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Photographic Archive—Annapolis
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The Greenfield Library photographic archive houses over 5,000 photographs. The photographs in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. The Library’s mission is to organize and preserve these unique visual materials, and to provide access to this collection. </p>
To learn more about our photographic use policy or to obtain high resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Photographic Archive Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Photographic Archive Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Photographic Archive—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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Annapolis, MD
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photographicarchiveannapolis
Still Image
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20.5 x 25.5 cm.
Original Format
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Photograph
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SJC-P-1811
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John Spangler Kieffer and Colleagues Talk in the King William Room after Ford K. Brown's Lecture "Shakespeare and Chartres", August 16, 1972
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1 photographic print : b&w
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8/16/1972
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Fox, Cecil H.
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Kieffer, John Spangler
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Annapolis, MD
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Still Image
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jpeg
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St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph.
Deans
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
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Photographic Archive—Annapolis
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The Greenfield Library photographic archive houses over 5,000 photographs. The photographs in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. The Library’s mission is to organize and preserve these unique visual materials, and to provide access to this collection. </p>
To learn more about our photographic use policy or to obtain high resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Photographic Archive Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Photographic Archive Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Photographic Archive—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
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St. John's College
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
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Annapolis, MD
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photographicarchiveannapolis
Still Image
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Physical Dimensions
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25.5 x 20.5 cm.
Original Format
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Photograph
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SJC-P-1810
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John Spangler Kieffer Seated in the King William Room during Ford K. Brown's Lecture "Shakespeare and Chartres", August 16, 1972
Description
An account of the resource
1 photographic print : b&w
Date
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8/16/1972
Creator
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Fox, Cecil H.
Subject
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Kieffer, John Spangler
Coverage
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Annapolis, MD
Type
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Still Image
Format
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jpeg
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph.
Deans
-
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Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Photographic Archive—Annapolis
Description
An account of the resource
<p>The Greenfield Library photographic archive houses over 5,000 photographs. The photographs in the collection document the history, academic, and community life of St. John’s College. The Library’s mission is to organize and preserve these unique visual materials, and to provide access to this collection. </p>
To learn more about our photographic use policy or to obtain high resolution images, please see the <strong><a title="Photographic Archive Use Policy" href="http://www.sjc.edu/academic-programs/libraries/greenfield-library/policies/#photographicarchivepolicy" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">Library’s Photographic Archive Use Policy</a></strong>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="Photographic Archives" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=7">Items in the Photographic Archive—Annapolis Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Publisher
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St. John's College
Contributor
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St. John's College Greenfield Library
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
photographicarchiveannapolis
Still Image
A static visual representation. Examples include paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type Text to images of textual materials.
Physical Dimensions
The actual physical size of the original image
25.5 x 20.5 cm.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Photograph
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
SJC-P-1809
Title
A name given to the resource
John Spangler Kieffer Seated in the King William Room before Ford K. Brown's Lecture "Shakespeare and Chartres", August 16, 1972
Description
An account of the resource
1 photographic print : b&w
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
8/16/1972
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Fox, Cecil H.
Subject
The topic of the resource
Kieffer, John Spangler
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Type
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Still Image
Format
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jpeg
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
St. John's College owns the rights to this photograph.
Deans
-
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PDF Text
Text
�BULLETIN
OF
The Friends of St. John's College
ANNAPOLIS, MARYLAND
_ July) 1949
�Address DeHvered at the 15 7th Commencement
of St. John's CoHege on June 6th, 1949
By Mr. john S. Kieffer, the President of the College
Members of the Graduating Class, St. Johnnies old and new, and guests.
Volume I
June 1949
Number 3
Published Quarterly
Entered as second-class matter February 18, 1949 at the post office at
Annapolis, Maryland, under the act of August 24, 1912.
