-octane journalism — foreign correspondence from war-ravaged countries — to writing the kind of historical fiction that has defined her career over the past three decades. She’s sold millions of copies of her novels around the world and seen them translated into dozens of languages.

“March,” which won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize, melded her journalism and fiction skills. The book is her imagining of the absent father in Louisa May Alcott’s post-Civil War classic, “Little Women.” In Brooks’ novel, March, the father, is an idealist who goes off to fight for the Union; after a shattering experience, he returns home to a family who has no idea of the horrors that have changed him.

“In journalism — to me — the purpose of the work was to show how the decisions that are made in the White House or in Whitehall (the London area that is home to the U.K. government) actually plays out in the lives of human beings,” she said.

“But often when you’re reporting, you know more than you can prove. You can’t find the two confirming sources that you need to put something in print. In fiction, you can follow the line of fact as far as it leads. But when the historical voices fall silent — or when those voices never had a chance to tell their own story — you can do all that research and figure out what you think might have happened and you can just write it. It’s tremendously liberating.”

She’s written fiction as wide-ranging in time and geography as 3,000 years ago in Israel (“The Secret Chord”), 1990s Bosnia (“People of the Book”), 1600s Britain (“Year of Wonders”) and a tale that covers the United States from the middle of the 19th century to the  21st (“Horse”).

The trick to making all those eras seem real, she says, is to keep your narrative eye on what’s timeless.

“I mean hate and love and fear and wanting to live and wanting to see your children live,” she said. “Those are the things that shape our consciousness, not the material goods, not whether the tables are made of oak or synthetic plastic … The thing isn’t important. It’s the human emotion — and that, I believe, doesn’t change.”

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— This is a guest post by Meagan Snow, a geospatial data visualization librarian in the Geography and Map Division. It also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

For thousands of years, the moon was an object of fascination across time, space and cultures. In 1610, Galileo Galilei first turned it into an object of scientific study, pointing his telescope to the moon and revealing a rugged world of mountains, valleys, craters and ridges.

Some 350 years later, in a 1961 speech to Congress, President John F. Kennedy committed America to landing on the moon within a decade. Thus began an intense mobilization across government agencies to make it happen. Landing a man on the moon successfully was a challenge not just of technology but also of geography: Given the moon’s uneven topography, choosing a good landing site was of utmost importance.

They would need a map.

The Aeronautical Chart and Information Center, then the nation’s premier mapping agency for defense, mobilized for the task.

The center employed experts in photogrammetry — the process for making accurate measurements from photos — who could transform aerial images to correct distortion, account for overlap among images and produce consistent maps without ground control points. Those skills were vital to creating an accurate lunar mosaic using images taken from telescopes.

The agency’s USAF Lunar Wall Mosaic: Lunar Equatorial Mosaic was produced in 1962, just one year after Kennedy’s speech. Cartographers created the map, a copy of which is held by the Library’s Geography and Map Division, by applying manual photogrammetric methods to telescopic photographs.

The large-format map created a foundational understanding across agencies and staffs of the moon’s topographic surface, and it was utilized for early decision-making within the Apollo program. Visible on the center-right section of the map is Mare Tranquillitatis (Sea of Tranquility), the area where the Apollo 11 crew landed safely in 1969.

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Belinda Carlisle, a child of L.A., and a couple of friends were teens hanging out in the city’s punk music scene in the late ’70s. Only one or two of them knew much about being musicians, but they threw themselves into it and by 1978, after a lineup change or two, started calling themselves The Go-Go’s.

They were, she remembers, “terrible,” but so were most of the other bands. They spent three years putting together material. No major labels were interested, so they signed with scrappy little I.R.S. Records. When they got the studio mix of their first album, “Beauty and the Beat,” they were somewhere between shocked and furious.

