• 8
  ‘Wizard of Oz’

  Library acquires original music and lyric sketches from the classic film.

• 12
  Native American Art

  A decadeslong project collects contemporary works by Native artists.

• 20
  Preserving Tradition

  Grants help Native communities document cultural practices.

• 
• May / June 2025
  Vol. 14 No. 3
• 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.
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  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

  Laura Lynn Broadhurst
  Nicholas A. Brown-Cáceres
  Deb Fiscella
  Kaley Harman
  Mark Horowitz
  Sahar Kazmi
  Sarah Kostelecky
  Wendi A. Maloney
  Maria Peña
  Wendy Red Star
  Neely Tucker

And, now, it has found a permanent home at the Library through a historic acquisition.

Ferdinando de’ Medici, the grand prince of Tuscany and patron of music in Florence, commissioned the viola from Stradivari in 1690. By the late 1700s, it had arrived in England. There the instrument remained, passing through the hands of various collectors until 1924, when it was sold to American amateur musician and Macy’s department store heir Herbert N. Straus.

In 1957, violist, philanthropist and educator Cameron Baird of Buffalo, New York, purchased the instrument from the Straus estate. After Baird’s death, his wife, Jane, placed the viola on loan with the Library in 1977 in a collaborative custodial arrangement.

Equal parts devotional item and chic accessory, small, ornate prayer books — like the 3-inch-tall Book of Psalms held in the Library’s Lessing J. Rosenwald collection — were a common way to showcase both great wealth and piety in this era of European society. An aristocratic lady might have carried the book with her to church or, like a piece of prized jewelry, brought it out for special occasions.

This customized 1641 Book of Psalms is a marvel not only for its diminutive size, but also for its remarkable condition and lavish decoration. At more than 380 years old, its golden threads remain unfrayed, and its intricate swirls of tiny seed pearls — hundreds of them — appear almost perfectly intact.

As the largest communal art project in the world, the AIDS Memorial Quilt honors the lives of Americans who have died of AIDS since 1981, the year the disease was first identified.

Housed in San Francisco, the physical quilt consists of 55 tons of fabric and holds hundreds of stories of love, loss and resilience. In 2019, records accompanying the quilt were entrusted to the Library’s American Folklife Center for safekeeping.

The scene is, literally, high art — a life-size tribute to a 600-year-old literary milestone, “The Canterbury Tales,” painted by Ezra Winter atop the walls of an Adams Building reading room.

Winter was one of America’s foremost muralists. A farm boy from Michigan, he attended the American Academy in Rome, designed camouflaging for American ships during World War I and later created works for, among others, the U.S. Supreme Court and Radio City Music Hall. He married Edna Grace Patricia Murphey Alberts, a successful businesswoman of many names and many talents who manufactured beauty products and made herself a fortune.

Those songs and others from the film were written by two of the most accomplished songwriters working in Hollywood and on Broadway: lyricist Yip Harburg and composer Harold Arlen. Harburg had penned the lyrics for classics such as “April in Paris” and “Buddy, Can You Spare a Dime?” Arlen would compose over 500 songs, many of them standards: “Come Rain or Come Shine,” “Stormy Weather,” “Ac-Cent-Tchu-Ate the Positive,” “The Man That Got Away.”

With “Oz,” Arlen and Harburg reached the pinnacle of their public recognition — and especially with “Over the Rainbow,” which won the Oscar for best original song and today is regarded as one of the 20th century’s greatest songs.

He was born and raised on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota, the seventh of 10 children. His name there was Rising Buffalo, and he was an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes — Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara. He endured brutal treatment at one boarding school for Native Americans or another, coming out of the experience with not much other than an artistic vision and vague plans for a better life. He wanted to show Native Americans as they were, with an eye that was as humorous as it was empathetic.

“I was just a lonely kid driving in my VW bus, driving to reservations to take my pictures,” he says now. “I didn’t have any idea anyone would want them.”

Indigenous Peoples of the Americas: A Guide to Resources at the Library of Congress serves as a gateway to further exploration of the Library’s historical collections — maps, sound recordings, personal papers, organizational records, legal resources and more — through links to format-specific research guides.

In my work, I gather information from library colleagues, including Native American librarians and archivists, as well as from tribal community members. This is part of the research needed to revise existing U.S. Indigenous headings to modern and accurate usage.

My day might include attending a meeting with people working in tribal public libraries in New Mexico, searching library catalogs for subject headings on specific Indigenous books, or connecting with my co-workers with questions about subject heading proposals from catalogers across the U.S. on Indigenous topics.

A videographer stood by, recording their performance for a project documenting their culture and heritage.

The Huron Band is one of 30 awardees across the U.S. to receive a Community Collections Grant between 2022 and 2024. Funded by the Mellon Foundation and administered by the American Folklife Center (AFC) at the Library, the yearlong grants are helping communities preserve unique cultural practices for future generations.

Recipients include multiple Native American and Indigenous groups.

Funded by the collective annual contributions of Friends of the Library of Congress, NLS staff members set up equipment for volunteers to narrate books in English and Cree. Alice Baker O’Reilly, chief of the Collections Division of NLS, highlighted the value of community members narrating stories in their library’s collection: “Someone who sounds like home is reading you a book about home — you can’t fake that.”

The information I found is a valuable resource for a solo exhibition I will have at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. in 2026. This exhibition will focus on Chief Plenty Coups’ life, his travels to D.C., his reverence for the land and his congressional testimonies advocating for the Crow people.

It also will highlight his inspiration for creating his own mini-Mount Vernon on the Crow Indian Reservation, land he gifted to be turned into a state park that now holds his estate, burial site, visitor center, house and sacred spring. This vision was deeply influenced by his first trip to Washington, D.C., in 1880 as part of a delegation of Crow chiefs. I can even imagine that on one of his many trips, he might have visited the Library of Congress.