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Here we are in the digital darkroom of the Prints and Photographs Division, where a 16-year-long effort to digitize in high resolution the 175,000 or so Farm Security Administration photographs of the country in the 1930s and ’40s is coming to an end, perhaps by the end of this year.

It’s kind of a big deal.

The FSA’s work (also carried out under the names of the Resettlement Administration and the Office of War Information) was intended to be daily publicity and propaganda for New Deal-era social programs that ran from 1935 to 1944. But over time, the images became some of the most iconic documentary photographs in American history, and the photographers some of the most revered.

There is Dorothea Lange’s “Migrant Mother,” Arthur Rothstein’s Dust Bowl-defining images, Russell Lee’s Southside Chicago photo of “Negro Boys on Easter Morning,” and dozens of others, including work by Walker Evans, Marion Post Wolcott, Russell Lee and Jack Delano.

They have been used for decades in books, documentaries, feature films, photography retrospectives, museum collections and endless newspaper, magazine and online stories. The Library issued its “Fields of Vision” photobook series in 2008, chronicling the work of several of these photographers.

Still, the chemical-laden images are eight decades old and deterioration has begun to set in on some due to their age. Making digital copies is essential both for their long-term survival and for ongoing historical study.

“For researchers … digital images are obviously a gazillion times better than looking at the original negative,” says Taren Ouellette, a digital library specialist who has worked on the project since its inception and now manages it. “You’re not having to pore over a negative with a loupe (a small magnifier), saying ‘What is this in the background?’ You can zoom in on your screen, and the image resolution is so high that you can read remote street signs and pick up other details.”

The FSA negatives were entrusted to the Library in 1944. For decades, they could only be accessed on-site, through prints or copies of prints. Meanwhile, other photographs went virtually unseen for years; Wolcott’s work was not widely appreciated until the 1970s and ’80s.

In the 1990s, the Library used newly available technology to make a first pass at digitizing the negatives, but the tools of the time could not create high-resolution images.

That was problematic because the film had been roughly treated when it was first produced – it was seen as journalism, not art – and dust specs or small scratches on the original negatives were not uncommon. Also, heavy usage in the intervening decades had taken a toll. (The Library has long since moved the negatives into its off-site storage at Fort Meade; patrons can no longer handle them.)

Even after a new digitization project began in 2010, the task was still daunting. Cameras required four photographs of a negative to produce one high-resolution file. Each image had to be carefully stitched together.

The acquisition of two 150-megapixel cameras greatly sped up the process – just one photo per negative required – but it’s still a small lab and with no more than one or two technicians at a time.

Further complicating the process, the FSA photo stock is varied, made by different manufacturers at different sizes for different cameras. They all are aging differently. Some negatives are on nitrate (preserved in fire-proof rooms at the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia), some are on 35 mm film strips, a few even on old-fashioned glass. Mostly they are 3-by-4-inch or 4-by-5-inch single negatives, which gives them their great depth of field and clarity.

Digitizing each image is a study in patience.

Technicians call up several boxes of negatives at a time, each with about 275 negatives, from cold storage to the digital lab in the James Madison Building. A technician opens the box, pulls a negative from its sleeve and places it on a custom-made photo table. Each item is cleaned and inspected, then placed in front of a camera on the table. The image is photographed, then the digital image is inspected again.

Let’s check in to see how this works.

In the dim light of the lab, Helen McNamara, a digital library technician, zooms in to look at a tiny, squiggly white line on a full-size image she’s just made of a negative. It’s a 1941 photo of a man in an office, but McNamara is staring at the squiggly line.

“A hair,” she murmurs.

She turns to the original negative and gets a small air bulb. She gently squeezes the bulb and a puff of air flows across the negative. Poof — the offending hair floats away.

She then replaces the negative on a stand with a stabilized camera and takes a new image. She then checks it again for focus, clarity, any remaining specs of dust or other flaws that can be corrected.

“We don’t retouch anything and we shoot everything full frame,” Ouellette says. “The idea is to preserve it as it is. If we can’t get something tiny off with the air bulb or some other minimal work, we’re not doing anything to it.”

Once the image is complete, McNamara saves the digitized image, which will be checked again and eventually uploaded to the Library’s website. She then removes the negative from the camera set-up, refiles it in a small envelope, and places that envelope back in its rectangular gray filing box.