“We were horrified,” Carlisle, the group’s lead singer, laughed in recent interview with the Library. “It was like, ‘This isn’t us. This isn’t punk.’ I mean, I love the album, but there are songs that were sped up. I think in some songs I sound like a chipmunk.”

Charlotte Caffey, songwriter and guitarist, said Carlisle wasn’t kidding.

“We were screaming and crying and cursing like, ‘This is the worst piece of (expletive) we’ve ever heard.’ ”

Despite their horror, the 1981 album slowly but surely went to No. 1, powered by the hits “Our Lips Are Sealed” and “We Got the Beat.” The Go-Go’s, rock’s most successful all-female band, were launched into the ’80s pop-culture stratosphere of MTV, magazine covers and the national zeitgeist, headed for the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. And nearly half a century later, the album has been inducted into the 2026 class of the National Recording Registry.

“Beauty and the Beat,” the Go-Go’s first album, featuring hits such as “We Got the Beat” and “Our Lips are Sealed,” has been inducted into the 2026 class of the National Recording Registry. Photo: IRS.

There were several striking things about the album when it hit the ’80s airwaves — the energetic fusion of pop, New Wave and punk; the way the band’s sunny L.A. version of punk contrasted with the tough-guy New York and London varieties; but also, consider this: The Encyclopedia Britannica still lists “Beauty” as the only No. 1 Billboard album by an all-female rock group who wrote and performed their own material.

Caffey said that producer Richard Gottehrer’s work was a brilliant distillation of the band’s “mushy” live performances. This clarity stemmed from his background as a songwriter and producer, with ’60s credits such as “My Boyfriend’s Back,” “I Want Candy” and “Hang On Sloopy.”

“What he wanted to shine were the lyrics, the melody,” she said. “… it didn’t sound as powerful to us, but the power came through being able to hear the lyrics and to hear the song, not just this loud (onstage) craziness that we were used to. … Richard was 100 percent right.”

The band was a quintet — Carlisle, Caffey, Gina Schock, Kathy Valentine and Jane Wiedlin — and came up the hard way.

They just got up onstage, often in a tiny basement club and banged away, learning on the fly. The spot was near The Masque nightclub in the 6600 block of Hollywood Boulevard, their breakout spot. The sidewalk in front now bears their star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

The basement club, meanwhile, with is cement walls, floor and ceiling, was “ground zero for ‘Beauty and the Beat,’” Caffey remembers: “It was no holds barred … you know, a creative melting pot of weirdos.”

Valentine, the last member to join the group (she moved to L.A. from Austin, Texas, at 19), was a guitarist who didn’t know women could be guitarists. She’d seen Suzi Quatro fronting her own group, and it had given her an ideal. The do-it-yourself frontier of punk gave her a way to realize it. For The Go-Go’s, she played bass and wrote songs, including “Can’t Stop the World” on “Beauty” and their later hit, “Vacation.”

“The thing that appealed to me was that you didn’t have to be a virtuoso,” she said in an interview. “You didn’t have to play guitar like Jimmy Page (Led Zeppelin’s lead guitarist). You could do it right now. It’s about attitude and energy and the songs.”

The band stayed together for three albums through 1985. They went on to individual careers and have since reunited from time to time, toured, gone on hiatus, recorded together and last year played a set at Coachella with Billie Joe Armstrong of Green Day.

That show, their biggest platform in decades, was part of a series of concerts that introduced them to a new generation of fans. For Wiedlin (backing vocals, rhythm guitar, songwriting), cementing their status is a legacy project worth pursuing.

“I would like to be remembered as a powerhouse and a punk rocker and someone that broke boundaries and smashed glass ceilings,” she said in an interview. “That’d be awesome.”

It’s been half a lifetime now, but the magic of those early days in L.A. — the punk clubs, the music, the lightning-in-a-bottle energy of “Beauty” — it still resonates, both in the lives of the band and in American pop culture.

“We were at the right place at the right time with this creative energy just engulfing us,” Caffey says. “It was so spectacular.”

