LibraryThing: Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson has a profile up at LibraryThing! This website description notes, "Enter what you're reading or your whole library—it's an easy, library-quality catalog. LibraryThing also connects you with people who read the same things."

Jefferson's profile gives and annotated and completely searchable version of the 4,889 books he donated to the Library of Congress. Do you and President Jefferson have any book in common?

From the site:

My library has been cataloged by helpful Thingamabrarii from the "I See Dead People['s Books]" group. The 6,487 volumes (c. 4,889 titles) included here are those I sold to the Library of Congress in 1815 for $23,950.

A fully annotated version of my library is available here. This is the digital version of The Catalogue of the Library of Thomas Jefferson, a five-volume scholarly bibliography compiled by E. Millicent Sowerby and published by the Library of Congress, 1952-1959.

One of Sowerby's major sources was my own handwritten library catalogue, begun in 1783 and continuously amended through 1814. Now at the Massachusetts Historical Society, that catalogue is available online, here.

When my library was sold to Congress, I sent along a manuscript catalogue presenting the books in a particular order, which I described to the Librarian of Congress as "sometimes analytical, sometimes chronological, & sometimes a combination of both." Unfortunately, that catalogue was retained by Mr. George Watterston when his tenure as Librarian ended in 1829, and has not been found.In the 1980s, librarians James Gilreath (Library of Congress) and Douglas Wilson (Knox College) discovered a manuscript catalogue of the collection - with the books in the order I preferred - created for me by a young gentleman named Nicholas Trist in 1823. This list, published by the Library of Congress in 1989 as Thomas Jefferson’s Library: A Catalog With the Entries in His Own Order is available in digital form, here. The notation for each title from this list can be found in the Comments section.

Irish Presidents

If you ask most people which President had Irish ancestry, you get one quick answer - JFK. But according to the Directory of Irish Genealogy, there are 15 others, including our current President:

• Andrew Jackson
• James Knox Polk
• James Buchanan
• Ulysses S Grant
• Chester Alan Arthur
• Grover Cleveland
• William McKinley
• Woodrow Wilson
• John Fitzgerald Kennedy
• Lyndon Baines Johnson
• Richard Milhous Nixon
• James Earl Carter
• Ronald Wilson Reagan
• George Herbert Walker Bush
• William Jefferson Clinton
• George W Bush

This page also gives some background on the genealogical questions surrounding some of the recent president's Irish ancestry.

To go with this, you can read a USA Today article on Bush's Irish link. That article actually only says there are 11 presidents with Irish ancestry, so believe who you choose.

Millard Fillmore's Boyhood Experiences

I found an 1903 article from the New York Times (it is available for free as PDF) that tells (and quotes) a letter that Millard Fillmore wrote to a friend about his childhood. I found this a fascinating ancedote on this oft-overlooked president. The letter talks about his childhood in East Sparta (Western New York). Fillmore writes about being apprenticed at 12 and how he had wanted to go fight in the War of 1812 instead (his father had rejected that idea). He then talks about how he found his apprenticeship at first useless as he was given all types of menial jobs, but he insisted on being properly trained and got his way. Fillmore also recalls a story about raffling a turkey and how after that, he never gambled again as well as some other ancedotes in the short portions the article quotes or mentions.

Nixon and Elvis

I was surfing around the National Archives homepage and found an online exhibit on the meeting between Richard Nixon and Elvis Presley. Nixon and Elvis met in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970. The exhibit includes Elvis' letter to the President (I found his handwriting very sloppy actually), information on the preparations, pictures from the meeting and Nixon's follow up letter to Elvis. It also has lots of downloads - you can set up your background to many of the photographs if you so desire (no, I didn't).

1852 Democratic National Convention

Since I posted a complete proceedings of a Republican National Convention, I found a Democratic National Convention to also post (again from Google Book). The 1852 Democratic National Convention resulted in the nomination of Franklin Pierce (and of course his eventual election to the Presidency). The convention was held in Baltimore from June 1-5, 1852. It took 49 ballots to agree on Pierce as the Democratic candidate. As you can see from the different votes, there were a lot of candidates and the numbers were all over the place. Enjoy!