The Hero Was A Big Man; The

By Reading We Discover Our World, Our History, And Ourselves.

In The Twentieth Century Our Highest Praise Is To Call The Bible 'the World's Best Seller.' And It Has Come To Be More And More Difficult To Say Whether We Think It Is A Best Seller Because It Is Great, Or Vice Versa.

Beware Of Charisma . . . Representative Men; Was Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1850 Phrase For The Great Men In A Democracy . . . Is There Some Common Quality Among These Representative Men Who Have Been Most Successful As Our Leaders? I Call It The Need To Be Authentic-or, As Our Dictionaries Tell Us, Conforming To Fact And Therefore Worthy Of Trust, Reliance Or Belief. While The Charismatic Has An Uncanny Outside Source Of Strength, The Authentic Is Strong Because He Is What He Seems To Be.

Our American Past Always Speaks To Us With Two Voices: The Voice Of The Past, And The Voice Of The Present. We Are Always Asking Two Quite Different Questions. Historians Reading The Words Of John Winthrop Usually Ask, What Did They Mean To Him? Citizens Ask, What Do They Mean To Us? Historians Are Trained To Seek The Original Meaning; All Of Us Want To Know The Present Meaning.

[the Library Of Congress] Is A Multimedia Encyclopedia. These Are The Tentacles Of A Nation. [referring To The Diverse Holdings Of The Library, Including Motion Pictures, Photographs, Recordings, Posters And Other Historic Objects Which Collectively Far Outnumber The Books]