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The
Dream of Flight: A Library of Congress
Special Presentation Commemorating the
Centennial of Flight
From the Home Front and
the Front Lines: A Special Presentation of Original Materials and Oral
Histories From the Veteran's History Project
Of the more than 121 million items in the Library of Congress,
which are considered "treasures"? Of course Thomas Jefferson's
handwritten draft of the Declaration of Independence is a treasure,
not only because of its association with Jefferson but also because
of what it reveals about how one of the founding documents of
America was written and rewritten and finally agreed upon by
dozens of men in the midst of a political crisis.
But what about Jelly Roll Morton's early compositions? Or Maya
Lin's original drawing for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial? Or
one of the earliest known baseball cards? Or the first motion
picture deposited for copyright? The Library holds all these
and more.
Thomas Jefferson, whose personal library became
the core of the Library of Congress, arranged his books into three
types of knowledge, corresponding to Francis Bacon's three faculties
of the mind: Memory (History), Reason (Philosophy), and Imagination
(Fine Arts).
Although the Library organizes its immense
collections according to a system created at the end of the1800s,
the treasures in this exhibition have been placed in the same
categories that Jefferson would have used, had he been deciding
where to put Alexander Graham Bell's lab notebook or George Gershwin's
full orchestral score for Porgy and Bess. |