James Hadley Billington

James Hadley Billington

James Hadley Billington (born June 1, 1929 in Bryn Mawr , Montgomery County , Pennsylvania , † November 20, 2018 in Washington, DC ) was the Director of the Library of Congress from 1987 to 2015 . He assumed the office on September 14, 1987, and was the 13th director since the Library of Congress was founded in 1800. On September 30, 2015, he retired at the age of 86.

Life

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

job

Billington was long a member of the Advisory Committee on Foreign Affairs and Theology Today and a member of the Committee on 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 the director of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars , the official national monument in Washington for the 28th American President. As director, he founded the Center's Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and seven other new programs, as well as Wilson Quarterly magazine .

Billington was an advocate of the American Memory National Digital Library Program (NDL), an electronic program that makes 8.5 million historical American terms and events from the collections of the Library of Congress and other research institutes accessible online. These unique materials, and the library's other Internet services such as THOMAS (a congressional data source), the online map catalog, exhibits, information from the US Copyright Office, and a website for children and families called America's Library, were viewed more than 2.6 billion times in 2017 alone.

Billington established the first national private sector advisory group, the James Madison Council, whose members support the NDRL program, many other wide-ranging library programs and acquisitions for the library's collections. In 2000, in the year of its 200th anniversary, Madison Council Chairman John Kluge made the largest donation in the history of the library: US $ 60 million to set up the John W. Kluge Center within the library for advanced scholars, and a Nobel Lifetime Achievement Prize in the social or social sciences.

Billington was the author of Mikhailovsky and Russian Populism (1956), The Icon and the Ax (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 Ax , Fire in the Minds of Men and The Face of Russia have been translated into several languages. Billington has accompanied ten Congress delegations to Russia and the former Soviet Union. In June 1988 he accompanied President Ronald Reagan to Moscow . He was 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 non-partisan initiative of the US Congress that has brought 6,265 young political leaders from Russia to America.

Billington has received 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 the Moscow State University for the Humanities (2001). In November 2002 he received an honorary doctorate from Oxford.

Billington was an elected member of the Russian Academy of Sciences and has received high-level awards in France , Italy , Germany , Brazil , Korea, and Kyrgyzstan . He served 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 .

Web links

Commons : James Hadley Billington  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography at the Library of Congress