Citing Primary News Today

The National Highways Association (NHA) was established in 1911 to promote the development of an improved national road network in the United States. Under the slogan "Good roads for everyone!" the NHA advocated the building and permanent maintenance by the federal government of a system of 50,000 miles (some 80,500 kilometers) of highways. This map, issued by the NHA in 1913, shows 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) of national highways proposed for Alabama. The NHA employed engineers to ...

The National Highways Association (NHA) was established in 1911 to promote the development of an improved national road network in the United States. Under the slogan "Good roads for everyone!" the NHA advocated the building and permanent maintenance by the federal government of a system of 50,000 miles (some 80,500 kilometers) of highways. This map, issued by the NHA in 1913, shows 1,500 miles (2,414 kilometers) of national highways proposed for Alabama. The NHA employed engineers to ...

This 18th-century Dutch map, produced in Amsterdam by the publisher Isaak Tirion (circa 1705--circa 1769), shows the northern coast of South American and its offshore islands, including Curaçao, Bonaire, and neighboring islands; Trinidad and Tobago; and Grenada. Guiana is divided, from west to east, into Spanish, Dutch, and French sections, corresponding roughly to a part of present-day Venezuela and present-day Guyana, Suriname, and French Guiana. The territory to the south of Guiana, in pres...

This photograph is an aerial view of the circus lot of the Russell Bros. Circus at Janesville, Wisconsin, in 1932. The availability of trucks following World War I led to a rapid growth of the trucking industry in the United States. Circuses quickly adapted to the new technology by creating "truck shows" or circuses that traveled overland via truck. Truck shows brought the circus to smaller towns across the country previously inaccessible by rail. This image shows a typical medium-size...

This hand-colored engraved plate by Johann Theodor de Bry (born in Liège in 1561, died in Frankfurt-am-Main in 1623), is from the German edition of de Bry's Grands voyages (Great voyages), an enterprise begun by de Bry's father, Theodor de Bry (1528--98). The work ultimately consisted of ten illustrated volumes on the colonization of the Americas. This 1599 engraving is a bird's-eye panoramic view showing the city, harbor, and river of Santo Domingo (present-day Dominican Republic)...

The interview series, "Ayiti Re-imagined: The First Black Sovereign Nation" will serve as a companion to a libguide being produced to draw public attention to the rich resources available for scholars on Haiti, centralize the information online, and broaden awareness of Afro-Caribbean materials in the Library of Congress's collections. This libguide and webcast will serve as resources that connect the Library with an emerging audience discussing Haiti's history, its representat...

Angelique, known as Angel, moves from France to the United States to marry American architect, John Smith. The newlyweds set up housekeeping in Los Angeles, California. She tries her best to be a good housewife but sometimes runs into problems as she learns English and adapts to her new life and culture. In this episode, Harold, a teenage box boy at the local grocery store, gets a crush on Angel, and his jilted girlfriend, Nancy, gets a crush on Johnny.

This 1929 photograph shows the interior of John Robinson's Circus during a spectacle, or "spec," performance of King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba in Cincinnati, Ohio. In the American circus, the spec developed as a procession that took place around the hippodrome track inside the big top, or circus tent, featuring as many of the performers and animals as the circus director was able to costume. John Robinson's Circus was especially known for its dazzling productions of King S...

In 1874-75, the Russian government sent a research and trading mission to China to seek out new overland routes to the Chinese market, report on prospects for increased commerce and locations for consulates and factories, and gather information about the Dungan Revolt then raging in parts of western China. Led by Lieutenant Colonel Iulian A. Sosnovskii of the army General Staff, the nine-man mission included a topographer, Captain Matusovskii; a scientific officer, Dr. Pavel Iakovlevich Piasetsk...

This map of colonial Guiana (present-day Suriname) is the work of Jan Jansson (died 1664), a Dutch cartographer who married into the Hondius family of illustrious mapmakers. Jodocus Hondius (1563-1612) and his sons, Jodocus and Henricus, engraved maps of the Americas and Europe, and were instrumental in popularizing the work of Gerard Mercator, the developer of the Mercator Projection that allowed navigators to use a flat map reflecting the curvature of the globe. The Hondius family published an...