LIBRARY of CONGRESS MAGAZINE MARCH/APRIL 2019 the ART of SONG Inside Native Voices, Heard Anew a Slave Memoir Written in Arabic
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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAGAZINE MARCH/APRIL 2019 THE ART OF SONG Inside Native Voices, Heard Anew A Slave Memoir Written in Arabic Plus Bully for Teddy FDR’s Great Globe 50 Shades of Green GERSHWIN PRIZE RECIPIENTS GLORIA AND EMILIO ESTEFAN FEATURES ▪ Wé McDonald performs at the 2017 tribute to 10 12 18 Gershwin Prize recipient Tony Bennett at Native Voices Uncovered The Art of Songwriting A Muslim Slave in America Constitution Hall. Shawn Technology reveals Collections show the Library acquires Miller new details in historical creative process behind manuscript of recordings. the music. extraordinary memoir. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAGAZINE ▪ On the cover: Emilio and Gloria Estefan, the 2019 recipients of the Library’s Gershwin Prize for Popular Song. Alberto Tolot LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAGAZINE DEPARTMENTS MARCH / APRIL 2019 VOL. 8 NO. 2 Mission of the 2 Trending Library of Congress The Library’s mission is to engage, 3 Extremes inspire and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of 4 Technology knowledge and creativity. 6 Curator's Picks Library of Congress Magazine is issued bimonthly by the Office of 4 Communications of the Library 7 My Job of Congress and distributed free of charge to publicly 8 Page from the Past supported libraries and research institutions, donors, academic libraries, learned societies and 22 Around the Library allied organizations in the United States. Research institutions and educational organizations in other 23 Favorite Places countries may arrange to receive Library of Congress Magazine on an exchange basis by applying in 24 In Memoriam writing to the Library’s director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access, 101 Independence Ave. 25 News Briefs S.E., Washington DC 20540- 4100. LCM is also available on the web at loc.gov/lcm/. All 26 Shop the Library other correspondence should be addressed to the Office of Communications, Library of 27 Support the Library Congress, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington DC 20540-1610. 28 Last Word [email protected] loc.gov/lcm ISSN 2169-0855 (print) ISSN 2169-0863 (online) Carla Hayden Librarian of Congress Gayle Osterberg Executive Editor Mark Hartsell 24 Editor John H. Sayers Managing Editor Ashley Jones Designer Shawn Miller Photo Editor Contributors John Y. Cole John Hessler Michelle Krowl CONNECT ON Wendi A. Maloney Ryan Moore loc.gov/connect Raymond White Brett Zongker MARCH/APRIL 2019 LOC.GOV/LCM 1 #TRENDING The oldest and largest FIFTY SHADES OF parade dates to the 1760s, GREEN in New York ▪ Top: St. Patrick’s Day City. Those first paradegoers in New Library collections reveal the marchers were York City. Prints and Irish experience in America. homesick Irish Photographs Division expatriates and On St. Patrick’s Day, it’s said, soldiers serving with the British army who, Right: “The Irish everybody is Irish. American,” a two-step according to organizers today, “reveled written by George M. Indeed, around much of the globe, the in the freedom to speak Irish, wear Cohan and published in centuries-old religious commemoration green, sing songs and play the pipes.” 1905. Music Division of Ireland’s patron saint has been The Library’s collections document not just transformed into a secular celebration of the joy of St. Patrick’s Day celebrations but everything Irish, dressed up in green and also the Irish experience in America through soaked in millions of pints of Guinness. photos, prints, music and newspapers. For more than 200 years, cities and towns The American Folklife Center, for example, across the United States have celebrated preserves traditional Irish-American folk the occasion — each in its own way. culture, and the Prints and Photographs Every March, the citizens of Hot Springs, Division’s Jacob Riis collection preserves Arkansas, put on the world’s shortest harrowing images of tenements in which St. Patrick’s Day parade, marching New York’s immigrant communities lived. the length of 98-foot Bridge Street Through popular song, Music Division (once named by Ripley’s Believe It or holdings capture the identity of Irish- Not! as the world’s shortest street in Americans in a new land, many wistful for an everyday use) before calling it quits. island they left behind: Enterprise, Alabama, sets its sights lower. From lovely Erin sad I come, Each year, residents there organize the Across the rolling sea; world’s smallest St. Paddy’s parade: One In stranger land to seek a home person of Irish descent, bearing an Irish A home of liberty. flag, marches a block from the courthouse to the boll weevil monument and back. —Mark Hartsell Boston began its celebration back in the 1730s, Philadelphia in the 1770s. Savannah first held its now-famous MORE INFORMATION parade in 1824, some 138 years before Irish-American Resources Chicago started