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Presidential libraries: from Boston to Honolulu ... or maybe Chicago

Presidential libraries can be found coast to coast, and may even go beyond that once a site is selected for President Obama's future repository of documents and artifacts. To quickly hopscotch around to the 13 official presidential libraries and museums overseen by the National Archives, plus that of Abraham Lincoln, check out this library list.

2. Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and Museum

AP
President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivers an address in the White House in Washington April 28, 1935. For his 'fireside chats,' Roosevelt was actually seated in front of three microphones in a White House room with no fireplace.

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

Website: www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/

Location: Hyde Park, N.Y. (also FDR's birthplace in 1882)

Opened: 1941

Attendance: 90,000

Admission: $14 (includes the Home of Franklin D. Roosevelt National Historic Site)

Bestselling gift shop biography: "FDR" by Jean Edward Smith

Hot-selling souvenir item: reproduction FDR campaign buttons

Lesser-known facts: FDR is credited with establishing the first presidential library as a way of making sure important history found in mountains of records about his administration were not lost to the public, but kept for researchers and average citizens to learn from and enjoy. The library is the only one used by a president while in office. Roosevelt used the library's study during trips to Hyde Park while serving his third and fourth terms, delivering several of his radio broadcast "fireside chat" from that location. FDR first sketched a drawing of for the library in 1937, and later sketched plans for a wing that would house first lady Eleanor's materials. The library has 50,000 books about their lives.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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