My family and I spent four days touring D.C. last week. I hadn’t been there since junior high school, ahem, 30 some odd years ago. And frankly, the only things I recall are eating every meal at Roy Rogers and a kid getting lost in the Smithsonian. Times have changed. I didn’t see one Roy Rogers restaurant. And although my daughter lost her lunch in the security line of the airport, we kept the family in tact for the entire trip.
I don’t have to tell you about the usual sites. You have to see The Mall – Capitol Building, Washington Monument, WWII memorial, Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian Museums, the White House. Enough said.
But there was one place which really knocked my socks off – the Library of Congress.
I don’t have to tell you about the usual sites. You have to see The Mall – Capitol Building, Washington Monument, WWII memorial, Lincoln Memorial, the Smithsonian Museums, the White House. Enough said.
But there was one place which really knocked my socks off – the Library of Congress.
The Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of Congress. It is also the largest library in the world, with millions of books, recordings, photographs, maps and manuscripts in 470 languages. In 1814, British troops burned the Capitol building and destroyed 3,000 of the volumes. The next January, Congress approved the purchase of Thomas Jefferson’s personal library of 6,487 books for $23,950. The doors first opened to the public in 1897.
For some reason, it wasn’t an easy decision, but I am glad they did it. Being able to view some of Jefferson’s original collections of books – from dictionaries and geography books, to the first bibles, to books on politics, in a variety of languages – was chilling.
To see documents titled, “The making of the Declaration of Independence,” or “the making of the Bill of Rights,” makes you feel very proud and patriotic. Letters to and from our forefathers, documents that helped form our country. It is amazing how much foresight these men (and women) had to preserve these documents and be sure we could learn from them years later.
And I haven’t even started on the magnificent art and architecture of the building and its rooms. We walked on the original marble floors. We viewed the friezes and sculptures and paintings which 50 American painters and sculptors created. There is a mosaic of Minerva, the goddess of wisdom waiting for you to climb the stairs of the Great Hall.
My point? Quite simply, if you go to our nation’s capital, please take some time to visit and tour the Library of Congress.
No comments:
Post a Comment