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—This is a guest post by Barbara Bair, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It also appears in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine. 

Ralph Ellison’s masterpiece novel, “Invisible Man,” was greeted as a sensation in both content and style when it was first published in 1952. The surreal first-person bildungsroman tale of a young man seeking affirmation of his identity as a Black citizen in America continues to be ranked among the best works of American literature of the 20th century. Ellison became the first African American writer awarded the National Book Award for Literature when he won the prize for the novel in 1953.

“Invisible Man” is a reflection on race and humanity in an era of Jim Crow repression and Black urban migration. It charts the challenging and often-nightmarish experiences of an unnamed narrator’s physical and metaphysical travel from the American South to New York City, where he becomes deeply immersed as a witness-participant in the complex politics and cross-cultural life of Harlem. Ellison’s improvisational approach to the novel’s structure reflects his love of blues and jazz, and his incorporation of parody, puns and wordplay honor the richness of black humor and the vernacular tradition.

A working manuscript of “Invisible Man,” with editing by Ellison. Manuscript Division.

Ellison left school in Tuskegee, Alabama (where he studied music and read canonical literature in the library), to go to Manhattan in the mid-1930s. His employment as a folklorist with the Harlem Federal Writers’ Project and the encouragement he received from Langston Hughes and Richard Wright laid a foundation for his creation of “Invisible Man” and his long career as an essay writer and cultural critic.

The famous opening lines of the novel’s prologue (“I am an invisible man … simply because people refuse to see me”) have retained their significance into current times, and Ellison continues to inspire rising writers and readers. With “Invisible Man,” he opened a path that led to the Black Arts Movement of a following generation and spoke to existential and universal aspects of the human condition.

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When there’s a statue of your dad on Capitol Hill, it’s probably inevitable that you think about things like history and legacy and preservation, so Rosanne Cash was particularly moved when one of her albums was inducted into the National Recording Registry a few days ago.

The singer-songwriter daughter of Johnny Cash — the musician and cultural icon — has herself been a steady figure in Americana, country and crossover music for half a century. “The Wheel,” a 1993 album about a chaotic period in her life, is now on the registry — just like her father’s “At Folsom Prison,” which he recorded when she was just 12.

In the Library’s collection of some 4 million recordings across all genres, including news, sports and other broadcasts, they are the only father and daughter duo on the registry. This year’s NRR selections, which also included music from Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Ray Charles, now preserves 700 recordings from the nation’s aural history.

The decades roll by; Cash is 70 now. She has more than a dozen studio albums, several Grammys, a memoir and induction into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame behind her. From this plateau, she can fully appreciate the arc of life that brought her here. Her stepmother, June Carter Cash, was the famous and influential singer whose parents and relatives were some of the key founders of American country music.

“Preservation is as meaningful as spirituality to me,” she said in an interview with the Library. “And so the fact that ‘The Wheel’ is going to be preserved, that 200 years from now somebody will go, ‘Oh, what’s that album that’s in the Library?’ …  (it means) that I can touch the future and they can touch the past.”

She’s donated many family possessions to the Country Music Hall of Fame and is preparing more items to be preserved at the Library. She’s held onto her journals, recordings, emails, her parents’ wedding certificate and so on — all to preserve the chain of family and musical history.

She was born in 1955, the first of four children of Johnny Cash and Vivian Liberto, teenage sweethearts who met in Texas. Her father’s mix of country, western and rockabilly music exploded into the national consciousness in the late 1950s from Sun Records, the Memphis label where Elvis was also rocketing to fame. It was just across the Mississippi River from his roots in dirt-poor rural Arkansas. Liberto was the inspiration for one of his biggest hits, “I Walk the Line.”

The couple divorced in 1966.

