2024 Archives, History and Heritage Advanced (AHHA) Internship Program on site at the Library of Congress in DC aims to hire Black, Hispanic or Latino, Indigenous, & communities of color historically underrepresented in the United States & in the Library’s collections. For juniors, seniors, graduate students, or recent grads. 10 weeks, 20 hours a week, $17.22 per hour
"The American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress is partnering with StoryCorps to tell a more diverse and holistic story of the pandemic as told by the people who lived through it. You’re invited to take part! The Center invites everyone to share their experiences, especially frontline workers, medical professionals, and emergency service workers."
Happy birthday to @flickrfdn - the biggest, best archive of no-restriction, public domain photos on the web, with over 100 participating institutions, including the #LibraryOfCongress!
The US Library of Congress has kicked off a crowdsourced transcription campaign for the papers of Leonard Bernstein. Help improve search, discovery, & access to this collection by volunteering: https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/bernstein/
"Kissinger struck a deal with the Library of Congress that, until five years after his death, blocks researchers from seeing his papers there unless they have his written permission.
Even if you could get in, according to the Library of Congress, many of Kissinger’s most important papers are still hidden from daylight by a thicket of high-level classifications, security clearances, and need-to-know permissions.
Kissinger did not reply to two polite requests for an interview, and then, four months later, refused outright.
But against Nixon and Kissinger’s own misrepresentations and immortal stonewalling, there is a different story to be found in thousands of pages of recently declassified U.S. papers, in dusty Indian archives, and on unheard hours of the White House tapes—offering a more accurate, documented account of Nixon and Kissinger’s secret role in backing the perpetrators of one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century."
"The Bangladesh genocide, also known as the Gonohotta (Bengali: গণহত্যা Gaṇahatyā), was the ethnic cleansing of Bengali Hindus residing in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) during the Bangladesh Liberation War, perpetrated by the Pakistan Armed Forces and the Razakars.
It began on 25 March 1971, as Operation Searchlight was launched by West Pakistan (now Pakistan) to militarily subdue the Bengali population of East Pakistan.
In the nine-month-long conflict that ensued, Pakistani soldiers and local pro-Pakistan militias killed between 300,000 and 3,000,000 Bengalis and raped between 200,000 and 400,000 Bengali women in a systematic campaign of mass murder and genocidal sexual violence."
"As its most important international backer, the United States had great influence over Pakistan.
But at almost every turning point in the crisis, Nixon and Kissinger failed to use that leverage to avert disaster.
Before the shooting started, they consciously decided not to warn Pakistan’s military chiefs against using violence on their own population.
They did not urge caution or impose conditions that might have discouraged the Pakistani military government from butchering its own citizenry.
They did not threaten the loss of U.S. support or even sanctions if Pakistan took the wrong course.
They allowed the army to sweep aside the results of Pakistan’s first truly free and fair democratic election, without even suggesting that the military strongmen try to work out a power-sharing deal with the Bengali leadership that had won the vote.
They did not ask that Pakistan refrain from using U.S. weaponry to slaughter civilians, even though that could have impeded the military’s rampage, and might have deterred the army.
There was no public condemnation — nor even a private threat of it — from the president, the secretary of state, or other senior officials.
Nixon and Kissinger bear responsibility for a significant complicity in the slaughter of the Bengalis.
This overlooked episode deserves to be a defining part of their historical reputations.
But although Nixon and Kissinger have hardly been neglected by history, this major incident has largely been whitewashed out of their legacy—and not by accident.
Kissinger began telling demonstrable falsehoods about the administration’s record just two weeks into the crisis, and has not stopped distorting since.
Nixon and Kissinger, in their vigorous efforts after Watergate to rehabilitate their own respectability as foreign policy wizards, have left us a farrago of distortions, half-truths, and
outright lies about their policy toward the Bengali atrocities."
Even #ChatGPT forgets that #civictech exists. Ask it to write a script to fetch the list of books by William Gibson via API. It will first reply "use google books" which requires an API token.
But you can query US Library of Congress and get the results without token.
The Library of Congress will showcase a range of treasures, technology and history from its recorded sound collection, the largest such audio collection in the world, in a daylong series of presentations and evening sound installations on Aug. 24.
This may be an ambitious project, but I do like to challenge myself occasionally, and this attempt at creating a hyper reality-based #colorized#photograph should be interesting.
On a special private tour in 2019, I got to walk through the massive closed stacks at the Library of Congress. I got in as many deep breaths as I could. If this scent could be bottled I would wear it as cologne. #books#bookshelves#loc#libraryofcongress#bookstodon@bookstodon
Bryan Hoffa is a library audio preservation specialist with the Library of Congress. In this video he shows us how 78rpm records are cleaned and digitized for the LOC. He also shares some interesting variables about the inconsistencies of 78s.