>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. >> John Van Oudenaren: My name is John Van Oudenaren. I'm the acting interim director of the Kluge Center here at the Library of Congress. Welcome to all of you and welcome to our speakers. Thank you to our speakers. This is an experiment cafe -- Kluge Cafe series. This is the first time we're doing this. And so we're actually very interested in getting feedback from the -- from the participants and the speakers as well as how well this works. I'll say a little bit about the background to this as I understood it because I was sort of vaguely involved in some of the discussions early on about this series. I think idea is to give our fellows a chance to present their work in a more informal setting, relieve them a little bit of the burden of doing a big formal talk, although they may -- some of them may still want to do that, and we'll still do that. But this is a chance to sort of present their work sitting down as opposed to standing at this lectern. It's a chance -- it's a -- the idea is to foster interaction amongst scholars. Serendipity look for unexpected thoughts and insights that might come from having people together on the platform. So it is, as I said, an experiment and we're looking forward to seeing how it works. Let me just briefly introduce the speakers, the participants, and then get out of the way. We have Ascension Mazuela-Anguita from Spain, who is going to work -- introduce you to her project on Alan Lomax's fieldwork in Spain. Chet Van Duzer, I'm proceeding from right to the left, or my right to your left, Chet Van Duzer who is the 2016 Mellon Fellow at the Kluge Center and he is working on the Ptolemaic World is Not Enough annotation for education in the Princeton copy of Ptolemy's Geography 1525. And then to his left Margarita Karnysheva, who is writing about researching and writing about a misinterpreted mission, American Intervention in Siberia 1918 to 1920. Many of you must -- might know the great George Kennan work on this area and Richard Allman [assumed spelling] worked in this area so she's actually adding new insights into this. And then the missing chair there is for Chelsea Stieber, who will arrive in a few minutes we hope. And she's working on writing for Haiti regionalism in the creation of modern Haitian literature, 1890 to 1940. So those are the topics. I spent a little time trying to think of a common theme that wove them altogether and I just sort of gave up. I thought it would be best to let the scholars tell what they're doing and we'll see what emerges. So with that I will get out of the way and turn it over to our fellows. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Ascension Mazuela-Anguita: Thank you. It is a great honor to have spent eight months doing research at the Alan Lomax Fellow at the Kluge Center [inaudible] intellectually stimulating utmost fear. I would like to express my appreciation to the Kluge staff and to the Kluge fellows for [inaudible] and insightful discussion. I am so grateful to Abby Porter [assumed spelling] from the [inaudible] for her interest in my project. I cannot thank enough the daily assistance of the American Folk Life Center's excellent staff, and especially of [inaudible] of the Alan Lomax collection. Let's start with music. [ Inaudible ] [ Singing ] [ Inaudible ] This is one of the almost 1500 folksongs recorded by Alan Lomax in Spain between 1952 and January 1953. The material resource of his journey, which are preserved at the American Folk Life Center, include music on magnetic tape, but also photographs, [inaudible], invoices, annotated maps, letters, diaries, and even the manuscript of part of a book for publication. Why did Lomax undertake field working in Spain? Columbia Records had commission [inaudible] to bring together a series of folk music albums, each of which would be devoted to a country or region. One of the albums would be dedicated to Spain. Lomax wrote [inaudible] musician and writer, director of the British Council in Spain asking guidance to help him find a Spanish folklorist with experience in field recording. On this light we can see [inaudible] indicating that Spanish ethnic musicologists continue to write the music down by hand. Given the possibility of finding a collaborator with the required equipment and experience, Lomax, who was living in Paris at that moment, decided to attend the attend the Folklore [inaudible] Festival to be celebrated in [inaudible] in June 1952 as it would be a good opportunity for networking. The coordinator of the festival was [inaudible], a [inaudible] musicologist who had been appointed director of the folklore division of the former Spanish Institute of Musicology. According to Lomax, when Schneider [assumed spelling] learned about his project he stated that he would personally see to it that no Spanish musicologist would help him. It was this encounter that made Lomax promise himself that he would record in Spain. The main source of funding was the BBC in London, which was planning a series of broadcasts in Spain. Lomax offered to provide them with recordings if they finance his trip and that of his British assistant, [inaudible]. The lack of cooperation from the Spanish musicologist to whom Lomax referred leaves us to wonder how he succeeded [inaudible] that allowed him to complete his project. It is also worth considering how his approach to fieldwork defers to that of [inaudible] working in Spain at the same time. The aim of my visit was to answer these questions by analyzing the documents from Lomax's Spain trip [inaudible] from oral history and technological tools. These materials offer a unique opportunity to approach the political situation and the Francoist dictatorship, the poverty of the country, and the moral constrictions faced by women through the eyes of Lomax and [inaudible]. Digital tools has been used in order to establish connections between the songs recorded by Lomax and other collections of Spanish traditional music compiled around the same time, such as [inaudible] at the Spanish National Research Council in Barcelona. The Barcelona collection is primarily made up of more than 20,000 folksongs copied on paper and collected throughout Spain between 1944 and 1960, most of them through the so-called folkloric missions and competitions organized by the former Spanish Institute of Musicology. Since 2011 I have been involved in the project to digitize and catalogue the Barcelona collection in an open access database. As the first stage of my research at the Library of Congress, I have incorporated the details provided by the Lomax collection into the same database, cataloging information on all the places visited by Lomax in Spain and all the songs and people recorded there, including his [inaudible] on the Association for Cultural Equity Online Archive. The material was catalogued by listening to the songs and consulting Lomax's notes on the [inaudible] boxes along with his diaries and notebooks. Some of the songs were broadcast into series of programs by the BBC. The song commentaries were cited in the database as well as the notes included in the albums that were published by Lomax or edited later. I also analyze catalogue and transcribe documents such as field notebooks, annotated maps, letters, and diaries connecting them to the music, people, and locations to which they refer, and including links to the corresponding [inaudible] on the Library of Congress website. Lomax's writings offer contradictory details regarding his itinerary and the dates of the recording sessions. Accounting records, such as those related to accommodation or car repair, have been particularly useful here as they provide accurate evidence of Lomax's itinerary and dates. The state has prepared the materials for analysis and comparison. It is now possible to identify concordances between this collection and the one in Barcelona. Mutual enrichment between collection can first be achieved through these digital tool. As part of the second stage, I have been using the database as a research tool for interpreting data and preparing an academic monograph on Lomax's [inaudible] in the cultural context of mid-20th century Spain. At the same time, through the social networks to which the database is connected, Lomax's contribution to Spanish traditional music can be better known and appreciated by a