Working in this manner, the staff gets about 1,000 images done each month — about 50 every working day, or about six an hour, one every 10 minutes or so. That’s somewhere around 12,000 per year out of catalogue of 175,000.

More than 160,000 have been digitized. The project is now in the home stretch.

Ouellette, who processes negatives herself each day, is excited about the collection’s importance but is straightforward about the slow pace of digitizing each image carefully.

“This gets tedious,” she says. “I tell the staff, ‘Please don’t shoot all day. I don’t want you to go insane. You’ve got to keep a fresh eye.’ ”

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This story appears in a slightly different version in the May/June issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

The Library invites you to join in our celebration of the nation’s 250th birthday this year, as we’re offering a range of exhibits and programs that bring the American experience to life.

The theme is “It’s Your Story.”  A new exhibition, “The Declaration’s Promise,” which will be highlighting treasures such as Thomas Jefferson’s rough draft of the Declaration of Independence and Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address opens July 3. (The Library has a long history with the original copies of the Constitution.)

Then in September, the exhibit “Alive in Many Hands” marks 50 years of the Library’s American Folklife Center, celebrating the center’s work in capturing and sharing living cultural traditions from every corner of the United States.

Plus, the popular “The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution” — the ongoing exhibition bringing George Washington and King George III together through their own words and artifacts — has been extended through July 4.

To help mark the occasion of the 250th, the Library also is offering a variety of programs: monthly Family Days, Live! At the Library events on Thursday evenings, Afternoons with the Library programs, concerts, symposia and a special initiative, “Fashion at the Library: The Threads that Connect Us,” that celebrates American history through fashion and style.

The “By the People” virtual volunteer transcription program is launching new campaigns that feature Colonial and founding-era diaries, letters, music, maps and more. Plus, “Revolution Crossroads” — a cutting-edge collaboration with the Smithsonian — uses advanced technology to reveal fresh insights from Revolutionary-era collections.

We hope you’ll join us when you can because, after all, it is your (national) story.

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Walk into the Library’s annual showcase of new acquisitions and the question always hits you right in the face: Where to start?

What about with this slim copy of Silver Surfer No. 1, the origin story of Marvel Comics’ “Sentinel of the Spaceways,” from the groovy year of 1968? How about this massive law book that’s more than 500 years old? The “Tombstone Edition” of a Philadelphia newspaper from 1765, which documented and amplified the American Colonies loathing of the Stamp Act and presaged the American Revolution?

There’s never really a wrong place to start. This year’s two-hour show-and-tell, held last week, brought hundreds of staffers and guests to look over intriguing displays of the Library’s recently acquired treasures, items spanning the nation, the globe and centuries of time. Many added to already impressive collections of historic figures.

“It’s not just that these are interesting photos of Ella Fitzgerald,” Raymond White, a senior music specialist in the Music Division, told several people clustered around his table, who were all gazing down at three 8-by-10-inch portraits of the jazz legend. “It’s what the three of them tell you when they are put together…”

It was a crowded, noisy, upbeat afternoon of discovery and explanation. Conversations buzzed and overlapped; staff experts and curious viewers leaned over display tables from opposite sides, heads together, talking loudly to be heard, gazing down at maps, manuscripts, records, artifacts and things you couldn’t have known existed. Example: Real butterfly wings pressed into the pages of French botanist Paul Constant Billot’s “Papillons,” published in 1839 and still beautifully preserved.

On this side of the room, the Library’s most recent bit of film history, a long-lost copy of “Gugusse and the Automaton,” not seen for more than a century, played on a loop. On that side, rising just above the milling crowd, was a huge 1860s print of interwoven biblical scenes and text by Levi van Gelder, a Dutch immigrant to who had just arrived in New York. At the back was a massive black and white map of Washington, D.C., by artist and cartographer Gareth Fuller, with several pairs of magnifying lenses set out to admire the details of each house and neighborhood park.

And here, good heavens, is a casual letter between 19th-century poetry giants.

One of America’s great poets, Walt Whitman (“Leaves of Grass” and many others) wrote to one of England’s great poets, Alfred, Lord Tennyson (“The Charge of the Light Brigade” and many others), on Aug. 9, 1878. It was several years after a stroke left Whitman partially paralyzed, but he was recovering. He was 59, living at 431 Stevens Street in Camden, New Jersey, and feeling chipper.

