John Adams Unbound: A Traveling Exhibition to Libraries

FAIN: LS-50128-08

Nashville Public Library (Nashville, TN 37219)
Elizabeth Coleman (Project Director: April 2008 to September 2013)

"John Adams Unbound" is a traveling exhibition based upon a larger exhibition of the same name developed by the Boston Public Library. The exhibition uses the lens of John Adams's personal library of 3,500 volumes -- deposited in the Boston Public Library in 1894 -- to reveal and examine for a national audience how the intellectual content and the historical context of Adams's reading reflected, shaped, and informed his world and revolutionary views. The story told in the exhibition is that of a great man committed to a lifelong scholarly humanistic endeavor that profoundly influenced his beliefs and actions. The exhibition travels to 20 public and academic libraries; a planning seminar for librarians and related educational materials support the tour.