Books That Shaped America

Books That Shaped America is one of the most intriguing online exhibits in the Library of Congress. The books listed here span 2½ centuries of American history.

These books have had a profound effect on American life, but they are by no means the only influential ones. And they are certainly not a list of the “best” American books. Curators and experts from throughout the Library of Congress contributed their choices, but there was much debate—even agony—in having to remove worthy titles from a much larger list.

Here are some of the books listed for the time period 1950-2000:

E. B. White, Charlotte’s Web (1952)
According to Publishers Weekly, Charlotte’s Web is the best-selling paperback for children of all time. The likely reason is that it is just as enjoyable for adults to read as children. This story line centers on a clever and compassionate spider and her scheme to save the life of Wilber the pig. It is especially notable for the way it treats death as a natural and inevitable part of life.

Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged (1957)
Although mainstream critics reacted poorly to Atlas Shrugged it was a popular success. Set in what novelist and philosopher Ayn Rand called “the day after tomorrow,” the book depicts a United States caught up in a crisis caused by a corrupt establishment of government regulators and business interests. The book’s negative view of government and its support of unimpeded capitalism as the highest moral objective have influenced libertarians and those who advocate less government.

Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
By debunking the “feminine mystique” that middle-class women were happy and fulfilled as housewives and mothers, Betty Friedan inspired the second-wave feminist movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Friedan advocates that women need meaningful work and encourages them to avoid the trap of the feminine mystique by pursuing education and careers. By 2000 the Feminine Mystique had sold three million copies and was translated into several languages.

Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965)
When The Autobiography of Malcolm X (born Malcolm Little) was published, the New York Times called it a “brilliant, painful, important book,” and it has become a classic American autobiography. Written in collaboration with Alex Haley (author of Roots), the book expressed for many African Americans what the mainstream civil rights movement did not: their anger and frustration with the intractability of racial injustice. In 1998, Time magazine listed The Autobiography of Malcolm X as one of ten required reading nonfiction books.

What other books do you think are on this list? Find out at Books That Shaped America.

Lorin Catudio 
Redmond Library Board, Emeritus

The Stern Collection of Lincolniana

The Library of Congress online contains an extensive collection of Lincolniana (historical artifacts related to Abraham Lincoln). Alfred Stern presented his outstanding collection of Lincolniana to the Library of Congress in 1953. Begun by Mr. Stern in the 1920s, the collection documents the life of Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865) both through writings by and about Lincoln as well as a large body of publications concerning the issues of the times including slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, and related topics.

Collection Highlights
The Lincolniana collection highlights contain political cartoons, election posters, writings, as well as photos and portraits. Here’s an election poster from the 1864 presidential campaign:

The collection also contains numerous letters from Lincoln written throughout his lifetime. In a letter to James H. Hackett, Lincoln writes:

"...I have endured a great deal of ridicule without much malice; and have received a great deal of kindness, not quite free from ridicule. I am used to it. Yours truly, A. Lincoln"

Other Lincolniana in the collection includes newspaper headlines and posters, including one from Ford’s Theatre announcing the president as a special guest. It was to be a fateful night:

For those who want to learn more about this extraordinary man, the Stern Collection of Lincolniana provides a wealth of information and artifacts.

Lorin Catudio
Redmond Library Board, Emeritus

Redmond Community Indicators 2012

Redmond Community Indicators is a tool for assessing progress toward achieving the eight broad community goals that underpin Redmond's Comprehensive Plan. The 2012 update was recently published, please see a selection of the highlights below.

---

GOAL: CONSERVE
(No Overall Trend)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Resource Consumption. The amount of waste per
single-family customer per week declined 3.5 pounds
to 55.3 pounds. The recycling rate among single family
customers decreased slightly to 62.4%. The
rolling three-year average water consumption fell
about four percent to 271 million cubic feet, the
lowest figure in at least nine years. Streams. All six
stream core sample sites have water quality index
scores greater than 40, which means that they are of
marginal concern or better. Two of eleven stream sites
given BIBI scores (“bug index” scores) rated above
35, the minimum required to support native habitat.

---

GOAL: COMMERCE
(Improving Trend)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Businesses. There are 5,533 businesses licensed to
operate in Redmond: 958 are newly licensed while
1,445 have operated in Redmond for at least seven
years. Population and Employment. Redmond’s
population reached 55,150 in 2011 and employment
reached 76,876 (2010, latest available, not comparable
to prior years). Income and Poverty. Redmond
median household income rose to $95,038; the mean
wage rose to $110,182 (inflation adjusted). Child
poverty rose from 5% to 6.6% in the Lake Washington
School District (2010), the highest level in over 15 years.