“My Dear Tennyson,” he began, soon catching the recipient up on his daily life. “This summer I have been & am well enough to be out on the water, or down in the fields & woods of the country more than half the time – finding myself at the present writing quite hefty (as we say here) and sunburnt…”

Here’s Thomas Jefferson, who was interested in nearly everything, investigating the best type of fireplace. He pursued this subject for decades, as historian Julie Miller noted in a blog post earlier this year, including an idea for a single fireplace that could heat an entire house — in effect, central heating.

On May 2, 1799, while vice president, he wrote a political protégé a letter that included drawings of a Rumford fireplace. This was the invention of American-born Sir Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, whose ideas for a tall, shallow fireplace with angled walls were widely published and highly regarded, so much so that King George III knighted him.

Jefferson sent his note to Wilson Cary Nicholas, who would have a long career in Virginia politics, with a solid endorsement: “I have used them myself, with great satisfaction.”

Nearby, the American Folklife Center featured a table with colorful images of communities from around the nation. There were lively photos of the Bahamian community in South Florida at the Goombay Festival in Miami’s Coconut Grove; photos of New York City subway trains in the 1980s, covered in graffiti; photos of “Ms. Mary,” a Gullah Geechee sweetgrass basket maker, selling her work on Highway 17 in South Carolina; and photos from “Dragons in the West: An Historical Profile of 20th Century Chinese American Pioneers,” a project started in 1986 from the Wei Li Fang collection.

Here’s the Rare Book and Special Collections Division with an eye-catching British set of alphabet tiles from 1870, brightly colored toys for children to learn their ABCs. Want to guess what the illustrations were for those first three letters 150 or so years ago? (We’ll pause here.) Apple, boat, cherry.

And, for another perspective on American ingenuity, here’s the Veterans History Project display. One item it featured was a World War I diary kept by Ivan Sparling, an Army private who served in France in 1918 and 1919. Paper was apparently scarce, so he wrote out his daily notes on individual sheets of … cigarette rolling papers.

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This is a guest post by Jane Hudiburg, an analyst in the Congressional Research Service. It also appears in the March/April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Tucked into the northeast corner of the Jefferson Building, the reading room of the African and Middle Eastern Division — also known as the Pavilion of the Seals — transports visitors across time and continents, immersing them in the late 19th-century United States, classical Greece and Rome and societies that emerged across the globe. Its Africana, Hebraic and Near Eastern collections span millennia — from a cuneiform livestock receipt dated to 2047 B.C. to Ethiopian manuscripts and contemporary newspapers.

At the heart of the domed ceiling, Elmer E. Garnsey’s rendering of the Great Seal of the United States is encircled by allegorical imagery, blending symbols of the Old World with the new. The Four Winds — figures from ancient iconography — sweep across depictions of American fruits and grains. Dolphins, lyres and torches symbolize (respectively) fisheries, fine arts and the pursuit of knowledge. An inscription of Abraham Lincoln’s enduring vision forms the border: “… that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”

Below the dome, four lunettes by artist W.B. Van Ingen display national landscapes, monuments and emblems of order and conflict. Each scene features a central tablet, inscribed with the words of U.S. statesmen. They are flanked by female figures bearing shields, each representing a division of the federal government: State, Treasury, Justice, Post Office, Agriculture, Interior, War or Navy. The cream and gold walls are adorned with seals of these departments and with green bands of laurel.

More than just a room, this richly decorated space serves as an international crossroads. At the confluence of art and governance, a steady stream of scholars, poets and policymakers — both foreign and domestic — passes through.

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The book is from an island in Indonesia. It was likely created in the 19th century but it looks much older. It is thick, heavy and dark. Black wooden boards as covers. Brown pages made of tree bark. On those pages are words and mysterious drawings. It rises 3 inches off the table, looking like a tome of spells and incantations.

Which, actually, it is.

This is “Poda ni pagar si jonnga,” or “Instructions for Magical Protection,” a book used by shamans of the Batak peoples in North Sumatra more than 100 years ago, written in a rarified script that few people could read then and fewer still now.

