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Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World

Exhibit on display at Booth Library January 12 - February 25, 2011

About the Exhibit

The American Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office, in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, is sponsoring the traveling exhibition, “Benjamin Franklin: In Search of a Better World.” This traveling exhibition is based upon a larger exhibition of the same name developed by the Benjamin Franklin Tercentenary, a nonprofit educational alliance in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The exhibit will give public audiences the opportunity to explore and to talk about Franklin's life, his contributions to the founding of this country, and his high standards for work, citizenship, and contribution to community. It will look at his background, his self-education, and his philosophical and religious beliefs and their effect on his work and life. It will show Franklin in the context of the eighteenth century and as a product of his times—a brilliant and rather unconventional product of his times—rather than as the venerable bespectacled and grandfatherly figure with whom we are all familiar.

The traveling panel exhibit consisting of six sections of colorful, freestanding photo-panels incorporating representations of artifacts from the original Franklin exhibition, and a new text written by the curator.