I stand here today grateful to the Seniors for their invitation to
deliver the Commencement address. It is a pleasure to speak the last
words you shall hear as students from the college, and to speak as a
representative of those who have been your teachers for four years. Your
departure is a loss to the college, a reminder that it exists in a world of
flow and change ; but it is also a gain to the college as you take your
places in society and represent St. John's to the outside world. Commencement is a time to look forward, not back. And so, with unspoken
remembrance of past toil, let us look to what lies before us.
The crisis of the world today spells out in capital letters the meaning
of the crisis we at St. John's recognized twelve years ago. Breakdown
of communication and loss of direction is no longer confined to the
academic community, it is plain to the man in the street. The colleges
and universities of the late nineteenth century rested secure in their faith
in Adam Smith. Britannia ruled , the ocean waves and Clerk Maxwell
ruled the ether waves. Scholars could be comfortably sure that, as under
laissez faire, tradesman, industrialist, laborer and farmer promoted the
world's economic health by pursuing each his individual gain, so the
domain of Truth was extended by each act of individual research. Today
this comfortable assurance is dispelled. Marx and Curie have let loose
forces to shatter that peaceful world. Originating in the library and the
laboratory, they have swept into the market place and the factory, and in
the process brought down the intellectual foundations of college and
university.
The shattering of a world does not mean necessarily the ending of a
' world. It means that the next generation will have to put it together
again. Building the world anew is an exciting task; you have work laid
out for you. The test of our, success with you will lie in whether you
are going forth from college to build a new world or to plunder the
ruins of the old.
·
I am not speaking inspirational generalities. The ruins are plain to
behold. The plunderers are at \~ark before our very eyes. They are those
who contend senselessly for the prestige of public office and shame the
great traditions of the Capitol with their self-seeking; they are those who
make a caricature of the heroic freedom of the continent builders by
cloaking monopolistic pillaging with the banner of free enterprise. There
is a side to American society today that reminds one of nothing so much
as the spectacle of the barbarians of late Roman times squatting in
imperial palaces and awkwardly strutting in shoddy purple. Our barbarians are more outwardly refined and often harder to recognize. Almost
at times they seem to be all of us. Let me list a few of the pillagers:
within the academic world there is the subsidizing athlete at one end of
�the scale, the cynical graduate student, working for his "union card" the
Ph.D. degree, at the other. Or perhaps these are victims of more clever
plunderers, the sports promoters and the educationalist racketeer. Outside there are the stock jobbers and suaver financial promoters, those
labor leaders who have turned the hopeful aspirations of their followers
into a source of profit and power for themselves, the salesman and
advertiser, the entertainer, who enriches himself by appealing to public
tastelessness. On every hand the work of patriotic plundering goes on,
feeding on the credulity and fears of an unwieldy populace.
I sketch this picture for no demagogic reasons. I am not summoning you to a crusade. As thoughtful, well-balanced men you know this
side of the world into which you are going and you abhor it. What I
would do today is to consider with you what your St. John's experience
has given you to help you live in this world and how in turn you can help
St. John's to live in it. I dwell on barbarism and ruin, not because that is
all there is, but because that is what challenges us all to building and
rebuilding according to the pattern laid up in heaven. St. John's was
chartered in our own heroic age to rebuild from the ruins of an earlier
war the republic of learning that had been King \Villiam's School. Its
charter affirms the principles of freedom of the individual and responsibility
to society that are the American heritage. It makes plain that through
liberal education these principles are kept in being. And it dedicates
St. John's forever to this purpose.
Because of this dedication you have had four years of freedom and
responsibility. You have practiced these principles in your studies and
in your community life. You have made mistakes; you have abused at
times your freedom and neglected your responsibility, but the fact that
you have been judged worthy of the degree proves that in greater measure
you have lived up to the principles. Living up to principles was the test
of the auxiliaries in Plato's Republic. Knowledge of principles was the
end to which the education of the guardians through dialectic was direct(ld.
