Harry S. Truman

Harry S. Truman (May 8, 1884 – December 26, 1972) was the 33rd President of the United States (1945–53), an American politician of the Democratic Party. He served as a United States Senator from Missouri (1935–45) and briefly as Vice President (1945) before he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945 upon the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was president during the final months of World War II, making the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Truman was elected in his own right in 1948. He presided over an uncertain domestic scene as America sought its path after the war, and tensions with the Soviet Union increased, marking the start of the Cold War.

Truman was born in Lamar, Missouri and spent most of his youth on his family's farm near Independence. In the last months of World War I, he served in combat in France as an artillery officer with his National Guard unit. After the war, he briefly owned a haberdashery in Kansas City, Missouri, and joined the Democratic Party and the political machine of Tom Pendergast. Truman was first elected to public office as a county official in 1926, and then as a U.S. Senator in 1935. He gained national prominence as chairman of the Truman Committee, formed in March 1941, which exposed waste, fraud, and corruption in Federal Government wartime contracts.

Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum

The Harry S. Truman Library and Museum is the presidential library and resting place of Harry S. Truman, the 33rd President of the United States (1945–1953), located on U.S. Highway 24 in Independence, Missouri. It was the first presidential library to be created under the provisions of the 1955 Presidential Libraries Act, and is one of thirteen presidential libraries administered by the National Archives and Records Administration.

History

Built on a hill overlooking the Kansas City skyline, on land donated by the City of Independence, the Truman Library was dedicated July 6, 1957, in a ceremony which included the Masonic Rites of Dedication and attendance by former President Herbert Hoover, Chief Justice Earl Warren, and former First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.

Here, President Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Medicare Act on July 30, 1965.

On December 11, 2006, Kofi Annan gave his final speech as Secretary-General of the United Nations at the library, where he encouraged the United States to return to the multilateralist policies of Truman.

Truman

Truman is a name of English origin that can be traced back to the Devon region of England. It may refer to:

People

Surname

See Truman (surname).

Given name

Robert H. Jackson

Robert Houghwout Jackson (February 13, 1892 – October 9, 1954) was United States Solicitor General (1938-1940), United States Attorney General (1940–1941) and an Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court (1941–1954). He is the only person in United States history to have held all three of those offices. He was also the chief United States prosecutor at the Nuremberg Trials. A "county-seat lawyer", he remains the last Supreme Court justice appointed who did not graduate from any law school (though Justice Stanley Reed who served from 1938 to 1957 was the last such justice to serve on the court), although he did attend Albany Law School in Albany, New York for one year. He is remembered for his famous advice that "any lawyer worth his salt will tell the suspect in no uncertain terms to make no statement to the police under any circumstances" and for his aphorism describing the Supreme Court, "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible only because we are final." Many lawyers revere Justice Jackson as one of the best writers on the court, and one of the most committed to due process protections from overreaching federal agencies.

Library

A library is a collection of sources of information and similar resources, made accessible to a defined community for reference or borrowing. It provides physical or digital access to material, and may be a physical building or room, or a virtual space, or both. A library's collection can include books, periodicals, newspapers, manuscripts, films, maps, prints, documents, microform, CDs, cassettes, videotapes, DVDs, Blu-ray Discs, e-books, audiobooks, databases, and other formats. Libraries range in size from a few shelves of books to several million items. In Latin and Greek, the idea of bookcase is represented by Bibliotheca and Bibliothēkē (Greek: βιβλιοθήκη): derivatives of these mean library in many modern languages, e.g. French bibliothèque.

The first libraries consisted of archives of the earliest form of writing—the clay tablets in cuneiform script discovered in Sumer, some dating back to 2600 BC. Private or personal libraries made up of written books appeared in classical Greece in the 5th century BC. In the 6th century, at the very close of the Classical period, the great libraries of the Mediterranean world remained those of Constantinople and Alexandria.