Stephen Hawking, the famous physicist and cosmologist, has one of the most recognizable voices in history, but it isn’t the voice he was born with. After losing his voice to medical complications, Hawking adopted a text-to-speech synthesized voice called “Perfect Paul.” He used this voice for 32 years, refusing “updates” to the system, and enlisting engineers to make this voice compatible with newer computers. His iconic robotic and monotone-sounding voice became part of his identity, appearing in TV shows, music, and even beamed into space after his death.

The development of Stephen Hawking’s voice is part of a larger history of scientists and engineers attempting to simulate the human voice through electronic machines. In her book Vox Ex Machina: A Cultural History of Talking Machines (MIT Press, 2024), Sarah Bell tells the history of voice synthesizers through six case studies of commercial voice synthesis products and their public reception, including “Perfect Paul.”

The first talking machine, the Voice Operation DEmonstratoR, or “Voder” for short, was unveiled at the 1939 World’s Fair in Queens, New York. Women who trained for six months called “Voderettes” operated the machine in real time via keyboard and spring-actuated foot pedals. Though technologically limited, the Voder amazed audiences. Just 43 years later, voice synthesizers no longer required human operators. The 1982 Software Automatic Mouth or “S.A.M.” was one of the earliest software-run voice synthesizers and provided the voice of early Apple Macintosh computers.

One of the themes Bell pursues is the contrast between the lofty dreams of developers and sci-fi writers and the much more mundane experience of average customers. For example, in 1978, Texas Instruments released the Speak and Spell, an educational tool to help children learn to spell. This virtual “spelling bee” would say a word, prompting the child to type in the correct letters. Despite being the first widely available consumer device with digital voice synthesis, the Speak and Spell was not a major commercial success.

Bell explains that developers had ignored a focus group of mothers who said the product would “be boring, noisy, unreliable, and most of all, expensive.” More recent examples, she says, such as Amazon’s Alexa, have demonstrated similar patterns. While developers hoped Alexa would revolutionize online shopping and home automation, most users only employ it for simple tasks like setting timers or playing music.

While World’s Fair audiences were generally delighted by the Voder, others expressed anxiety about its implications. For instance, Bell recounts that in a 1939 Boston Globe column titled “Voder for President,” Jay Franklin speculated that a machine capable of imitating dialects could sway public opinion or even run for political office. This reflected real cultural unease about the power and potential manipulation of synthetic voices. In turn, new releases of voice synthesis technology have generated ongoing debate in the press and in the public sphere.

Voice synthesis machines have made life more accessible, as in the case of Stephen Hawking, and some in the scientific community imagine that combining voice synthesis with artificial intelligence could revolutionize how humans work. Voice-enhanced machines could be teachers, care for the ill, provide companionship, or support individuals in mental health crises.

Bell warns, however, that corporate interests may prioritize profit over public benefit, and that bias can be built into synthetic voices, reinforcing existing racial and gender stereotypes. Voice synthesis, she cautions, is not a Deus ex machina; it will not provide easy solutions to social ills, which can only come via critical engagement with the technologies and their social dimension.

Bell completed the research for Vox Ex Machina as a 2018 Digital Studies Fellow at the Kluge Center. The book was recognized as one of the Best Books of 2024 by The New Yorker.

You can listen to clips of the voice synthesizers discussed in Bell’s book here.

“What is it about democracy that justifies our faith, especially African Americans’ faith in it?” asks political theorist Melvin L. Rogers in his book The Darkened Light of Faith: Race, Democracy, and Freedom in African American Political Thought (Princeton University Press, 2023).

Partly in response to the rise of Afro-pessimism, a tradition that views the persistence of racial inequality as an inescapable consequence of slavery, Rogers acknowledges the powerful allure of this type of thinking. Yet he opposes it because, he argues, it takes away autonomy from the American people who have created their world. Instead, Rogers highlights the political tradition of a group of African American thinkers who viewed history as open-ended and believed that America’s meaning was something to “struggle over.” These thinkers, he recounts, envisioned creating a racially just society by improving democracy and its institutions.

