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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.

4. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library & Museum

Gordon Converse/The Christian Science Monitor/File
President Dwight D. Eisenhower waves to onlookers in this 1955 file photo

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

Website: www.eisenhower.archives.gov/

Location: Abilene, Kan. (Ike's birthplace: Denison, Texas, 1890)

Opened: 1962

Attendance: 163,554

Admission: $10 adults; $9 seniors

Bestselling gift shop biography:  “At Ease” by Dwight Eisenhower

Hot-selling souvenir items: Dog tags, boyhood home Christmas ornament, and the Presidential Passport that can be stamped at each of the presidential libraries.

Lesser-known facts: Five distinct buildings make up the 22-acre complex, including Ike’s boyhood home, museum, research library, visitors center, and Place of Meditation chapel – the president’s final resting place. … Plans for World War II museum were already under way prior to Eisenhower being elected president. The scope shifted after he was elected to the White House and chose his boyhood hometown as the location for his presidential library.

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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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