That was by design. The Hata Poda writing system was reserved for Batak traditional healers or shamans. Given the inroads of Islam, Christianity and other religions across Indonesia over the past centuries, and the rise in regional use of Romanized script, there just aren’t many people who can read it today.

“It’s a manual with instructions for various methods of divination and/or hints to remind the shaman who is already familiar with the methods,” says Joshua Kueh, head of the South Asian, Southeast Asian, Tibetan and Mongolian section in the Asian Division. “It’s one of the more fascinating items in our collections, but it’s in an esoteric language and we don’t know all that much about it.”

The 104-page book is one of four Batak manuscripts in the Library’s collections. Staff experts from the Asian, conservation and digitization divisions spent a couple of weeks preparing them for imaging, then photographing each page, so that they are now all online.

“They’re very unique, they’re valuable, but a lot more work needs to go into translating and understanding them,” Kueh said. “Hopefully getting them online will be a service to scholars and people who know a lot about them. My hope is to be able to spark conversations with them and get more information.”

One of the book’s much smaller companions (it’s just under 3 inches tall and just over 3 inches wide, with 42 pages) is an untitled work that also has religious and magical purposes. It’s modern in the sense that it deals in part with rifles, pistols and gunfire.

Kueh reached out to an expert on Batak languages, Uli Kozok, a retired professor at the University of Hawai‘i, for help in translation.

“The text opens with invocations to the pangulubalang, a supernatural war leader and protective force,” Kozok wrote. “The second section appears to function as instructions for the art of shooting, accompanied by anthropomorphic illustrations depicting figures equipped with firearms.”

It’s a compelling glimpse into a world gone by, with more of its history yet to be revealed.

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Arthur Sze will serve a second term as the nation’s 25th Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry for 2026-2027, the Library announced today, as we highlight National Poetry Month.

Sze, who lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was first named poet laureate in September 2025 and began working to expand appreciation of poetry through his focus on translating poetry originally written in languages other than English. His newest book, “Transient Worlds: On Translating Poetry,” features translations from 13 languages and provides a personal guide to poetry in translation.

The book is published today by Copper Canyon Press in association with the Library.

“The book is a vehicle to widen and deepen the appreciation of poetry through the lens of poetry in translation,” Sze said.

Sze was previously honored with the Library’s 2024 Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry. He’ll be at the Library on April 14 for a conversation with the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom, Simon Armitage, on the art and process of writing and translating poetry; Armitage has a new translation of “Gilgamesh” that will be published on the same day. Register here for free tickets to this Live! At the Library event.

In his second term, Sze is crafting his signature project, “Words Bridging Worlds,” and will embark on a U.S. tour to host public events, including readings, moderated discussions and workshops focused on poetry and translation. Queens College of the City of New York is partnering with Sze to support the tour’s workshops through the college’s MFA program in creative writing and literary translation.

“Arthur Sze is opening the world of poetry by giving us a unique view of his process of writing and translating poetry — and challenging students and the public to try writing and translating poetry as well,” said Acting Librarian of Congress Robert Randolph Newlen. “The Library of Congress is proud to reappoint Arthur Sze, a leading poet of our time, as our nation’s 25th U.S. Poet Laureate.”

Sze joins a long line of distinguished poets who have served as Poet Laureate, including Ada Limón, Joy Harjo, Tracy K. Smith, Juan Felipe Herrera, Charles Wright, Natasha Trethewey, Philip Levine, W.S. Merwin, Kay Ryan, Charles Simic, Donald Hall, Ted Kooser, Louise Glück, Billy Collins, Stanley Kunitz, Robert Pinsky, Robert Hass and Rita Dove, among others.

Sze was born in New York City in 1950 to Chinese immigrants. He is the author of 12 poetry collections, most recently “Into the Hush” as well as the prose collection “The White Orchard: Selected Interviews, Essays, and Poems,” both published in 2025. Other works include “Sight Lines,” which won the National Book Award for Poetry; “Compass Rose,” a Pulitzer Prize finalist; and “Archipelago,” selected for an American Book Award.

In addition to the Bobbitt Prize, Sze’s honors include the Bollingen Prize for American Poetry from Yale University, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize from the Poetry Foundation, a Shelley Memorial Award from the Poetry Society of America, a Jackson Poetry Prize from Poets & Writers, a Lannan Literary Award and a Lila Wallace-Reader’s Digest Writers’ Award. A former chancellor of the Academy of American Poets and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, he is a professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts. He lives with his wife, the poet Carol Moldaw.