general audience. In order to provide a different approach, both to the database and to the Lomax Spanish collect at the library, I have created a story map which presents Lomax's itinerary connecting each town to the [inaudible] sample of an example of the music recorded there. These are also connected to [inaudible] image belonging to the Lomax collection and to a link to the complete information concerning that location on the database. This application was intended to make data more visual and accessible not only to researchers but also to our brother audience outside the [inaudible] purely academic context. Analyzing references distributed in a variety of documental sources allows us to compose Lomax's [inaudible] and to understand his itinerary. Lomax explained what he named the Spanish [inaudible]. A recognized person provided him with a business card, which included a brief note as a type of letter of recommendation asking another person to assist Lomax in his project. I will mention a few examples of Lomax's contacts. We already mentioned [inaudible] Festival invited Lomax to his house in Madrid and provided him with tape at the end of his journey. He [inaudible] in honor of the virgin, Lomax would drive to the area to record their music following [inaudible] suggestions. Through the database it is possible to find concordances between Lomax's recordings of this group and the [inaudible] years before as part of the Barcelona collection. [ Speaking Foreign Language ] [ Singing ] Another international figure who attended the Panama Festival was [inaudible] actually a musicologist. Subsequently, Lomax visited him in [inaudible] and recorded [inaudible] in his company. [Inaudible] explained to Lomax some aspects of the political situation in Spain, as well as the origin of folk groups from different Spanish regions that participated in the Panama Festival. Most of them formed part of various government initiatives. Lomax thought that folklore was something that lives, changes, especially in the country, this is contrasted with the official folklore music of Spain from that period. In Madrid Lomax studies connection with researchers who were compiling music for the Spanish Institute of Musicology, such as [inaudible]. The later, for instance, [inaudible] the north of Spain and planned to worked with Lomax in both the south of Spain and Morocco. [Inaudible], who told Lomax that the music of this remote village in the [inaudible] was of interest for its antiquity. Consequently, Lomax visited this place where he recorded music in the house of this man. [Inaudible] had visited the same village six years before and had transcribed some of the pieces performed by the same informant. [ Singing ] [ Music ] In Madrid Lomax also had a meeting with the [inaudible] in October. His [inaudible] influenced Lomax's subsequent itinerary in the north of Spain. For example, [inaudible] friend and history professor at [inaudible] University [inaudible] Lomax counseling all his commitments. According to Lomax, the professor had friends throughout that region and only needed a phone call to provide him with [inaudible]. After leaving Spain Lomax returned to Paris and in April moved to London where he worked on the revision of the recordings in close collaboration with [inaudible], an [inaudible] Spanish musicologist who worked for the BBC. The excerpt on the slide suggests that [inaudible] propose Lomax for the BBC for the [inaudible] to record music in Spain. Lomax and [inaudible] joined book publication which was not brought to completion probably due to [inaudible] death in 1955. [Inaudible] also provides an [inaudible] between Lomax's work in Spain and the first systematic recordings of Spanish folk music, which were [inaudible] between July 1932 and January 1933 by [inaudible], U.S. citizens of [inaudible] origin. The context of these recordings was the center for history [inaudible] in Madrid. [Inaudible] was the person responsible for the folklore division of this institution and assisted [inaudible] in his field work. It is remarkable that two researchers from the United States carried out field recordings in Spain at a 20 year interval in such contrasting political and cultural situations, that this -- the second republic and the dictatorship. These [inaudible] in differences with regards to contacts and institutional support. Lomax's network of contacts in Spain included musicologists, but [inaudible] procession of people such as artists, journalists, anthropologists, and even people who he have just met on his arrival in a town and acted as spontaneous guides. He had [inaudible] Lomax's assistant, in this journey commented that she never really knew how he got hold of all the people he did. Lomax's documents contain constant references to [inaudible] and reflect the important role that she played in helping Spanish women open up for the recordings and talk about topics that they would never have discussed with [inaudible]. A part of my research consisted of analyzing how women, from their own spaces, contributing to setting -- contributed to setting up this collection. [Inaudible] writing are scattered among Lomax's papers so that at first they could be confused with text written by Lomax himself. They begin with a description of [inaudible] arrival in Barcelona Airport in August 1952, and an encounter with Lomax. They also contain comments on her experiences through her journey, her role in the recording process, and her feelings. These memoirs demonstrate her connections with Spanish women. For instance, learning to dance with young girls or trying on traditional women's costumes. She also explained her experience when Lomax left her to record a group of young girls on her own and even wrote that Spanish women were the nicest people she had ever met. [Inaudible] was also skilled at talking with men. For example, when Lomax reported on his field work in the north of Spain he wrote that while he recorded a young man told [inaudible] some of the things [inaudible] wouldn't have told him about the sex life in the area. [Inaudible] memoirs are very rich in comments on the particularities of Spanish family culture. To give an example, 26 year old widow from the [inaudible] region explained to her that before marrying women used to have a boyfriend for more than 10 years and that when a husband died his wife had to wear black clothes forever. Spanish women talk about their lives, but also sang songs related to their customs. [ Music ] Lomax showed a special interest in Spanish women's lives and explained that in his worldwide field work he found feature of song and dance that are specific to women. When he recorded [inaudible] he always asked the female singer to hold a child in her arms. Women played an important role in the oral transmission of music in Spain. The clear [inaudible] of the Barcelona collection were women and they have learned the songs from their mothers or grandmothers or from other girls. To conclude, the material results of Lomax's Spain trip can only barely reflect the deep impact that his visit must have had on the habitants of the small villages where he recorded. His amazing legacy can complement other collections of Spanish folk music compiled on paper in the same period. Lomax's itinerary reflects concordances with the fieldwork carried out by Spanish researchers whose [inaudible] from part of the Barcelona collection. However, these concordances have a very limited scope. This is probably due to the [inaudible] of people who follow Lomax's contact network to his limited relationship with Spanish musicologists and to his concept of folklore. The approach to the [inaudible] and singing of women through the otherness of Lomax and [inaudible] suggest that oral tradition is a key question that must be asked to challenge the loss of women's voices in historical accounts and to place women on the map of music history. The accessibility of this collection [inaudible] easily researchable and interactive platform through the database and the map application will allow researchers [inaudible] school teachers, folk music performance, and the community in general to use and enjoy this magnificent collection increasing a sociological impact. