• 12
  Plot on a Prince

  Papers reveal an attempt to kidnap the son of King George III.

• 14
  ‘The Two Georges’

  Exhibit explores the similar lives of George III and George Washington.

• 20
  Bring on Burt

  Library acquires the papers of composer Burt Bacharach.

• 
• january / february 2025
  Vol. 14 No. 1
• Mission of the Library of Congress
• The Library’s mission is to engage, inspire and inform Congress and the American people with a universal and enduring source of knowledge and creativity.
• Library of Congress Magazine is issued bimonthly by the Office of Communications of the Library of Congress and distributed free of charge to publicly supported libraries and research institutions, donors, academic libraries, learned societies and allied organizations in the United States. Research institutions and educational organizations in other countries may arrange to receive Library of Congress Magazine on an exchange basis by applying in writing to the Library’s Director for Acquisitions and Bibliographic Access, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington DC 20540-4100. LCM is also available on the web at loc.gov/lcm/. All other correspondence should be addressed to the Office of Communications, Library of Congress, 101 Independence Ave. S.E., Washington DC 20540-1610.
• news@loc.gov
  loc.gov/lcm
  ISSN 2169-0855 (print)
  ISSN 2169-0863 (online)
• Carla Hayden
  Librarian of Congress
• April Slayton
  Executive Editor
• Mark Hartsell
  Editor
• Ashley Jones
  Designer
• Shawn Miller
  Photo Editor
• Contributors

  Allison Buser
  Flora Fraser
  Sahar Kazmi
  Anne McLean
  Julie Miller
  John Powell
  Neely Tucker

The Library currently is in the midst of a major, 18-month centennial celebration of the series — a century of free concerts, historic commissions and broadcasts featuring generations of legendary artists like Leonard Bernstein, George Szell, Igor Stravinsky, Leontyne Price, Joshua Bell and countless others. The celebration launched in February 2024 and continues through this December.

Among the great national libraries, sponsorship of a major concert series still is a rare thing. But the Library does have certain enviable advantages: the Coolidge Auditorium, considered one of the world’s finest acoustic environments; a stunning musical instrument collection; and treasures from the Music Division’s holdings to enrich every concert experience.

A major portion of the organization’s processed records, spanning 1915 to 1968, now are available online at the Library for the first time. About 80% of the approximately 80,000 items have been digitized thus far, greatly expanding research access to primary source materials for scholars and students studying the civil rights movement.

The records cover many topics: segregation in schools, on buses and in public facilities; discrimination in housing and property ownership; voting rights; police brutality; racial violence; and countless other infringements of civil rights.

The British easily marched in, ransacked and burned the Treasury, the President’s House (the White House), the Navy Yard, the Capitol (and the Library of Congress inside) and other federal buildings. Troops were ordered not to pillage or destroy civilian property, a command that largely was respected.

But one Royal Marines officer, Nathanael Cole, decided to extricate a keepsake, though it’s not clear from where: a King James family Bible, printed in Philadelphia in 1807 by Mathew Carey.

His personal world atlas, a large two-volume set of more than 120 maps now held in the Library’s Geography and Map Division, may not have been the monarch’s most ornate possession, but it created an appropriately memorable splash when it was unveiled
in 1704.

Distinguished by special binding and the king’s royal cypher, or monogram, the atlas opens with a title page engraving showing a stately Louis XIV beside a map of the British Isles, his foot crushing the symbolically snake-haired man writhing beneath it.

The Madison’s main entrance is suitably imposing, framed by a colonnade of 24 towering piers that, as the Architect of the Capitol notes, attempts to “capture the spirit of classical architecture while remaining faithful to the canons of modern innovation.”

Just behind the colonnade and above the doors, a colossal bronze tribute to reading and learning greets arriving visitors.

“Falling Books,” a sculpture by Frank Eliscu, is what is sounds like: Ninety-eight giant, open books tumbling from the heavens to the folks below, their faces craned upward to see. Like the building it decorates, “Falling Books” is big: The sculpture measures 50 feet high and 35 feet wide. Some of the books are as much as 5 feet wide.

Augustine Washington also left behind some surveying tools, which proved to be as useful as anything else. By 15, young George already was practicing surveying land, and by 1749, when he was 17, he was working as a professional surveyor. This employment largely came through the connections of his patron, Lord Fairfax, on whose Northern Neck land the young Washington received most of his work, mapping out nearly 200 new claims. This was good money in the era and an even better opportunity.

The mastermind: Matthias Ogden, a Continental Army officer serving under George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

The target: Prince William, the 16-year-old son of King George III now serving as a midshipman in the Royal Navy.

As the king’s third son, William held little hope of inheriting the throne. So, at age 13, he had joined the navy and, in September 1781, sailed into New York harbor with a squadron under Adm. Robert Digby — and thus became the first British royal ever to set foot in America.

“Two Georges” would not be possible without the support of several private donors, one of whom is Beverly Lannquist Hamilton. Hamilton, a retired executive in the investment industry and a James Madison Council member, first decided to support the “Two Georges” exhibition in 2018. When she learned of the project, Hamilton already had been researching her own revolutionary past.

“Growing up in Lexington, Massachusetts,” Hamilton says, “I always knew that my DAR patriot was a minuteman who mustered there on April 19, 1775, when the alarm was raised, in time to join other militias in shooting at the British on their return from Concord to Boston. … The exhibit was a perfect fit.”

I knew little then of George and Martha but a substantial amount about the characters of both monarch and consort. They are central figures in two books that I had researched over the previous 15 years in the Royal Archives at Windsor: “The Unruly Queen: The Life of Queen Caroline,” the king’s daughter-in-law, and “Princesses: The Daughters of George III.”

It was unorthodox in 2004 to imagine the patriot Washingtons receiving in friendship the royal despot and his queen. Obediently, I followed other tourists through the elegant interiors and out onto the breathtaking views of Maryland across the Potomac. I could not shake the feeling, however, that there was much that the two couples had in common, despite obvious differences, and much that they would have relished discussing.