Marvin Kranz, a former historical specialist in the division, would often be called upon to provide a tour of the division's collections, which are stored in a vault, to visiting VIPs. One of Kranz's tours was filmed before his retirement. It offers a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most fascinating and interesting materials in the Library's collections. You can take this virtual tour from the convenience of your computer. The tour is one of several hundred available from the Webcasts page.
You may not know who Titian Ramsay Peale was, but his journals, as Kranz will tell you, are a very important record of an 1840s expedition to the North and South Pacific in which botanical specimens were gathered and brought to the United States. Some of those plants are the ancestors of plants that can be seen in the U.S. Botanic Garden, at the bottom of Capitol Hill in Washington.
Kranz also talks about the collection of the poet Robert Frost and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who fought hard to establish equal rights for women and produced a Woman's Bible (ca. 1895) because she felt her gender did not receive equal status in the Bible.
The diaries of Gen. George S. Patton are in the Manuscript Division, as are the papers of 23 U.S. presidents. These papers are digitized and online for Presidents Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Madison.
Some of the division's greatest treasures are in "Words and Deeds in American History." This presentation also includes "Collecting, Preserving and Researching History," which provides a history of the division, established when the Library moved from its cramped quarters in the U.S. Capitol to its magnificent new building in 1897.