The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship
The exhibition The African American Odyssey: A Quest for Full Citizenship, showcases the incomparable African American collections of the Library of Congress. Displaying more than 240 items, including books, government documents, manuscripts, maps, musical scores, plays, films, and recordings, this is the largest black history exhibit ever held at the Library, and the first exhibition of any kind to feature presentations in all three of the Library's buildings.
A selection of highlights from this exhibition includes:
Activism in the Black ChurchThis pamphlet discusses the history of this African American denomination, educational efforts among people of color in Ohio, and other issues vital to the African American community during Reconstruction. It provides important historical data about the African Methodist Episcopal Church (A.M.E.), especially in Cincinnati, discusses the church's diverse ministries, and outlines the denomination's numerous uplifting and charitable endeavors in the Cincinnati community. There is also historical information about Wilberforce University in Ohio, an institution of higher education purchased by the A.M.E. Church in 1863.
An African American Institution of Higher Learning—Wilberforce UniversityA group of Ohioans, including four African American men, established Wilberforce University near Xenia, Ohio, in 1856, and named it after the famous British abolitionist, William Wilberforce. When the school failed to meet its financial obligations, leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal Church purchased it in 1863.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress
The American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition is an unprecedented permanent exhibition of the rarest, most interesting or significant items relating to America's past, drawn from every corner of the world's largest library.
Selected highlight from this exhibition:
Mound Builders of OhioThis Plan of the Ancient Works at Marietta, Ohio, was sketched in 1837 by Charles Whittlesey, geologist, engineer, and student of ancient North American cultures. It depicts a huge earthwork shaped by so-called Mound Builders, prehistoric Indians who lived in the Ohio Valley. Such mounds, varying greatly in size and built for purposes that are still not fully understood, once numbered in the thousands throughout the Midwest. Many have been eradicated by the spread of settlement and and the expansion of farmland.
Bob Hope and American Variety
Bob Hope was among the 20,000 vaudeville performers working in the 1920s. Many of these performers were, like Hope, recent immigrants to America who saw a vaudeville career as one of the few ways to succeed as a "foreigner" in America. Throughout his extraordinary professional career of nearly seventy years, Bob Hope practiced the arts he learned in vaudeville and perpetuated variety entertainment traditions in stage musical comedy, motion pictures, radio, television, and the live appearances he made around the world in support of American armed forces. Today, the stage variety show is mostly a memory but its influence is pervasive thanks to the long and rich careers of vaudeville veterans like Bob Hope.
A selection of highlights from this exhibition includes:
Bob Hope and Family(First Image): Avis Townes Hope, with six of her seven sons. Bob Hope, born Leslie Townes Hope, is standing in the front center.
(Second Image): William Henry Hope and his wife, Avis Townes Hope, are shown with six of their seven sons at their family home in Cleveland, Ohio. Bob Hope, is seated in front of his father.
Luna Park, ClevelandBob Hope spent many hours at this Cleveland amusement park. He often earned money singing on the trolley on the way to the park and won more money at the park by winning footraces. Hope recalled in 1967, “We'd have been called juvenile delinquents only our neighborhood couldn't afford a sociologist.”
The Civil Rights Act of 1964: A Long Struggle for Freedom
This exhibition, which commemorates the fiftieth anniversary of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964, explores the events that shaped the civil rights movement, as well as the far-reaching impact the act had on a changing society.
Selected highlight from this exhibition:
The Dream of Flight
On December 17, 1903, Wilbur and Orville Wright made the world's first sustained, powered, and controlled flight in a heavier-than-air flying machine, thereby realizing one of mankind's oldest and most persistent aspirations - human flight. The Dream of Flight honors that achievement, using the Library's rarest and most significant materials to explore the notion that flight, whether fanciful or actual, has inspired and occupied a central place in most cultures.
A selection of highlights from this exhibition includes:
Practical Flyer in 1905Intent on building a practical machine, the Wrights spent 1904 and 1905 flying and experimenting at Huffman Prairie near Dayton, Ohio. By 1905, they had improved their engine, propellers, and control system—with separate pitch, roll, and yaw controls—making it the first fully controllable aircraft. In its best performance, the 1905 model gave compelling evidence it was capable of banking, turning, and making figure eights. It could be called the world's first practical airplane.
Wright Family HomeThe Wright family lived first in Indiana, where Wilbur was born, but they moved to Dayton, Ohio, in 1869. In April 1871, they purchased this new home where Orville was born later that year. In June 1878, the family moved to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where they remained for three years, moving to Indiana for another three years until they returned to Dayton for good in 1884. From then on, this modest house in a working-class section of Dayton would be home for Wilbur and Orville, who eventually added shutters and built the wraparound porch.
Language of the Land: Journeys Into Literary America
From Robert Frost's New England farms to John Steinbeck's California valley to Eudora Welty's Mississippi Delta, authors have described the American landscape to evoke a strong sense of place. They have peopled our land with memorable characters and woven into their works the regional traits of a dynamic culture. Using the metaphor of a journey, Language of the Land: Journey into Literary America examines the following literary heritage though maps, photographs, and the works of American authors from a variety of periods.
A selection of highlights from this exhibition includes:
A farm between Columbus and Cincinnati, OhioAnd full ears grow on the corn, and the stalks bow with the weight of fat kernels, and they become gold. And legumes flower and fall and fill the land with the fragrance of new-mown hay. When harvest time comes the women and children sing with joy, the children romping around the stack of hay.
Feike Feikema, The Golden Bowl
A Literary Map of OhioBeyond the last house on Trunion Pike in Winesburg there is a great stretch of field. . . . In the late afternoon in the hot summers when the road and the fields are covered with dust, a smoky haze lies over the great flat basin of land. To look across it is like looking out across the sea. In the spring when the land is green the effect is somewhat different. The land becomes a wide green billiard table on which tiny insects toil up and down.
Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition
With Malice Toward None: The Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial Exhibition commemorates the two-hundredth anniversary of the birth of the nation's revered sixteenth president. More than a chronological account of the life of Abraham Lincoln, the exhibition reveals Lincoln the man, whose thoughts, words, and actions were deeply affected by personal experiences and pivotal historic events
A selection of highlights from this exhibition includes:
The Journey of the President-Elect - February 13, 1861The Presidential Journey—Reception of the President in Columbus, Ohio
The Journey of the President-Elect - February 14, 1861The president-elect and his party departed Columbus, Ohio, at 8:00 a.m. for a twelve-hour train trip to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. In spite of a pelting rainstorm that lingered the entire day, large enthusiastic crowds gathered to greet Lincoln in towns along the route. As the train zigzagged through rural Ohio towns, Lincoln gave brief impromptu speeches, his voice growing hoarse.
Lincoln's Long Journey Home - April 28, 1865President Lincoln's Funeral—Building Erected for Reception of his Remains at Cleveland, Ohio
