“Public Domain Day” is celebrated on first day of the year. Although copyright laws vary by country, in the United States, works registered or first published in 1928 enter the public domain, as are sound recordings from 1923.

Much fanfare has accompanied the arrival of the first versions of Mickey and Minnie Mouse, the iconic cartoon character seen in the animated short films “Steamboat Willie” and silent film ‘Plane Crazy” as they enter the public domain in the U.S. January 1, 2024.  Duke University notes that Walt Disney Company still retains the copyrights to later versions.

Beloved childhood favorites such as the Millions of Cats (oldest picture book in print), House at Pooh Corner (introducing the Tigger character; the original Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) was opened up to free use in 2022.) and Peter Pan or the Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up have also entered the public domain.  The class of 2024 represents both famous and obscure works that both evoke our earliest childhood memories and explore gripping social issues that remain significant today.

Examples are Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: A Biography (a groundbreaking novel known for its exploration of gender fluidity and sexuality), Coming of Age in Samoa: A Psychological Study of Primitive Youth for Western Civilisation by Margaret Mead (an influential work in anthropology which challenged Western perceptions of sexuality and influenced the nature vs. nurture debate that raged in the beginning of the 20th century and still rages today ), and Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (a pioneering exploration of gender identity and lesbian love). Also noteworthy is W.E.B. Du Bois’s Dark Princess which explores themes of racism and international politics, and D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover which was banned for obscenity in the United States, Canada, Australia, India and Japan. Fun Fact, the movie on Netflix is based on this novel (talk about relevance…).

The University of Pennsylvania maintains a digital catalog of U.S. copyright entries to verify if material is available for public use.  Popular places to find digitized items in the public domain  include repositories like HathiTrust.  Groundbreaking social issues are explored in these works from 1928, after revisiting them, you may feel that little has changed since 1928.