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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.

10. The Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation & Library

Barth Falkenberg/The Christian Science Monitor/File
Godfrey "Budge" Sperling, Jr. (center), Washington Bureau Chief of The Christian Science Monitor hosts President Ronald Reagan at a Monitor Breakfast held at the White House in 1985.

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

Website: www.reaganlibrary.gov/

Location: Simi Valley, Calif. (Reagan's birthplace: Tampico, Ill., 1911)

Opened: 1991

Attendance: 356,683 (more than 400,000 counting attendance at lectures and public programs)

Admission: 21 adults; $18 seniors

Bestselling biography: "An American Life" by Ronald Reagan

Hot-selling souvenir items: Leather-bound edition of the Reagan diaries; "There is no limit" and "It can be done" desk plaques.

Lesser-known fact: Because of President Reagan's fondness for jelly beans (he began eating them to stop smoking), the library sells a loft of Jelly Belly products. The company created blue (blueberry-flavored) jelly beans for his presidential inauguration so the White House would have red, white, and blue candies. ... When President Reagan first saw the Simi Valley land on which the library sits, he fell in love with the setting – the surrounding mountains, wide-open spaces, and horse trails.

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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.”

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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