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Chet Van Duzer: Hello. Thank you all for coming. Changing subjects a little bit, although Ascension did show an annotated map, a map annotated by Lomax, so we have that commonality working for us. I'll be talking to you this afternoon about an extraordinary book, a copy of Ptolemy's Geography, the 1525 edition which is held by Princeton in the university library. And it is very, very heavily annotated, has many handwritten annotations on it as you'll see. Ptolemy's Geography, when it was rediscovered in Byzantium about -- in about 1300, and then spread across Europe in the 14th and 15th century in both a manuscript and printed editions, it became the most important geographical text of the European renaissance. And on the one hand, there was a great enthusiasm for the work. It was reproduced in many manuscripts and a great abundance of printed editions. But on the other hand, there was a dissatisfaction with the work, specifically as regards the fact that it's a mathematical geography. It's not very descriptive at all. The work consists of text that gives instructions on how to make maps and a database of 8000 locations with their latitudes and longitudes. So very little in the way of description. And so the work came to be supplemented in various ways. And one of those ways was annotation, as we see here. So here's the Ptolemaic map of Spain in the book, and in case you can't see it immediately, all of the text that I've highlighted is handwritten, supplementary, descriptive information. So it's really an extraordinary book. Looking at a few other maps from this book. Here's the Ptolemaic world map. And as you can see, it's surrounded by handwritten supplementary texts. The texts are not only on the maps themselves but also on black pages following the maps. The annotator was that enthusiastic and he had so much to say that he also wrote on following pages. The text, as I said, was printed -- this edition was printed in 1525. The annotations were composed in 1527. At one point the annotators refers to a historical event as having taken place last summer, and that event took place in 1526. I want to point out here, this is something I'll return to later, that what Princeton has is really half the book. So we can see a visible difference in the paper in the two parts of the book here. And what have is the end of the text block on the left and the beginning of the maps on the right. So at some point in the book's history a dealer had these annotated maps. He realized that in order to get the full value out of selling the book it had to be complete. So he took the text from another copy and bound it together with the maps. So we have in the Princeton copy the annotated maps with unannotated text from a different copy. So what does all this text say? Well, it's -- he's adding very substantial and very detailed descriptive text to Ptolemy's basically mathematical description of the world. So just to look at a few examples. On the third map of Africa, looking at this text, add, he says, and that's an instruction to the student, these annotations were made for a student, which is one of the most interesting aspects, add right in this book that the map above is defective, for there where I put this sign, the one I've circled, is the Aphroditopolites nome and a landlocked metropolis between which and Crocodilopolis, towards the Nile, there was a Lake Mirios about which below. And then on the map he places that sign to the location where this text applies. Looking at another example, the Ptolemaic fourth map of Asia, looking at the text in the left margin. He says, not far from Tripoli there is a field that Strabo calls Marca in which Posidonius says a dead dragon was seen. It covered half an acre, and was so thick that men mounted on horses on either side could not see each other. Its mouth was large enough to receive a man riding a horse, and each scale of its skin was larger than a shield. So this really couldn't be any more different from Ptolemy's text, this long list of 8000 places with their latitudes and longitudes. He's giving a historical, descriptive information, including about, if you would say, the animals or monsters that were thought to live in a particular region. Looking at the Ptolemaic map of Spain. Again in the left margin, he says, there is great confusion among different authors regarding the name of the promontory in Spain that faces west. And he goes on to discuss in considerable detail the different opinions regarding the name of this promontory of Ptolemy, Mela, Pliny, Solinus, Aelian, and Strabo. So he's very engaged with classical literature, and we'll see more evidence of that later. The map of the Atlantic and the New World. Again, we can see very heavy annotation. And these annotations are some of the most interesting in the book. He talks -- he's talking about the discovery of the New World and the discovery of the route from Europe around Africa to Asia. And what he says is that these are not new discoveries, that both of these things, the New World and the route to Asia around Africa, had been discovered in antiquity. And so he makes little of the recent Spanish and Portuguese discoveries. On the preceding page, that is the page just before this map of the New World, he writes, remark, as I often said, that neither this route to the west, nor that of the Portuguese around the tip of Africa, is new, but had already been done by other ancients, then abandoned, and now finally in our times taken up again, as is clear from Aristotle, a most celebrated witness and a noble author for increasing one's confidence. And on the map himself he says, along these same lines, we will venture, based on the excerpts from Aristotle that I transcribed below, that the men and women found in this new land were Carthaginians by origin, and that afterwards, left alone and deprived of communication with other peoples, they became savages and gradually lost their customs and rites and the use of clothing through long desuetude. So this question is of where the peoples of the New World came from? If all people were descended from Adam and Eve and Columbus was the first to reach the New World, where did the people living there come from? And what he's saying is that they were Carthaginians. That they're Carthaginians, this [inaudible] work claimed that Carthaginian sailors encountered a large land mass in the Atlantic, and what he was concluding is that that was how the New World was peopled. The annotator had a strong character. He -- as we saw, he is very content to disagree with Ptolemy. He also did not hesitate to voice was rather strong opinions about the peoples who lived in the maps in Ptolemy. So if we look at the modern map of France, he has drawn a banner across the top which says, this province produces a great number of chicken farmers, innkeepers, cooks, flute-players, gamblers, drunkards, and fools. [ Laughter ] The modern map of Spain. He says here, the best thing for one's financial affairs is not to take a loan from a Catalan merchant [laughter]. And there are similar statements on a number of the maps. They're all negative except for one, which is -- I'll mention later, he -- across one of the maps of Italy he says that heroic virtue is innate to Italian blood. Guess where he was from [laughter]? So some of -- not all of the maps are annotated. We saw that a number of them are very, very heavily annotated. Some of them have no annotations at all. And we can't be certain because -- whether that was because the annotator was not so interested in those regions. It's also possible that he just didn't finish the program of annotation he had in mind. But the fact, I'm inclined to think that we can read something into the fact that they're not annotated, because if they had been priorities for him he would have come to them sooner. So the Ptolemaic map of Taprobana. There was an abundance of classical material that he could've added to the map here. He did not. And I take this as evidence that his real interest was in the Mediterranean Basin, which was where the classical civilizations of Greece and Rome were most active. The modern map of the Holy Land has no annotations. I think that's quite surprising in 16th century Europe. So, again, his interest was classical antiquity, not religious history. The modern map of Southern Africa. Another -- from another annotator we might have expected some text here about Portuguese voyages around Africa. As we saw, he