The complete Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress consists of approximately 20,000 documents.  Most of the items are from the 1850s through Lincoln's presidential years, 1860-1865.  Treasures include Lincoln's draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, his March 4, 1865 draft of his second inaugural address, and his August 23, 1864 memorandum expressing his expectation of being defeated for re-election in the upcoming presidential contest.  In its online presentation, the Abraham Lincoln Papers comprises approximately 61,000 and images and 10,000 transcriptions.  https://memory.loc.gov/ammem/alhtml/malhome.html

Ingenuous:  candid, frank, or open in character or quality; characterized by an inability to mask feelings, not devious.  Disingenuous: the dis- prefix establishes the negative; thus, not candid, not frank, not open in character or quality; insincere.  Note:  The meaning of disingenuous has been shifting about lately, as if people were unsure of its proper meaning.  Generally, it means "insincere" and often seems to be a synonym of cynical or calculating.  http://www.grammar.com/ingenuous-disingenuous-vocabulary

John Lithgow won two Tony Awards, four Emmys, and has had seven books for children on The New York Times best-seller list.  This brilliant actor/writer has some stories to tell!  In STORIES BY HEART he invokes memories of three generations of family history while tracing his own life as an actor and storyteller.  Mr. Lithgow tells of reading P.G. Wodehouse to his father when he was gravely ill--the same story his father had read to him 50 years before (a jazzy tour-de-force, he plays 9 characters!)  It rallied the old man's failing spirits and in the sound of his father's laughter, Mr. Lithgow discovered the healing power of storytelling--and so will audiences through this funny and touching performance.  http://www.lct.org/shows/john-lithgow-stories-by-heart/  Lithgow call Stories by Heart his "trunk show" as he goes around the county visiting towns and halls new to him.

Iowa fans' 'Wave' connects with Chicagoan, others at children's hospital by Shannon Ryan  The idea sprouted in May 2017 from Hawkeyes fan Krista Young, who sent a message to Levi Thompson, the administrator of a Facebook group called Hawkeye Heaven, asking if he could encourage fans to participate.  Thompson asked fans who had children in the hospital to send him photos of them looking down at the stadium from the window.  Over the next few months, he posted the photos with a message asking fans to wave to the kids after the first quarter.  "I had over 100 photos sent in," he said.  "I thought it had a pretty good chance to work.  I have more than 100,000 (Facebook) followers.  I saw how many people it was reaching.  It had over 2 million views from all the posts I made.  The first game happened, and the whole idea worked.  It was amazing."  During Iowa's football game against Penn State on Sept. 23, 2017, Amber Miles of Chicago took a rare moment away from her daughter and headed to the 12th-floor family area—now called the "press box"—that overlooks the Kinnick Stadium field.  She witnessed a new tradition at the end of the first quarter as fans at the 70,000-capacity stadium turn and wave to young patients and their families looking out the window.  http://www.chicagotribune.com/sports/college/ct-iowa-waving-fans-childrens-hospital-spt-1005-20171004-story.html

Babies begin to learn words and what they mean well before they begin talking, and researchers are beginning to understand how they do it.  "I think it's especially intriguing that we find evidence that for infants, even their early words aren't 'islands':  even with a very small vocabulary they seem to have a sense that some words and concepts are more 'similar' than others,” Dr. Elika Bergelson from Duke University, Durham, North Carolina told Reuters Health by email.  “While they still have a lot to learn before they show adult-like or even toddler-like levels of comprehension, this gives us a peek into how those early words and concepts are organized.”  True word learning requires making connections between speech and the world around us and learning how different words relate to each other.  Bergelson's team studied 6-month-old babies to see whether they recognized these connections, as opposed to merely recognizing words in isolation.  Using eye tracking, the researchers found that infants looked significantly more at pictures of named objects (“car,” for example) when the objects were paired with unrelated objects (like a picture of a car with a picture of juice) than when the objects were paired with related objects (like a picture of a car with a picture of a stroller).  Using home video recordings, the researchers also observed that the infants learned to recognize words better when they could see the objects as the words were being used (for example, when they were told, "here's your spoon," when the spoon was actually present).  “Treat your baby like a real conversational partner,” Bergelson  said.  “Even young infants are listening and learning about words and the world around them before they start talking themselves, and their caregivers make that possible.”  Dr. Dana Suskind from the University of Chicago, who has studied ways to help parents enrich infant language development but who wasn’t involved in this research, told Reuters Health by email, "From my standpoint, this work continues to reaffirm the critical importance of early and intentional parent language and interaction from day one and that learning doesn't start on the first day of school but the first day of life!  Will Boggs  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/babies-learn-what-words-mean-before-they-can-use-them/

