Librarian of Congress and Archivist of the United States Discuss Collaborations

by Katelyn Sanders, University of Oklahoma

Librarian of Congress Dr. Carla Hayden and Archivist of the United States David Ferriero are passionate about accessibility of information and engaging history. Their June 24 discussion was riddled with competitive banter, though the respect they have for each other was clear. As they talked about their work, they peppered one another with historical jabs and quips about which institution has the more interesting artifact or more exciting program. While Hayden teased Ferriero that the Library of Congress completed digitalization of Alexander Hamilton’s letters to his wife, Ferriero shot back that the Archives have his wartime documents from his time as George Washington’s aide de camp.

The two discussed collaborative projects, including working with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History. They described ways the intuitions can work together, with an example that the Library holds the documents that the Wright brothers wrote about their plane, while the Archives have the patents, and the Smithsonian has the plane itself. Hayden described their collaborative work as “cross-fertilization between institutions.”

Both have developed programs to engage the public. Ferriero has developed exciting initiatives to involve children, including a sleepover at the Archives, to which Hayden joked that she wants to poach the program, and that the Library of Congress has Thomas Jefferson’s recipe for macaroni and cheese that they could serve the kids.

Jonathan Eig Doesn’t Pull Any Punches

by Paige J. Dhyne, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign iSchool

Jonathan Eig is curious, which is a good thing, as it’s the number one quality of a successful biographer. His curiosity led him to tell the story of the boxer who just wouldn’t quit: Muhammad Ali. In the June 24 Auditorium Speaker presentation, Eig discussed his book, Ali: A Life, a PEN/ESPN award winner. Eig discussed his role in solving the disconnect between his enchantment with Ali’s story and the truth of Ali’s story. “The storyteller’s job is to find the motive, explain the meaning,” he said. “And that is the challenge. If you’re going to write this book and it’s going to be worth a damn, you need to be able to explain what made the person.”

One of Eig’s greatest challenges was writing about a man with which he shares nothing in common – except, as the attendees learned, a sense of humor. As a biographer, Eig visited the places that Ali had boxed and met people who influenced him. But Eig took it a step further to try and understand the black kid who grew up in the Jim Crow South and overcame the political and racial intolerances of his time.

On the morning he was to interview Ali, Eig ran the exact route that Ali ran as a child, 60 years earlier. Eig understood that Ali used to race the city bus every morning to school and would stop at every city block on the way until the bus caught up. He asked Ali, “Is there anything you want to say? The last word in the book should be yours.” Ali never answered him, however, as he was too ill, but Eig received word later from Lonnie, Ali’s wife, that Ali wanted the book to be read to him by Eig. Unfortunately, he never had the chance with Ali’s sudden passing.

“Every story belongs to someone, but it belongs to all of us as well. Ali left his to me. It was his life, but it’s my story. I’ve pulled no punches, it’s all in there.”

In a time in which people isolate themselves and differences can seem scary, Eig feels privileged to know strangers intimately through his career as a biographer. “Every story belongs to someone, but it belongs to all of us as well. Ali left his to me,” he said. “It was his life, but it’s my story. I’ve pulled no punches, it’s all in there.”

More Than a Cookbook: A History Revealed

by Paige J. Dhyne, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign iSchool

The ALCTS President’s Program, sponsored by the University of Kentucky Libraries, featured the James Beard Book Award winner Michael Twitty, author of The Cooking Gene: A Journey through African American Culinary History in the Old South. When Twitty approached the podium, he dished out the truth about his identity, his culture, and what it means to track the legacy of his ancestors through cuisine and the political erasure of the historical South. “This is not a cookbook filled with recipes. My work is not about making the food, but how the food makes us,” he said.

The book came from a need to place himself and his ancestors on the timeline of the South, something he realized he needed to do after experiencing the death of his mother and realizing she too was a whole person – a child who grew into a woman with many stories to tell. When he first approached publishers, they had asked him to write about different topics that embraced only one aspect of his identity. But he wanted to write about real food, his Southern food “daily cooked, daily eaten,” made by people who hold complex identities like himself: Black, Jewish, Gay, and African-American.

Twitty read from his book while dispensing multiple truths. He discussed the enslavement of his people, our people as American citizens, and the research process which revealed documents that invalidated their identities and instead assigned them a monetary value. He told of how people in enslavement – a distinction he makes in that his people were not nouns (i.e., slaves), but living and suffering due to an assigned title that described free laborers – were brought to America based on hungers fueled by rice and sugar. “We all have a cooking gene that codes to the same phenotype,” he explained. “The food on the table as inspired by other cultures and countries.”

Lastly, Twitty addressed the librarians in the audience about the politics of the library spaces we cultivate. Archive materials aboout black and African Americans de-humanize them in the way they were recorded, but librarians can help ease the discomforts of reading these documents by evolving spaces and services. Beyond being accepting, Twitty urged, “Use spaces to create family, to bridge people, and to create the peace and civility we desperately need right now in this country.”

Twitty will continue to explore other aspects of his identity in the next book of this trilogy, Kosher Soul.