Cash grew up wanting to be a songwriter, not necessarily a performer. But after making that leap, she didn’t try to echo her father’s work. She recorded her first album in her early 20s; No. 1 country hits like “Seven Year Ache,” “I Don’t Know Why You Don’t Want Me” and “Never Be You” followed in the 1980s. They were part country, part pop and not at all like her father’s hard-country, western-influenced songs from a generation earlier.

“I can do myself with no problem,” she said in her conversation with the Library. “But it was impossible also for me to be anything like my dad, because he grew up on a cotton farm in Arkansas in the Great Depression. I grew up in Southern California in the ’60s and ’70s, listening to Fleetwood Mac and Elton John and Janis Joplin … there was just no crossing of our backgrounds.”

 

“The Wheel,” Rosanne Cash’s 1993 album, has been inducted into the 2026 class of the National Recording Registry. Photo: Rumblestrip.

“Interiors,” a 1990 album, marked a transition to dark, more introspective folk music. “The Wheel,” in 1993, was greatly influenced by the breakup of her marriage to country star Rodney Crowell. She was also falling in love with John Leventhal, a musician, producer and songwriter. The emotional upheaval and personal chaos left her at a raw, new stage in life; a mother in her 30s who was a much different person than the young woman who had risen to stardom in her 20s.

Her lyrics were more confessional; her music was more folk and Americana than anything else. She seemed on a different platform, looking at life through a harder but more insightful lens. “The truth moves through us even when we sleep,” she wrote in the title cut of “The Wheel.”

The song came to her all in a rush, she recalled, “almost like a volcanic energy was bubbling up in me.” Desperate to get it down, she called a babysitter to rush over and watch her young children.

Then: “I locked myself in a walk-in closet for an hour and a half, and I wrote ‘The Wheel.’ It was as if it was there, and I just had to put pen to paper. … Most songs require a lot more diligence, dedication and, you know, just showing up for work and paying attention. But that one came almost fully formed.”

It was a turning point in her career. Leventhal wrote the music for several of the songs on the album, and the pair co-produced it. They got married, too, and remain so 31 years later.

The song stuck with her audiences as well. She still performs it in concert and released an expanded 30th anniversary edition of the album a couple of years ago.

“I sang ‘The Wheel’ in performance a couple weeks ago, and I kind of got goosebumps singing it,” she said. “I said to the audience at the end, ‘What a gift it is to sing a song, a 30-something-year-old song, and still feel it’s so alive in me. I love it.”

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Here’s a story for Jewish American Heritage Month and the nation’s approaching 250th birthday that you probably didn’t know:

When American Colonies formally declared their independence on July 4, 1776, the first foreign government to recognize them as the United States of America was the tiny Caribbean island of Sint (Saint) Eustatius, a Dutch-controlled outpost and international trading hub. The recognition came in the form of an official gun salute to the arriving American brig Andrew Doria and has gone down in history as the “first salute” to the new nation.

After that symbolic moment, the island’s 600 or so Jewish citizens, many who had family and business ties in the American Colonies, got to work as some of the new nation’s best suppliers. They sent guns, provisions and basic supplies around the British blockade and into the hands of revolutionaries. During the war, the island’s harbors teemed with American ships. The supply route helped the Americans keep fighting and infuriated the British crown.

“For the British, the island of St. Eustatius becomes a huge thorn in the side, and Admiral [Sir George] Rodney recognizes that Jews are playing a decisive role in terms of sending provisions,” said Laura Arnold Leibman, the Leonard J. Milberg professor in American Jewish Studies at Princeton University, during a lecture at the Library earlier this month. “He decides he’s going to invade the island. He rounds up all the Jews, kicks them off the island and takes all of their goods.”

Rodney wrote in 1781 that “had it not been for that nest of vipers … this infamous island, the American rebellion could not possibly have subsisted.”

British control of the island (today known locally as Statia) didn’t last, but Jewish contributions to the American cause did. Jews were only about 0.1 percent of the Colonial population of about 2.5 million in 1776 but participated in ways that established their future in the new nation.

