Bill LeFurgy Biography

Baltimore, bird’s-eye view, 1869
Baltimore, bird’s-eye view, 1869. Source: Library of Congress.

Bill LeFurgy is an American historian and author who writes about the Gilded Age and Jazz Age, especially the Ziegfeld Follies, silent film actresses, and the photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston. He spent more than three decades as an archivist and historian, including years at the Library of Congress, and is the author of Ziegfeld Girls and the Birth of Hollywood Glamour and Louise Brooks: A Life in Pictures.

A career in archives and history

Bill started out at the Maryland Historical Society and then moved to the Baltimore City Archives, where he wrote guides to the city’s records and early government. He went on to the National Archives and Records Administration and spent the later part of his career at the Library of Congress, helping build the national program for preserving digital information.

What he’s researching now

Today Bill’s research centers on the entertainment world of the 1910s and 1920s. He is building a catalog of Alfred Cheney Johnston’s Ziegfeld and theatrical photographs, the portraits that defined the era’s image of glamour. From them he is reconstructing who the performers were and how celebrity and spectacle took shape on Broadway and beyond. That work feeds his essays on Salomania, burlesque, silent film, and the making of modern celebrity — as well as his historical mystery novels, including Into the Suffering City and Murder in the Haunted Chamber. Bill lives in Takoma Park, Maryland, with his wife and two cats.

Selected publications

Most items below link to a permanent DOI. A complete record is on ORCID.

Jazz Age and entertainment history

Primary-source editions

Complete, annotated transcriptions of period sources, each deposited with a permanent DOI.

Baltimore and archival history

  • The Records of a City: A Guide to the Baltimore City Archives. Baltimore City Records Management Office, 1984. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7655008
  • “Prudent Laws and Wise Regulations: Three Early Baltimore Mayor’s Messages, 1797–1799,” Maryland Historical Magazine 78, no. 4 (1983): 278–86.
  • Governing Baltimore: A Guide to the Records of the Mayor and City Council. Baltimore City Records Management Office, 1981. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7654977
  • “Baltimore’s Wards, 1797–1978: A Guide,” Maryland Historical Magazine 75, no. 2 (1980).

Digital preservation

Most of these were written at the Library of Congress.

  • Dozens of posts for The Signal, the Library of Congress digital preservation blog, 2011–2014.
  • “Library of Congress Strategies for Working with Geospatial Data: A Collaborative Engagement” (with Erin Engle and William Lazorchak). IASSIST, 2011. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3781625
  • “NDIIPP Partner Perspectives on Economic Sustainability,” Library Trends 57, no. 3 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.0.0044
  • “Digital Preservation and Copyright: An International Study,” International Journal of Digital Curation 3, no. 2 (2008). https://doi.org/10.2218/ijdc.v3i2.61
  • “Long Term Storage — 100 Years of Digital Data” (with Francine Berman, Robert Chadduck, Dan Atkins, and Tony Hey). Proceedings of the 2006 ACM/IEEE Conference on Supercomputing. https://doi.org/10.1145/1188455.1188531
  • “Building Preservation Partnerships: The Library of Congress National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program,” Library Trends 54, no. 1 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1353/lib.2006.0004
  • Preservation of State Government Digital Information: Issues and Opportunities. Library of Congress, 2005. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.20517150
  • “Levels of Service for Digital Repositories,” D-Lib Magazine 8, no. 5 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1045/may2002-lefurgy
  • Human Radiation Experiments: The Department of Energy Roadmap to the Story and the Records. U.S. Department of Energy, 1995. DOE/EH-0445.