thought little of those voyages so it's not surprising that he makes no remark here. Looking at a few of the sources of the annotations. One of his most -- the book that he had to resort to most frequently was Caelius Rhodiginus' Antiquarum Lectionum Libri IVI books. It's basically an encyclopedia. It's a very poorly organized encyclopedia with quotations from classical authors on an enormous variety of subjects. And when I go through the annotations and I find that he's citing a classical author, I have to check whether he's citing the author directly or citing the classical author by way of this book for example. A very similar book in terms of its nature that is consisting of enormous masses of quotations from classical authors is this book by Sabelico, another work of encyclopedic nature. This is the title page of the edition of Pomponius Mela with annotations by the Swiss scholar Vadianus. This was another of his favorite sources. And he makes use not only of Pomponius Mela, the Roman geographer, but also Vadianus' commentary on Mela. And Giovanni Pontano's Dialogi, that's the source of some of his insulting comments about the peoples of various regions. So he's a humanist scholar. He doesn't just take an insult he heard on the street. He has a source, a classical -- a literary source for his insults. The care spent on the annotations, one of the nice things about this project is that the annotations were written by a scribe, which is somewhat surprising. It has the great benefit of making most of the text pretty legible. And just to compare the hand in which these annotations were written, that is the hand of a scribe, with those in another annotated Ptolemy that's a little bit more typical, we see here the difficult hand of a scholar's annotation in a different copy of Ptolemy, much more difficult to read. So the mere fact that a scribe was hired to write these text into this copy of the book bespeaks a project with a lot of money to play with. Modern map of eastern India. Looking at the text on the following page the annotator says, in addition to what was said on the four other maps of India, I think it is here worth adding a few words regarding the fertility of that land. My point here is that he's referring to the text he wrote on the other four maps of India. It's a whole planned program of annotations. It's not just casual remarks that he made as they occurred to him. The Ptolemaic world map that I showed earlier. Tremendous care was devoted to the planning and layout of the annotations on this page. At the top and bottom we have symmetrical quotations from Vitruvius about the inhabitants of the northern and southern parts of the world. We have these triangular boxes at the corners of the map. It's no accident that the text fits in those triangles so neatly. He has a little title to the annotations that run down the left and right margins. At the left we have on the Hyperboreans. On the right on the Antipodes. And I want to point out that the text is perfectly symmetrical. So it runs down the margins and then into the lower margins and it ends at symmetrical points. And this, again, was -- it didn't happen by accident. It was all very carefully planned. So we're talking about a project to which very substantial resources, both of time and money, were devoted. The purpose of the annotations, as I mentioned, these annotations are unusual in that they were made for a student. So what we have in this book is a program of geographical education in the early 16th century. It's really quite extraordinary. And I want to look at some of the evidence that the annotations were made for a student. On the third map of Africa, in the lower left, the annotator writes, where I added the Nasamones, who were missing, so that you would know the custom of this people. So he's addressing the student. And also in this annotation we see an interest in teaching the student about ethnography, teaching the student about the customs of different peoples. The Ptolemaic map of Greece, the lower left, this I willingly written so that you will know that these provinces have many products suited to the study of the inhabitants, that is that are revealing about the inhabitants. So again, an interest in ethnography, an interest in the customs of different peoples. The eighth map of Europe. About which also see Book 1 of our Strabo, to whom you should have recourse for such things, rather than to others. So he's giving the student advice about which classical authors to consult on which subjects. Ptolemaic map of Asia Minor. I've explained these things from Alexander the Great here so that by using them, you can understand what Pliny says in Book 5, chapter 29. So he's expecting his student to be very engaged with this material, to be comparing information from one source with that from another. Ptolemaic map of Italy. Of all the Alpine peoples, are listed here by Pliny, but you, speaking to the student, list them with their modern names. Write the modern names beside the ancient ones, by conjecture. So he's giving the student an exercise. Write out ancient names from Ptolemy, place beside them your best guesses as to their modern equivalents. Some material on the back of the modern map of the British Isles. For since I once crossed over to Britain in order to get to know the English customs and pursuits, it would be unworthy, if I did not add something to this map regarding the hospitality of that people. So first of all, this indicates some of the annotator's travels. It also, again, reflects the annotator's interest in the customs of different people. So how does this work? How does the educational program in this work compare with that in other 16th century texts that were aimed at imparting geographical education? Well, it turns out to be much more sophisticated and thus was designed for a much more advanced student. So here's Peter Apian's Cosmographicus liber of 1524. There's a one-page description of Africa in this work. The annotator could easily write one page about a river in Asia. So he's offering a student a much higher level of detail. There's a long list of place names with their latitudes and longitudes. So this is exactly the sort of mathematical geography that one would get from Ptolemy himself. So the book is not adding much for the student. Johannes Honter's Rudimento cosmographica. One of the sentences is a list of the most important cities of Poland. Well, that's wonderful but it's not much detail. It's not any analysis. So, again, I mean, and what Ptolemy was basically offering was a list of the places in Poland. Here we have a list of classical place names with their modern equivalent, that is a commonality between contemporary graphical text and the annotations. So what can we conclude about the annotator? He was Italian. He uses mostly Italian sources. He occasionally uses an Italian word in his Latin. The banner, as I mentioned before, across one map of Italy read, heroic virtue is inherent in Italian blood. He traveled widely. He visited the Hungarian court for commerce, he mentions at one point. He visited Augsburg. He traveled to England and he was familiar with English ecclesiastical writers and seems to have visited the shrine of Thomas Becket. It's also possible that he traveled in Greece. I'm not entirely certain about that. And his overriding interest was in European classical antiquity. The maps of Asia are lightly annotated. The modern maps are lightly annotated. There's no annotation of the map of the Holy Land, as I mentioned before. He repeatedly argues against the great antiquity of Egypt. So if Egypt was more ancient than Greece it would have more prestige, so he argues that Egyptian culture is not that old. And he argues that recent geographical discoveries merely repeated the accomplishments of the ancients. So a few conclusions. What exactly is this book? It was intended for an advance student of geography, clearly. The annotations profess an interest in ethnography and more broadly demonstrate the great richness of classical geography. The hiring of a scribe and careful arrangement of the texts indicate a very expensive production. Was this a copy made for the student? So was a scribe hired, instead of the student as he had been instructed writing these texts in the book himself, was a scribe hired to do that for him? Or was this perhaps a fair copy for the