“The Revolution both shaped Jewish American communities and changed the course of Jewish American history,” Leibman told her afternoon crowd in the Jefferson Building. “… Like their Christian neighbors, Jews came to the Colonies seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity, and they often came escaping persecution in other places, whether that was pogroms or just social discrimination.”

Laura Arnold Leibman, an author and professor, speaks about Jewish life in Colonial America at a recent event during Jewish American Heritage Month in the Jefferson Building. Photo: Shawn Miller.

Leibman’s lecture, hosted by the African and Middle Eastern Division, was just one event in the Library’s series of observations of Jewish History Month. Debra Band, an accomplished manuscript artist and author, discussed her five biblical illuminated manuscripts recently acquired by the Library. Meanwhile, the American Folklife Center, highlighting its 50th anniversary, showcased Jewish cultural heritage, with a concert of Sephardic Jewish music with Lily Henley. (Links to these two presentations will be added soon.)

In the Revolutionary days, the Colonies’ Jewish population was split, like the rest of the neighbors, between loyalists and those fighting for independence. Jews fought in militias alongside Christian troops and men such as Haym Salomon, a spy and financier, helped broker relationships (particularly with France) that kept the Revolution going.

Moses Seixas, a key member of the Jewish community of Newport, Rhode island, wrote to George Washington after his inauguration, tactfully asking that Jews be assured of the same religious liberties as Christians.

Washington did so.

“May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants — while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid,” he replied.

The war also threw people together in unexpected ways. Jews fleeing invading British forces wound up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, building new connections. Ashkenazi and Sephardic Jewish bonded over a new siddur, or prayer book, published in 1766 by Isaac Pinto of the Shearith Israel synagogue in New York. It was written in English, providing a common language for worship.

And, of course, there were those Caribbean ties.

Until the early 19th century, the largest and wealthiest Jewish communities in the Americas were in the Caribbean and along the northern coast of South America. Curaçao, an island just north of Venezuela, and Suriname, a tiny nation on the mainland between Guyana and French Guyana, had “between four to five times as many Jews as any of the largest communities in what would become the United States,” Leibman told her audience. Even tiny St. Eustatius – just 8 square miles, well to the east of Puerto Rico – had “about twice the number of Jews that you would find in either New York or Philadelphia.”

This was so well known in the Colonial era that Jewish families in American port cities would strategically marry off their children to prominent Jewish families in the Caribbean, creating generational ties.

“If I was somebody in Newport and I wanted to trade with Jamaica, I might marry off a son or daughter to somebody who’s a major trader (there),” she said. “Those networks become very important for Jews’ key role during the Revolution.”

After the war, the reshaped community emerged stronger and more unified, providing a bridge to the mid-19th century, when Jewish immigrants from German areas in Europe began to arrive in large numbers, reshaping the community once again.

“But for all the work that they do,” Leibman said, “it was always on the shoulders of that generation that lived through, survived, and then flourished following the Revolution.”

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The 2026 National Recording Registry inductees were announced today, bringing everything from Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It),” Weezer’s self-titled debut “Weezer (The Blue Album),” José Feliciano’s “Feliz Navidad” and 22 other recordings into the Library’s catalogue that preserves the nation’s sound heritage.

This year’s class spans 70 years of music, news and sports broadcasts and other audio recordings. It includes music from country, pop, jazz, Latin, folk, funk and R&B artists. The list begins with 1944’s “Cocktails for Two,” a novelty record by Spike Jones and His City Slickers, and concludes with Taylor Swift’s 2014 album, “1989.”

The only non-musical inductee was the electrifying broadcast of the 1971 boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Frazier at Madison Square Garden, known as the “Fight of the Century.”

“The Library of Congress is proud to select these audio treasures and will work to preserve them with our partners in the recording industry,” said Acting Librarian of Congress Robert R. Newlen, who made the final selections from a list composed by the National Recording Preservation Board.

