This is your invitation to attend Walt Whitman’s Birthday Party. Whitman worked as a schoolteacher, printer, newspaper editor, journalist, carpenter, freelance writer, and civil servant, but he is best known as one of America’s poet of democracy.
On June 1 at the Thomas Jefferson Building, activities will include an author talk from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m., featuring “O Captain, My Captain: Walt Whitman, Abraham Lincoln, and the Civil War;” a birthday party for Whitman. A Whitman butterfly maker activity and handouts of “Walt Whitman’s Guide to Nature Walking” will be available all day.
From 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., visiting families are also invited to participate in the Library’s crowdsourcing initiative “By the People” and help transcribe selections from Whitman’s writings and papers to make them more searchable and accessible online.
Walt Whitman Open House will feature a special array of rarely seen Whitman collection items from the Manuscript, Rare Book, Music, and Prints and Photographs divisions, as well as Serials and General Collections. The display will include items pertaining to Whitman’s time in Washington, but also other materials from throughout his life, including the walking cane given to him by nature writer John Burroughs, draft poems, artistic renderings of Whitman and rare editions of “Leaves of Grass.”
As part of the celebration, the Library’s Poetry and Literature Center will host a special showing of the new documentary short film “Walt Whitman: Citizen Poet,” directed by Haydn Reiss and Zinc Films and produced in association with the Poetry Foundation. Filmed in part at the Library of Congress, “Walt Whitman: Citizen Poet” features Poets Laureate Tracy K. Smith and Robert Hass, among other poets, discussing Whitman’s life, poetry, and legacy.
A reading of Whitman’s poems from his Washington years will follow at the Folger Shakespeare Library that evening.
The Library of Congress is inviting visitors to Explore America’s Changemakers in 2019 through a series of exhibitions, events, and programs. Exhibitions drawing from the Library’s collections will explore the fight for women’s suffrage, Rosa Parks’ groundbreaking role in civil rights history and artists’ responses to major issues of the day. Other events throughout the year will explore changemakers through music, performances and public programs.
This crowdsourcing initiative “By the People” reflects advancement toward a goal in the Library’s new user-centered strategic plan: to expand access, making unique collections, experts and services available when, where and how users need them.
Learn more about the Library’s five-year plan at loc.gov/strategic-plan/
The Library of Congress is the world’s largest library, offering access to the creative record of the United States – and extensive materials from around the world – both on-site and online. It is the main research arm of the U.S. Congress and the home of the U.S. Copyright Office. Explore collections, reference services, and other programs and plan a visit at loc.gov, access the official site for U.S. federal legislative information at congress.gov and register creative works of authorship at copyright.gov
Although Walt Whitman was considered to be a racist, so was virtually every other white person then alive in America.