For example, when in 1800 the Baltimore-based ship Eagle left Sainte-Domingue (today the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic) the printed clearance its captain received shows how the influence of the French Revolution stretched even to routine documents issued in France’s Caribbean colonies. The Eagle’s clearance is headed Liberté, Egalité, and is dated according to the French revolutionary calendar: “le 17 Pluviose l’an huit de la République Française, une & indivisible” (17 Pluviose, year eight of the French Republic, one and indivisible). The port from which the Eagle sailed, Port-Républicain, was previously Port au Prince. It became Port au Prince again with the creation of the independent nation of Haiti in 1804.

The clearance of another Baltimore ship, Adventure, tells a similar story. When it passed through the port of New York on August 15, 1783, seaport officials issued the clearance on a printed form headed with the name of Sir Guy Carleton, the British commander-in-chief of North America. The American Revolution was then ongoing and British forces occupied New York. When they evacuated the city in November 1783, New York’s printers undoubtedly benefited from the work required to print new port documents, just as their counterparts would later in Port au Prince/Port-Républicain.

The clearances issued to the Adventure and the Eagle are among the 138 files of ships’ papers, each containing from one to several documents, that the Library of Congress bought in two installments from a rare book dealer named C. S. Hook in 1903. Hook was and remains an indistinct character. An advertisement he placed in the May 20, 1917, issue of the New York Times reads: “Old Law Books Wanted. Spot cash paid for Acts, Laws, etc. of all states. Correspondence solicited.” The address he provided was a post office box in Staunton, Virginia. In his dealings with the Library of Congress between 1903 and the 1920s, the always acronymic Hook’s addresses included the Staunton post office box and others in Atlantic City, Charlottesville, Cincinnati, New York, Richmond, and Savannah.

The first batch of ships’ papers Hook sold the Library of Congress consisted of eleven documents (accession #463, October 16, 1903) and was jumbled together with a miscellaneous group of nineteenth-century manuscript letters and printed documents on a range of unrelated maritime and non-maritime subjects. Hook included letters by a few prominent figures, including Henry Ward Beecher, Peter Cooper, and Toussaint L’Ouverture. He charged the Library $21 for everything, making it hard to know how he valued the ships’ papers specifically. Their monetary value became clearer on December 1, 1903 (accession #491) when Hook sold the Library another lot consisting of 127 ship documents for $33.

To make the ships’ papers accessible to researchers, the Manuscript Division initially added them to a category called “Marine Miscellany.” By 1918 Marine Miscellany consisted of eight volumes and two large portfolios of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century ships’ papers and logbooks. Marine Miscellany was one of several “Miscellany” collections that were later broken up and added to the Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection (MMC). (Marine Miscellany persists as just a small collection in the MMC, as do remnants of a few others, including Connecticut Miscellany, Irish Miscellany, and Poetry Miscellany.) Hook’s ships’ papers were each cataloged by the ship’s name and filed alphabetically in the MMC, which is how they remain today. Now a new project to digitize the MMC will make these papers, along with the rest of the rich cacophony of voices in the MMC, available online for the first time. (This is an ongoing digitization project, which is moving through the collection alphabetically, which is why all the digital images you see in this post are of ships whose names begin with A.)

Much was gained when the ships’ papers were cataloged individually and researchers could search the Library’s online catalog by ships’ names. But when the ships’ papers were alphabetically interspersed with the other small collections in the MMC, something was lost – their connection to Hook and his mysterious source.

What was that source? On closer look it becomes clear that the ships’ papers that Hook sold to the Library in 1903 have enough in common to make them seem more like a coherent collection than a random group. They probably have a connection to some common source. Most of the ships represented by papers in the Hook purchases date from the last decades of the eighteenth century and the first of the nineteenth, stopping with the embargoes that halted trade just before the War of 1812. While some of these ships sailed to ports in the United States, Europe, South America, and as far away as Indonesia and the Canary Islands, most went to the colonial Caribbean. Perhaps most important: almost all these ships originated in the port of Baltimore. This points to the possibility that sometime around the turn of the twentieth century the customs house in Baltimore, or maybe a Baltimore shipping company, sold off, or perhaps discarded, this group of by then century-old ships’ papers.

In 2013 I used a digital platform developed at the Library of Congress called Viewshare to map a sample of ships’ papers in the MMC, including Hook’s 1903 accessions, #463 and #491, plus several others. The digital map I made with Viewshare made it possible to visualize Hook’s ships traveling back and forth between Baltimore and ports in such Caribbean colonies as Antiqua, Cuba, Guadeloupe, and Martinique, to name just a few. The ships chiefly carried coffee, cocoa, and sugar, crops produced mainly by the labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Other cargoes included salt, rum, wine, and campeche wood, or logwood, which was used to make dye. The ship captains are named, as are the English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Dutch, and Swedish colonial customs officers, health inspectors, and other port officials who signed these documents. Crew members typically were not named, but in some cases they are, as with the Adventure’s clearance, where a list of “Mens Names” appears in the left margin.

Individually, each of the ships’ documents is an eloquent record of the history of the colonial Caribbean, the trade in the products of enslaved labor, the careers of sea captains, sailors, and colonial port officials, the management of infectious disease in the era before scientific medicine, and the way that waves of political change affected the operations of everyday life. Taken as a group, they tell a story about the port of Baltimore in an era of revolutions and war. They are just one example of the riches to be found in the Manuscript Division’s Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection.

For more on the ships’ papers and Viewshare see:

Camille Salas, “Exploring Cultural Heritage Collections with Viewshare,” Library of Congress, June 11, 2013.

Camille Salas, “Bringing Hidden Collections to Light with Viewshare: An Interview with Julie Miller, Historian at the Library of Congress,” The Signal: Digital Happenings at the Library of Congress blog, July 31, 2013.