annotator himself? I'm not sure. Finally, I mentioned before that what Princeton had was only really half the book. It was the annotated maps without -- with a text block that had no annotation. And while I was doing this research I was curious about what might have become of the other half of the book, of the annotated text. Surely an annotator who was so enthusiastic would not have left the text unannotated. It seemed most likely that the annotated text block of the book had been just lost over time, had been destroyed. But through remarkable good fortunate I managed to discover, here again is showing the difference between the two halves of the book, I managed to discover the text block of the 1525 edition of Ptolemy's Geography in a private collection Brussels annotated by the same hand. And the collector who owned the book has now very generously sold it to Princeton and so the two halves of this extraordinary book have now been rejoined after considerable time spent apart. Thank you very much. [ Applause ] >> Margarita Karnysheva: Thanks everybody for coming to listen to our talks. Before I start my presentation I would like to express my gratitude to the Library of Congress staff, in particular of course to the Kluge Center people. I also appreciate the professionalism [inaudible] divisions as well as the European division and the American Folk Life Center. I also would like to say thank you to Daniel [assumed spelling], who provided very useful advice and tips for my research. And I am leaving in a week so I'm sad a little bit because I spent here nine very fruitful months. So thank you all again. My research is on the American expedition to Siberia between 1918 and 1920 when the Entente intervened into the Russian Civil War. This is another map, I am following the previous presenters. It's not easy to count exactly how many countries participated, but according to Winston Churchill totaled 14 countries, including the United States. This is a military map, so the blue color shows the [inaudible]. And the red color shows where allied and [inaudible] forces were located. The allies conducted [inaudible] and counterinsurgency operations against the Bolshevik Reds. Since this controversial [inaudible] is inseparably tied to the Russian revolution and the Civil War in Russia, we have incalculable number of publications on this topic. Naturally the very fact of the U.S. troops haven't been operated in Russia, the fact of [inaudible] interference in the Russian Civil War creates ample opportunities for it being utilized as a convenient tool for anti-American propaganda campaigns. Unsurprisingly, the narratives that have been formed for 100 years mirrored all the abrupt shifts in Soviet and Russian American relations. And, of course, due to the recent rise of [inaudible] Americanism in Russian, now these narratives are often used by the Russian propagandists. The main goal of my research is not the study of these events, not the study of these events, but investigation of historical and political contexts in which the main interpretation is both in Russian and English where written, as well as how ideological, political, and social affiliations of the numerous writers of these events shape the narrative -- the narratives they produced. While doing my research I identified the two dominating Russian language narratives, which can be conventionally named the red and the white. The red, or the Soviet communist party narrative, consists of two interpretations. One is the [inaudible] illusion created by the group of Marxist historians led by Pokrovsky, who in 1919 himself actively participated in the negotiations on signing separate peace treaty between Russia and Germany. Being vehemently anti-British, anti-French, and anti-Japanese, this group asserted that the United States has not recognized the intervention and American participation in the real fighting was actually very limited. Even though they harshly criticized President Wilson for his [inaudible] imperialistic and now colonial foreign policy disguised under democratic [inaudible], I would say that this narrative was rather favorable. In the 1930's this narrative was reconsidered due to internal political struggle in the Soviet leadership and the rapidly changing international situation on the eve of the World War II. Following the deterioration of Soviet Japanese relations that led to the civil [inaudible] wars, the Soviet historians claimed that they recognize that the most active participant of the [inaudible] intervention has been imperial Japan and Trotsky has been accused of being a German and Japanese spy. The beginning of the Cold War; however, resulted in creation of the narrative where America was viewed as the organizer and sponsor of the Entente intervention. This narrative dominated official Soviet historiography up to the 1990's when it was replaced by the anti-communist white narrative. It is worth mentioning that nowadays Russia is undergoing kind of white renaissance, everything somehow related to the white movement [inaudible] values, songs, literature are extremely popular in Russia. There are many drama films and [inaudible] produced recently that unlike the abandoned Soviet narrative [inaudible] prerevolutionary Russia and anti-Bolshevik white movement favorably. And the reds [inaudible] as radical fanatics whose main purpose was destruction of Russia and its peoples. I think that the surprising popularity of the defeated whites can be partially explained by the communist party efforts to erase the memory of the white movement from Russia's history. However, the 70 years of the red narrative domination proved to be counterproductive. The white interpretations of the American intervention can be divided into two sub narratives, the one created by the supporters of Russian and -- of Russian anti-Bolshevik socialist parties and the one created by the Russian rightists. The letter included not only far right loyalists advocating restoration of [inaudible] dynasty, but also [inaudible] conservatives and nationalists who oppose the socialists. One would think that the whites, who refused to recognize the Bolshevik treaty with Germany and continue to fight on the American side, should have created a pro-American narrative. However, the right whites unanimously accused their [inaudible] of provoking and escalating the Civil War to win Russia this [inaudible] people. Basically, the white narrative asserted that not only the United States, but entire Entente have provoked the Civil War to force Russia to continue fighting against the Germans. And when they failed to [inaudible] Russian people, they [inaudible] treacherously abandoned them to suffer torture and death at the hands of the victorious Red Army. According to this narrative, General William Greaves, the commander of the American expeditionary force in Siberia, in fact, gave assistant -- gave assistance not to his white allies but to the Bolsheviks. And the [inaudible] had generally financed antigovernment terrorist organizations, including the Bolsheviks, to destroy the Russian empire. This narrative often noted in all kind of conspiracy theories and knowledge [inaudible] themselves constitute a fertile soil for creating conspiracy theories, not only in contemporary Russia and the United States but worldwide. So my research aims at finding inconsistencies, false premises, wrong conclusions, misunderstandings, and misinterpretations in this anti-American narratives. Here at the Library of Congress I studied archival documents from 12 collections, including papers of President Wilson's Secretary of State Lansing, Secretary of War Baker, Senator William Borah, American Ambassador to Japan [inaudible], and many others. It was priceless to have all the necessary publications at hand, especially the recently published ones. What surprised me in the U.S., despite the fact that this two year-long occupation of a huge part of Russia's territory is not known to the [inaudible] academia audience, it has been actually scrutinized in every single detail. Also, I discovered that the library possesses a unique and very rare collection of the white authors' writings published in Europe between the 1920 -- between the 1920's and 1930's. In conclusion, I would like to say that my research is not over and I need to study tons of materials at the National Archives in Washington, D.C., as well as some Russian and Japanese documents. But anyway, I'm sure that the information that I collected at the Library of Congress will constitute the most important part of my database. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> Chelsea Stieber: Okay, hello. Thank you everyone for coming. Thank you also to the Library of Congress, the Kluge Center for organizing, and also, yeah, to all of these wonderful talks. I'm sorry that I was not here for the beginning. I am now back to teaching. So I'm wearing these two hats. So I'll start right off so we can get to questions and then food, and hopefully both at the same time. So it was interesting, I got the poster sent to me Travis [assumed spelling] and I thought to myself, oh no, that's the wrong title. And I realized that I had proposed a title in 2015 for what I was going to be doing at the Library of Congress, and it has turned into this. So this, I think my talk will hopefully be a testament to the work and the research I've done here that has really transformed and enriched the scope and rigor of my book. So, yes, it's changed quite a bit. So in this talk I'll just do a short overview of my book project, focusing on the main intervention as well as the stakes in the fields I'm working in, and then I'll briefly describe two of the collections that I've used here to make that work possible. So as you see, the book project, it's currently under the working title Haiti's Paper War, Post-Independence Writing and the Making of the Republic, 1804 to 1954. And the book basically does -- is what it's doing is revealing the power struggles and strategic silences at stake in the scripted representations of Haiti's past since 1804. I'm particularly interested in questions of civil war and regional conflict as they played out almost continuously in literature, politics, and culture in postcolonial Haiti. Indeed, and this is really sort of really the main crux of this at the moment, while much recent scholarship has rightly emphasized the Haitian revolution as the radical instantiation of enlightenment liberalism in the Atlantic world, it is not only this. So my book considers the aftermath of Haiti's radical anti-colonial gesture within Haiti, and specifically the factional conflicts that both shaped the revolution itself and conditioned the possible futures postcolonial independence statehood. And a brief background here on the history and the specificity of this, because it will be useful to you, I think. The newly independent state of Haiti in 1804 divided itself along the same lines that had divided it during the revolutionary period between those who were liberals, who wished to see the independent state as a republic, and in 1804 they wanted to proclaim Haiti as the last true remaining place of liberal enlightenment, especially after the first French republic had faltered. And then on the other side, those who envisioned a military authoritarian regime. These tensions remained unresolved for the first two years of Jean-Jacques Dessalines' rule over independent Haiti from 1804 to 1806. And it's important to note here that this state never bore the name of a republic. It was a military state and then an empire. And it was Dessalines' decision to proclaim an empire, orchestrated in secret by his advisors, the backers of this military authoritarian state, that more or less sealed his fate. The republican faction staged an uprising and assassinated Dessalines in October 1806. So the republican faction felled the empire, but they were unable to unite the nation. Instead, Dessalines' assassination marked the start of an official civil war between north and south, between monarchy and republic, that lasted until 1820. And what's so fascinating about this period to me, and what is so useful for understanding the rest of Haitian history in my mind, is that we see two drastically different versions of postcolonial Haitian statehood play out, vying for hegemony. These are possible futures of what an abolitionist black state could or should be. And one of the most salient differences between the two sides is the way that each state used and defined the notion of, liberty, liberty or freedom depending on how you translate it. And if we take as given that both regimes, both the monarchy and the republic, agreed that liberty did mean abolition and freedom from chattel slavery, it is also true that they fundamentally disagreed on its meaning with regard to enlightenment principles and questions of individual rights. So did liberty mean independence from colonial rule or did it mean freedom from arbitrary government and the guaranty of individual rights? And this differed in each state. In the north, Christophe, Henri Christophe, the king, saw liberty primarily as independence from colonial rule and not as a guarantee of individual rights. Indeed, the two for him were mutually exclusive. His military state turned monarchy placed individual, or rather anti-colonial independence, above all else. That meant that individual liberties and rights had to be sacrificed for this greater good of sovereign statehood. Conversely, Alexandre Pation's state in the south finally founded the republican government that partisans of enlightenment liberalism had been envisioning since 1791. His regime embraced the revolutionary language of individual rights and radical democracy, but it is important to note often felt short -- fell short of this in practice. So I've elaborated on these foundational tensions in early postcolonial Haiti at length here because I believe them, as I said before, to be central to understanding the continued civil war secessionist regimes and regional conflicts that persisted throughout 19th and 20th century Haiti, and even to the present day. And more important for our purposes here, they reveal crucial background on the battles over national identity and cultural legitimacy that have marked Haitian writing since independence. For -- while I place great importance on historical and political background here in my work, my book is ultimately still about writing and how we can use writing to trace the continued residences of civil war and regional conflict in Haiti. Take, for example -- here, let me check my time. Yeah, we're good. [Speaking foreign language] or paper war that occurred between the north and south during this 1806 to 1820 civil war period. The printed matter that came out of each regime, the monarchy and the republic, supported their oppositional political agendas. So in the north we have pamphlets, newspapers, and essays from the northern monarchy that served a primarily utilitarian purpose in support of the regime's militant anticolonial agenda. In the southern republic, on the other hand, and this is fascinating to witness, writing begins to take on the emergent modern sense of literature as [speaking foreign language], that is literature as imaginative, creative works, of the autonomous liberal mind. And so southerners were doing this in order to position themselves against northern writing and also to position themselves within a world republic of letters that supported their liberal enlightenment agenda. They actually did this via the literary magazine, which was itself a recent invention of the republic of letters. So these southern writers were performing the successes of the liberal republican model by heralding literary writing as a direct expression of the liberal mind and the creative intellectual abilities of the individual author. So here the book basically reveals how writing itself became the subject -- excuse me? >> Slides? >> Chelsea Stieber: Oh no, no, this is just a preface. Oh, but thank you very much. No, no slides yet. They're at the end. Yeah, my book basically shows how writing itself became the subject of civil war, and more specifically the limits and criteria for what constituted literature at specific moments in Haitian history. So what I've done and what I've done with this research is to basically trace this throughout the 19th and 20th century where we see these sort of returns and continued residences of these foundational fractures in writing, and especially between this idea of a utilitarian form of writing that was in support of a certain regime and a much more liberal [speaking foreign language] idea of literature. So ultimately my book is a new history of Haitian writing that