---

GOAL: CULTURE
(Improving Trend)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Recreation and Arts. The largest increase in
participation in City recreation program was among
those ages 5 to 12, while overall participation
increased to over 148,000. Events. About 24,000
people took part in Redmond Lights and Derby Days
combined in 2011 – about the same number as
participated in 2010. Over 44,000 participated in
arts-related performances and exhibitions in 2011.

---

Visit the City of Redmond’s Community Indicator page for complete details and access to historical annual reports.

A Collective Memory: American Treasures of the Library of Congress

In 1814, Francis Scott Key wrote new words for a well-known drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven, to celebrate America's recent victory over the British. However, only on March 3, 1931 (following a twenty-year effort during which more than forty bills and joint resolutions were introduced in Congress) was a law finally signed proclaiming The Star Spangled Banner to be the national anthem of the United States. Happy 81st birthday! 

The American Treasures of the Library of Congress collection contains a copy of the first printed edition of our national anthem — one of only ten copies known to exist.

BTW, before 1931, My Country, ‘Tis of Thee, whose melody is identical to the British national anthem, served as our de facto national anthem.

American Treasures
The American Treasures of the Library of Congress online exhibition contains the rarest, most interesting, or significant items relating to America's past. This includes items, such as the Original Rough Draught of the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s First Draft of the Gettysburg Address.

Other exhibits in the American Treasures collection are more obscure, such as the Huexotzinco Codex. The Huexotzinco Codex is an eight-sheet document on amatl, a pre-European paper made in Mesoamerica. It is part of the testimony in a legal case against representatives of the colonial government in Mexico, ten years after the Spanish conquest in 1521.

Historic Photos
The Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress contains a huge archive of photos — one of the crown jewels of the American Treasures collection. The 1930s-40s in Color exhibition is a dramatic set of color photos from the Great Depression and World War II that capture an era generally seen only in black-and-white. It’s astonishing to see how much more powerful these images are in color.

The following photo shows a family at the Vermont State Fair in Rutland (1941). Notice the girls’ homemade dresses are made from the same bolt of cloth — very common and very practical in those days.

The next photo shows a small store with live fish for sale in Natchitoches, Louisiana (1940).

The next photo shows two men on a mule-drawn wagon fertilizing an oat field in Georgia (1940). Despite the widespread introduction of farm machines throughout the country, mules and horses were still commonly used for farm labor.

And finally, the last photo shows a woman operating a hand drill on a Vengeance dive bomber in a Vultee-Nashville aircraft factory (1943). With so many men in uniform during World War II, large numbers of women worked in factories.

Photographers working for the United States Farm Security Administration (FSA) and later the Office of War Information (OWI) created these images between 1939 and 1944.

Word Play with Word Clouds: Redmond, Jabberwocky, and Green Eggs and Ham

Word clouds, popular as Web navigation aids, can now be easily created for your own custom visual designs using a new generation of free Web tools. The most popular word cloud design tools are: Tagxedo, Wordle, Wordlings, and Tagul

Tagexdo
Tagxedo turns words — famous speeches, news articles, even your resume — into a visual word cloud. A word cloud (or tag cloud) displays words that are individually sized to represent the importance or frequency of occurrence within a body of text.

Here’s a word cloud that uses part of the text of the Wikipedia entry for the City of Redmond. As you might expect, “Redmond” is the most prominent word. You can set options to ignore common words, such as “the” or “a”.

Here are the words of the Lewis Carroll poem, Jabberwocky, overlaid onto an image of a dragon. With Tagxedo, you can use standard images to contain your text, or upload your own image files.

Wordle
Wordle is a Java-based word cloud generator, in which all words have equal weighting. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. Here’s a word cloud based on all the words in the text of the children’s book, Green Eggs and Ham.Green Eggs and Ham, written by Dr. Seuss, contains a vocabulary of only 50 different words, which is far less than the more chatty The Cat in the Hat, which uses 225 words.

Wordlings
Wordlings is the simplest of the word cloud generators. Just enter a line of text and your word cloud starts forming, by repeating the words of your text.

Tagul
Tagul is an interactive word cloud Web service that allows you to create hyperlinks for each of the words in the word cloud. Here's an interactive word cloud (requires Flash) that contains links to the home pages all of the member KCLS libraries. Try clicking on the library names.

Keeping an Eye on the Past: The Washington State Library Photograph Collection

The Washington State Archives recently revamped its online Digital Archives. The archives is dedicated to preserving electronic records from both state and local agencies that have legal, fiscal, or historic value.

The archives also includes the State Library Photograph Collection, which contains 5,274 images of various subjects related to Washington's history, people, geography, and economic development, from 1851-1990. Here’s one of a Boeing 314 Clipper flying past Mt. Rainier.