Though I do not offer you to the world as ready made guardians, I do remind you that in idea and essence the work you have done for your degree
has been directed towards knowledge of the principles you have lived
up to. From the very beginning of your course with Homer's Iliad, the
nature and limitations of man's freedom have been a persistent theme, and
his responsibility to his fellows your constant study. Freedom and responsibility have been portrayed epically and tragically in the characters of
Achilles and Agamemnon, of Oedipus and Antigone. The ironic scrutiny
of Socrates has helped you disentangle their essential statement from the
bemazed opinions of the Sophists. The Hebraic and Christian scriptures
have raised them to the high level of theology, whence Augustine and
Thomas have drawn them down in systematic detail. The still unmet
challenge of the scientific revolution, reflected in Bacon, Hume, Kant
and Hegel, speaks to you today from the whirlwind of Marx and Curie.
Has your reading of the Great Books fitted you to descend into this cave
of the winds ?
\i\That hopeful signs can I point to, what prognostications make, that
will fulfill my duty as Commencement Orator and yet preserve my honesty
and intellectual integrity? I detect one hopeful sign. We hear less, as
time goes by, of "the economic interpretation of history." The notion
i
l'.
·~
prevalent at the time of my graduation from college twenty-two )'ears
ago, that politics was meaningless has faded away. Too many of you.
through service in the Armed Forces, have participated in the ultimate
politics of our times, not to have learned its awful meaning. The restoration of the supremacy of politics over economics restores to relevance the
freedom of the will. It restores the possibility that you may face the world
as rational men, that you and your society have choices open to you again.
There is good or evil to be chosen and tragic greatness to be attained. I
know this prediction of mine will be drowned out by the soothing voices
preaching adjustment and offering psychiatry to exercise the world's ills.
Do not listen! There is not a world to get adjusted to, but a free world
to build, if you have truly gained the freedom signified by your degree.
Words inevitably betray us into generalities. Am I not an unworldly
professor, naively ignorant of the realities you face, the need for a job or a
professional training, the desire to provide for your families or to start a
family? No, I am not. These are realities, but their reality lies in the
ultimate happiness or misery that will come from the choices you make.
Conditions and necessities will limit you and restrict your choices, but
will not govern you, if you are truly realistic. This is what I mean when
I affirm that the crisis of the world today has restored politics to its proper
dominance as the art of governing society. The assumptions of the
period between the wars that economic determinations governed still
linger on in the stereotyped expression "we live in an age of specialization,"
"it's a highly competitive world." Many people still govern themselves
according to these precepts. In hundreds of colleges students have chosen
chosen courses to fit themselves for a job with Standard Oil, General
Motors, the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. A substantial minority have fled this bleak prospect by taking refuge in the lost cause of culture and the arts. I suggest that both these groups are unrealistic. The
world you are fit to build and are going to build is a world of cooperation
not competition. All signs point that way; the world federation movement, the gropings of the national administration toward policies of naional assistance in housing, health, education and civil rights, the countless
cooperative endeavors of private groups, all point to the end of the era
of competition. You are equipped to find your place, to make your place
in this world that is gradually emerging from the ruins.
Your liberal education must be thrown into the balance as the issue
emerges whether the new world of cooperation is to be one of free and
responsible cooperation of rational men or one in which the cooperative
principle is exploited by the manipulation of a few. Those graduates
who have trained themselves towards a specific job have placed themselves in jeopardy of becoming efficient servitors of the machine, technicians who permit themselves to be used as means to an unexamined end.
This seems to be the avowed purpose of Soviet edus:ation. In our own
society the same end is being pursued unconsciously. I do not subscribe
to the view that a few wicked monopolists are deliberately constructing a
fascist society. I do believe that the great industrial system we have built
up is operated by people who see it as an end in itself, and this is the stage
setting for fascism. The science of statistics is today arregating to itself
the queenship of science. The clever men in the cave are trying to be
philosopher kings.
�j\
!!
