‘Surrounded by Western Civilization’: The Overlooked Curators of Culture

A wall of used books inside Blue Plate Books in Winchester, Virginia, a tidy, clean, well-lit shop, with some soft piano music in the background. The bookstore has 20 or more hideaways and cubicles, created by shelves of books, most of them floor to ceiling, with the books themselves categorized by genre, alphabetized by author. Courtesy of Blue Plate Books

Despite America’s relative youth when compared to such countries as Great Britain, Italy, China, and Japan, repositories of the past abound in the United States.

Our major cities feature art and history museums, orchestras, ballets, statues of great men and women, monuments, and libraries. A visitor to our nation’s capital, for instance, might spend a week touring that city’s museums and outdoor exhibits—the different Smithsonian museums and galleries, the National Gallery of Art, the International Spy Museum, the Museum of the Bible, the Victims of Communism Museum, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, and more—and still barely cover only a fraction of the more than 70 museums and galleries that the city offers.