David Walker, Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton, Martin Delany, Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Billie Holiday, and James Baldwin are among the group of nineteenth and twentieth-century Black intellectuals, activists, and artists portrayed by Rogers. Each of them, argues Rogers, was committed to creating a more racially just society, even while they were excluded from full political participation.

Rogers reads these thinkers closely. Among others, he examines David Walker’s 1829 pamphlet Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America; Anna Julia Cooper’s 1892 A Voice from the South; Ida B. Wells’ detailed journalistic narrations of lynchings; Billie Holiday’s protest song “Strange Fruit”; and W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. These authors employed rhetoric to try to change how their fellow citizens viewed the nation and the people, and they appealed to human sensibilities like “fear, sympathy, love, shame, and horror” to change hearts and minds. Billie Holiday’s mournful song “Strange Fruit,” for example, encourages her audiences to reflect on the horrors of lynching and their place in American history.

Rogers hopes that the works of these thinkers can help current generations discover useful ways to progress as a society. In his famous 1852 address, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?,” Frederick Douglass wrote that “We have to do with the past only as we can make it useful to the present and to the future.”

Baldwin, according to Rogers, issued a similar plea: “that Americans assume a different attitude, critically embrace their past, and allow both to structure a collective vision of responsibility.”

The “perfectionist” thinkers, as Rogers refers to them, embodied faith in that they knew that their success was not assured. Yet they were willing to struggle to bring about their vision of democracy and of a racially just society.

Rogers worked on The Darkened Light of Faith during his tenure as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John. W Kluge Center in the summer of 2019. The book won the 2023 Best Book Award from the American Political Thought Section of the American Political Science Association (APSA); the David Easton Award from the Foundations of Political Theory Section of APSA; and the Ralph J. Bunch Award from APSA.

This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.

Susan Schneider’s book Artificial You: AI and the Future of Your Mind (Princeton University Press, 2019) begins with a thought experiment: it’s 2045, and you’re shopping at the “Center for Mind Design,” where upgrades like “Human Calculator,” for genius math skills; “Zen Garden,” for meditation expertise; or “Hive Mind,” for experiencing the internal thoughts of loved ones are available for purchase. These and other upgrades may all sound appealing, but at what point would these enhancements to your brain ultimately change your identity, making you no longer “you?” Throughout her text, Schneider encourages us to consider what makes us who we are, and whether replacing parts of the brain with microchips might lead to the loss of essential elements of the self. These are not only futuristic hypotheticals, says Schneider, but are pressing questions today as brain chips to treat mood disorders and artificial hippocampi are already in development.

Schneider put the final touches on this book as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kluge Center in 2019. Later that year, she returned to the Kluge Center to continue researching AI and mind design as the Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology, Exploration, and Scientific Innovation.

Named as one of Forbes’s Must-Read Brain Books of 2019, Artificial You has only grown more relevant since its release. With the emergence of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and DALL-E, discourse about AI has surged, especially related to areas like education, the workforce, healthcare, misinformation, and privacy. AI is becoming part of daily life, integrating into the platforms we already use. As Schneider notes, these developments raise not just familiar concerns around potential job losses, plagiarism, election interference, and cyber-attacks, but also deeper philosophical questions about the human mind.

A central concern for Schneider is consciousness, which she defines as “the “felt quality of experience,” our inner life that allows us to feel joy, pain, and everything in between. Consciousness is what divides beings from automatons, Schneider explains. If humans were to develop a machine with consciousness, it would raise major ethical questions. For instance, Schneider writes, if your housework assistant android were conscious, making it clean your house without pay or consent could be equivalent to slavery. For these reasons, she emphasizes the importance of developing more sophisticated tests (the Turing Test was an early one, first developed in the 1950s) to help identify machine consciousness and prevent harming sentient beings.

Among Schneider’s central messages is that, in order to prevent AI from harming society, we must regulate its development and design it with care. When it comes to engaging with AI, she contends, philosophy may well become a “matter of life and death.”

