Margaret Mead: Human Nature and the Power of Culture

To commemorate the 100th anniversary of Margaret Mead's birth, the Library of Congress presents a selection of materials from its extensive Mead collection, which came to the Library after her death. The corpus of notes and other field materials that Mead preserved are available to scholars interested in evaluating and building on her research. Totaling more than 500,000 items, the Margaret Mead Papers and South Pacific Ethnographic Archives is one of the largest collections for a single individual in the Library. The collection includes manuscripts, diaries, letters, field notes, drawings, prints, photographs, sound recordings, and film. For this exhibition, items have been selected from the collection to document major themes in Mead's life and work.