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.

3. Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum

AP/File
In this file photo, President Harry S. Truman holds up for the benefit of the throng that turned out to greet him at St. Louis' Union Station Nov. 4, 1948, a copy of the Chicago Tribune, published early election night with the headline 'Dewey Defeats Truman.' The President told the crowd:'That is one for the books!'

Website: www.trumanlibrary.org/

Location: Independence, Mo. (Truman's birthplace: Lamar, Mo., in 1884)

Opened: 1957

Attendance: approximately 70,000

Admission: $8 adults; $7 seniors

Bestselling gift shop biography: “Truman” by David McCullough

Hot-selling souvenir item: “The Buck Stops Here” desk sign

Lesser-known facts: Mr. Truman worked in his office at the library five days a week for almost 10 years after it opened in 1957.  He taught the early docents how to give tours of the exhibits. … Harry and Bess Truman, their daughter Margaret, and her husband are all buried in the courtyard.

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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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