Well folks, I have an interesting topic for you this week. Public libraries.
There has been quite a bit of controversy here in my hometown recently about the role of the public libraries. Now I know what most of you are thinking. Who needs them? I can get everything I need right here on my phone or my laptop.
That may be true but think about it. Is it really everything you need?
I ran into this problem when I was teaching my college history courses. Students often said, “Why do I need to learn this? If someone asks me a question, I can just look it up on my phone.”
Ah, therein lies the problem.
First, who is feeding that information to your phone? Is it accurate? Is it the only answer? Should you take it at face value?
Second, what are you going to do with that info? Are you going to share it? Are you now the expert on that topic based solely on what some mysterious source has told you?
If you plan on sharing that info, what would you do if someone challenged you on the validity of what you say? God forbid, what happens if their phone gives them a different answer?
These are just a few examples of why libraries, like classrooms, are so important.
Libraries not only provide resources but also opportunities.
They should replace all the signs that say “Library” with ones that say, “Opportunity”.
Libraries allow people to learn at a local level, with local people and neighbors, in a friendly environment that could care less about your social background.
Libraries are open to all, free of charge, with the sole purpose of giving you the opportunity to learn.
Libraries have been a key part of our history since the days of our founding fathers.
Why? Thomas Jefferson said it best:
“An educated citizenry is a vital requisite for our survival as a free people.”
https://dp.la/exhibitions/history-us-public-libraries/beginnings
Brady, Hillary, and Franky Abbott. A History of US Public Libraries. Digital Public Library of America. September 2015. https://dp.la/exhibitions/history-us-public-libraries.
Before public libraries spread across the United States after the Revolutionary War, people were looking for outlets to access and discuss literature. During the Enlightenment, these came in the form of literary salons, which gained popularity in France and Italy. Salons were spaces for conversations about art, politics, and literature. They were particularly empowering for women, who had been barred from formal learning spaces and now had a place to exchange ideas, read and share their writing, and debate. Decades later, libraries offered a similar opportunity for women to enter the workforce and academia in new ways, too.
With the rise of non-religious texts and literacy rates in the 1700s, private book clubs among wealthy men evolved into subscription libraries. Subscription, or membership, libraries were funded by membership fees or donations, with collections accessible only to paying members. While today there are fewer than twenty membership libraries in existence in the US—many of which focus on special collections or rare material, rather than a varied book selection—from the late 1700s to the mid-1800s, they sprang up in cities across the country. The first of these libraries was formed in Philadelphia, under the direction of Benjamin Franklin, and would come to be known as the Library Company.
In pre-Revolutionary War America, books were hard to come by for anyone who was not wealthy or a member of the clergy. The expense and rarity of books meant that members of the middle or lower classes did not readily have access to reading material.
That changed in July 1731, when Founding Father Benjamin Franklin helped bring the membership library to the American colonies.
That’s right folks, Benjamin Franklin!
Franklin worked with the other members of what was called the Junto, a club of thinkers that gathered to discuss “queries on any point of Morals, Politics, or Natural Philosophy,” as Franklin described in his autobiography. Franklin and the other Junto members, primarily merchants, owned few books and were looking for a way to access more material for their weekly discussions.
Using money from the Junto members, alongside a forty-shilling investment from each of the library’s first fifty members, Library Company organizers started its first collection. By 1732, they had sent the library’s first book order to London. Though many of the library’s early books were about education or religion, the collection expanded to feature broader topics. Notably, a majority of the Library Company’s books were written in English. (At the time, most other private and university libraries had collections primarily in Latin.) Library members could access these books as they pleased, while non-members would need to provide collateral for their borrowed book.
In addition to membership libraries, Benjamin Franklin also played a role in the development of the first lending library. In 1790, Franklin donated a collection of books to a Massachusetts town that named itself after him. Though the town asked Franklin to donate a bell, he determined that “sense” was more important than “sound.” Franklin residents voted for those donated books to be freely available for town members, creating the nation’s first public library.
Public libraries began spreading in earnest in American towns and cities after the Civil War. These lending libraries are defined as board-governed and tax-funded instead of operated under a subscription model. Most importantly, they are open to all, do not charge for their services, and focus on serving the needs of the general public.
The first totally tax-supported library was established in Peterborough, New Hampshire, in 1833. While there were many other libraries that met new public-oriented milestones—like the Darby Free Library in Pennsylvania, which has been in continuous service since 1793—the first large public library was the Boston Public Library, founded in 1848. Boston Public Library opened in 1854 and all Massachusetts residents could borrow from its collection, which began with 16,000 volumes.
