Posts Tagged ‘National Archives’
“Let us leave a splendid legacy for our children… guard it well, for it is far more precious than money… and once destroyed, nature’s beauty cannot be repurchased at any price.”*…
From the National Archives, an extraordinary collection of Ansel Adams‘ photos of National Parks in the U.S…
In 1941 the National Park Service commissioned noted photographer Ansel Adams to create a photo mural for the Department of the Interior Building in Washington, DC. The theme was to be nature as exemplified and protected in the U.S. National Parks. The mural project was halted because of World War II and never resumed, however the photographs remained.
Much later in 1962 the photographs were accessioned into the holdings of the Still Picture Branch at the National Archives and Records Administration. The original prints created for the project now reside within the series 79-AA: Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks and Monuments, 1941 – 1942, while the negatives were originally retained by Adams at the time. Ansel Adams would later visit the Still Picture Branch and review his photographic prints in 1979.
The holdings of the National Archives’ Still Picture Branch include 226 photographs taken for this project, most of them signed and captioned by Adams. They were taken between 1941 and 1942 at the Grand Canyon, Grand Teton, Kings Canyon, Mesa Verde, Rocky Mountain, Yellowstone, Yosemite, Carlsbad Caverns, Glacier, and Zion National Parks; Death Valley, Saguaro, and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments. Other pictures were taken at the Boulder Dam; Acoma Pueblo, NM; San Idelfonso, NM; Taos Pueblo, NM; Tuba City, AZ; Walpi, AZ; and Owens Valley, CA. Many of the latter locations show Navajo and Pueblo Indians, their homes and activities.
The Kings Canyon photographs were taken in 1936 when the establishment of the park was being proposed. These prints were added by Adams to the mural project. The one photograph of Yosemite (79-AAU-1) was a gift from Adams to the head of the Park Service, Horace Albright, in 1933.
In addition, there are eight photographs taken by Adams of Yosemite in the General Photographic Files of the National Park Service (79-G)…
Many, many more at: “Ansel Adams Photographs of National Parks.”
“It is horrifying that we have to fight our own government to save the environment” – Ansel Adams
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As we wonder, we might recall that it was on this date in 1940 that an ancestor of the art featured above was discovered: a teenager named Marcel Ravidat found the entrance to cs in southwest France when his dog investigated a hole left by an uprooted tree. Ravidat collected three friends, then followed his dog down what turned out to be the narrow entrance into a cavern, where they came upon (part of) the now-storied collection of wall markings— 15,000- to 17,000-year-old paintings, consisting mostly of animal representations– that are among the world’s finest examples of art from the Upper Paleolithic period.
See also: “To practice any art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow.”
“…When fascism comes to the United States it will be wrapped in the American flag and will claim the name of 100-percent Americanism”*…
Sinclair Lewis sent up a warning flare in 1935. 90 years later, Richard Ovenden (Oxford’s librarian and author of the important– and terrific— Burning the Books: A History of Knowledge Under Attack) smells smoke…
In the space of three short months, the Archivist of the United States, Colleen Shogan, and the Librarian of Congress, Carla Hayden, have both been fired by the Trump administration. Both of these institutions have suffered setbacks before, and have come back stronger. One of the most severe attacks came at the hands of the British. In 1814 a British expeditionary force besieged Washington and set fire to the Capitol building. Officials had already recognised the threat and commandeered every cart they could find to move the National Archives outside the city.
The Capitol building also housed the Library of Congress, and its 3,000 volumes of highly combustible material could not be moved so quickly. The volumes were ignited by British troops. The whole building, and much of the city, was consumed by flames.
News of the destruction of the library reached Thomas Jefferson, whose presidency had ended five years before. In a letter published in a Washington newspaper, he expressed his outrage at the “barbarism” of the British, and offered to make good the losses from his own private library. Congress purchased 7,000 volumes from the former president; with Jefferson’s books, the Library was reborn.
The Library of Congress serves two functions simultaneously. It is both the national library and the library of the legislature. It is as if the British Library was the same organisation as the libraries of the House of Commons and the House of Lords. The irony of course is that unlike its predecessor in 1814, the 119th US Congress has done nothing to protect its own library.
Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, stated in a press briefing that Hayden had been dismissed because the Library had been providing “inappropriate books for children”. It was another senior Trump aide, Kellyanne Conway, who in 2017 introduced the world to the notion that there could be “alternative facts”. This reason for firing Hayden — who has, since 2016, greatly strengthened the institution she inherited — is another “alternative fact”.
