James H. Billington

James Hadley Billington ( born June 1, 1929 in Bryn Mawr, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania ) is the current Director of the Library of Congress. He assumed the office on 14 September 1987 and the 13th since the founding Director of the Library of Congress in 1800.

Life

Billington was educated at a private school in the region of Philadelphia. He held the farewell speeches at the Lower Merion High School and Princeton University. There he graduated in 1950 with honors. Three years later he earned his doctorate at Balliol College, Oxford, England. After serving in the United States Army, he taught 1957-1962 in Harvard history and taught 1964-1974 at Princeton, where he was a history professor.

Profession

Billington was a long time member of the Advisory Panel on Foreign Affairs and Theology Today and a member of the Board of Foreign Scholarships (1971-1976; Chairman: 1973-1975), which is responsible for the worldwide academic exchange under the Fulbright Program.

Between 1973 and 1987, Billington was director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, the official national memorial in Washington for the 28th American president. As director, he founded the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies at the Center and seven other new programs, as well as the Wilson Quarterly magazine.

Billington is supporter of the American Memory National Digital Library Program ( NDL), an electronic program that makes it accessible online 8.5 million American historical concepts and events from the collection of the Library of Congress and those of other research institutes. These unique materials and other Internet services of the library as THOMAS ( a Congress - data source), the online card catalog, exhibitions, information from the U.S. Office of Copyright and a website for children and family that calls itself America 's Library, were called last year alone, more than 2.6 billion times.

Billington taught the first national advisory group from the private sector, to support the James Madison Council, the members of the NDRL program, many other far-reaching programs of the library and acquisitions for the collections of the library. 2000, the year of the 200th anniversary, made the chairman of the Madison Council, John Kluge, the largest donation in the history of the library: 60 million U.S. dollars to set up within the library, the John W. Kluge Center, a place for advanced scholars, and a Nobel prize for lifetime achievement in social sciences or social sciences.

Billington is the author of Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (1956 ), The Icon and the Axe (1966 ), Fire in the Minds of Men ( 1980), Russia Transformed: Breakthrough to Hope, August 1991 ( 1992) and The Face of Russia ( 1998 ), the companion book to the three -part television series of the same name, which he wrote and set to music for the Public Broadcasting Service. The Icon and the Axe, Fire in the Minds of Men and The Face of Russia have been translated into several languages. Billington has accompanied ten congressional delegations to Russia and the former Soviet Union. In June 1988 he accompanied President Ronald Reagan to Moscow. He is the founder of the Open World Program and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Open World Leadership Center. The Open World Program is a nonpartisan initiative of the U.S. Congress, which has brought from Russia to America 6,265 young political leaders.

Billington has been awarded 33 honorary degrees, including the Woodrow Wilson Award from Princeton University (1992 ), the UCLA Medal ( 1999), and the Pushkin Medal from the International Association of the Teachers of Russian Language and Culture ( 2000). Most recently, he was honored with honorary doctorates from the University of Tbilisi in Georgia (1999) and Moscow State University for the Humanities ( 2001). In November 2002 he was awarded an honorary doctorate at Oxford.

Billington is an elected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and has received prestigious awards in France, Italy, Germany, Brazil, Korea and Kyrgyzstan. He is on the Board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and a member of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.