BYU

Harold B. Lee Library

Exploring the West: The Legacy of Lewis and Clark

  • Time: 7:00 AM
  • Date: Feb 3, 2005 to Jun 1, 2005
  • Place: L. Tom Perry Special Collections


About the Event

Americans have always wondered about what’s around the next corner. We have an insatiable curiosity to understand and demarcate our known universe. We sent Lewis and Clark into an unknown expanse in 1803, we sent Neil Armstrong to walk on the moon in 1969 and today our president talks about sending men to Mars. In fact, you could say that exploration is one of our national hobbies.

The Harold B. Lee Library and L. Tom Perry Special Collections are celebrating the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition and America’s love of exploration with an exhibition commemorating the efforts of Lewis and Clark, as well as other explorers who broadened the understanding of our nation for their generations.

Exploring the West: The Legacy of Lewis and Clark documents the exploration of the United States from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. It highlights the many maps, travel descriptions and documents held by the L. Tom Perry Special Collections. In the exhibit, visitors will be able to stroll through the past and see the discovery of America take place.

The exhibition will feature the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as related events of the period, including the Louisiana Purchase, the fur trade, exploration of the Pacific Northwest, and the mapping of Utah. Among the explorers to be highlighted in the exhibition are Willliam Clark, Merriwether Lewis, Father Escalante, Zebulon Pike, Stephen Long, Charles Wilkes, John Fremont and Howard Stansbury.

Two House of Learning Lectures will be associated with this exhibit. More information on the lectures and their topics will be made available through the Special Collections website (http://lib.byu.edu/sites/sc). The exhibit will run from February through June 2005.

We invite faculty to submit proposals for future exhibits in Special Collections. We are especially eager to have faculty use our exhibitions as teaching aids in their curriculum. Please send your proposals to Scott Duvall, Assistant University Librarian for Special Collections at: scott_duvall@byu.edu