The University’s Main Library is holding an exhibition in honor of the United States’ 250th anniversary.  The exhibit, which is available to the public from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m., opened on July 28 and will be on display until Aug. 28.

The exhibit consists of three parts and is divided into historical themes, which are located throughout the library. Displays can be found between the ground floor lobby before the east entrance and Room 220 on the second floor.

The Main Library’s chief communications officer, Heather Murphy, provided insight into the exhibition. 

“In recognition of the America 250 anniversary, the exhibit explores how government documents have recorded, shaped and preserved American democracy over the past 250 years,” Murphy said. “It highlights how government records have established democratic institutions, expanded rights, documented challenges to participation, supported civic engagement and preserved the documentary record for future generations.”

Sanga Sung, an assistant professor and government information librarian at the Main Library, pieced together the presentation using historical artifacts and documents that have national significance. The artifacts range from the recorded hearings of the 93rd Congress regarding the Watergate Scandal to personal letters of former President Andrew Jackson celebrating the success of the Indian Removal Act. 

When setting up the exhibit, Sung said she wanted to present different themes and aspects of American democracy.

“It’s (about) going back to the fundamental library functions in literacy and information literacy,” Sung said. “To think about who created this information, why and how, things like that to help our visitors and patrons and student population to think about information critically … that was the main goal of this exhibit.” 

The glass enclosures showcase federal documents that pertain records of the United States population in 1910, a 1920 New York Tribune article that reported on women voting three months after the 19th Amendment was added into the U.S. Constitution and former President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 address to the nation on civil rights. 

The State of Illinois is represented in an exhibit in front of room 220, with historical archives like the state’s 1818 Constitutional Convention and the revised state constitution created in 1970. 

The exhibit in room 220, titled “Preserving Democracy,” has special consideration to the noticeable absence of records in the U.S. government. The section displayed printouts of webpages with error messages where public information should be accessible, including the Health Resources & Services Administration’s missing page on monkeypox and the National Park Service’s error result on a page that once had a 2016 study of historic places across the U.S. tied to LGBTQ+ history. 

The erasures coincide with recent removals of publicly accessible information after President Donald Trump’s executive order in March 2025 called for the removal of “anti-American ideology” at the Smithsonian Institution and for the U.S. Department of the Interior to change to locations that perpetuated “a false revision of history.”

The United States government also removed scientific data on climate change, studies which showed that undocumented immigrants commit less crime than American citizens and several sections of Article 1 in the U.S. Constitution. 

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