focuses on civil war, on internal divisions, and strategic silences that have shaped our conception of Haitian national literature. The need for new scholarship that interrogates oversimplified representations of Haiti's diverse realities is a pressing one, but I think even beyond the immediate Haitian context my book offers a compelling regional paradigm for grappling with the wider Caribbean, which like Haiti, remained geographically, politically, and culturally stratified for most of the 19th century and, of course, into today. The Dominican Republic is an excellent example, divided between north and south, between interior and coast. Cuba is markedly different from west to east. But because these various Caribbean populations have been defined since their inception as sort of -- in relation to the European metropole, they are marginal because Europe is center, this makes them always already regional in a larger Euro Atlantic context. So in essence, my book is challenging the notion of the Caribbean regional and the Euro Atlantic and arguing that regional difference within the Caribbean is a necessary and productive lens for analysis. One final note just on contributions. There's some debates in francophone postcolonial literary studies about this idea of what was literature and the world republic of letters because I think it's really useful to think here about what gets obscured and what gets highlighted. I'm joining up with some other scholars who are working on sort of critiques of the field to reveal how studies of Caribbean literature has failed to consider, or even register, marginal, and in this sense I mean non-hegemonic or non-cosmopolitan writing precisely because it does not engage with the market forces of international recognition or world literary debates. So I'm identifying a culture of writing from beyond the world republic of letters on the margins of this international literary field of Paris-based consecration. And one note on methodology and sources by way of transitioning to my slides, and also to the content section of this talk, to do this book, to focus on silences, what's written out or delegitimized in scripted representations of Haiti, it was absolutely critical for me to go back to primary sources themselves. So the histories that were written in the 1850's and the 1890's, newspapers, essays, rather than relying on secondary readings of that original content and specifically Anglophone readings. And this is something that I know is sort of widespread in everyone's field, but the need for Haitian studies is so, so strong because there is this sort of, not a slippage, but a failure, I think, to take account of when there is this tension, the civil war tension that I'm talking about that sort of gets reproduced throughout the 19th century. It also involved a lot of reading. And so, you know, to the extent that that's possible for a book project, and I certainly have learned as this is my first book, what is and is not possible to take on, but being able to work here at the Library of Congress has been transformative in that way. The library holds so many Haitian sources from the 19th and 20th century, the most important ones but also some really interesting, lesser-known publications from Haitian scholars produced locally, many of which exist outside of this Port-au-Prince sphere as well which has been fantastic. So in the final minutes that I have here I want to highlight two of the collections that I've been using that are really critical to my research. So the first is a Haitian social science journal, the [speaking foreign language]. It's a social science journal. It's arguably the most important 20th century social science journal in Haiti, and it certainly the most prolific, and still in existence today as well. It's a hugely important repository of scholarly production of locally produced knowledge in Haiti, and the library has a near complete run of it. It's one of the only libraries that does in microfilm or on microfilm [inaudible] and in bound volumes. I will not belabor this point; however, because I already gave a short talk on it at the National Digital Initiatives Collections as Data Conference here at the library, so you can just watch it and learn a little bit more about this so I can skip to the other stuff. We're also doing an exciting digital humanities project with this here at the library, labs.loc.gov. So check it out. It's on my Twitter but I think it's the sixth hour and 35 minute mark on the YouTube channel for that conference so check it out. Okay, so the second resource that is -- that I've been using is this fascinating manuscript division collection called the Celestine Bencomo Collection. The collection holds hundreds of pieces of archival material related to nearly every Haitian head of state from the 19th and early -- all of the 19th and then the early 20th century. Just a little bit on this interesting man, Celestine or Celestino Bencomo, served as the Console of the Republic of Cuba in Port-au-Prince on and off 1909 and 1914. And during that time he collected all sorts of interesting pieces, lithographs, painted portraits, decrees, letters, other official documents on or about Haiti's leaders. And he gifted this material to the U.S. government in 1925, at which point the Department of State transferred it over to the Library of Congress. And having this fascinating and really well-preserved archival material allowed me to do some fun things, some new analyses on some rare, and in some cases, as far as I know, unique, historical documents on Haiti. And so specifically here I did a few other analyses, but this one is on the heraldry and coats of arms of Haitian leaders. So what I want to kind of show is how these coats of arms, this heraldic symbolism, reveals the ruptures and continuities, the [inaudible] and adaptations of symbols of power in early postcolonial Haiti. And more specifically, I want to make an argument about the empire of Fostou Soluke, you have his name here, who is one of Haiti's least studied or understood leaders. He ruled as an emperor between 1849 and 1858. And there is a black legend that surrounds the history and legacy of his rule that is not too dissimilar from the memory of Napoleon III in France. And indeed, the two ruled during the same period, though it's true that Soluke proclaimed his empire before Louis Napoleon. And in this sort of black legend Soluke is either a symbol of violence and cruelty or of ignorance and pure mimicry. The truth is, of course, somewhere in between, or maybe not even there. But it's true that Soluke's legacy and memory is heavily mediated by his detractors' depiction of him, especially because there's so little self-representation from his regime in the way of writing, artwork, or propaganda, which is why this Bencomo Collection has so many original documents is amazing because we're able to see some of what the documents coming from his regime looks like and some of the images. And just a side note, Soluke is best known for Solukery [phonetic], which were basically French republican caricatures, detractors of Napoleon III's regime who used the image of a black emperor in Haiti to ridicule the return to empire under Louis Napoleon. And so what I'm trying to do with these images is sort of understand more about this particular leader. So let's just look briefly at the images and I'll do a little comparison just to show you how I did my reading and analysis of these coats of arms. So here you have -- and what's really fascinating with the Bencomo Collection is you have a bunch of different documents, so I was able to look at the variation of these coats of arms. And in fact, you know, for Soluke I think I found four different ones, for Christophe there were six. So it's interesting to see that there were different printers and different images, or not images rather plates that they were using for these. So let me show you the first comparison. So here we have Napoleon I's coat of arms, 1805, and Dessalines' coat of arms just to show you -- what I want to show you is how Soluke builds his out more or less from these prior leaders. What's fascinating, and these are not actually in the Bencomo Collection, unfortunately, although there is -- there are a few documents from Dessalines, which is -- which is great, even from [inaudible]. But you see here, there's a really