The Library of Congress Literary Initiatives Office is the home of the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry, a position that has existed since 1937 when Archer M. Huntington endowed the Chair of Poetry at the Library. Since then, many of the nation’s most eminent poets have served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress and, after the passage of Public Law 99-194 (Dec. 20, 1985), as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry — a position that the law states “is equivalent to that of Poet Laureate of the United States.”

During his or her term, the Poet Laureate seeks to raise the national consciousness to a greater appreciation of the reading and writing of poetry. In recent years, laureates have initiated poetry projects that broaden the audiences for poetry.

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When Amelia Earhart gave a speech in London on May 22, 1932, she told a funny, scary, death-defying story about how she got there — by flying solo nonstop across the Atlantic, landing the day before. She was the first woman to do so, the second human being to do so, and it was five years (to the day) after Charles Lindbergh pioneered the feat.

“Something happened which had never happened before in my 12 years of flying, that is, the altimeter, the instrument required to register altitude — height above ground — failed,” she said of her 15-hour flight. “The hand swung around the dial in such a manner that I knew it was out of commission for the rest of the night.”

When her memoir, “The Fun of It,” came out a few months later, her publisher (who was also her husband and promoter, George Putnam) threw in a nifty promotional gimmick: a tiny 78 rpm record of a snippet of that speech, tucked inside the back cover.

A little over nine decades later, Amanda Zimmerman, a reference specialist in the Library’s Rare Book and Special Collections Division, opened a first-edition copy of “Fun,” and there, still nestled in place, was the little record. She was charmed. It was just so tiny.

“It was just meant to be ephemeral, kind of like a ring you would get in a box of Cracker Jack,” she said. “It wasn’t really meant to last.”

Her question: Could the Library’s preservation team figure out a way to still play this 94-year-old thing?

Well. The grooved top of the record was made from some sort of cheap plastic and the bottom was made of cardboard (there is no side B). The envelope in which it was enclosed was made from pulp paper, which is highly acidic. An old phonograph could play a 78, sure, but a needle might just plow through the aged grooves and destroy them.

The answer from preservation: Yes!

The solution was the IRENE project, which uses optical imaging to create a digital file of a record, effectively unwinding the record’s grooves into one very long digital strip. This sound file, like any other digital recording, can then be cleaned up, sorted out and … played.

It’s named after the first disc imaged by physicist Carl Haber, “Goodnight Irene,” a little more than 20 years ago, and has been continually tested and improved at the Library, working with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory. By never touching the record’s surface, IRENE can digitize records that are corroded, marred with gunk or even broken into a couple of parts.

Even the best of the old 78 recordings were notorious for having lots of pops and hisses, and Earhart’s little record was never meant to be the best. Close inspection revealed that it had never been played.

Once in the lab, technicians used a focal probe, a very small fiber optic device that can be directed to a specific point, to capture in 3-D each tiny change in the record’s grooves.

Here to explain better explain is Fenella France, chief of the Library’s Preservation Research and Testing Division.

“It’s probably about three-quarters of an inch circular and points down like a laser to the surface of the object that we’re capturing,” she said. “You could probably just say ‘optical imaging,’ but to be very precise, for this we used a focal probe.”

Peter Alyea, a preservation science specialist, scanned the disc (it took nearly three hours) and then began the process of cleaning it up.

Emerging from the digital file was Earhart’s voice, still scratchy and a little hard to hear clearly. This was in no small part because the recording of her London speech was made from a radio signal picked up and broadcast in New York.

Earhart didn’t say anything particularly dramatic in the 90 seconds or so of the recording, much of what she said appears verbatim in the book and there are other recordings of it. A good bit of the total recording time, after the clip played above, is just a radio announcer breaking in to describe the broadcast, where it is from, and so on.

Still, the project did what IRENE does — unlock a tiny moment of recorded history from an obsolete piece of technology and preserve it for the modern world.

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—This is a guest post by Hampton Sides, the author of, among other works, “Blood and Thunder,” “In the Kingdom of Ice” and, most recently, “The Wide Wide Sea.” It’s also the concluding piece of the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine, which is devoted to voyages of exploration.