Julie Miller, “Ravens, Lemons, and Peste: 19th-Century Maritime Health Certificates in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress,” 4 Corners of the World: International Collections at the Library of Congress blog, April 7, 2021.

“In his dealings…” The Manuscript Division’s accession files provide information about Hook’s sales over many years.

“eight volumes…” Handbook of Manuscripts in the Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1918), 245-246.

“made with Viewshare…” The Library discontinued Viewshare in 2018.

The Declaration in Script and Print tells the story of the composition and first printings of the Declaration of Independence in 1776-1777 and traces the history of 19th-century artistic reproductions of our nation’s founding document. With a keen eye for the technical and creative choices that defined these reproductions of the Declaration, Dr. Bidwell offers his analytical and interpretive examinations of historic broadsides, prints, and illustrations while also presenting a deeply researched and lively narrative of the people and events involved in bringing the Declaration of Independence to the American public in various formats over the course of the nation’s first century. Dr. Bidwell’s book also provides a comprehensive checklist of the Declaration’s nearly two hundred printings known to exist. The Declaration in Print and Script explores a transformative moment in print history by discussing the artistic techniques of typesetting, engraving, and lithography used to reproduce and illustrate the various editions of the Declaration in this era. The Library couldn’t be more excited to host Dr. Bidwell and to learn more about the research and writing process that brought this book into being.

The event on July 17 will include four parts:

• John Bidwell will present a brief introduction to his book and the process by which he identified, researched, and interpreted the Library’s collections in his work.
• Then, Stephanie Stillo, the Chief of the Rare Book and Special Collections Division, will engage with Dr. Bidwell in a conversational interview segment.
• With the remaining time in the hour, the audience will have the opportunity to ask questions.
• Before and after the event on stage, a curated display of select printings of the Declaration of Independence from the
  Manuscript and Rare Book Divisions will highlight the Library’s extraordinary Americana collections.

This event will be free and open to the public, and you can register to attend via this link. If you are unable to join us in person on July 17, the event will be filmed and posted to RBSCD’s filmed events page.

John Bidwell is a curator emeritus at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City and served as the Astor Curator of Printed Books & Bindings there. Dr. Bidwell received his bachelor’s degree in history at Columbia University, earned his M.A. at Columbia’s School of Library Service, and received his doctorate in English from Oxford University. He has written extensively on the history of papermaking and the graphic arts. The “Made at the Library” series highlights works that emerge from research conducted at the Library of Congress and features authors, artists, and other creators in conversation with experts from the Library’s staff. In addition to exploring the rich and varied printing history of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Bidwell will offer his perspective on the experience of working with the Library’s collections. This event will be cosponsored by the Rare Book and Special Collections Division and the Manuscript Division. Please join us if you can!

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The 1876 Centennial Exposition was a massive world’s fair held in Philadelphia to commemorate the 100^th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Occupying over 200 newly constructed buildings in Fairmount Park, the fair drew more than nine million visitors for an exuberant six-month celebration of American progress and patriotism.

The fair’s patriotic symbolism culminated on July 4, 1876, with a staged reading of the Declaration of Independence by a descendant of signer Richard Henry Lee, held in front of Independence Hall. Members of the National Woman Suffrage Association, however, disrupted the event by pushing their way to the platform to give Susan B. Anthony the opportunity to present a “Declaration of Rights” for women to Thomas W. Ferry, acting vice president of the United States. Hurrying from the building, the women distributed copies of the document to the assembled body. Safely outside, a crowd gathered, and Anthony read the women’s demands, which included equality for all individuals.  This was not the first time (the 1848 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments set a precedent) and certainly not the last, that the Declaration of Independence inspired women to demand their rights.

Meanwhile, a stirring painting by Archibald M. Willard, titled “The Spirit of ’76” (better known simply as “Yankee Doodle”), created especially for the Centennial Exposition, captured the imagination of the fair’s visitors. As they did with the stirring language of the Declaration of Independence, women’s rights activists appropriated the painting’s visual power for their own ends. More than forty years after the Centennial Exposition, the women’s suffrage movement continued to take inspiration from the Declaration of Independence and Willard’s painting in publications (below) and postcards (above), tying the movement for women’s voting rights and equality to the rights of representation sought by the nation’s founding generation.

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Hall mined his naval career of more than twenty years to produce several popular books, including Account of a Voyage of Discovery to the West Coast of Corea, and the Great Loo-Choo Island and Extracts from a Journal, Written on the Coasts of Chili, Peru, and Mexico, in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822.  He retired from the Royal Navy in 1823, and two years later he married Margaret Hunter of Edinburgh. As the daughter of a diplomat, Hunter was already an experienced traveler when she married Hall. In 1827 the Halls, their fifteen-month-old daughter Eliza, and Eliza’s nurse, Mrs. Cownie, set out for North America. Basil Hall’s three-volume book, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828, was published in 1829. More than a century later, Margaret Hall’s letters to her sister, Jane Hunter Guthrie, were published by British author Una Pope-Hennessy in 1931. In 1932 Pope-Hennessy sold the original letters and her transcriptions to the Library of Congress, where they are available for research in the Margaret Hunter Hall Papers in the Manuscript Division.

Margaret and Basil Hall prove the theory that crabby people make the best observers. “Both Captain and Mrs. Hall disapproved on principle of everything that America presented of equality and fraternity and were completely out of their bearings in a society unmapped by class distinctions,” Pope-Hennessy writes. “They held democracy to be a demoralizing blight from which, however, it was always possible a country might recover.” They held this view in common with British author Frances Trollope (about whom Pope-Hennessy also wrote). Trollope (the mother of novelist Anthony Trollope) overlapped with the Halls during her time in the United States and, like them, wrote about the dismay she felt on getting to know Americans and their political and social practices. In her book, Domestic Manners of the Americans, published in 1832, Trollope wrote, “Captain Hall, when asked what appeared to him to constitute the greatest difference between England and America, replied, like a gallant sailor, ‘the want of loyalty.’ Were the same question put to me, I should answer, ‘the want of refinement.’”