big difference. And Dessalines created his coat of arms after Napoleon I. There's a little bit of an interesting thing going on in history here. They -- it appears that Desslines backdated all of his decrees and all of the official nominations of him as emperor to make it look like he nominated himself, or was nominated before Napoleon, but it's not true, or that's what it most likely looks like. And it's a compelling argument, I believe that to be the case. In any case, so we're going on the idea that Dessalines created his -- oh no, Dessalines created his coat of arms off of Napoleon I. But as you see here, there really isn't that much that they're working on, right? There isn't that much that's shared. We have the lions in Dessalines, you have the [inaudible], which is significant in French revolutionary imagery but also the importance of the rooster in Hispaniola and in the specific [inaudible] case is also interesting. So I'll come back so that you can see some of the other comparisons. Then we come to Henri Christophe's coat of arms, which is a significant departure from Dessalines but brings some of the Dessalines image in and also then starts to look a little bit more like a more typical or characteristic, a more real symbol, perhaps closer to Napoleon or more generally to a coat of arms as it would look in any regime of that sort. I'll skip over the details just for the sake of time, but it's interesting to remark the different ones that I was able to find. And then here you can see the comparison now to what Soluke came up with. And so it's interesting because Soluke basically, I think, reinterprets Napoleon I's coat of arms through Dessalines and Christophe's adaptations. So he's creating something that's wholly derivative but entirely new at the same time. He maintains the two lions, and his lions, I think, look much more like Christophe's than like Dessalines, but the way that they're turned also evokes Dessalines, which is really interesting. He returns the eagle to the shield instead of the [speaking foreign language] that Dessalines had or the phoenix that Christophe had, the mythic phoenix. He also at the liberty tree, which I think is interesting. This is a republican, the Haitian [speaking foreign language] which is a republican symbol which leads me to believe that he's basically amassing symbols from prior regimes in order to create a more capacious idea of his power and of Haitian national identity. Interestingly though, the most radical gesture in this is his addition of the imperial rope, which returns us -- oh, I'll skip. Yeah, that was Christophe. You can see some of those similarities. And then back to Napoleon I. I mean, the imperial robe is an exact replication of -- I mean, he basically just puts all of that on top of the Dessalinean [phonetic] or Christrophean [phonetic] imagery there. And he actually used this imperial rope in his coronation ceremony. We have images of it. So they're in the collection. So it's interesting. He's -- it's a complete copy of Napoleon I that's sort of dressing this interesting reinterpretation of previous symbols of Haitian power. And so I wonder, by way of concluding this, what that might tell us about Soluke. And as I said before, I think it points to his savvy and an understanding of creating and using symbols to gesture to previous Haitian rulers and to create this larger sort of idea of Haitian national identity. But the Napoleon focus, I mean this is what so many historians have pointed to, it was just pure imitation of Napoleon. I think there's something certainly a bit more sophisticated going on there, not least of all because in -- on December 20, 1848, Louis Napoleon, Napoleon III, was elected president of the second republic in Haiti. And so at the very least we have an awareness of this fact in this sort of return to imperial Napoleonic symbolism and this 1849 heraldic symbolism from Soluke. I think, my own interpretation that I'm still kind of still working through right now, is that it's actually a really great form of sophisticated trolling and that Soluke actually proceeded the [inaudible]. I mean he was sort of wanting that perhaps even to happen. In any case, I think what we see from this analysis is a much more sophisticated and complex portrait of a little studied and even less understood leader, which I was able to undertake. So I'll leave it there. Thank you again for listening. I look forward to the discussion. [ Applause ] [ Inaudible ] >> John Van Oudenaren: To proceed but we can both take questions from the floor and we can also have the panelists comment to each other. Either one, I think, would work. So do any of you want to comment on each other's work? >> Chet Van Duzer: A question for Ascension. You mentioned the possibility of descendants of the singers being interested in the project, and I wanted to know whether that's happened so far? >> Ascension Mazuela-Anguita: Yes, that's an excellent question. We have [inaudible] which the database is collected. We have messages from descendants of the informants asking about if we have as part of the collection somebody, her grandfathers or grandmothers, and sociologically it's quite interesting. >> Chet Van Duzer: That must be very gratifying. >> Ascension Mazuela-Anguita: Yes, it is. >> John Van Oudenaren: Others? >> Margarita Karnysheva: Oh, I have a question to Chet. Do you think that these ancient maps can be used for educating modern students? >> Chet Van Duzer: Wow, I -- >> Margarita Karnysheva: Not in geography but -- >> Chet Van Duzer: I'm certainly finding it very educational going through the annotations. So I hope eventually, yes, that other people will learn from them as well. So thank you. >> John Van Oudenaren: Actually, I would start out with a question for Chet as well. About the annotations, the -- are they all based on classical sources? I mean, this is 1525. By this time you've got, you know, several decades of Spanish and Portuguese discoveries, exploration, is that incorporated in the annotations or is it just purely exercising classical literature? >> Chet Van Duzer: It's -- so a lot of classical learning comes by way of these sort of collections of classical quotations that were published in Italy in early 16th century. But there's very, very little reference to recent discoveries. There's a fair number of corrections of classical authors, but not on the basis of Portuguese or Spanish voyages, for example. >> John Van Oudenaren: Because at some point the Europeans conclude that Ptolemy is an interesting artifact, but just totally wrong. I don't know when that occurs but it can't be too much later than this. >> Chet Van Duzer: Yes, but not yet. >> John Van Oudenaren: Not yet, okay. Anyway, all right, I was very curious about that. Other questions? Comments? Yes? [ Inaudible ] >> About the students. You mentioned that these -- he would have written these things for a student and I wondered what kind of student would be doing this? Is it a map making student or a student of classics or who would the student be? >> Chet Van Duzer: So what I'm imagining is that the annotator would essentially tutor for a very wealthy family in northeastern Italy is as close as I can get. And it would have been part of an education devoted to both classical literature and specifically geography, not map making as such but geography principally. >> John Van Oudenaren: Very good. Okay, well I think it's probably best maybe if we continue informally around the food and the wine. I thank -- these have been four fascinating talks. They're on different subjects but also people coming out of different sort of, I don't even want to use the word academic, different research traditions, different institutions that they're working from, from, you know, our last speaker who is really grounded in the American academic tradition it seems to other, you know, Spanish, Russian, and Chet, I guess, is our free flying spirit, whatever. And so it's been not only different topics, but also different ways that people, different traditions, different methodologies that people can approach material and get fascinating results from. So please join with me in thanking our group. And again, this is an experiment so we really appreciate feedback on how we proceed in the future. Thank you. [ Applause ] >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. visit us at loc.gov.