A few months ago, while traveling in Portugal, I paid a visit to one of the most extraordinary shrines ever built to celebrate the enterprise of exploration. Lisbon’s Monument of the Discoveries, inaugurated in 1960, is a formidable structure of cement and rose-tinted stone that takes the shape of a mighty ship’s prow looming over the Tagus River estuary. Along the sides of this figurative vessel, historical luminaries from Portugal’s golden age of exploration — including Vasco da Gama, Prince Henry the Navigator, Bartolomeu Dias and Ferdinand Magellan — struggle heroically toward the sky, as though exploration were a divine activity, synonymous with grandeur itself.

The monument recalls a time when tiny Portugal ruled the seas, when its sleek carracks and caravels were launched from wharves on the Tagus to probe the farthest reaches of the planet, and when Lisbon boasted the world’s preeminent shipbuilders, mapmakers and inventors of ingenious navigational instruments.

The monument seems to be telling us: A great nation is an exploring nation. A great nation soars upward when it ventures outward.

In recent years, a long-overdue reassessment of explorers, particularly European explorers from the Age of Discovery, has been taking place. Statues of once-celebrated pathfinders have been toppled, obelisks of famous navigators vandalized. For modern revisionists, exploration is seen as a suspicious endeavor from the dark era of imperialism, an activity almost exclusively reserved for white males who sought riches and glory while working on behalf of rapacious national interests.

Yet many of the statue-topplers go further, essentially arguing: Those explorers shouldn’t have gone out in the first place. They shouldn’t have wondered, and they shouldn’t have wandered. These critics fail to distinguish between exploration itself and what so often came after exploration — that is, the occupiers, pathogens, alcohol, whalers, miners and missionaries, the stealing of land and seizing of resources.

In my view, this distinction is an important one. We can celebrate the inquisitive while deploring the acquisitive. We can extol history’s grand feats of exploration while condemning the ruthless colonial chess game that so often fueled them. We can find much to admire in the voyages of early mariners like Vespucci, Magellan, Tasman, Bering, Bougainville and Cook, while renouncing the violence and avarice of imperial conquest. We can recognize the astonishing risks those and other explorers took, the perils and hardships they faced, and the ingenuity they summoned while venturing into the unknown to give us a more complete picture of our vast, wondrous planet.

Disparagers of exploration tend to ignore a fundamental truth about our nature: To be human is to ask questions. What’s over the horizon, over the next mountain range? What does it look like over there? Are there opportunities for a better life, a fuller existence? Nearly everything good and bad about our species is tied up in this boundless, restless curiosity of ours, this nagging, gnawing need to know. Although this impulse sometimes leads us into trouble, it can’t be helped.

Of course, we need to be mindful of exploration’s many unintended consequences and ripple effects. We should be more careful where we step, and how we treat the new worlds we visit. But exploring is what we do. It’s how we define ourselves, how we get beyond ourselves, maybe even how we reach for the divine.

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— This is a guest post by Josh Levy, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Only traces remain of Salomon August Andrée’s 1897 attempt to reach the North Pole.

From a base on the Svalbard archipelago, the engineer and his two companions had hoped to float a hydrogen balloon gracefully over the pole, drop a Swedish flag and claim the glory of first discovery.

They were never seen alive again.

At first, the public received communications from Andrée directly, delivered by carrier pigeons. Then there were rumors of possible sightings that thinned as time passed, then silence. And then, in 1930, the accidental discovery of the expedition’s wreckage and the scattered remains of the explorers themselves, resting on the tiny island of Kvitøya, about 250 miles east of their launch site.

Incredibly, the party of scientists and sealers who found the wreckage also discovered photographic negatives that could still be developed, with notebooks and diaries that could still be read in parts. Among them was what must have been Andrée’s last diary, still resting in his coat’s inside pocket.

Collectively they documented the expedition’s downfall, a balloon voyage of only three days followed by painful months of slow progress across the ice. Yet documentation of the men’s last days remained fragmentary, their precise causes of death unclear. The stunned rescue party felt themselves swept back in time, felt almost as though they could see Andrée and his crew before them, pulling their heavy sleds across the ice and ultimately reaching land, “filled with renewed courage, with fresh hopes.” Then cold, exhaustion, and tragedy.