Unlike Frances Trollope, who left her husband behind in England, the Halls appear to have not only traveled together, but also shared their observations. About Baltimore, for example, Basil writes in Travels in North America: “I was beyond measure relieved by finding that it was not the custom of the place to cram down our throats their institutions, their town, their bay, their liberty, their intelligence, and so forth.” While Margaret writes in a letter to her sister: “No one here has spouted to us of their Institutions and their buildings and their liberty and fifty other things of which the Philadelphians boasted morning, noon, and night. Margaret describes what may have been their usual, shared practice. One evening in Charleston, ducking an invitation to a ball, “we put on our dressing gowns and sat down to write, which many persons perhaps would consider the greatest fatigue of all, but I find it quite a refreshment.”

Margaret and Basil Hall’s journey began when they landed in New York in April 1827. From there they traveled up the Hudson River, into New England, then down to New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. They continued south to Washington, Charleston, Savannah, Mobile, and New Orleans; then to St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh, and finally back to New York, where they embarked for England in June 1828.

When they weren’t visiting prison and asylum inmates, the Halls went to parties, dinners, and balls. They visited state legislatures and, in Washington, the House of Representatives and Senate, and courts in session.  In Washington, also, they mixed with foreign delegations. In the south they visited plantations, where they watched enslaved people at work and toured their cabins. They witnessed slave sales in Washington and Charleston. They met the president, John Quincy Adams, who gave Margaret a locket with a cutting of his hair as a gift for Eliza. They met Joseph Bonaparte, in exile in the United States after the downfall of his brother, Napoleon. On a steamboat on the Raritan River in New Jersey they bumped into Aaron Burr. They met with Secretary of State Henry Clay and toured the State Department where they saw George Washington’s 1775 military commission. Currently the commission, part of the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress, where it is housed like Margaret Hall’s letters in the Manuscript Division, is on display in the Library’s exhibition The Two Georges: Parallel Lives in an Age of Revolution.

While Margaret’s observations parallel Basil’s in some cases, in others they diverge because of the segregation of the sexes in many public and private spaces. At a tea in the home of New York’s governor, DeWitt Clinton, the Halls walked together into a room that they soon realized contained only men. The governor “came forward and giving me his arm hurried me into the adjoining room” where his wife was entertaining the women. After a dinner in Columbia, South Carolina, Margaret wrote that “ladies in America have a vile custom of crowding all together at dinner tables and leave the gentlemen likewise to herd by themselves.” What this meant was that some of what the Halls saw and reported was specific to each one’s sex. In Washington, for example, Margaret reported that “Basil dined yesterday with a large party of the Vice-President and many members of the House of Representatives at [British ambassador] Mr. Vaughan’s, from which I was, of course, excluded.”

There were so many things Margaret Hall did not like about the United States, and she took care to describe each one in detail. After visiting the New York State Assembly she wrote, “The favorite attitude of the principal speaker was his left hand in his breeches pocket whilst with his right he clutched a pencil and sawed the air in a manner that showed him much in want of Hamlet’s advice to the Players. Now and then he shifted his left hand from the favourite pocket back further than it would be quite delicate to particularise.”

Parties in Washington were too crowded, or “squeezy.” “There is no room to walk about for the purpose of seeing people, and if there were there is no one worth seeing. You may say, perhaps, that dancing in a space no bigger than a cheese plate must be poor amusement for anyone out of their teens, but it is not quite so wearisome as standing crushed up to the wall,” she complained. After attending a South Carolina ball to celebrate Washington’s birthday she wrote that women dressed like “girls at the circus or strolling players at the Dundee Theatre . . . such fabrications of silver muslin and tinsel, such feathers and flowers.” She was appalled at the sight of a “pretty girl” at a Washington dinner “feeding herself with very much-melted ice cream with a great steel knife!” Commenting further on the inadequacy of American utensils she described how hard it was to eat South Carolina rice with one of the “great lumbering, long, two-pronged forks” that she found were generally used. As for the men, she was disgusted by their tobacco chewing and frequent spitting.

Margaret Hall didn’t hate everything. She liked the peach pickle she ate in Washington, she enjoyed some of the places she stayed, and she occasionally, grudgingly, admired the landscapes she passed through. Reading between the lines it is apparent that she was treated by people both free and enslaved with hospitality and kindness just about everywhere she and her family went in the United States. Although she was a perceptive observer and an articulate and witty writer, she may not have thought of herself as an author since, unlike her husband and the other travelers, she never wrote a book, and her letters went unpublished for more than a century. Those letters, in Pope-Hennessy’s published edition and the originals in the Manuscript Division, preserve a trove of detailed information about life in the antebellum United States from a cranky, but observant, visitor.

“Pope-Hennessy writes…” Margaret Hunter Hall, The Aristocratic Journey, Being the Outspoken Letters of Mrs. Basil Hall, Written during a Fourteen Months’ Sojourn in America, 1827-1828, ed. Una Pope-Hennessy (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1931), 6.

“the want of refinement…” Frances Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whittaker, Treacher & Co., 1832), 65-66. Pope-Hennessy’s book, Three English Women in America (London: E. Benn, 1929), covers Trollope, Fanny Kemble, and Harriet Martineau.

“One evening…” Basil Hall, Travels in North America, in the Years 1827 and 1828 (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea & Carey, 1829), 2:392. Margaret Hall to Janet Hunter Guthrie, December 21, 1827; February 26, 1828, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 157, 210-211.

“these places…” Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 5; David J. Rothman, The Discovery of the Asylum, Social Order and Disorder in the New Republic (Boston: Little Brown, 1971).

