Two of the Library's leading Web sites, American Memory and Meeting of Frontiers, have added new collections to their offerings. American Memory (http://memory.loc.gov), has added two new collections to its more than 8 million online items. The first addition is named "The Stars and Stripes: The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919"; the second displays maps of Macau, the oldest permanent European settlement in Asia, which can be found in American Memory's "Map Collections, 1500-2003."
Meeting of Frontiers (http://frontiers.loc.gov), the world's largest bilingual collaborative library site, has added collections from the United States, Germany and Russia.
"The Stars and Stripes"
The collection of newspapers known as "The Stars and Stripes: The American Soldiers' Newspaper of World War I, 1918-1919" joins American Memory's more than 120 thematically organized collections.
At the direction of Gen. John J. Pershing, The Stars and Stripes newspaper was published in France by the U.S. Army from Feb. 8, 1918, to June 13, 1919. By early 1918 American forces were dispersed throughout the Western front, often mixed at the unit level with British, French and Italian forces. The primary mission of The Stars and Stripes was to provide these scattered troops with a sense of unity and an understanding of their part in the overall war effort. The eight-page weekly featured news from home, poetry, cartoons and sports news, assembled by a staff that included journalists Alexander Woollcott, Harold Wallace Ross and Grantland Rice.
On borrowed printing presses, using a delivery network that combined trains, automobiles and one motorcycle, the staff produced a newspaper with a circulation that peaked at 526,000 copies. This new online collection presents the complete run—71 weeks—of the World War I edition.
The collection also includes special presentations that discuss the newspaper's content: its illustrations and advertising, publication of soldiers' poetry and coverage of women. Brief biographies of editorial staff members and their later careers indicate the high level of journalistic talent at The Stars and Stripes. A timeline and map place the newspaper within the greater historical and geographical context of the war.
The collection was processed with optical character recognition (OCR) software to allow users to search the full text of the newspaper for a word or phrase. This feature expands the collection's usefulness to historians and genealogists who are researching names and details that do not appear in the headlines. "The Stars and Stripes" collection serves as a pilot project in the development of search-and-display capabilities to be used in future releases of historic newspapers.
Maps of Macau
The Geography and Map Division has mounted a special online presentation devoted to Macau as part of the "Map Collections, 1500-2003" of the American Memory Web site. The materials are at http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/gmdhtml/macau/.
Macau was returned by Portugal to China in 1999 and is now known as the Macau Special Administrative Region of the People's Republic of China. The region consists of the city of Macau on a small peninsula of the Chinese mainland and the two small islands of Taipa and Colôane, which are connected by a causeway. The entire area of this administrative region is 21 square kilometers, which is about one-tenth the size of Washington, D.C. As of July 2001, Macau had an estimated population of about 454,000.
The Portuguese established this port on the southeastern coast of China at the mouth of the Zhu Jiang (Pearl River) in 1557, when they were the dominant power in European trade with Asia. Portugal continued its presence in Macau for more than 400 years. In December 1887, after a series of negotiations between Portugal and China about Macau's sovereignty, a protocol was agreed upon that recognized Portugal's occupation and governance of Macau. Following Portugal's revolution of 1974 and China's development of a reunification strategy, China and Portugal issued the Joint Declaration on the Question of Macau on April 13, 1987. This declaration stated that on Dec. 20, 1999, China would resume its exercise of sovereignty in Macau.
By viewing this small selection of 16 maps, one can see evidence of European influence in the mapping of Macau, reflecting the Europeans' strong economic interest in the port city for more than 400 years.
Meeting of Frontiers
New collections on the Meeting of Frontiers Web site come from the Library of Congress; the State and University Library of Lower Saxony in Göttingen, Germany; the National Library of Russia; and the Russian State Library.
The Meeting of Frontiers site is a bilingual, multimedia English-Russian digital library that tells the story of American exploration and settlement of the West and the parallel exploration and settlement of Siberia and the Russian Far East. With the latest additions, the site now includes more than 330,000 digital images that are available for use in schools and libraries and by the general public.
Left, Street musicians with harp and violin in the upper yard of Dom Smith, Vladivostok, Russia, ca. 1899, from the Eleanor Pray Collection; center, men in uniform at a railway guard booth; right, Included in the new Eleanor Pray Collection in the Library's Meeting of Frontiers Web site are these images of everyday life in Vladivostok, Russia, at the end of the 19th century. Pray with friends at tea.
New Library of Congress collections on the site include the Kiowa Stories from the papers of Hugh Lenox Scott and the Eleanor L. Pray Album. Scott was a West Point graduate and career military officer who served at various Western posts between 1876 and 1897. In 1892 he was assigned to Fort Sill, Okla., and given command of Troop L of the 7th Cavalry, an all-Indian unit consisting of Kiowa, Comanche and Apache soldiers. During his years in the West, Scott developed an increasing interest in the region's indigenous populations and became an astute practitioner of Plains Indian sign language—a nonverbal method of communicating with hand gestures—that he used to gather information about Native American cultures. The selections from the Scott papers included in Meeting of Frontiers consist of Kiowa stories that he collected while stationed at Fort Sill.
The Eleanor L. Pray Album features images from Vladivostok in 1899-1901 and the life of an American merchant family living in the city at that time. It was created by Eleanor Roxanna Lord Pray (1868-1954), an American woman who lived in Vladivostok for 36 years (1894-1930). The album eventually was inherited by Pray's granddaughter Patricia D. Silver, who in 2002 donated it to the Library of Congress for scholarly use and digitization. The album offers a unique and private perspective on Russian and expatriate life at a crucial time in late-czarist Russia. Among the expatriates pictured in the album is Richard T. Greener, the U.S. commercial agent in the city at that time and the first African American graduate of Harvard College.
The latest Meeting of Frontiers update also includes, from the State and University Library of Lower Saxony, a large portion of this institution's extraordinary Asch Collection. Acquired by Georg Thomas von Asch (1729-1807), a German who studied medicine at Göttingen and then entered the Russian National Service, this collection is a comprehensive record of Russian expeditions to Siberia in the second half of the 18th century. It includes books, manuscripts and maps, as well as medals, minerals, plants, clothes and other items of scientific interest that Asch gathered while serving as an official of the Russian government. Asch donated the collection to Göttingen, where it became the core of the library's extensive Russian collections. The digitization of 246 rare books for Meeting of Frontiers was funded by a grant to the library by the German Society for Research.
Meeting of Frontiers partners since 1999, the Russian state and national libraries contributed rare books, maps and manuscripts to their already extensive collections of digitized materials on the Meeting of Frontiers site. The additions include unpublished memoirs of Russian exiles in Siberia, Russian documentation about the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and the 1837 translation into Aleut of the Russian catechism by Ioann Veniaminov (St. Innocent).
Significant in-kind contributions to the project have been made by the Open Society Institute-Russia, Yukos Oil and the Foundation for Internet Education, and the State and University Library of Lower Saxony (SUB). Digital project partners include the Library of Congress, the Russian State Library, the National Library of Russia, the SUB, the Rasmuson Library of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the Institute of the North at Alaska Pacific University at Anchorage, and several dozen regional libraries, archives, and historical societies in Siberia and the Russian Far East.
