MJM page included in Sept. 11 exhibition
Opening Saturday and running through Oct. 26 in the Thomas Jefferson building, the exhibition includes:
the front pages of several hundred newspapers collected from cities across the country on Sept. 11-12;
photos documenting the devastation;
audio interviews conducted with citizens from across the country, including New York, Pennsylvania and Washington, D.C.;
propaganda pamphlets and newspapers gathered by the library’s field offices in Delhi, Cairo, Jakarta and Islamabad, which offer the other side of the “War on Terrorism”;
and aerial photography and mapping, which documents ground zero and the destruction at the Pentagon.
“There’s not going to be tons of text in the exhibition. Some of the material might even be hard in terms of content,” said Diane Kresh, the library’s director for public service collections. “The point is, as a library we collect all points of view from all media, from all over the world. It’s overpowering, and I’m glad the events are fully and accurately documented.”
Also on display will be archived Web site selections documenting the tragedy and the following months. “We’ll have everything from the (American) Red Cross asking for blood on Sept. 11 and the days after to a whole collection of URLs,” said Kresh. “We’ll have a whole range of material that captured that time … We’ll even have illustrations and children’s drawings.”
A series of free public programs dubbed “Summon the Heroes” is set to accompany the exhibition. It includes concerts by such notable performers as Tom Paxton and Suzanne Vega, as well as discussions by cultural historians, photographers, artists and illustrators about the impact of Sept. 11 on their lives and work.
For more information on the exhibition or the subsequent events, call the library at (202) 707-4604 or log on to www.loc.gov.
Staff writer Christian Czerwinski can be reached at (703) 878-8074.