“Margaret reported…” Margaret Hall to Janet Hunter Guthrie, September 15, 1827; February 22, 1828; January 4, 1828, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 62-63, 209,170.

“she wrote…” Margaret Hunter Hall to Janet Hall Guthrie, September 16, 1827, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 64.

“Commenting further…” Margaret Hunter Hall to Janet Hunter Guthrie, January 3, 1828; January 19, 1828; February 22, 1828; January 15, 1828; March 2, 1828, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 169, 185, 209, 182, 212.

“peach pickle…” Margaret Hunter Hall to Janet Hunter Guthrie, December 29, 1827, in Pope-Hennessy, Aristocratic Journey, 165.

Fought between August 1942 and February 1943, the World War II Guadalcanal Campaign in the Solomon Islands launched the Allied ground offensive in the Pacific Theater. At the end of six months of brutal land, air, and sea fighting, 7,100 Allied and 31,000 Japanese servicemembers lay dead. Allied forces gained a crucial foothold in the Pacific that included the strategically critical Henderson Airfield on Guadalcanal, and greatly weakened the vaunted Japanese Imperial Army.

Among the tens of thousands of American servicemembers who fought at Guadalcanal was a former Treasury Department lawyer named Herbert Christian Laing Merillat. His story was unique: He was sworn in as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps just a week before shipping out with the First Division. The former Rhodes Scholar joined under a new program in the Marine Corps Public Relations Division. He was officially designated a press officer, tasked with working with the civilian press and suggesting story ideas to them. By design, he received only a rudimentary week of training so that he could not be “snatched away to lead a platoon into battle.” Merillat later described his role as “a civilian in uniform.”

During the Guadalcanal Campaign, Merillat focused on gathering information for an eventual unit history, which Houghton Mifflin published during the war in 1944 under the title The Island: A History of the First Marine Division on Guadalcanal, August 7-December 9, 1942. Like many other wartime histories, it was censored before publication to remove sensitive or classified information and to limit the impact on national morale. A New York Times review explained that while the book was not the official history — though Merillat was an active-duty Marine — “it will do until that is written and released. For this is the real story, soberly, honestly, authoritatively told.”

Merillat returned to the subject again in 1982 for the fortieth anniversary of the campaign, when he published Guadalcanal Remembered, which was based on his diaries. In fact, he considered the book “a heavily annotated diary” of his time on Guadalcanal.

In Guadalcanal Remembered, Merillat did not include several entries which documented his struggles with his roles in the military and in the war. Perhaps he considered this text extraneous to the historical narrative or too personal to publish. As the following excerpts from his original manuscript diaries show, however, these raw reflections capture his thoughts and insecurities in the weeks leading up to the ground attack and in the first couple months of the campaign, revealing some of the burdens of recording history as it happened.

May 16, 1942: “Will my assets for civilian life be assets for military life?”

In his first few days in the Marines, Merillat pondered his role in the war effort and the challenges he would encounter. As a newly minted officer with minimal training, Merillat questioned whether he could make the transition into the military.

“I write this on the train to New River [North Carolina]—feeling that I am the greenest officer who ever set off on an important fighting expedition—the greenest in any war in any age. I have been so immersed in the business of making physical preparations for the expedition that I have scarcely begun to think of the nature of my new duties, the danger and excitement I face, or the seriousness of my work and position.”

“Will my assets for civilian life be assets for military life?”

May 23, 1942: “It seems that the Marine is a highly romantic creature”

Merillat spent much of May and June 1942 aboard the troop transport ship Wakefield (AP-21) on the way to New Zealand, where the First Division would spend eight weeks before deploying to Guadalcanal. As an officer, Merillat had the unenviable task of censoring mail written by Marines to loved ones back home. Although he found the task of ensuring against the leakage of sensitive information dull, reading the mail provided him with an opportunity to make wry observations about the moods and outlooks of enlisted Marines.

“I have been censoring mail today—a dull task with bright moments. It seems that the Marine is a highly romantic creature. Either he thinks he is madly in love, or he thinks there is some virtue in pretending he is in love. His expatiation on this subject is profuse, if not imaginative. Letters are either of this sticky sweet variety, to sweethearts, or in a fully affectionate and reassuring vein, to parents and families. I like the letter in which the Marine told his gal to ‘keep your chins up’—a dig which cannot have been intentional if one is to judge by the effusive lyricism of the rest of the letter.”

June 3, 1942: “Is there any other place in all God’s universe where this is going on?”

As he sailed on the Wakefield across the Pacific towards New Zealand, Merillat found wonder in the southern skies. In this entry, he pondered the war and his place in the universe.

“I saw the Southern Cross for the first time last night… As I leaned on the rail before the deck house, watching the bow cut into an inky sea & the rigging roll to & fro against the Milky Way, for a vivid moment I felt what madness war is. A luxury liner, one of the most amazing mechanical achievements of man, rushing through a Pacific night, not a light showing, with 5000 husky men aboard—headed in secrecy and urgency for a rendezvous where those 5000 will be hacked to bits—dashing along on a great body of water on a planet which seems infinitesimal—which is infinitesimal—under the Milky Way. Is there any other place in all God’s universe where this is going on?”

July 21, 1942: “I do feel certain my work is more important than most about me realize.”

Merillat’s unique role in the war made him a strange figure among these thousands of men preparing for war. While others would focus on contributing to immediate military victory, Merillat’s efforts could not be appreciated until the end of the war afforded the benefit of historical perspective.

“All this seems very trifling when I consider that the main business at hand is to get a fighting machine into shape. Everyone who will kill a Jap[anese soldier] is more important now than I am—or is he? I don’t know. I do feel certain my work is more important than most about me realize.”

August 22, 1942: “It’s a strange hard world I don’t fit into.”

At the time, Merillat maintained his philosophical distance from the war. He could not understand American violence towards captured Japanese soldiers and instead considered the Japanese to be products of poverty and obedience to military orders when other Marines dehumanized them.

