Library of Congress's Blog

— 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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Now that baseball is in full swing, let’s pause between innings to go back to those thrilling days of yesteryear, when pro ball included teams like the Boston Beaneaters, pitchers threw underhanded and gloves were optional.

This would be in the mid– to late 19th century, when the game wasn’t yet America’s pastime and guys were still sorting out the rules. This was also the time when baseball cards, like gloves, were getting to be a thing.

The Library’s marvelous Benjamin K. Edwards collection, featuring some 2,100 baseball cards from 1887 to 1914, are part of the Library’s Free to Use and Reuse sets of copyright-free images that you can use any way you’d like. There are more than 100 sets that have been curated, including posters from the golden age of travel, the art of the book, real and imagined aircraft and so on.

Baseball cards in this era often came in cigarette packs, as did our hero image above of Mike Mattimore, he of the Philadelphia Athletics in 1888, posing here in more the suggestion of a slide than the actual thing. Old Judge cigarettes was one of the first companies to make trading cards (they at first included sports other than baseball) and this image is part of a set well known to collectors.

Mattimore was a Pennsylvania native, then 29 and in his second year of a four-year career. He was not physically imposing — he stood 5-feet-8 and weighed about 160 pounds — and was primarily a pitcher struggling to stay in the game.

The 1888 campaign was his best, as he went 15-10 with four shutouts, which is impressive. But in the two ensuing years he went a combined 10-15 and had control problems, both on and off the field, the Society for American Baseball Research reports.

A newspaper reported he once committed six errors in one game, argued with his coach, got suspended and then traded. His bio page at SABR includes another newspaper report that in his final season he and several other players were “frequently in a state of beastly intoxication.”

He wound up moving to Montana, worked as a boilermaker and lived out his days, passing away in 1931.

Inaugurated into the first class of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Christy Mathewson played for 17 seasons and is regarding as one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history, wining 373 games. Prints and Photographs Division.

Every baseball fan knows Christy Mathewson, one of the greatest pitchers in the game’s history and one of the founding five members of the sport’s Hall of Fame. His fellow electees in that 1936 inaugural class will give you an idea of his stature: Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, Honus Wagner and Babe Ruth.

Another Pennsylvania native, he stood 6-foot-1 and went 195, a big man for the era, and he had matinee-idol looks to boot. He won 373 games with a career earned run average of 2.13, playing from 1900 through 1916. He won 37 games in a single season and won at least 20 games in 12 consecutive years, according to Baseball Reference, an online statistics database.

Those are remarkable numbers, but his Wins Above Replacement score — an estimation of the number of wins a player adds to the team above the play of a journeyman replacement — is 107.2, eighth highest for a career pitcher and 24th for any position. (Perspective: More than 23,600 people have played in the major leagues since 1876. More perspective: Mike Mattimore’s WAR was minus 3.2.)

Our card above, from 1911, was produced by another tobacco outfit, Hassan Cork Tip cigarettes. It catches him mid-career, his famous bangs dangling above his right eye, that quiet smile. In contrast to most hard-living players of the day, Mathewson was college-educated and deeply religious. He wrote a popular memoir and a children’s book and was nicknamed “The Christian Gentleman.” In 1911, the Giants were in the middle of a three-year National League championship run and Mathewson was their ace. He was perhaps the most popular man in New York if not the nation.

“He gripped the imagination of a country that held a hundred million people and held this grip with a firmer hold than any man of his day or time,” wrote Grantland Rice, the famed sportswriter.

Tragedy never seemed far away from Mathewson, though. One brother died by suicide in 1909, another from tuberculosis in 1917. Mathewson contracted tuberculosis himself shortly after serving in World War I. It was widely speculated that a brief exposure to chemical weapons contributed to the illness.

He continued to manage teams for a couple of seasons, struggling with his health, but died in 1925. He was 45.

John M. Ward, a star player who put himself through law school and formed the first sports labor union in 1885. Prints and Photographs Division.

Lastly, we have John Montgomery Ward, who, as his Hall of Fame page notes, fought as much for players’ rights as he did to win games. He put himself through Columbia Law School in 1885, while playing for the Giants, and set up the first sports labor union for fellow ball players that same year. He then went back to school for a political science degree and set up a new league, the Players League, that was eventually absorbed by the still-dominant National League.

Yet another Pennsylvania native, he was a bright kid whose parents died by the time he was 13. He turned to baseball to support himself and turned pro at 18 for the Providence Grays. He pitched, played shortstop and second base and seemed to do a bit of everything, including stealing 540 bases.

He retired from baseball in his mid-30s, represented players in labor disputes and eventually became a terrific golfer. He died in 1925, the same year as Mathewson, at the age of 65. He was inducted to the Hall of Fame in 1964.

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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.

This 1936 Dorothea Lange photo at a farm camp in Nipomo, California, became known as “Migrant Mother” and the most famous photo of the Depression. It is printed full frame here to show FSA identification markings. The woman in the photo was not identified until the 1980s. She was Florence Owens Thompson. Prints and Photographs Division.

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.

Russell Lee took this photograph on the Southside of Chicago on Easter Sunday, 1941. It became one of the iconic photos of the Farm Security Administration’s photo program. Prints and Photographs Division.

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.

Few images defined the Dust Bowl better than this April 1936 photo from Cimarron County, Oklahoma, of a father and his two sons caught in a dust storm. Photo: Arthur Rothstein. Prints and Photographs Division.

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.

About 1,500 of the FSA photographs were shot in color, then a new medium, including this shot of Faro and Doris Caudill, homesteaders in Pie Town, New Mexico, in the fall of 1940. Photo: Russell Lee. Prints and Photographs Division.

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.

Walker Evans took this photograph of a general store in Moundville, Alabama, in the summer of 1936. Prints and Photographs Division.

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…”

Ella Fitzgerald in two publicity photos and in one arresting portrait by Carl Van Vechten. Photo: Neely Tucker. Prints and Photographs Division.

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…”

Michelle Krowl (right) of the Manuscript Division answers questions about their new acquisitions at last week’s showcase. Photo: Shawn Miller.

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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