Wednesday, April 15, 2009

History Changers

“History is the only laboratory we have in which to test the consequences of thought.”- Etienne Gilson

At OnlineBestColleges.com I ran across an article, 25 Librarians Who Changed History. It’s not that a librarian changed history that I found so interesting, it’s the eclectic group of people who were librarians at one time or another.

For instance did you know Benjamin Franklin was a librarian? He and his philosophy group, Junto, organized the "Articles of Agreement," which set up The Library Company, the nation’s first library. He was their second librarian.

Mao Zedong was an assistant librarian at Peking University. The chief librarian at Peking University was a Marxist who succeeded in converting Mao to communism.

Before her distinguished political career, Golda Meir worked as a librarian.

J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, went to night school at George Washington University and supported himself by working at the Library of Congress as a messenger, cataloguer and clerk.

Spy, writer, diplomat and lover, Giacomo Casanova, worked as a librarian for the Count of Waldstein in Dux, Bohemia.

Visit OnLineBestColleges.com for more information on these people as well as the complete list, including John Buckley, Pope Pius XI and Lewis Carroll.

You may want to remember the names of your local librarians as you might see them on a future list of history changers.

Thanks for stopping by.


Tags: Gilson, famous librarians, Casanova, J. Edgar Hoover, Meir, Zedong, Benjamin Franklin, The Library Company,

2 comments:

Helen Ginger said...

That is so interesting! I had heard about a few of them being librarians, but not all. That would be interesting to go find out the rest of the list. (And I've never been a librarian, although I do love to snoop around libraries and book stores.)

Helen
http://straightfromhel.blogspot.com

Anonymous said...

Excellent and very interesting post, Jane. I learned some things here today.

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