• 6
  Lives Reimagined

  Exhibit honors the experiences of enslaved children.

• 12
  Library at 225

  From a humble start, the Library grew into the largest in history.

• 20
  Jefferson’s Library

  The president’s books are the foundation of today’s Library.

• 
• March / April 2025
  Vol. 14 No. 2
• 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
• William Ryan
  Executive Editor
• Mark Hartsell
  Editor
• Ashley Jones
  Designer
• Shawn Miller
  Photo Editor
• Contributors

  Katherine Blood
  Nathan Cross
  Olivia Dorsey
  Carla Hayden
  Sahar Kazmi
  Wendi A. Maloney
  Mari Nakahara
  Adam Silvia
  April Slayton
  Neely Tucker

The Washington Sakura Matsuri (the Japanese name for the festival) collection at the Library includes over 30 vibrant posters — beginning with 1987 and ongoing — commissioned to promote the festival. Their artist-designed images spark joy and reflect on natural beauty, friendship between Japan and America and local and global communities coming together in celebration. Inspired by the glowing blossoms, pink is almost always involved!

Their fates intertwined years later, when their families united through the marriage of Lockett’s son to Singleton’s daughter — and again in 2024, when their mutual granddaughter donated their manuscript collections to the Veterans History Project.

The Singleton and Lockett collections are the Veterans History Project’s first from African American veterans of World War I, and their letters, journals and photographs offer glimpses into the adversity and resilience that characterize the African American experience of that war.

The Prints and Photographs Division recently acquired three collections that document such work by the Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer: “Children in Peril,” “Escaping Human Trafficking” and “Ryan White and the Battle Against AIDS” — the last a chronicle of the American teenager who became an international symbol of the fight against the disease.

People magazine had hired Yamasaki and reporter Bill Shaw to contribute to a special feature on living with AIDS, along with other teams in major cities across the U.S. The pair arrived at White’s home in Cicero, Indiana, in summer 1987 to begin work.

The piece, titled “Complex,” was one of many on view as part of artist Maya Freelon’s immersive exhibition “Whippersnappers: Recapturing, Reviewing, and Reimagining the Lives of Enslaved Children in the United States” at Historic Stagville in Durham, North Carolina.

The Bennehan-Cameron family enslaved more than 900 people at Stagville, once one of the largest plantations in the state, at its peak in 1864.

Tucked inside were two copies of sheet music for a highly syncopated, upbeat piano piece with intense flurries of notes — more than 2,000 in a song that took less than three minutes to perform. It was called “Maple Leaf Rag,” and it blew the doors off everything.

“Maple” sold 75,000 copies of sheet music in six months and went on to sell millions both as sheet music and in dozens of recordings. It changed the lives of both men and changed popular music. It became the signature piece of ragtime, which itself lent its name to an era of American life and helped set the foundations for jazz.

It was built that way. For good reason.

Not once, but twice, within the decades preceding the building’s design, the Library literally went down in flames.

On Aug. 24, 1814, during the War of 1812, British troops set fire to government buildings in Washington, D.C. The Library’s 3,000 or so reference books, then housed in an unfinished U.S. Capitol, provided ready fuel for the fire.

How it started:

How it’s going: 225 years later, the Library has amassed what is widely considered the greatest collection of knowledge ever assembled. And, while Congress remains the Library’s first audience, the Library also reaches millions of people around the world, who now have access to its unparalleled resources.

“Know ye,” Lincoln proclaimed on New Year’s Eve in 1864, “That reposing special Trust and Confidence in the Integrity, Diligence and Discretion of Ainsworth R. Spofford of Ohio, I do appoint him Librarian … .”

Spofford would serve as Librarian of Congress for over 32 years — a period during which, thanks largely to his drive and vision, the Library grew into a position of national prominence.

At the time of Spofford’s appointment, the Library was a small institution that served only Congress. The Boston Public Library, Boston Athenaeum and Astor Library in New York City were bigger, as were the Harvard and Yale libraries.

This inscription — meaning “Books, delight of the soul” — adorns the circular mural in a corner of the ceremonial office of the Librarian of Congress in the historic Thomas Jefferson Building. Beneath the words, a young woman holds a book in one hand and touches her heart with the other.

Her sentiment is clear, and it is present in embellishments throughout the office. Occupied by Librarians of Congress from 1897 to 1980, the space is a magnificent ode to the power of the written word.

Owls, lamps and books appear repeatedly among the office’s decorations, and illustrations on the north and south walls trace the evolution of the poet. Nearly everywhere you look, there are gold engravings, stately marble and figures of trumpeters blaring their song.

Smith did so, and Jefferson sold Congress 4,931 titles (encompassing 6,487 volumes) for $23,950 the next year, forming the DNA of today’s Library of Congress, now the largest library in the world. But even in that 1814 offer, Jefferson indicated he wasn’t going to include everything he had. That would come later, after his death, “so that the whole library, as it stands in the catalogue at this moment should be theirs, without any garbling.”

In 1999, council members Jerry Jones — the owner, president and general manager of the Dallas Cowboys — and his wife, Gene, kicked off the Library’s bicentennial celebration with a $1 million gift. They were joined in support by several other council members.

At the time of this gift, then-Librarian of Congress James Billington observed that in the meditative space of Jefferson’s library, you feel as though you are communing with the spirit of the man himself. Jerry Jones noted that “all of the people of this country should help make the Library of Congress a truly vital and active treasure house of knowledge.”

In a neat cursive script, President John Adams added, “Approved,” followed by his signature and the date: April 24, 1800 — 225 years ago this April.

With that — an act of Congress that also provided for the furnishing of congressional offices and the construction of sidewalks in the capital city — the world’s greatest library was born.

The Library of Congress couldn’t be recognized as such at the time, of course.

The collections of the Library — set in a room at the back of the new U.S. Capitol building — held a scant 152 titles and three maps. From that modest beginning, the Library grew into a global treasure of more than 181 million collection items — the greatest collection of human knowledge ever assembled.