You can read more about Schneider’s work here or hear directly from her here.

This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.

Simón Bolívar achieved the impossible. He led the successful liberations of six Latin American countries, navigating terrain ranging from crocodile-infested jungles to the frozen peaks of the Andes. He narrowly avoided two assassination attempts, thanks to the help of a mistress, endured great personal loss when his wife died at a young age, and suffered frequent defeats in battle. Despite never being a soldier or having any military training, Bolívar managed to defeat Spain, then one of the world’s great powers.

In Bolívar: An American Liberator (Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2013), Marie Arana chronicles the extraordinary life and lasting legacy of the man known as “The Great Liberator” and often likened to the Latin American George Washington. At first, Arana questioned whether another Bolívar biography was necessary; after all, the Library of Congress alone holds more than 2,600 volumes about him. But as she examined the existing literature, she found that many accounts were in Spanish and either overly idealized or fiercely critical.

Bolívar was, as Arana puts it, a “controversial man” with a complicated legacy. While a champion of Enlightenment ideals, he also acted as a dictator on at least three occasions and has been invoked by modern strongmen like Hugo Chávez to justify authoritarian rule. He freed slaves a half century before the Emancipation Proclamation and was a dreamer who envisioned united sovereign nations across Latin America. Yet, he was violent as well: he executed a general of his own army and at one time ordered the massacre of 800 prisoners when he feared a prison uprising.

Determined to create a more balanced and human portrait, Arana grounded her biography in Bolívar’s own words, as well as on testimonies of witnesses from his time. As a Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the Kluge Center in 2009, she found a wealth of primary sources. In the Hispanic Division, she uncovered 32 volumes of Bolivar’s letters, chronicles from generals and soldiers who fought alongside him, accounts from travelers who witnessed his campaigns, and court documents detailing his difficult childhood as an orphan. In the Geography and Map Division, she discovered a fold-out graphic charting every kilometer Bolívar ever traveled, along with maps of his hometown. These sources allowed Arana to cut through myth and legend, offering vivid details about Bolívar’s character, as well as his dress, charisma, humor, and brash language.

Since his death, both the extreme left and the extreme right have sought to instrumentalize Bolivar’s legacy. As Arana explains, “we ensure his immortality by recreating him again and again.”

Bolívar: An American Liberator won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Biography in 2014 and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction.

You can read Arana’s blog about Bolívar and his papers at the Library here and listen to her discuss her research here.

This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.

On the battlegrounds of the US Civil War, both sides relied on a surprising weapon—the telegraph. This new electronic communication system was crucial for coordinating troop movements, managing supply lines, and transmitting military intelligence. But like all technologies, it came with vulnerabilities. Messages traveling through wires could be intercepted, or “tapped,” revealing critical plans to the enemy. Civil war telegraphers also tapped lines to send fraudulent messages and confuse their enemy. To counter these risks, the Union and Confederacy developed early cipher systems to disguise communications and confirm their authenticity.

The Listeners: A History of Wiretapping in the United States (Harvard University Press, 2022) by Brian Hochman traces the history of wiretapping, or the “act of intercepting or recording messages or voice conversations transmitted over electronic communications networks,” back to Civil War era (1861-1865) espionage. Though often thought of as a uniquely 21^st-century problem, Hochman shows that wiretapping has a much longer, more complex, and more contested history than many realize. Wiretapping has been a part of America’s electronic communications systems from the beginning, and, according to Hochman, the American ideal of electronic privacy has never truly existed in practice. The Listeners traces the evolution of the wiretap from a “specialized intelligence-gathering tool to a mundane fact of American life.”

Every generation seems to have its own wiretapping scandal. Hochman guides readers through 160 years of colorful history, including cases of Prohibition-era surveillance of bootleggers and speakeasies, illegal government surveillance of suspected spies during WWII, the Nixon and Watergate scandal, the wiretapping of Civil Rights leaders, and the aftermath of September 11, 2001. In each of these periods, the law struggled to keep pace with the rapidly developing telecommunication technologies, in part because legislators were unable to predict every way that information could be recorded, intercepted, and manipulated.