By 1920—less than 150 years after Benjamin Franklin first donated what would become a town’s first public library collection—there were more than 3,500 public libraries in the United States. This rapid expansion of the US public library can be traced back to another American man’s donation—steel magnate Andrew Carnegie. Carnegie’s funding had built about half of these 3,500 public libraries, earning him the nickname, the “Patron Saint of Libraries.”
Carnegie funded the building of 2,509 “Carnegie Libraries” worldwide between 1883 and 1929. Of those, 1,795 were in the United States: 1,687 public libraries and 108 academic. Others were built throughout Europe, South Africa, Barbados, Australia, and New Zealand. The last Carnegie Library grant in the US was issued in 1919.
So who was this Carnegie guy?
Steel magnate Andrew Carnegie became one of the wealthiest industrialists in America but gave much of his fortune away for the “improvement of mankind.” When asked about the best philanthropic gift he could give to a community, his answer was a free library.
Carnegie, who was born in Scotland and moved with his family to Pittsburgh at thirteen years old, grew up in poverty. A turning point for young Carnegie, which would help guide his work as a philanthropist years later, was spending Saturday afternoons at a local private library at the invitation of a wealthy Pittsburgh man.
Carnegie eventually became superintendent of the city’s division of the Pennsylvania Railroad but quit after seeing new opportunities in the iron industry after the Civil War. It proved a risk that paid off in a big way. Carnegie’s Keystone Bridge Company (which worked to replace wooden bridges with iron ones), his later Carnegie Steel Company, and investments in the United States Steel Corporation, made Carnegie a fortune as a steel tycoon. But some of his big business choices had dire consequences for working-class Americans—like the Homestead Strike and the Johnstown Flood—that tarnished his reputation and then fueled his desire to rehabilitate it through philanthropy.
In his autobiography, Carnegie remembered that, as a child, “I resolved, if wealth ever came to me, that it should be used to establish free libraries.” And he did, providing public libraries to communities across the country, all engraved, at his request, with an image of a rising sun and “Let there be light.”
In other words, “Let there be opportunity.”
Now folks, you didn’t think I would let you get away without a final dose of history, did you? For my die-hard followers, here you go:
https://www.history.com/news/8-impressive-ancient-libraries
1. The Library of Ashurbanipal
The world’s oldest known library was founded sometime in the 7th century B.C. for the “royal contemplation” of the Assyrian ruler Ashurbanipal. Located in Nineveh in modern-day Iraq, the site included a trove of some 30,000 cuneiform tablets organized according to subject matter. Most of its titles were archival documents, religious incantations and scholarly texts, but it also housed several works of literature including the 4,000-year-old “Epic of Gilgamesh.”
The book-loving Ashurbanipal compiled much of his library by looting works from Babylonia and the other territories he conquered. Archaeologists later stumbled upon its ruins in the mid-19th century, and the majority of its contents are now kept in the British Museum in London. Interestingly, even though Ashurbanipal acquired many of his tablets through plunder, he seems to have been particularly worried about theft. An inscription in one of the texts warns that if anyone steals its tablets, the gods will “cast him down” and “erase his name, his seed, in the land.”
2. The Library of Alexandria
Following Alexander the Great’s death in 323 B.C., control of Egypt fell to his former general Ptolemy I Soter, who sought to establish a center of learning in the city of Alexandria. The result was the Library of Alexandria, which eventually became the intellectual jewel of the ancient world.
Little is known about the site’s physical layout, but at its peak, it may have included over 500,000 papyrus scrolls containing works of literature and texts on history, law, mathematics and science. The library and its associated research institute attracted scholars from around the Mediterranean, many of whom lived on-site and drew government stipends while they conducted research and copied its contents. At different times, the likes of Strabo, Euclid and Archimedes were among the academics on site.
The great library’s demise is traditionally dated to 48 B.C. when it supposedly burned after Julius Caesar accidentally set fire to Alexandria’s harbor during a battle against the Egyptian ruler Ptolemy XIII. But while the blaze may have damaged the library, most historians now believe that it continued to exist in some form for several more centuries. Some scholars argue that it finally met its end in 270 A.D. during the reign of the Roman emperor Aurelian, while others believe that it came even later during the fourth century.
3. The Library of Pergamum
Constructed in the third century B.C. by members of the Attalid dynasty, the Library of Pergamum, located in what is now Turkey, was once home to a treasure trove of some 200,000 scrolls. It was housed in a temple complex devoted to Athena, the Greek goddess of wisdom, and is believed to have comprised four rooms—three for the library’s contents and another that served as a meeting space for banquets and academic conferences.