Saving a Language--A rare book in MIT’s archives helps linguists revive a long-unused Native American language by Jeffrey Mifflin   In 1992, Jessie Little Doe Baird began having a series of puzzling visions.  A citizen of the Mashpee tribe of the Wampanoag Nation, she saw people who appeared to be her ancestors, speaking a language she couldn’t understand.  Then one day, she passed a Cape Cod road sign for the village of Sippewisset.  Seeing the traditional Wampanoag writing on it, she suddenly realized that her visions were about Wôpanâak, the language that her ancestors had spoken when they encountered the Pilgrims at Plimoth Plantation.  According to an old prophecy, Wôpanâak--which the Wampanoags consider a living and animate thing--was destined to go away and then come back.  Little more than two centuries after the Mayflower’s arrival, it was, indeed, disappearing; 1833 marks the last documented reference to Wôpanâak’s being spoken.  But the prophecy also promised that the language would return when it could be welcomed back.  And it predicted that the descendants of those who had broken the circle--the common language linking the Wampanoags to their ancestors--would have a hand in closing it again.  In her visions, Baird was asked to go see if the people wanted the language to return.  At her urging, the Mashpee and Aquinnah tribes launched the Wôpanâak Language Reclamation Project in 1993.   Read extensive article at https://www.technologyreview.com/s/409990/saving-a-language/

The first Thanksgiving wasn't in Plymouth, Mass. in 1621.  It was in Maine in 1607.  Or Texas in 1598.  Or Florida in 1565.  The best-documented account of the “real first Thanksgiving” is in historian Michael Gannon’s book “The Cross in the Sand.”  For most of the 16th century, the indigenous peoples of what is now Florida repelled at least six well-planned attempts at Spanish settlement on the peninsula.   By 1561, Spain’s King Phillip II vowed that his minions were not going to waste any more money or lives trying to colonize Florida, although he continued to claim it.  That decision lasted all of three years, until French Huguenots landed in a different area of Florida, near what is now Jacksonville, and received a very different welcome.  The Timucuan people actually helped the French build a fort, according to the National Park Service, which now maintains the site.  Phillip commissioned an experienced naval officer, Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, to settle the area and root out the French.  After hugging the coastline for a time and detouring briefly to fire on the French, Menéndez finally came ashore on Sept. 8, 1565, and established St. Augustine, which still exists.  A priest on the voyage, Father Francisco Lopez, described the scene:  “ . . . The general landed with many banners spread, to the sound of trumpets and salutes of artillery.  . . .  The general marched up to the cross, followed by all who accompanied him, and there they kneeled and embraced the cross.  A large number of Indians watched these proceedings and imitated all they saw done.”  A Catholic Mass was held immediately and songs of praise sung.  Another priest recounted that Menéndez “had the Indians fed and then dined himself.”  So this is the scene that Gannon claimed “was the first community act of religion and thanksgiving in the first permanent [European] settlement in the land.”  Gannon, who died in 2017, had been making this claim since 1965, but the story did not make waves until the 1980s, when an Associated Press reporter stumbled upon Gannon’s research and sent it out over the national wires.  According to journalist Melanie Kirkpatrick, Gannon was dogged by the news media and traditionalists for weeks.  Massachusetts residents called him “the Grinch who stole Thanksgiving.”  But there may, in fact, be more grinches.  As public radio station KUT in Austin has reported, in Texas there is not one but two “first Thanksgiving” claims.  One story has a Spanish explorer sharing a meal with the Mansos people in what is now El Paso in 1598. And a sign outside Canyon, Tex., claims that the Spanish explorer Coronado had a feast of Thanksgiving there in 1541.  An English settlement in Maine known as the Popham Colony held a “harvest feast and prayer meeting” with Abenaki people in 1607, according to the Library of Congress.  The settlement was abandoned the next year.  In spring 1610 at Jamestown, a ship filled with rations was met with a “thanksgiving prayer service” and celebration, the Library of Congress says.  And there’s yet another English contender, from 1619.  A handful of English colonists called the Berkeley Company settled the area east of what is now Richmond.  According to H. Graham Woodlief, president of the Virginia Thanksgiving Festival, King James I had decreed that on every anniversary of the group’s arrival, the company give prayers of thanksgiving.  The colonists did so for three years, until the settlement was destroyed.  Gillian Brockell  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/11/22/thanksgivings-hidden-past-plymouth-in-1621-wasnt-close-to-being-the-first-celebration/?utm_term=.405017e250c4

http://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 1803  November 24, 2017  On this date in 1642, Abel Tasman became the first European to discover the island Van Diemen's Land (later renamed Tasmania). On this date in 1859,  Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/November_24