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.

13. George W. Bush Presidential Library and Museum

Kim Johnson Flodin/AP
A woman walks throuogh the entrance to the archives at the George W. Bush Presidential Library, Monday, Jan. 14, 2013 on the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas. The moving-in process is underway at the George W. Bush Presidential Library, where some 40,000 artifacts from his time in the White House will be kept.

Website: www.georgewbushlibrary.smu.edu/

Location: Dallas, on the campus of Southern Methodist University (George W. Bush's birthplace: New Haven, Conn., 1946)

Scheduled opening: May 1, 2013.

Interesting facts: Trees from President Bush's Prairie Chapel Ranch in Crawford, Texas, have been used to landscape the 23-acre library site. The building, like the Clinton Presidential Center in Arkansas, is a state-of-the-art environmental facility. Its archive will include 200 million e-mails, the largest electronic records collection of any presidential library. Online, the library already offers 360-degree views of some of the many gifts and artifacts the president and first lady Laura Bush collected during their time in the White House. Among the featured objects is the bullhorn Mr. Bush used to speak to first responders amid the ground zero rubble shortly after 9/11.

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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.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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