The Library has just made available a collection of narratives on its popular American Memory Web site. The materials are available at www.loc.gov and add to the more than 100 diverse collections already online.
"The Capital and the Bay: Narratives of Washington and the Chesapeake Bay Region, ca. 1600-1925" comprises 139 books selected from the Library of Congress's General Collections and two books from its Rare Book and Special Collections Division. "The Capital and the Bay" includes first-person narratives, early histories, historical biographies, promotional brochures and books of photographs that capture in words and pictures a distinctive region as it developed between the onset of European settlement and the first quarter of the 20th century.
A special presentation, "Pictures of People and Places," consists of selected illustrations from books included in "The Capital and the Bay."
Another American Memory collection has been augmented. "A Century of Lawmaking, 1774-1873" has just been expanded with more than 130,000 pages of proposed bills and resolutions from the 13th Congress to the 42nd Congress.
American Memory is a project of the National Digital Library Program of the Library of Congress. Its more than 100 collections—which range from papers of the U.S. presidents, Civil War photographs and early films of Thomas Edison to papers documenting the women's suffrage and civil rights movements, Jazz Age photographs and the first baseball cards—include more than 5 million items from the collections of the Library and those of other major repositories.
The latest Web site from the Library is aimed at kids and families. The colorful and interactive "America's Library" (www.americaslibrary.gov) invites users to "Log On … Play Around … Learn Something."