You can either search the photo collection by keyword, or browse the collection titles. In searching for the photos of Asahel Curtis, I came across this one taken at Neah Bay, where a whale is being cut up by whale hunters:

Asahel Curtis began his photographic career in 1897 and chronicled much of the Pacific Northwest over the next several decades.

You can also find photos of historical figures, such as Ezra Meeker, who travelled the Oregon Trail by ox cart and was the founder of Puyallup WA.

Hit the Road: The 2011 Washington State Travel Planner is Now Available

The 2011 Washington State Travel Planner is available online. This 152-page, full-color publication is filled with road trips, travel planning tips, maps and photographs that will inspire your wanderlust to explore Washington State. You can also order printed copies of the travel planner here.

In addition, the state’s Experience Washington Web site provides a wealth of travel-related resources.

A Douglas County Road Trip
Last week, I traveled through Douglas County. The town of Waterville (elevation 2,650 feet) is the county seat of Douglas County, Washington. The town sits on a broad plain called the Waterville plateau. In the late 19th century, early settlers raised cattle. However, potatoes and wheat eventually became the dominant agricultural industry. Tourism is on the rise here, and the historic Waterville Hotel makes a great overnight stay.

The most striking building in Waterville is the brick and stone Douglas County Courthouse, which was built in 1905.

State Route 2 runs right through downtown Waterville, whose population is around 1,200. Many older building still remain on West Locust Street, which is part of Route 2.

The Waterville Auto Company building on East Park Street is a reminder of the town’s older days.

You can learn about the area’s history at the Douglas County Historical Museum. The mural on the museum’s building depicts a mining scene.

Four miles east of Waterville on Route 2 lies the tiny town of Douglas. The Douglas General Store is the community center.

St. Paul's Lutheran Church is a prominent landmark in Douglas. Build in 1915, the church originally held services in English and German, the language of many of the early settlers in this area.

Spring is the season for shearing sheep — and the occasional alpaca.

Route 2 east of Douglas passes through large tracts of farmland. The Farmer’s Community Hall is one of the few buildings along this road.

As Route 2 climbs up the plateau, the view looking west towards the Cascades is dramatic.

Wherever you go, enjoy your travels through Washington state!

Census 2010: Why We Count

The U.S. Census counts every resident in the United States, and is required by the Constitution to take place every 10 years. The 2010 Census will help communities receive more than $400 billion in federal funds each year for things such as:
   • Hospitals
   • Job training centers
   • Schools
   • Senior centers
   • Bridges and tunnels 
   • Emergency services

The data collected by the census also helps determine the number of seats your state has in the U.S. House of Representatives. It’s quite possible that Washington, which currently has 9 congressional seats, may pick up an additional seat. All the more reason why every person counts.

In March of 2010, census forms will be delivered to every residence in the United States and Puerto Rico. When you receive yours, just answer the 10 short questions and mail it back. To find out more, see United States 2010 Census.

Census 2000 Figures for Redmond
You can find detailed 2000 Census information for your community by accessing the U.S Census Fact Sheets. To view the Redmond Fact Sheet, use the 98052 zip code. This fact sheets contain a wealth of demographic information, such as the percentage breakdown by age group of the 50,249 residents of Redmond.

The Census Bureau Web site also includes demographic information about congressional districts at Fast Facts for Congress. Detailed maps for congressional districts are also available, such as the one for Washington’s Congressional District 1 (includes Redmond).

Experience Washington: Your Staycation Travel Guide

It’s no surprise that many people are choosing to stay close to home for vacations this year. You can get some great ideas for travel planning by checking out the state’s new Experience Washington Web site. Here are some recent trips around Washington state I've taken over the past year:

Chihuly Bridge of Glass
The Chihuly Bridge of Glass is a 500-foot-long pedestrian bridge linking downtown Tacoma to the city's waterfront. Conceived by Dale Chihuly, artist and native of Tacoma, it is a display of color and form soaring seventy feet into the air.

Kubota Garden
Kubota Garden is a 20 acre Japanese garden in the Rainier Beach neighborhood of Seattle. A public park since 1987, it was begun in 1927 by Fujitaro Kubota, who had arrived from Shikoku, Japan. The park is popular with photographers, especially during the peak of the fall foliage.

Cle Elum
Exploring rural Washington can be a fun experience. On the side of an older building in Cle Elum, I found this remarkable advertisement:

Washington State Ferry
The Washington State Ferry is known as the “poor man’s yacht”. What a great way to explore Puget Sound, especially with kids. And such a dramatic way to return to Seattle after a long day trip!

Enjoy your travels around the state!