Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library

Dwight Eisenhower's library is the heart of a sprawling campus in Abilene, Kansas, the railroad town where he grew up the son of modest, hardworking parents. The library building was dedicated in 1962, joining a museum, the boyhood family home preserved on its original site, and a domed chapel called the Place of Meditation where Eisenhower, his wife Mamie, and their first son are buried.

The collections span two careers in one man. As Supreme Allied Commander he directed the D-Day invasion and the defeat of Nazi Germany, and the library holds the records of that command alongside those of his two terms as president. His presidency brought the Interstate Highway System, the creation of NASA, the dispatch of troops to enforce school desegregation at Little Rock, and a Cold War run with conspicuous caution.

The museum frames Eisenhower as both warrior and peacemaker, the general who warned in his farewell address of the dangers of a permanent "military-industrial complex." The wide Kansas setting, far from any coast or capital, fits the image he cultivated of a plain Midwesterner who rose to command armies and then the nation.