Harry S. Truman Presidential Library

Harry Truman's library opened in 1957 in Independence, Missouri, the town he had lived in since boyhood and returned to after leaving Washington. It was the second presidential library built under the new federal system, and Truman took it seriously as a working institution. He kept a personal office in the building and came in most days, greeting visitors, answering students' questions, and guarding what he saw as the dignity of the office he had held.

The collections center on the crowded, consequential years of his presidency: the end of the Second World War and the decision to drop the atomic bomb, the founding of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan and the Truman Doctrine that shaped the early Cold War, the recognition of Israel, the desegregation of the armed forces, and the war in Korea. Few single terms reshaped American foreign policy so completely.

A reproduction of the Oval Office as it looked under Truman anchors the museum, and a famous mural by Thomas Hart Benton, painted while the former president watched, fills a wall of the lobby. Truman and his wife, Bess, are buried in the building's courtyard, keeping him close to the records of the presidency he never stopped defending.