1933 Goudey Big League Chewing Gum trading card featuring a color illustration of baseball legend Babe Ruth.
▪ A Babe Ruth baseball card, published by the Goudey Gum Co. in 1933. Prints and Photographs Division

America’s Most Powerful Export?

From music to movies to sports, U.S. popular culture rules the globe.
Baseball, basketball, football, blues, jazz, rock, Hollywood, Broadway, comic books — what would the planet look like without the great spewing fountain of American pop culture?

Never mind the economic, dance floor and movie theater impact of America’s entertainment industry. When the Cold War came down to it, the United States had what Soviet kids wanted most: blue jeans and rock ’n’ roll. Who could compete with Levi’s and Elvis?

Likewise baseball, first codified in New York in 1845, was America’s much beloved national pastime — but then became a cultural mainstay in nations as diverse as Castro’s Cuba and post-World War II Japan.

The Library’s collections preserve much of this history in multiple formats. In the early 20th century, once modern recording and film technologies took hold and broadcast and mass distribution outlets proliferated, American creativity rocketed not just from Key West to Honolulu but around the world. The global impact of American films, television, theater, music (blues, jazz, rock, rap), comic books and even fast food can’t be quantified — but much of it can be catalogued.

Ella Fitzgerald singing into a microphone on stage, wearing a feathered hat and an ornate, dark, long-sleeved gown.
Billie Holiday singing into a microphone, wearing a light-colored dress with a large bow and dark gloves on stage.
A collection of handwritten and typed lyric drafts, including lyrics for "My Favorite Things" and early Disney sketches.
▪ Top: William Gottlieb’s classic photos of jazz singers Ella Fitzgerald (left) and Billie Holiday. Prints and Photographs Division

▪ Middle left: An original lyric sketch for “Over the Rainbow” by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, scrawled on a scrap of yellow legal paper. Music Division

▪ Middle right: A storyboard for “Plane Crazy,” a 1928 animated short film that marked the first appearance of Mickey Mouse. Prints and Photographs Division

▪ Bottom: Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric drafts for “My Favorite Things” from “The Sound of Music.” Music Division

The Library’s baseball holdings are exhaustive. The National Audio-Visual Conservation Center holds millions of items documenting film, music, television and radio history, perhaps best recognized in the National Film Registry and the National Recording Registry.

The Stephen A. Geppi Collection of Comics and Graphic Arts is home to iconic editions of heroes such as Spider-Man, Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman and so many more. The Music Division holds the entire collections of titans such as George and Ira Gershwin, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, Oscar Hammerstein II and Billy Strayhorn.

But it’s always the individual items that take the breath away.

The first storyboard of a Mickey Mouse cartoon, before anyone had seen anything by Walt Disney. The 1899 sheet music of Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag,” sent in for copyright deposit, before “ragtime” was the name of an era or before the word “jazz” even existed. And there’s Ruth Graves Wakefield’s 1939 recipe for a little creation she served at her restaurant in Whitman, Massachusetts.

You, and the rest of the world, now know it as the chocolate chip cookie. Sometimes American history can be just that sweet.

—Neely Tucker
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