“Two Jap[anese] wounded were being tended by corpsmen while I was there. One, wounded in at least four places, was perfectly impassive as they dressed his wounds. Looked about him calmly as though nothing of particular interest was taking place. Heard several Marines coming up remark ‘we ought to shoot [him]. . . It’s an attitude hard to understand—the Jap[anese] had fought hard to the death, bravely if foolishly, but these men spoke as though they were less than human for daring to fight. The ignorant Jap[anese] peasant soldier fights on orders as ours do, and with amazing daring. Though their cause is hateful to us, why blame a peasant lad laying helpless in the sand, beyond practicing the treachery drilled into him, for the awfulness we are embroiled in. In battle kill the Jap[anese] to the end of the fight, as long as they constitute a menace—by all means. But when the battle is over, & a man lies helpless at your feet, why call him a [name] & propose to shoot him through the head. It’s a strange hard world I don’t fit into.”

Four decades later, however, Merillat defended the mindset of the Marines he observed at Guadalcanal, writing that “in the Battle of Tenaru, several Japanese wounded had waited until an approaching American came within range, then tossed a grenade or fired a pistol at him. The ‘kill-‘em-in-cold-blood’ attitude, then, often was justified, and became common on both sides.”

August 31, 1942: “This has not worked out well”

Merillat was often his own harshest critic, blaming his reserved personality for limiting his progress on his unit history. But even during despondent periods, he took solace in the potential impact his work would have in the future.

“This has not worked out well & I might as well face it. I haven’t the brass or the back-slapping, good fellow facility that a war correspondent (i.e., police reporter) needs to get along. I need to interview people who are friendly and civil, who meet me half way. In such an exchange I can do well, I know. But I find little friendliness here, and few who meet me half way. The officers with who I must deal are for the most part cold—discouraging rather than encouraging, regarding me as a strange intruder in their little clique.”

“All that sustains me is the thought that these are painful times for everyone & I may as well suffer here as anywhere. Some day I hope to return to life & loves—I have neither here. If only I felt I was doing something useful it would be so much easier. Perhaps I am doing something useful. I know (what many of those here seem not to know or realize) that when this war is over the history of this Division will seem very important, and be of tremendous interest to those who were in it during the war.”

September 30, 1942: “There are so many scores of heroes here.”

Two months into the Guadalcanal Campaign, Merillat was tasked with writing citations for military awards that Admiral Chester W. Nimitz would bestow. The number of awards were limited not by the number of meritorious actions that occurred, but by the number of medals available.

“I wouldn’t like the responsibility of having to pick out the most deserving cases—there are so many scores of heroes here.”

Merillat donated his original diaries to the Library of Congress in 2000, where they form part of the H. C. L. Merillat Papers.  The diaries became publicly available for research upon his death in 2010. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery.

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“A civilian in uniform…” Herbert Christian Laing Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered (New York: Dodd, Meade & Company, 1982; repr., Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2003), 11.

“It will do until that is written…” Foster Hailey, “‘George’ and—Captain Merillat—Report on Guadalcanal,” New York Times, October 29, 1944.

“A heavily annotated diary…” Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, 3.

“Will my assets for civilian life…” H. C. L. Merillat, diary entry, May 16, 1942, unbound war journal, H. C. L. Merillat Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“It seems that the Marine…” H. C. L. Merillat, diary entry, May 23, 1942, unbound war journal, H. C. L. Merillat Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“Would spend eight weeks…” For a history of the Wakefield, see its entry on the digital version of the Dictionary of American Naval Fighting Ships.

“Is there any other place…” H. C. L. Merillat, diary entry, June 3, 1942, unbound war journal, H. C. L. Merillat Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“More important than most about me realize…” H. C. L. Merillat, diary entry, July 21, 1942, bound war journal, H. C. L. Merillat Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“It’s a strange hard world…” H. C. L. Merillat, diary entry, August 22, 1942, bound war journal, H. C. L. Merillat Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“It’s a strange hard world…” Merillat included an edited version of this entry in Guadalcanal Remembered but omitted the discourse on Japanese bravery and orders. Historian John Dower’s classic volume War Without Mercy (W. W. Norton & Company, 1986) explains more about the process of dehumanization in the Pacific Theater.

“In the Battle of Tenaru…” Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, 106.

“This has not worked out well…” H. C. L. Merillat, diary entry, August 31, 1942, bound war journal, H. C. L. Merillat Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“There are so many scores of heroes…” H. C. L. Merillat, diary entry, September 30, 1942, bound war journal, H. C. L. Merillat Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

“But by the number of medals…” Merillat, Guadalcanal Remembered, 158-159.

On June 14, 1861, Professor Lowe ran into a snag with an ascent. After having completed all his preparations, he discovered that the gas company would not turn on the gas necessary to fill his balloon unless someone would guarantee payment of the bill. An appeal was made to Rhees’s boss, Professor Joseph Henry, the secretary of the Smithsonian Institution. But as Rhees explained to Laura, “Prof Henry wrote him a certificate that he knew Mr Lowe had been employed to make the experiment but with his usual reserve would not say that he would be security for the bill $100.”

After an hour of waiting for a resolution, Rhees decided to take matters into his own hands. “I concluded to go up & see Riggs, President of the Gas Co- Brown the Sec’y being out of the city, but we could not see him he was at a dinner party.” Moving on to Simon Cameron’s residence, perhaps with Professor Lowe in tow, Rhees was told that the secretary of war was asleep. He then went to the White House, in hopes of making an appeal to John Hay, one of Abraham Lincoln’s private secretaries, but Hay was not there. Had Rhees been lucky enough to run into the technology-loving president, he might have secured the sought-after authorization. But he wasn’t that lucky. Thus, without the Civil War equivalent of a purchase order guaranteeing payment of the bill, Lowe did not have access to the gas necessary to inflate his balloon and, Rhees lamented, “had to give up the experiment for last night.”

