July 2026 Newsletter

Message from the Director

Happy Birthday, America! You are big and complicated; you are many things to many people at home and around the world. The Declaration of Independence includes this lofty sentiment: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

In Jeffrey Rosen’s The Pursuit of Happiness (2024; Simon & Schuster), he describes a different definition of happiness than we typically have now. He discusses that Benjamin Franklin devised a list of 12 virtues that he pursued in his personal life and concluded that “without Virtue Man can have no Happiness in this World.” Rosen argues that for the Revolutionary generation “the pursuit of happiness” is the lifetime pursuit of self-improvement rather than doing whatever feels good. Benjamin Franklin established a subscription library, which became the model for today’s public libraries. Freedom of Speech is meaningless without Free Inquiry, which is the essential mission of public libraries. This is why public libraries are essential to being a citizen in a free society.

You can look at U.S. history through rose-colored glasses or through a glass darkly or try to dispense with those myths altogether and pursue as many resources as you can to get a greater understanding of who we are and how we got here. You can even use our resources to help write our next chapter. It is not our role to tell you what to think, it is our role to provide resources for you to draw your own conclusions.

Your public library is your conduit to research through catalogs from BCCLS through WorldCat that connect you to resources around the world. We have physical materials like books, DVD’s, magazines and Museum Passes and great online resources like Hoopla that provides access to the Great Courses (a wide variety of college level lecture series), and Kanopy. We also have great programming. Check out the calendar below.

David Cubie, Library Director