[Aztlan] LOC Online Exhiibition

[Greg Sandor]

http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/kislak/kislak-exhibit.html

To celebrate the donation of the Jay I. Kislak Collection, the Library of 
Congress presents The Cultures and History of the Americas, an exhibition 
featuring fifty highlights from the more than 4,000 rare books, maps, 
documents, paintings, prints, and artifacts that make up the Jay I. Kislak 
Collection at the Library of Congress. Like the collection itself, the 
exhibition focuses on the early Americas from the time of the indigenous 
people of Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean through the period of 
European contact, exploration, and settlement.
This exhibition explores several themes, including the pre-Columbian 
cultures of Central America and the Caribbean as revealed in sculpture, 
architecture, and language; encounters between Europeans and the indigenous 
peoples; the growth of European Florida; and piracy and trade in the 
American Atlantic.

The Library has created two electronic presentations for this exhibition 
that allow for interactive exploration of individual objects. Visitors can 
use the newly designed technology "Page by Page" to turn the leaves of a 
seventeenth-century book, The Buccaneers of America. A second station 
highlights the Tortuguero box, a seventh-century wooden artifact from the 
Mayan culture, and allows visitors to examine the box and decipher its 
ancient hieroglyphs.

This exhibition is a preview of the permanent Kislak space to open in the 
Northeast Galleries of the Thomas Jefferson Building.