Lowe must have secured the necessary guarantees for bill payment, or obtained funding in some other way, as he continued with his balloon experiments and demonstrations on the Mall, including one involving Rhees himself.

On July 14, 1861, Rhees excitedly wrote Laura about his own “ride by the ‘air-line’ to regions in the skies.” He described his balloon ascent as “perfectly grand and delightful. The motion was so gentle that I could have stood in the basket without holding on to the sides at all, and I had no sensation of fear.” Lowe, who remained earthbound managing the rope tethers, estimated that Rhees ascended a thousand feet during his ten minutes in the air. Although he had “a full view of the country” at that height, he struggled to discern if the many military camps he saw through the tree canopy in nearby Virginia belonged to Union or Confederate forces. Changing conditions prevented Professor Henry and his daughters from making their own ascent that day, and Rhees told Laura, “I was the only one of the Smithsonians to ascend & the Professor said—‘well Mr Rhees this is something to remember for a life-time.’”

Thanks to letters written to his wife Laura that summer, William J. Rhees’s interactions with Thaddeus Lowe and his own ascent in the aeronaut’s balloon will be remembered well beyond his lifetime.

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“Columbia Armory grounds…” In 1861 the Columbia Armory was located near where the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum is today.

“…into his own hands.” Rhees later wrote an article about Lowe and the use of balloons during the Civil War. The author identification for Rhees stated that he “had charge of Mr. Lowe’s balloon experiments for the Smithsonian Institution in June, 1861.” This may have been the primary reason Rhees took such an interest in Lowe’s balloon trials and was permitted to make an ascent himself. See William Jones Rhees, “Reminiscences of Ballooning in the Civil War,” The Chautauquan 27, no. 3 (June 1898), 257. Rhees also donated a copy of his article to the Library of Congress.

As of May 27, 2025, volunteers can transcribe and review an exciting variety of addenda and supplementary materials from the Manuscript Division’s Walt Whitman Papers in the Charles E. Feinberg Collection via the By the People crowdsourcing transcription Walt Whitman campaign.

Items categorized as Addenda include fragmentary materials in Whitman’s hand — thoughts on the physiology of the body, instructions to a printer — and printed items that document the famed poet as a popular celebrity, public intellectual, friend, and cultural commentator.

“Supplementary” materials are divided into three crowdsourcing projects for ease of transcription: Supplementary File I, Supplementary File II, and Supplementary File III. These projects include a variety of programs, lectures, reviews, articles, news clippings, brochures, letters, literary criticism, and whole issues of literary magazines containing articles about Whitman’s work. These materials span more than a century, from the Victorian period into the post-World War II era.

A sampling of Supplementary File items includes an undated, handmade pamphlet containing the verses of Whitman’s famous 1865 elegy to Abraham Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d,” with an artistic rendering of a hand holding a sprig of lilacs on its cover. There is also a printed admission ticket for an October 1890 lecture about Whitman by famed orator Robert Green Ingersoll, delivered in Philadelphia as a fundraiser for the ailing elderly poet, who was working on what would become his “death-bed edition” of Leaves of Grass (finished in 1891, published in 1892). Copious printed materials from the 1900s include the flyer for a May 1919 celebration of the hundredth anniversary of Whitman’s birth, sponsored by the Camden, New Jersey, Elks lodge, held as World War I was coming to an end.

Most of the materials newly available for transcription were created about Whitman by other authors, either during his lifetime or long after his death. Items include literary criticism, lecture materials, and musical performances based on Whitman’s poetry. There is ample evidence of Whitman’s grassroots popularity and materials that reveal the enduring importance of his poetry in local communities and gatherings. The items document commemorative events and Whitman celebrations sponsored by fraternal associations, religious groups, organizations, lecture circuits, settlement houses, and at lodges, community centers, neighborhood playhouses, and concert halls. For example, public history commemorations of Whitman are represented through a Whitman statue by sculptor Jo Davidson that was placed in Bear Mountain State Park, New York, in 1939, and the creation of the Walt Whitman Birthplace Historic Site on Long Island after World War II.

In honor of the May 31 anniversary of Whitman’s birthday, you can learn more about the poet of democracy and his lasting legacy by participating in the crowdsourcing transcription process yourself. Find out more about it at https://crowd.loc.gov/campaigns/walt-whitman/.

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Mary Oliver (1935-2019) remains one of the nation’s most popular and widely read poets. She is best known for her poetry about the healing, revelatory, and transformative benefits of observing and immersing oneself in nature, and for her prose about natural history, literature, and life.

A Library of Congress National Poetry Month exhibit, Mary Oliver: Poet of the Natural World, will be on display on the second-floor mezzanine of the Library’s Thomas Jefferson Building through May 31, 2025.

All the items on display come from the Mary Oliver Papers in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division. The exhibit chronicles how Oliver’s deep interest in the natural world—in woods and meadows, streams, ponds, and marshes; birds, animals, and plants—stemmed from her childhood in Ohio, extended throughout her career as a writer, and framed her adult life in the seaside community of Provincetown, Massachusetts.

The exhibit features objects representative of the collection, including photographs of Oliver, a diary and journal, a bird-watching list, personal correspondence, draft poems, and the cover design for one of her books. Also on display is evidence of sources of inspiration for Oliver, including beach-findings and feathers she collected on her walks, two books she kept on her writing desk, and her relationships with friends and her longtime partner, photographer and bookstore owner Molly Malone Cook (1925-2005).

Oliver was a birdwatcher and animal lover from her youth. Her outdoor forays in Ohio brought her to favorite trees and the banks of a flowing stream. The first part of the exhibit includes photographs of Oliver as a child, teenager, and mature writer; a snapshot she kept of a swimming swan; some of her lists recording bird sightings; a diary description of springtime; and the mockup for the cover design of Owls and Other Fantasies (2003), one of the collections of writings she named for birds, like Red Bird (2008) and Swan (2010).