The sweep and diversity of the class “beautifully captures the scope of the American experience as we celebrate our nation’s 250th anniversary,” said Robbin Ahrold, chair of the NPRB. “…it is a thrilling reflection of America at its best.”

Fans made more than 3,000 nominations of recordings to consider this year, with Weezer among the most nominated. The 2026 selections mark the first recordings by Taylor Swift and Beyoncé chosen for the registry. It also marks the first time a father and daughter have been included – Johnny Cash’s “At Folsom Prison” album was selected in 2003, and this year Rosanne Cash’s album “The Wheel”  was inducted. (You can submit nominations on the Library’s website; suggestions for the 2027 class closes on Oct. 1, 2026.)

Weezer’s 1994 debut album was one of the top vote-getters from fans for entry into the National Recording Registry this year.

The NRR now has 700 entries – about 0.01% of the Library’s 4 million collected recordings.

Belinda Carlisle, singer and songwriter for The Go-Go’s, one of the most successful all-female rock bands, said she was thrilled their 1981 album, “Beauty and the Beat,” made the registry.

“It’ll be great 100 years from now when someone is doing their research and they see The Go-Go’s in there,” she said in an interview with the rest of the band. “I would love that 100 years from now, looking back and seeing how the personality of the band that was so important and the music was so important at that time.”

Longtime country music star Vince Gill said that his 1994 song, “Go Rest High on That Mountain,” dealing with the loss of his brother, was the most meaningful work of his career, though it was never a big hit.

“I’ve been writing songs for over 50 years, and if you asked me straight up what’s the one song you’d want to be remembered for, I would pick this one, hands down,” he said in an interview with the Library. “Wouldn’t even be close.”

National Public Radio’s “1A” will feature music from this year’s NRR clas in “The Sounds of America” in the weeks ahead, including interviews with the Library and several featured artists.

Taylor Swift’s “1989” album is her first work to be included in the National Recording Registry.

On this blog, there will be stories with Rosanne Cash and The Go-Go’s during the next several days, so be sure to check back in. Meanwhile, here’s the rest of the list.

Recordings Selected for the 2026 National Recording Registry

(chronological order)

“Cocktails for Two” – Spike Jones and His City Slickers (1944) (single)“Mambo No. 5” – Pérez Prado (1950) (single)“Teardrops from My Eyes” – Ruth Brown (1950) (single)“Fly Me to the Moon (In Other Words)” – Kaye Ballard (1954) (single)“Put Your Head On My Shoulder” – Paul Anka (1959) (single)“The Blues and the Abstract Truth” – Oliver Nelson (1961) (album)“Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music” – Ray Charles (1962) (album)“Turn! Turn! Turn! (To Everything There Is a Season)” – The Byrds (1965) (single)“Amen, Brother” – The Winstons (1969) (single)“Feliz Navidad” – José Feliciano (1970) (single)“The Fight of the Century: Ali vs. Frazier” (March 8, 1971) (broadcast)“Midnight Train to Georgia” – Gladys Knight and the Pips (1973) (single)“Chicago” Original Cast Album (1975) (album)“The Devil Went Down to Georgia” – The Charlie Daniels Band (1979) (single)“Beauty and the Beat” – The Go-Go’s (1981) (album)“Texas Flood” – Stevie Ray Vaughan and Double Trouble (1983) (album)“I Feel For You” – Chaka Khan (1984) (single)“Your Love” – Jamie Principle (1986) / Jamie Principle/Frankie Knuckles (1987) (singles)“Rumor Has It” – Reba McEntire (1990) (album)“The Wheel” – Rosanne Cash (1993) (album)“Doom” Soundtrack – Bobby Prince, composer (1993)“Go Rest High on That Mountain” – Vince Gill (1994) (single)“Weezer (The Blue Album)” – Weezer (1994) (album)“Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” – Beyoncé (2008) (single)“1989” – Taylor Swift (2014) (album)

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