Celebrations Today – July 16
Holidays and observances
- Christian feast day:
- Engineer’s Day (Honduras)
- Holocaust Memorial Day (France)
Celebrations Today – USA: July 16
National Corn Fritters Day
National Personal Chef’s Day
National Ice Cream Day – Third Sunday in July
National Corn Fritter Day
National Fresh Spinach Day
National Personal Chef Day
Today in US History: July 16
Let Us Now Praise Famous Men
Walker Evans,
Edwin Locke, photographer,
February 1937.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945
On July 16, 1936, photographer Walker Evans (1903-75) took a leave of absence from the Farm Security Administration (FSA) to accept a summer assignment with Fortune magazine. Evans, who had begun working as a photographer in 1928, had developed a modest reputation by the time that he was hired in October 1935 by Roy Stryker, then leader of the FSA photographic section. Stryker agreed to grant him leave for the magazine assignment on the condition that his photographs remained government property.
Washstand in the dog run and kitchen of Floyd Burroughs’ cabin,
Hale County, Alabama,
Walker Evans, photographer,
circa 1935-1936.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945
Evans and the writer James Agee spent several weeks among sharecropper families in Hale County, Alabama. The article they produced documented in words and images the lives of poor Southern farmers afflicted by the Great Depression; their work, however, did not meet Fortune‘s expectations and was rejected for publication.
Evans’ desire to produce photographs that were “pure record not propaganda” did not harmonize with Stryker’s emphasis on the use of the image to promote social activism. Soon after the Alabama series was completed, Evans returned to New York. There Evans and Agee reworked their material and searched for another publisher. In 1941, the expanded version of their story was published in book form as Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, now recognized as a masterpiece of the art of photojournalism.
Walker Evans went on to exhibit and publish his work (he was a staff photographer at Fortune, 1945-65) and to teach at the Yale University School of Art and Architecture. James Agee became one of America’s most influential film critics as well as a poet, novelist, and screenwriter. James Agee died in 1955; Walker Evans died in 1975.
- For more information on Walker Evans’ life and another example of a photographic series representative of his work, select the photographic essay New York City Block in the special presentation Documenting America: Photographers on Assignment within the American Memory collection: America from the Great Depression to World War II: Black and White Photographs from the FSA-OWI, 1935-1945. Search on Hale County in this collection to view one hundred photographs taken by Evans in Hale County, Alabama, which furnished material for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.
Hale County, Alabama
Floyd Burroughs, cotton sharecropper, Hale County, Alabama
Sharecropper Bud Fields and his family at home, Hale County, Alabama
Walker Evans, photographer,
circa 1935-1936.
America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945
- Walker Evans’ colleagues at the FSA included other leading American photographers such as Dorothea Lange, Russell Lee, John Vachon, and Marion Post Wolcott. Photographs of the photographers, many taken by one another, are collected in Portrait Sampler of FSA Photographers. Photographic essays on the photographers and their work are available in the presentation Documenting America: Photographers on Assignment.
- View fifteen of the most frequently requested images from America from the Great Depression to World War II: Photographs from the FSA and OWI, ca. 1935-1945, as well as fifteen favorites selected by the curators of the collection in another online presentation.
- A complementary collection, Voices from the Dust Bowl: The Charles L. Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection, 1940-1941, documents the everyday life of residents in the FSA’s migrant work camps in central California during 1940 and 1941. Many of the individuals whose stories and songs are gathered in this collection shared both the socioeconomic and historic experience of the individuals documented by James Agee and Walker Evans.
- Search on depression in American Life Histories: Manuscripts from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1940 for depression-era stories. Also search on New Deal for stories relating to that program.
A Capital City
Washington, D.C. views. Panoramic View of Washington, including U.S Capitol,
Theodor Horydczak, photographer,
circa 1920-1950.
Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959
On July 16, 1790, the Residence Act, which stipulated that the president select a site on the Potomac River as the permanent capital of the United States following a ten-year temporary residence in Philadelphia, was signed into law. In a proclamation issued on January 24, 1791, President George Washington announced the permanent location of the new capital, an area of land at the confluence of the Potomac and Eastern Branch (Anacostia) rivers that would eventually become the District of Columbia. Soon after, Washington commissioned French engineer Pierre-Charles L’Enfant to create a plan for the city.
Plan of the City Intended for the Permanent Seat of the Government,
by Pierre Charles L’Enfant,
Manuscript map on paper, 1791.
American Treasures of the Library of Congress
L’Enfant arrived in Georgetown on March 9, 1791, and submitted his report and plan to the president in August. It is believed that this plan is the one preserved in the Library of Congress.
L’Enfant’s plan was greatly influenced by the traditions of Baroque landscape architecture and his projections of a future city population of 800,000. Its scheme of broad radiating avenues connecting significant focal points, its open spaces, and its grid pattern of streets oriented north, south, east, and west is still the gold standard against which all modern land use proposals for the Nation’s capital are considered.
The glorious vistas and dramatic landscape of today’s Washington are a result of L’Enfant’s careful planning. From the steps of the U.S. Capitol one can gaze down the mall to the Washington Monument and on to the Lincoln Memorial.
- Learn more about the capital city’s attractions by searching the Today in History Archive on Washington, D.C. or District of Columbia. Featured institutions and sights include the White House, Arlington National Cemetery, the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the famous cherry trees, and the Washington Monument.
- The Library’s online exhibition Temple of Liberty: Building the Capitol for a New Nation gives a detailed account of the architectural development of the city and the Capitol building.
View of Washington City
Washington, D.C., 1871.
Panoramic Maps - For a wealth of images of our Nation’s Capital, visit the online collection Washington as It Was: Photographs by Theodor Horydczak, 1923-1959. Photographer Theodor Horydczak’s collection includes thousands of photographs documenting the architecture and social life of the Washington metropolitan area from the 1920s through the 1950s.
- Among the most prized items on display in the American Treasures of the Library of Congress exhibition are L’Enfant’s 1791 plan for the city of Washington and Benjamin Henry Latrobe’s plan for the transformation of the White House into the symbol of power we know today.
- Discover many images, documents, and several motion pictures of Washington, D.C., in American Memory; search the collections individually on the names of monuments and federal institutions. For example, America’s First Look into the Camera: Daguerreotype Portraits and Views, 1839-1864 includes an 1846 photograph of the Capitol.
- Search the papers of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson at the Library of Congress to find many documents concerning the selection and creation of Washington, D.C.
- A Century of Lawmaking for a New Nation contains a wide variety of congressional information associated with the early history of Washington, D.C. Search in the 1st Congress using the phrase seat of government to find congressional materials related to the Residence Act.
- Map Collections contains more than one hundred maps of the District of Columbia throughout its history.
Today in History – July 16-External Links
Today’s Weather in History
Today in Earthquake History
This Day in Naval History
Today’s Document from the National Archives
Today’s Events, Births & Deaths –Wikipedia
Today in History by AP
On this Day -1950 to 2005 – Today’s Story–BBC
On This Day: The New York Times
This Day in History –History.com
Today in Canadian History – Canada Channel
History of Britain that took place On This Day
Russia in History –Russiapedia