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World History A desire to honor our veterans and to collect their stories and
experiences while they are still among us motivated the U.S. Congress
to create the Veterans History Project. Visit to learn how you can
participate. Responding in a timely fashion to current events, the Geography
and Map Division presents up-to-date maps that locate areas relating
to situations covered by news organizations. Eight Women Who Came to the Front: The Library of Congress international gallery starts with "Beginnings,"
an exploration of how world cultures have dealt with the creation
of the universe and explained the heavens and the earth. The exhibition Scrolls From the Dead Sea: The Ancient Library of
Qumran and Modern Scholarship brings before the American people
a selection from the scrolls which have been the subject of intense
public interest. Over the years questions have been raised about
the scrolls' authenticity, about the people who hid them away during
the period in which they lived, about the secrets the scrolls might
reveal, and about the intentions of the scrolls' custodians in restricting
access. The Library's exhibition describes the historical context
of the scrolls and the Qumran community from whence they may have
originated; it also relates the story of their discovery 2,000 years
later. In addition, the exhibition encourages a better understanding
of the challenges and complexities connected with scroll research. Timbuktu, Mali, is the legendary city founded as a commercial center
in West Africa nine hundred years ago. Dating from the 16th to the
18th centuries, the ancient manuscripts presented in this exhibition
cover every aspect of human endeavor and are indicative of the high
level of civilization attained by West Africans during the Middle
Ages. This exhibition examines the life and career of Winston Spencer
Churchill and emphasizes his lifelong links with the United States--the
nation he called "the great Republic." The exhibition
comes nearly forty years after the death of Winston Churchill and
sixty years after the D-Day allied invasion of Nazi-occupied France
during World War II. It commemorates both of these events. Throughout French history the powerful have sought to harness culture
to their own ends. They understood that the representation of power--what
today we call "image"--is a form of power itself. They
patronized artists, artisans, and intellectuals who produced works
that proclaimed the legitimacy of their rule, reinforced their authority,
and enhanced their prestige. At times, they stifled creative impulses
incompatible with their ambition. The relationship between power--or
politics--and culture in French history is thus an ambivalent one,
defined as much by conflict and censorship as by cooperation and
patronage. It represents a new Russia, willing and anxious under its first
democratically elected president, Boris Yeltsin, to affirm the core
democratic value of open access to information. Shortly after defeating
the attempted coup of August 1991, a group from the victorious democratic
resistance led by the chief archivist of Russia, Rudolph Pikhoia,
took over the previously top secret archives of the Central Committee
of the Communist Party and began the process of both consolidating
democratic control over all archives in Russia and attempting to
make them available for the first time for public study.
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