According to the ancient chronicler Pliny the Elder, the Library of Pergamum eventually became so famous that it was considered to be in “keen competition” with the Library of Alexandria. Both sites sought to amass the most complete collections of texts, and they developed rival schools of thought and criticism. There is even a legend that Egypt’s Ptolemaic dynasty halted shipments of papyrus to Pergamum in the hope of slowing its growth. As a result, the city may have later become a leading production center for parchment paper.
4. The Villa of the Papyri
While it wasn’t the largest library of antiquity, the so-called “Villa of the Papyri” is the only one whose collection has survived to the present day. Its roughly 1,800 scrolls were located in the Roman city of Herculaneum in a villa that was most likely built by Julius Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus.
When nearby Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 A.D., the library was buried—and exquisitely preserved—under a 90-foot layer of volcanic material. Its blackened, carbonized scrolls weren’t rediscovered until the 18th century, and modern researchers have since used everything from multispectral imaging to X-rays to try to read them. Much of the catalog has yet to be deciphered, but studies have already revealed that the library contains several texts by an Epicurean philosopher and poet named Philodemus.
5. The Libraries of Trajan’s Forum
Sometime around 112 A.D., Emperor Trajan completed construction on a sprawling, multi-use building complex in the heart of the city of Rome. This Forum boasted plazas, markets and religious temples, but it also included one of the Roman Empire’s most famous libraries. The site was technically two separate structures—one for works in Latin, and one for works in Greek.
The rooms sat on opposite sides of a portico that housed Trajan’s Column, a large monument built to honor the Emperor’s military successes. Both sections were elegantly crafted from concrete, marble and granite, and they included large central reading chambers and two levels of bookshelf-lined alcoves containing an estimated 20,000 scrolls. Historians are unsure of when Trajan’s dual library ceased to exist, but it was still being mentioned in writing as late as the fifth century A.D., which suggests that it stood for at least 300 years.
6. The Library of Celsus
There were over two-dozen major libraries in the city of Rome during the imperial era, but the capital wasn’t the only place that housed dazzling collections of literature. Sometime around 120 A.D., the son of the Roman consul Tiberius Julius Celsus Polemaeanus completed a memorial library to his father in the city of Ephesus (modern-day Turkey).
The building’s ornate façade still stands today and features a marble stairway and columns as well as four statues representing Wisdom, Virtue, Intelligence and Knowledge. Its interior, meanwhile, consisted of a rectangular chamber and a series of small niches containing bookcases. The library may have held some 12,000 scrolls, but it most striking feature was no doubt Celsus himself, who was buried inside in an ornamental sarcophagus.
7. The Imperial Library of Constantinople
Long after the Western Roman Empire had gone into decline, classical Greek and Roman thought continued to flourish in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. The city’s Imperial Library first came into existence in the fourth century A.D. under Constantine the Great, but it remained relatively small until the fifth century when its collection grew to a staggering 120,000 scrolls and codices.
The size of the Imperial Library continued to wax and wane for the next several centuries due to neglect and frequent fires, and it later suffered a devastating blow after a Crusader army sacked Constantinople in 1204. Nevertheless, its scribes and scholars are now credited with preserving countless pieces of ancient Greek and Roman literature by making parchment copies of deteriorating papyrus scrolls.
8. The House of Wisdom
The Iraqi city of Baghdad was once one of the world’s centers of learning and culture, and perhaps no institution was more integral to its development than the House of Wisdom. First established in the early ninth century A.D. during the reign of the Abbasids, the site was centered around an enormous library stocked with Persian, Indian and Greek manuscripts on mathematics, astronomy, science, medicine and philosophy.
The books served as a natural draw for the Middle East’s top scholars, who flocked to the House of Wisdom to study its texts and translate them into Arabic. Their ranks included the mathematician al-Khawarizmi, one of the fathers of algebra, as well as the polymath thinker al-Kindi, often called “the Philosopher of the Arabs.” The House of Wisdom stood as the Islamic world’s intellectual nerve center for several hundred years, but it later met a grisly end in 1258, when the Mongols sacked Baghdad. According to legend, so many books were tossed into the River Tigris that its waters turned black from ink.
So, there you have it folks. Libraries are key to our success as a nation.
Libraries have provided people with the opportunity to learn since the 7th century. Why would anyone even begin to think we could survive without them?