Private citizens and companies, not just the government, have used wiretaps in creative ways. For example, Hochman recounts how in 1864, D.C. Williams, a con artist, was caught running a complex insider trading scheme using information intercepted from telegraphs. Gangsters and bootleggers spied on police, often more than the other way around. Private detectives tapped conversations to investigate marital disputes, and companies paid spies to tap their telephones to monitor labor union influence among employees. All of these unofficial eavesdroppers were among “the listeners,” says Hochman.

These ties to criminal activity contributed to creating wiretapping’s reputation as a “dirty business,” which threatened Americans’ civil liberties. Then, as the US government increased its use of wiretaps, and “law and order” politics grew in the 1960s, what had initially been a strong grassroots opposition to wiretapping began to fade. Today many Americans willingly invite listening devices from major technology companies into their homes. For Hochman, this remains an important puzzle. How is it that so many Americans became so comfortable with being listened to? Part of the answer, he says, is that the ascendance of law and order politics normalized wiretapping as “good police work” in America.

Hochman researched The Listeners as a 2018 Kluge Fellow. It was awarded the 2023 Surveillance Studies Network Book Prize and was selected as one of Publishers Weekly’s Top 20 Nonfiction Books of 2022.

This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.

Imagine waking up behind the wheel of a truck hurtling down a winding road. You have no idea how to drive, and everything you love is inside. You start to learn how some of the controls work, but you’ve never had a real lesson. Well, you better learn how to drive the truck—and quickly. This is how astrobiologist David Grinspoon explains humanity’s current challenge. Though we are just beginning to understand the significant impact humans have had and will continue to have on Earth, he says, we must rapidly learn how to steer our future in order to survive.

In Earth in Human Hands: Shaping our Planet’s Future (Grand Central Publishing, 2016), Grinspoon explores the idea that Earth has entered the Anthropocene, the term many scientists now use to describe the era in which humans are a dominant force of ecological change. While other species have created geological change throughout Earth’s history, humans are the only ones with an awareness of their impact. This awareness, contends Grinspoon, is the good news, because if we know what we are doing, there is at least a chance we can become wiser and make better choices.

There have been examples of humans learning from their mistakes and correcting course to help the planet. For instance, Grinspoon recalls that in the 1970s, spacecraft investigations of the planet Venus helped scientists realize that chlorine destroys ozone. This led to the discovery that chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in refrigerators and aerosols were releasing chlorine into the stratosphere, thus forming a hole in the Earth’s ozone layer, which protects us from the sun’s harmful ultraviolet radiation. Without the ozone layer, life on Earth would not survive. Governments around the globe took stock of the urgency and cooperated to ban CFCs. Today, the ozone layer is healing, a rare and inspiring example of successful global cooperation to fix a pressing environmental issue.

Grinspoon hopes that humans can learn to use technological skills in global cooperation to enhance the possibility of survival for all lifeforms on Earth. He refers to this vision as “Terra Sapiens,” or “wise Earth.” To work toward a wise Earth, he suggests, leaders must avoid getting bogged down by regret for past actions, or fear that change is impossible. Rather, embracing hope and using a growing knowledge of the Earth and other planets is imperative in order to shape a future we wish for.

Grinspoon researched and wrote this book while in residence at the Kluge Center as the first Baruch S. Blumberg NASA/Library of Congress Chair in Astrobiology. He drew on the Library’s rich science collections, including Carl Sagan’s personal papers. With help from librarian Margaret “Peg” Clifton, whom Grinspoon called a librarian with “special powers,” he was able to find some rare materials, including, unexpectedly, the English translations of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, a Russian space engineer who also wrote philosophical reflections.

You can listen to Grinspoon discuss his research here.

