The Georgian Collections in the Library of Congress

The Georgian Collections in the Library of Congress: Georgia has been represented in the collections of the Library of Congress since its inception. The library of Thomas Jefferson was purchased by Congress in 1815 after the destruction of the original collection during the War of 1812. Jefferson was keen on the sources of antiquity which were replete with mention of the land of Colchis, the home of the princess Medea and of the famed Golden fleece.
Contemporaneous with the creation and growth of the Library of Congress was the Russian conquest of the Caucasian peoples in the first half of the nineteenth century; this caused a rise in academic interest in the peoples of these lands. Scholarly works about them and of their literary and historical products were produced in a wide array of European languages. Many of these reside in the general collections of the Library of Congress. Materials published in the Georgian and related Kartvelian languages, however, were few until the creation of the Near East Section in 1945, which has custody of them. Read more at: http://www.loc.gov/rr/amed/nes/cty/cgs/cgsoverview.html