In Owls and Other Fantasies, Oliver made many species of birds and their habitats her subject matter. In the book’s poems and essays, she paid tribute to a swan, a loon, a hawk, a kingfisher, a meadowlark, a catbird, a crow, owls, herons, hummingbirds, kookaburras, wrens, and starlings. She opened the book with one of her most famous poems, “Wild Geese.” The part of the exhibit devoted to Oliver’s love of birds includes a set of feathers that inspired the graphic illustrations that appear in the pages of Owls and Other Fantasies.

The next section of the display, on her contemplative life in Provincetown, features seashells and a broken ceramic bird she gathered while beachcombing near the shoreline. Oliver’s life in the environs of Provincetown was shared with Cook and a circle of friends that included filmmaker and artist John Waters. Oliver first met Cook at Steepletop, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay’s historic home and farm in the Hudson River Valley. The two began living in Provincetown full time after Oliver retired from teaching in 2001.

The Provincetown portion of the exhibit shows Oliver enjoying boating and time with Cook, and walking in the woods with her friend, the dancer, potter, and ecologist Paulus Berensohn (1933-2017). In a joyful 2001 note to Berensohn signed by both Mary and Molly, Oliver described the transition to year-round life in Provincetown as a return to “the ocean’s edge, to the woods, to sunrises . . . oak leaves, grass, and grasshoppers.” Other letters in the Mary Oliver Papers reveal that Berensohn, who shared Oliver’s close affinity with nature, served as a confidante for Oliver during Cook’s struggle with and eventual death from cancer, and the grief that Oliver experienced after her partner’s passing.

In the aftermath of Cook’s death, Oliver found personal comfort and spiritual uplift in poetry, in encouraging environmental awareness, and in the rituals of the Episcopal Church. She kept a copy of the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer close at hand on her desk and taped a schedule for prayer times, along with the word COURAGE to her typewriter.  She also cherished a day-by-day collection of work by the Persian poet Rumi, A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings (2006), edited by her friend, the translator and fellow naturalist poet Coleman Barks. In her copy, retained in her papers, Oliver marked the Rumi poem “Love Moves Away” with a plain slip of paper. The poem is testament to the difficulty of finding equanimity after loss. Taking walks to the seashore and nearby Blackwater Pond also continued to soothe and provide a meditative state of grace for Oliver and to inspire new poetry.

Visitors to the exhibit can read the Rumi poem, as well as typed drafts of two of Oliver’s own poetic works, “At Great Pond” (which figures the sun rising like a bird in flight) and “Morning at Blackwater” (which describes the “half-miracles” of birds and insects that begin to sing at dawn and the scent of blossoming honeysuckle, like a “sweet odor of prayer.”)

For more information on visiting the Library of Congress and to obtain free timed-entry tickets, see https://www.loc.gov/visit/.

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“Manuscript Division . . .” See also Barbara Bair, “Poet of the Natural World: Mary Oliver Papers Newly Available in the Manuscript Division,” Unfolding History blog post, June 20, 2024.

“Hudson River Valley . . .” In addition to the Mary Oliver Papers, the Manuscript Division’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Papers hold Mary Oliver materials stemming from Oliver’s friendship with Millay’s sister and literary executor Norma Millay, and Oliver’s residence for a time at the historic property. Molly Malone Cook served as Oliver’s literary manager during their years in Provincetown.

“grasshoppers . . .” Mary Oliver and Molly Malone Cook to Paulus Berensohn, September 7, 2001, box 9, Mary Oliver Papers, Manuscript Division, Library of Congress.

The Milagros Gonzalez Jamias Family Photograph Album, housed in the Library of Congress Manuscript Division, depicts the life of a Filipino family during the American colonial period. The album contains photographs taken between 1921 and 1935, offering unique insight into Philippine society during a period of political reform, increased commercialization, and heightened American influence. The album portrays the impact of American influence in Filipino society while reflecting the lighthearted nature of domestic life for many wealthy families during this period.

In 1902, the American victory in the Philippine-American War resulted in the establishment of a provisional colonial government in the Philippines and the recruitment of wealthy Filipinos to participate in the new colonial project. Hoping to win the support of educated elites in the Philippines, the head of the Philippine Commission William H. Taft (later United States president) offered powerful government positions, elevated social status, and economic advancement to the wealthy Filipinos who supported his administration. This policy would come to shape Philippine society during the twentieth century, ensuring that many Filipinos equated wealth and status with the United States.

Many Filipinos who participated in the colonial government gained extended access to American consumer markets, causing many Filipino families to adopt American fashion and technology as a symbol of their elite social status. Reflecting this dynamic, the album includes photographs of the Gonzalez family dressed in American clothing and accompanied by American automobiles. The album also includes photographs of the vacations, family events, and workplaces of its subjects, indicating the role that wealth played in the education, labor, and leisure of the Gonzalez family. This dynamic showcases the dual identity of Filipino elites, as both key figures in Philippine society and participants in the American colonial project.

Beyond insight into Filipino society, the photograph album serves as a personal, visual history of the Gonzalez family, featuring their childhood adventures, careers in medicine, and experiences as parents. The dramatized poses and sarcastic captions in the album reflect the playful nature of family life for many affluent Filipinos during this era. Captions like “On strike” and “They’re spoiling the view” further emphasize the closeness among the Gonzalez family members, a bond that endured even as their descendants relocated to Washington, D.C., after World War II.

As the twentieth century progressed, increasing numbers of Filipinos immigrated to the United States in response to war, decolonization, economic opportunity, and changing immigration legislation. Like many Filipino families who immigrated to Washington, D.C., in the postwar era, members of the Gonzalez family established roots in the local Filipino American community. Reflecting the complex family histories of many Filipino Americans, the album offers a nuanced perspective on Filipino society while providing valuable insight into the lived experiences and history of a Filipino family.