You can read more about Grinspoon’s experience at the Kluge Center in these blogs:

• Inquiring Minds: David Grinspoon Reflects on his Tenure at Library of Congress
• Inquiring Minds: An Interview with Astrobiologist David H. Grinspoon
• Kinship and Scholarship: A Librarian and Scholar Find Books and Each Other

While Chair, Grinspoon hosted several talks and panels with distinguished scholars including the following:

• Terra Sapiens: The Human Chapter in the History of Earth
• Searching for Life in the Universe: What Does it Mean for Humanity
• The Longevity of Human Civilization
• The Evolving Moral Landscape: Perspectives on the Environment, Literary, Historical, and Interplanetary

This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.

Close to 60,000 loyalists, about one in forty of the American population, left the newly formed country following the Revolutionary War. In New York City, when the last of the British Forces departed on November 25^th, 1783, patriots held feasts, bonfires, and celebrated with the “biggest fireworks display ever staged in North America” up to that point, writes Maya Jasanoff in her book, Liberty’s Exiles: American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (Knopf, 2011). But, for those who had not wanted the British to leave, and were now scared for their future in a new country whose formation they had opposed, this was a time of fear and uncertainty. They were faced with a difficult choice: should they stay, or should they leave with the British?

Jasanoff’s book is the first global history of the loyalist diaspora. This civilian exodus, the largest one in the history of the United States, was worldwide. Loyalists moved to Britain, Canada, the Bahamas, the West Indies, Africa, Australia, and India, often leaving behind friends, family, houses, and lives.

Loyalists, recounts Jasanoff, were as diverse in their demographics as they were in their reasons for supporting Britain and leaving the United States. Elizabeth Johnston, for example, a very young mother, followed her husband, a loyalist army captain, from Georgia to Savannah, then on to Charleston, St. Augustine, Scotland, Jamaica, and finally to Nova Scotia. She faced hardships and isolation, losing three children to disease along the way.

David George, another loyalist, was born enslaved in Virginia. Along with roughly 20,000 other enslaved individuals, he took advantage of the Dunmore Proclamation, which promised freedom to any slaves who joined the British side.

George travelled to Savannah, Georgia, with British forces and worked as a preacher. After the war, George moved his family to Nova Scotia and established a church that served multiracial congregants. Then, in 1792, he became one of the founding settlers of Freetown, a settlement for freed slaves in Sierra Leone.

The Revolutionary War, Jasanoff reminds us, often separated family, friends, and neighbors. Even Benjamin Franklin became estranged from his only living son, William Franklin, a loyalist who was imprisoned during the war and afterward lived in exile in England until his death. The two never reconciled.

Although their journeys were difficult, Jasanoff found that these so-called “losers” of the Revolutionary War often successfully found homes and stability elsewhere in the British Empire.

In Liberty’s Exiles, Jasanoff shatters long-held stereotypes of loyalists. She highlights, among other features, their role in spreading American ideas and influence worldwide. For instance, loyalists in the Bahamas and Sierra Leone demanded political representation from their British governors, demands which sounded “uncannily like those of their patriot peers,” according to Jasanoff. Liberty’s Exiles encourages Americans to reevaluate their history, looking at the Revolutionary War as a part of world history not confined to national boundaries.

Jasanoff researched and wrote Liberty’s Exiles as a Kluge Fellow in 2006. In the Library’s Manuscript Division, she found loyalist writings, including those from East Florida, that proved invaluable to her research. These refugees were devastated to learn Florida would be ceded to Spain in the 1783 Paris Peace Treaty, which ended the war and recognized the Thirteen Colonies as sovereign. This meant refugees would be forced to swear allegiance to the Spanish crown or leave. One account by John Cruden, president of the Assembly of the united loyalists, described how at a toast to the King of England a few days after the news, “two of the Gentlemen were so much agitated that they covert their faces with handkerchiefs, but they could not conceal the Tears that trickled down their Loyal Cheeks.”

Jasanoff also used maps from the Geography and Map Division to support her research and illustrate Liberty’s Exiles including a map of the Middle British Colonies in America, from 1776; and a map of North America After the Peace of Paris, from 1783.

