The Harold B. Lee Library's L. Tom Perry Special Collections at Brigham Young University is celebrating the bicentennial of the Lewis and Clark expedition and America's love of exploration with a new exhibition running from February to June 2005.
The exhibition, "Exploring the West: The Legacy of Lewis and Clark," opens Thursday, Feb. 3 with a special House of Learning Lecture at 2 p.m. in the library auditorium. Co-curator Jay Buckley will speak on "Why Lewis and Clark Mattered Then and Why They Matter Now." All are welcome to attend the lecture and exhibit opening.
As an effort to commemorate Lewis and Clark along with other explorers who broadened the understanding of our nation, the exhibition documents the exploration of the United States from the late 18th to the mid-19th centuries. It highlights the many maps, travel descriptions and documents that are held by Special Collections.
"The exhibition frames the accomplishments of Lewis and Clark and links their exploratory accomplishments to our own rich Utah heritage by examining the pioneering survey work of Howard Stansbury in the Salt Lake and Utah valleys," says Gordon Daines, co-curator in the Special Collections at BYU.
The exhibition will cover related events of the period, such as the Louisiana Purchase and Western trading and development. The explorers highlighted in the exhibition include Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Father Escalante, Zebulon Pike, Stephen Long, Charles Wilkes, John Fremont and Howard Stansbury.
"We are driven to understand the unknown," Daines explains. "This is one of the reasons why the experiences of early explorers such as Lewis and Clark still resonate with us. They entered an unknown wilderness and made it known. People all around us enter the unknown every day. Doctors seek cures for cancer. Historians seek to better understand the past. Astronauts explore outer space."
For information visit http://sc.lib.byu.edu or contact either Gordon Daines at (801) 422-5821, Gordon_Daines@byu.edu or contact Mike Hooper, communications manager of the Harold B. Lee Library at (801) 422-668, mike_hooper@byu.edu.
Writer: Michael Hooper
