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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.

12. William J. Clinton Presidential Center

Ric Feld/AP
Lights reflect off a railroad bridge on the grounds of Bill Clinton's presidential library as the lighted center is reflected in a fountain Wednesday, Nov. 17, 2004, in Little, Rock, Ark., the night before the grand opening.

  • By Ross Atkin Staff writer

Website: www.clintonlibrary.gov/

Location: Little Rock, Ark. (Clinton's birthplace: Hope, Ark., 1946)

Opened: 2004

Attendance: 291,000

Admission: $7 adults; seniors $5

Bestselling gift shop biography: "My Life" by Bill Clinton

Interesting souvenir items: Bill's Favorite Cookies mix; "The Bill Collection: Selections from the Clinton Music Room" CD with the president's favorite tunes

Lesser-known facts: The striking design of the Clinton Presidential Center is inspired by and is meant to resemble in some way the six bridges that span the Arkansas River in Little Rock. The design earned it the highest award of the American Institute of Architecture in 2006. Environmentally it stands out, too, as the only federally maintained facility to achieve a platinum rating by the US Green Building Council. The carbon-neutral building uses 34 percent less energy than other buildings of its kind.

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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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