Among many awards, Liberty’s Exiles received the prestigious Cundill History Prize in Excellence; the George Washington Prize for the best book on America’s founding era; and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. It was a finalist for the Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction.

Jasanoff returned to the Kluge Center in 2019 to serve as the Kluge Chair in Countries and Cultures of the North.

You can hear Jasanoff discuss her research on the loyalists at the 2011 National Book Festival here and at the Kluge Center here.

This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.

With a death toll of 1.5 million people, the Kazakh famine of 1930-1933 was one of the most devastating episodes of the Stalinist regime, leading to the death of over one third of the Kazakh people. Yet, the history of this catastrophe remains largely untold both in the West and Kazakhstan.

The Hungry Steppe: Famine, Violence, and the Making of Soviet Kazakhstan (Cornell University Press, 2018) by Sarah Cameron is the first comprehensive English-language analysis of the Kazakh famine and has since been translated into Russian and Kazakh. Drawing on extensive research in Kazakh and Russian archives, Cameron links the famine to Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, which attempted to transform Kazakhs, a nomadic people, into a “modern, Soviet ‘nation,” by ending nomadism and centralizing agricultural production under state control.

Several fellowships and foundations supported Cameron’s book, including a Kluge fellowship from January to July 2015. While at the Library of Congress, she explored materials from the African and Middle Eastern Division and the European Division, uncovering several sources she had not found in Russia or Kazakhstan. Notably, Cameron discovered oral history accounts that allowed her to include Kazakh voices, a difficult task due to the nomadic features of Kazakh culture, which meant most histories were oral and only later assembled when famine survivors could talk openly after the Soviet Union collapsed.

One such source is Qïzïldar Qïrghïnï, or “Red Terror,” a 1991 collection of oral histories compiled after the fall of the Soviet Union.

“I was still a child but I could not forget this,” and “Surviving a famine is not less than surviving a war” said Zh. Äbĭshŭlï, a survivor of the Kazakh famine who later fought for the Red Army in World War II. Through voices like Äbĭshŭlï’s, Cameron provides perspective on the daily lives of famine victims and the difficult decisions they faced in order to survive.

Cameron’s book brings awareness to this overlooked tragedy and improves understanding of Soviet history. She describes how, by including the Kazakh famine in Soviet history, we can see the broader picture of the Soviet “modernization” project and the widespread devastation caused by Stalin’s high-priority goal of nation-building.

The Hungry Steppe received numerous awards, including Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History and the W. Bruce Lincoln Book Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. The book also received the Harriman Rothschild Book Prize from the Association for the Study of Nationalities and the Southern Conference on Slavic Studies Book Award (formerly Richard Sites Award).

You can read more about Cameron’s research here or hear from Cameron directly here.

This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.

Historian, civil rights activist, and public intellectual John Hope Franklin (1915 – 2009) transformed the field of American history. Franklin authored and edited 17 books, including the landmark From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans (1947), which sold over three million copies. This book helped establish African American history as an academic field, one vital to American historical scholarship. His final work, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006), offers a personal account of his experiences living through the tumultuous years that led to the dismantling of legal segregation.

Born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, Franklin endured racism throughout his life. At just six years old, he was evicted from a train after mistakenly sitting in a whites-only car. At age 19, Franklin traveled to Macon, Mississippi, to assist the economist Giles Hubert in conducting interviews to create a report on the social conditions of Black cotton farmers for Professor Charles S. Johnson’s book Shadow of the Plantation. One evening, after buying ice cream, Franklin was surrounded by a crowd of white men on the store’s porch. The men questioned Franklin’s presence in Macon and asked if he was afraid of being lynched. Eventually, they allowed Franklin to leave, but after this thinly veiled threat, Franklin informed his supervisor that he wished to leave Macon immediately. Later, he was denied serving in World War II solely because of his race. Franklin recounted the experience of being rejected from military service in this Kluge Center-sponsored talk. Decades later, when he was 80 years old and a well-known scholar and author, he was nonetheless mistaken for a coat-check attendant at a Washington club where he was a member.