dyeing its river green. loc.gov/rr/main/irishamerican 2 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS MAGAZINE EXTREMES FDR’S GREAT GLOBE Roosevelt and Churchill directed World War II using these massive maps. The “President’s Globe” is big — really big and important. Weighing a whopping 750 pounds and measuring an impressive 50 inches in diameter, the globe was specially designed for use by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II. The massive representation of the Earth helped Roosevelt gauge distances over water to allocate personnel and materiel in support of the war effort. An estimated 12 to 15 of the globes were produced. One was given as a Christmas present to the president in 1942, and he placed it directly behind his office chair, often referring to it during his workday. Matching globes were given to British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gen. George C. Marshall and others. Each man used his globe as a reference point when communicating with the rest. The globes’ history was authoritatively documented by Arthur H. Robinson, director of the map division of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the war. Robinson said the globes offered the leaders “a view rather like that of an astronaut today. That certainly would have helped them contemplate the immense strategic and logistical problems of a truly global conflict.” The globe’s size and weight required that a special base be built to hold and rotate it — the cradle uses rubber balls seated in steel cups to move the huge sphere. The OSS mapmakers who worked on the project, however, never received personal credit. Instead, they left a “signature” by inserting their hometowns onto the sphere — one can only guess which towns those might be among the 17,000 place names present. Roosevelt’s globe is now part of his library and museum in Hyde Park, N.Y. The Library holds the version that resided in the House of Representatives. Today, visitors can see ▪ Top: Franklin D. Roosevelt examines the the globe on display in the Geography and “President’s Globe,” used by Allied leaders during Map Division Reading Room, just one of the World War II. Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library division’s amazing cartographic artifacts. Below: Mapmakers left their “signatures” on the globes by including their hometowns on the sphere. —Ryan Moore is a cartographic collection Julie Stoner specialist in the Geography and Map Division. MARCH/APRIL 2019 LOC.GOV/LCM 3 TECHNOLOGY ▪ Top: One of the — an effort to better understand the artworks created by works for art historical purposes Diego Rivera for an REVEALING RARE and to inform their conservation. English translation of the Maya creation myth. RIVERA The team digitally photographed the Jay I. Kislak Collection / paintings at multiple wavelengths spanning Library of Congress Library uses technology to the ultraviolet through the visible and into Opposite: Tana Villafana explore below the surface of the near-infrared, a technique known as of the Library performs hyperspectral imaging. In this process, tests on a painting by paintings by Diego Rivera. discrete components of an object — inks, artist Diego Rivera. glues, parchment — respond in unique Shawn Miller Diego Rivera was by all measures one of ways to the different wavelengths. the most important Mexican artists of the 20th century — his large-scale murals To get a more precise sense of the paints in San Francisco, Mexico City, New York and pigments Rivera used, they employed and Detroit helped transform the style of fiber optic reflectance spectroscopy, public art and brought new ideas from the which uses a white light source and a Parisian avant garde to the Americas. spectrometer to measure the amount and the color of light reflected from an In the early 1930s, American writer and art object. And to analyze chemicals and critic John Weatherwax approached Rivera elements in the paintings, they used X-ray about illustrating an English translation of fluorescence spectroscopy, a process that “Popol Vuh,” the Maya creation myth. Long nondestructively bombards the paintings fascinated by ancient indigenous cultures with high-energy X-rays in precisely of Mexico and Mesoamerica, Rivera agreed defined locations, inducing elements of and produced a series of watercolors the pigments to emit secondary X-rays and gouache paintings to illustrate the that can be captured and analyzed. text — paintings that in part derive their layouts, color palettes and themes from Preliminary results — to the team’s surprise early Mesoamerican books or codices. — show the artist used very different pigment and paint palettes. For curators Weatherwax’s translation was never and scientists, the project makes clear the published. But, today, the Library holds new knowledge that can be gained when three of the watercolors — largely they collaborate to better understand the unknown to art historians and the collections — and that the sciences and public — in its Jay I. Kislak Collection. the arts are full of hidden surprises.