The Library of Congress is a reference-only research library and has no lending library for children or adults, its collections being built through legal deposit legislation, passed by Congress in 1909 and updated as recently as 2016.
Shogan was dismissed as Archivist of the United States and replaced by Marco Rubio — who clearly has so much free time alongside his dual role as Secretary of State and national security adviser that he can also run the world’s largest National Archives.
One role that archives play is to preserve documents for legal and evidential reasons. After his last presidency, Trump’s illegal removal of classified documents, stored in a guest bathroom at Mar-a-Lago, resulted in their eventual retrieval by the National Archives under the provisions of the Presidential Records Act.
The removal of Hayden and Shogan demonstrates the exercise of arbitrary power, asserting control over knowledge. Both are the first women to lead their respective institutions, and both committed to reaching all parts of the nation they were appointed to serve. If the ideologically motivated censorship of collections and the recent mass deletion of government websites is anything to go by, the Trump administration is intent on removing swaths of knowledge from public circulation.
In a famous letter of 1813, Thomas Jefferson compared the spread of ideas to the way one candle is lit from another: “He who receives an idea from me”, he wrote, “receives instruction without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me”. Instead of Trump lighting the candles of knowledge in the US today, they are being systematically snuffed out…
An institution that survived British torching in 1814 is now facing a new onslaught: “The US Library of Congress is under attack,” from @richove.bsky.social in @financialtimes.com.
For more on why the attack on the LoC (and the Archive): “Trump Is Trying to Take Control of Congress Through Its Library“- “admin is trying to take over the Library of Congress, ‘a major component of the legislative branch” that confidentially advises lawmakers’.”
And related: “Chaos At The Copyright Office: Trump’s Firing Of Register Shira Perlmutter Came After AI Report’s Release, Leaving Industry Wondering What’s Next“- “speculation about the role that a long-awaited report on [on the use of copyrighted materials to train generative AI models] may have played in his action.”
Apposite, Human Smoke by Nicholson Baker: as Hamilton Nolan explains:
… a history of the years leading up to World War 2. The entire book takes the form of short, stylized, factual items of a few paragraphs or less, presented in chronological order, which taken together tell the story of societies sliding—often unwittingly—into very dark places.
While reading the book, I found over and over again that certain entries would vividly remind me of things happening today. The experience was so vivid that I decided to present a few of them to you here—first, Baker’s entry in his book, and then the modern thing that it made me think of. I make no sweeping claims that one thing is just like the other, or that this time is equivalent to that time. I’m only a curious reader, not a professional historian. I make no sweeping claims at all. It’s just interesting. “History doesn’t repeat itself,” Mark Twain said, “but it often rhymes.”…
And per William Faulkner (“”The past is never dead. It’s not even past”)…
* Sinclair Lewis
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As we listen carfully for echoes, we might celebrate International Museum Day.
Keep those cards and letters coming…
for larger version, click image above (or here), and then click again
Readers will recall earlier visits to Letters of Note (“correspondence deserving of a wider audience”). That wonderful site now has company– and official company at that.
The letter-of-request above*, and tens of thousands of other historically- and politically-interesting documents can now be found at the Online Public Access Prototype of the National Archives.
* One notes that, while the Vice President’s response to Disney was “schedule too tight,” later President Nixon used Disney World as the venue for his “I am not a crook” speech…
[TotH to GMSV]
As we sharpen our quills, we might recall that it was on this date in 1972 (months before his Disney World performance) that President Nixon signed the bill authorizing $5.5 million to develop the Space Shuttle program– NASA’s main focus from that point until President Obama’s recent redirection.
Nixon with NASA Administrator James Fletcher and a model of spacecraft-to-come (Source: NASA)
Bad Santa…
For more merriment, see Sketchy Santas. (And for another real treat see the masterful Terry Zwigoff film memorialized in the title of this missive.)
As we make a list and check it twice, we might celebrate Virginia’s (the state’s, not the doubting young girl’s) ratification of the Bill of Rights. As the tenth consenting state (of 14 at the time), Virginia pushed the first ten amendments to the Constitution past the two-thirds necessary to take effect; and on this date in 1791, they became law.
(Congress had actually passed 12 amendments in 1789, and sent them to the states for ratification. As to the two amendments not adopted, the first concerned the mechanics of the population system of representation, while the second prohibited laws varying the payment of congressional members from taking effect until an election intervened. The first was never ratified, while the second was finally ratified more than 200 years later, in 1992.)
The Bill of Rights (source: National Archives)
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