His family’s history was shaped by racial violence. When John Hope was six, his father, Buck Colbert Franklin, moved to Tulsa to set up a law practice, planning for the family to follow once his wife Mollie finished her teaching contract. But the very week the family planned to reunite, the Tulsa Race Massacre erupted. Although Buck Franklin remained physically unharmed, he lost nearly everything he owned, including his house, clothes, law office, and records. Resolute to help, he set up a law office in a tent and spent years fighting for restitution for his clients and successfully suing the city for blocking the reconstruction efforts of Black businesses. With no home and very little money, the move had to be delayed, separating the family for nearly five years.

Despite these challenges, John Hope Franklin led an extraordinary academic and professional career. He graduated from Fisk University in 1935 and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in history from Harvard. In 1956, as department chair of history at Brooklyn College, he became the first Black department chair of a predominantly white institution. He later taught at Fisk, Saint Augustine’s, North Carolina Central, Howard, and Duke.

He also played a pivotal role in the civil rights movement: joining the NAACP Legal Defense team to prepare research that helped Thurgood Marshall successfully defend Brown v. Board of Education in 1954; marching from Selma to Montgomery, Alabama, in 1965; and serving on President Bill Clinton’s Advisory Board on Race from 1997-98. Among many honors, he received honorary degrees from more than 130 colleges and universities, the 1994 Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the 2006 Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity.

Franklin began writing Mirror to America in 2001 while in residence as the very first Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the John W. Kluge Center. “The fact that this is a John W. Kluge book bespeaks the immense generosity of the library,” he wrote in the acknowledgments. The Kluge Center had done what it does best, by providing a quiet environment to write and research, and unparalleled access to millions of books and manuscripts.

In 401 pages of finely crafted text, Franklin shares stories of both triumph and ongoing struggle. His autobiography provides a human perspective on the toll of segregation, the power of scholarship, and the need to continue fighting for a more just America.

This post, and others in this series, does not constitute the Library’s endorsement of the views of the individual scholar or an endorsement of the publisher.

The Center has fulfilled that mission spectacularly: since its founding, more than 1,000 scholars have spent time at the Library to conduct research, participate in talks and seminars, and meet with members of Congress and their staff. Kluge Center scholars have brought expertise in fields ranging from international relations and political science, to U.S. and world history, to science and technology studies and media studies, as well as philosophy and ethics. Post-graduate researchers have come early in their careers, many to work on their first books. Others arrived at the Center at the height of their career as chairs or distinguished visiting scholars to share their knowledge and pursue new directions.

Over the past twenty-five years, the Kluge Center has fostered scholarship that has generated conferences, public talks, articles, musical compositions, and more than 140 books. Scholars enjoy unparalleled access to the Library’s over 178 million items, the largest collection in the world, which includes original manuscripts, as well as legal history, maps, and music, film, and photography archives. Housed in the Thomas Jefferson Building, dedicated study and meeting spaces provide a both peaceful and engaging academic environment that encourages creative exchange, while giving scholars the time, space, and focus to dedicate to their work.

To celebrate the Kluge Center’s anniversary, the 25 for 25 blog series will spotlight 25 books that were researched or written while their authors were in residence at the Kluge Center.

Selecting just 25 titles from hundreds of award-winning, ground-breaking, and widely different works was a daunting task. As a first step, a team of interns spent several weeks combing through the Kluge Center’s alumni roster to compile a long list of noteworthy publications. Kluge staff then further reviewed that list, ensuring each title met some key criteria: each book was at least partly researched or written at the Kluge Center, and the books were representative of the wide-ranging scholarship the Kluge Center is known for. Finally, a staff committee met to cull the shortlist to the 25 works you will see in this series. These conversations were challenging, in the best possible way, and involved lots of debate since the possible choices were so numerous. The 25 books that were ultimately selected represent only a small fraction of the Kluge Center’s diverse, rigorous, and imaginative scholarship, so we invite you to browse our full alumni list to learn more about our enterprising community.

The 25 for 25 series launches today—join us as we celebrate our Silver Jubilee!