The recovered photos and other artifacts, geographer Derek McCormack writes, found their way to cemeteries and museums in Sweden and beyond, rematerializing Andrée and his crew as “ghostly figures through which dreams of late nineteenth-century Swedish national aspiration” could be rehearsed all over again.

The Library’s Manuscript Division holds its own unusual artifacts from Andrée’s voyage, orphaned from a more hopeful moment: fabric samples from the construction of his balloon. Set aside by aviator Gaston Tissandier while consulting for the project, they’re now filed alongside schematics and other paperwork that document Andrée’s aspirations in minute detail, long before his fate was known.

Somehow the fabric still looks pristine. Woven of Chinese silk, the pieces are dull and grayish and stiff, carefully layered and laminated to reduce the possibility of tears. Workers eventually stitched together more than 3,000 such pieces, their seams reaching a length of over nine miles. Ultimately those seams leaked so much hydrogen that Andrée’s ballon was forced into a slow, irreversible descent.

Like other polar explorers of his time, Andrée sold himself as more scientist than adventurer, sidestepping the questionable research value of a drifting flight over a nearly blank landscape. Yet it was the danger of such voyages, not the science, that elevated polar explorers of his day into national heroes.

Researchers, therefore, might ask: What was Andrée really hoping to discover? Was it the science of polar environments or his mettle as a man? Innovative ballooning technologies or the nature of the Swedish nation? Those questions remain open, decades after the expedition’s demise.

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— This is a guest post by Josh Levy, a historian in the Manuscript Division. It also appears in the March-April issue of the Library of Congress Magazine.

Only traces remain of Salomon August Andrée’s 1897 attempt to reach the North Pole.

From a base on the Svalbard archipelago, the engineer and his two companions had hoped to float a hydrogen balloon gracefully over the pole, drop a Swedish flag and claim the glory of first discovery.

They were never seen alive again.

At first, the public received communications from Andrée directly, delivered by carrier pigeons. Then there were rumors of possible sightings that thinned as time passed, then silence. And then, in 1930, the accidental discovery of the expedition’s wreckage and the scattered remains of the explorers themselves, resting on the tiny island of Kvitøya, about 250 miles east of their launch site.

Incredibly, the party of scientists and sealers who found the wreckage also discovered photographic negatives that could still be developed, with notebooks and diaries that could still be read in parts. Among them was what must have been Andrée’s last diary, still resting in his coat’s inside pocket.

Collectively they documented the expedition’s downfall, a balloon voyage of only three days followed by painful months of slow progress across the ice. Yet documentation of the men’s last days remained fragmentary, their precise causes of death unclear. The stunned rescue party felt themselves swept back in time, felt almost as though they could see Andrée and his crew before them, pulling their heavy sleds across the ice and ultimately reaching land, “filled with renewed courage, with fresh hopes.” Then cold, exhaustion, and tragedy.

The recovered photos and other artifacts, geographer Derek McCormack writes, found their way to cemeteries and museums in Sweden and beyond, rematerializing Andrée and his crew as “ghostly figures through which dreams of late nineteenth-century Swedish national aspiration” could be rehearsed all over again.

The Library’s Manuscript Division holds its own unusual artifacts from Andrée’s voyage, orphaned from a more hopeful moment: fabric samples from the construction of his balloon. Set aside by aviator Gaston Tissandier while consulting for the project, they’re now filed alongside schematics and other paperwork that document Andrée’s aspirations in minute detail, long before his fate was known.

Somehow the fabric still looks pristine. Woven of Chinese silk, the pieces are dull and grayish and stiff, carefully layered and laminated to reduce the possibility of tears. Workers eventually stitched together more than 3,000 such pieces, their seams reaching a length of over nine miles. Ultimately those seams leaked so much hydrogen that Andrée’s ballon was forced into a slow, irreversible descent.

Like other polar explorers of his time, Andrée sold himself as more scientist than adventurer, sidestepping the questionable research value of a drifting flight over a nearly blank landscape. Yet it was the danger of such voyages, not the science, that elevated polar explorers of his day into national heroes.

Researchers, therefore, might ask: What was Andrée really hoping to discover? Was it the science of polar environments or his mettle as a man? Innovative ballooning technologies or the nature of the Swedish nation? Those questions remain open, decades after the expedition’s demise.

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