Crowdsourcing at the Library of Congress: New Whitman addition & May 24 LOC research event

By the People Bulletin

 

New Walt Whitman addition

By the People just launched 4,000+ new pages of Walt Whitman's notebooks, poetry and prose manuscripts, letters, and other materials for transcription. The Thomas B. Harned collection will be our last major addition to the Walt Whitman campaign for some time, so jump in now if you want to transcribe the papers of the great American poet! Thomas Harned was a Philadelphia attorney and a good friend of Whitman’s during the time that the poet lived in Camden, New Jersey. He became one of Whitman’s three literary executors and donated his collection to the Library of Congress in 1918.

You'll find some truly fascinating items in the Harned collection. This set includes a number of Whitman's notes and notebooks which contain draft lines of poems and essays, addresses of friends and contacts, and sketches from his time working in hospitals in Washington and Brooklyn during the Civil War.  Whitman visited hospitals daily while in Washington, DC to care for soldiers by writing letters back home, bringing food and sweets, playing games, and talking with them to pass the time. In his notebooks, he sometimes recorded the name and military rank of the soldiers he visited, occasionally noting details about the soldier and their condition. Help us transcribe these notebooks and walk alongside Whitman as he made his hospital rounds.

May 24 virtual research event at the Library of Congress

Note: This event is not hosted by By the People but may be of interest to BTP volunteers! 

Join the Library of Congress for the final online research sprint with the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) for their History Unfolded project on May 24, 2023, 6:00-8:00 PM EDT (US and Canada). Search the Library’s historic American newspaper collection, Chronicling America, to find out what people knew and how they reacted to the Holocaust. Staff from the Library of Congress will present the Library’s historic newspaper archive, Chronicling America, and Staff from USHMM will introduce the History Unfolded project. They will instruct participants on how to submit relevant newspaper articles to the History Unfolded database. Following the presentations there will be time to conduct your own research and upload findings to History Unfolded.

Click here for more information and to register for the webinar.

 

Best,

Abby & the By the People team