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“new colonial project . . .” “The Philippine-American War, 1899-1902,” Archive for the U.S. Department of State, accessed March 12, 2025.

“his administration . . .” Norman G. Owen, “Introduction: Philippine Society and American Colonialism,” in Compadre Colonialism: Studies in the Philippines under American Rule, ed. Norman G. Owen (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1971), 4-6.

“the United States . . .” “The Philippines, 1898-1946,” U.S. House of Representatives, Office of the Historian, accessed March 12, 2025.

“elite social status . . .” Gino Gonzales, “The Philippine Dress: 500 Years of Straddling Polarities,” Arts of Asia, Autumn 2022.

“after World War II . . .” “Eva Milagros Jamias Carr,” The Washington Post, December 12, 2006.

“immigration legislation . . .” John M. Liu, Paul M. Ong, and Carolyn Rosenstein, “Dual Chain Migration: Post-1965 Filipino Immigration to the United States,” The International Migration Review 25, no. 3 (1991): 487–513.

First, can you tell us a little bit about what you do at the Library?

I’m a cataloging librarian in the Manuscript Division. I work with senior cataloging specialist Bennett Heggestad and other staff in the division to accession and catalog collections and perform a variety of other related responsibilities. Through that collective effort, we are involved in the life of a collection from the time the Manuscript Division receives it and throughout our work to enable and maintain access to the material.

So, tell us about this collection and photo album.

Sure, this is from the K. C. Emerson Papers. It’s a small collection processed by Laura Kells and originally cataloged by Bennett. I later updated the catalog record to include additional material. Emerson was a U.S. Army officer, an entomologist, and a prisoner of war in the Philippines who survived the Bataan Death March during World War II.

Like my former colleague Laura Kells, who processed the Emerson Papers, there are lots of things in this collection that I find interesting. I especially like the numerous international recipes Emerson recorded in his notebooks, especially the one for adobo, arguably the unofficial national dish of the Philippines. Seeing it here makes me think about how wartime food shortages impacted regular people, how they adapted to those shortages by tinkering with their recipes, how they probably hungered not only for food but nourishment from life beyond the war. It also makes me think of how adobo has evolved over time and in kitchens all across the Filipino diaspora, including mine.

But I really find myself drawn to this photo album. Flipping through the pages, you see different pockets of life against the backdrop of war, including the Philippine countryside, the markets, and the daily lives of Indigenous people, Filipino servants, and common folk and families. You can imagine how daily encounters with machinery, uniformed soldiers, weapons, and other symbols of war changed their lives.

A lot of the images are of common activities, like bowling matches and cockfights, or household items like irons, or the rattan chairs you see in many people’s homes, which my dad has talked about, reminding me of the impact of the war on industries producing these and other household objects. There are báhay kúbo, or “nipa huts,” which remind me of a traditional folk song of the same name that my mom taught me as a child. One of those báhay kúbo is literally being moved on sticks by townsfolk. My dad explained that this was one way people in a community participated in one another’s lives. Those homes were built with sturdy yet lightweight material so that they could be moved if necessary, such as during a flood.

But in looking at those photos, it’s hard not to imagine how those communities experienced the disruption of war, how differently their frame of reference must have been compared to soldiers like Emerson, and what kinds of cross-cultural dialogues they all must have had. I also think of my late great-uncle who shared a little of his experience surviving the Bataan Death March as Emerson did, both arriving at that specific path, yet coming from and returning to very different lives. Some of the images also seem to throw things out of time – like the military vehicles that were later repurposed and became the basis for the country’s postwar jeepney transportation system, but here they are war machinery.

In other words, there’s an intersection of culture and war in this album, and a throughline from past to present, one that for me also evokes photographs from my dad’s childhood, when he remembers finding shells of bombs where he and other kids would play. Emerson was documenting his war service and experiences, but there’s also a story about Filipino identity across time – one about Filipino people who’ve struggled to adapt to war, and to international migration, and to colonially imposed education systems that were so foreign to people’s lived experiences at first yet have become so integral.

The historian Daniel Immerwahr writes that history textbooks and overviews often treat America’s territorial empire as “an episode rather than a feature,” where the acquisition of a new territory becomes a notable event but the colonies themselves somehow “vanish.” Photo albums like this help show that isn’t the case. I previously cataloged atlases and at times looking through this album has been like the experience of looking through an atlas: You can see the throughline, the continuity, the far-reaching tentacles of war and occupation disseminated across culture, land, the movement of people, the manipulation of resources and environments and technologies, the redefining of geographic boundaries, all perpetuated through time. Somehow the movement and stillness of those events come together in photographs like this, as they do in maps, showing the relationships between people, land, technologies, industries, and more. Together they help bring a sense of clarity, because these aren’t just individual images of people frozen in wartime. It’s one of the things that makes research so powerful, the ability to find something that may help you understand better your connection to other people through the smallest of details.

What else have you brought out here?

I also have a couple of miscellaneous things from other collections. I always like finding doodles, sketches, any kind of handmade surprise in a collection item. There are so many unexpected things in the collections: ship’s logs with dramatic sketches of shipwrecks, little books with handmade binding and specimens of type and letterpress, mysterious handwritten alchemical books, travel journals with hand-drawn maps, and little things that remind me of places where I’ve lived. I love this shipwreck image especially.

I also brought out an annotated typescript from the Estella T. Weeks Papers, which shows sketches of Shaker dance steps and a musical notation the Shakers developed in the early  nineteenth century. They’re meant to be there, but they do look like doodles. Even if you’re not particularly interested in Shaker history, there’s so much visual appeal there.

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“An episode rather than a feature…” Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019), 14.