11!
i
r
I
What can you who are going J,o,rth into this world do? First you
must not flee from it, no matter how much you might long to imitate the
tJ.ightingale. You must learn to kn0w it, to discern the builders from
the plunderers. You must find yourselves and which of the buildingtrades you belong to and then join ithat group to which you belong. It
tnay be that some of you are auxiliaries and ,,should properly be engaged
in restraining the plunderers, whether as , journalists, as teachers, as
Lawyers, as physicians or ..divines.' ·Some of you will be men of gold,
men who will seek understanding· and through Socratic examination make
clear to the rest of us the ends towards which we· are building. Each
bf you will keep this goal before himself, but some among you will make
it your whole lives. I wish I rnuld give you clear advice where to seek
the discipline for the career of guardian. . Certainly not in the graduate
schools. The only place I know is in that .''graduate s.chool" of the liberal
arts towards which Scott Buchanan pointed, but whic;h is yet to be built.
Some of you may help to build it. Finally all of you are artizans, men
of iron.and bronze,. doing your democratic p;i,rt in ·the work of society;
If we. ·are to build this new world· I· see rising, that work must be done}
with a•; full rational sense, that whatever job yo.u hold is a ·necessary part
of· the whole, and that you are doing what you are best fitted tci do in it'.
· · St. John's has not prepped you· for graduate school though many of
you will go to graduate schools and be prepared to do good work there,
nor has St. John's trained you for specialized jobs in industry. To many
people this means we are not a college. Often we are damned for doing
nothing but read and talk. Of cm.atse we do much more, but certainly
through having you read the Great Books we have drawn you from the
hurried, harried seizing of the moment; the Faustian ambiguity of the
modern world. By getting you to talk we have prepared you for life in
a human world, where you will talk and listen and be listened to. If you
have merely learned to talk to one another in a special jargon, we have
failed. The fact that your final orals are open to the public, symbolizes
the purpose that you are to talk to all your fellow men. Expect and learn to
be misunderstood, but patiently seek understanding. There is no immediate measure of your success, but the more fully you belong in the St.
John's :community, the more you will take the measure of the world's
cheap and obvious standards. For the cooperative building to which I
point you, you will often have to stand alone. You will stand alone the
more easily because St. John's will always be standing behind you.
\i\That can you do to help St. John's live in this world? For one
thing, you can continue to live in St. John's, by never abandoning the
Grea.1. Books. As long as you live in St. John's, St. John's will live in
you. But St. John's lives not as an idea only, but as a community on
this campus devoted to a common purpose. Your choices, of profession,
of causes to support, of lives to live will speak, well or ill, of St. John's
and will draw attention to our purpose. Your widening experience will
equip you to return and tell us ho we can do our job better.
:
I have a few more words to 'say. I have been talking to you about
the world you are going into and help build. St. John's College is also
going into that world. We have a job of building to do here and need
cooperation in doing it.
~
What is St. John's College? It is the progran1, we would all fay,
yet everyone of us would say in a different way what the program is.
~n one sense St. John's is a myth; not a falsehood, but a wholeness of an
~dea ~awards which we all strive, but never grasp in its wholeness. The
idea is the purpose to teach students to think, to give them through the
Great Books, the stretching of their imaginafons out from their immediate
and passiona.te responses to sensation to the greater world that men have
created or chscovered by reason.
~t. John's is a logos, a connecting of many elements. When we try
to brmg th~ pr~gram. int? daily. practice we are making a logos of
myth.
It is this which is so difficult, because connections are hard to
make.. Th~ faculty are often discouraged in their attempts and much of
our discu~s10n comes to deg~nerate into trivial dealings with the crooked
progress 111 day to day learrnng and teach'.ng. Yet the common purpose
expressed in the myth, holds us together.
. Last J anuar~ I. s_aid in a college forum that St. John's College was
bigger than any i.ndividual. This. I ~aid in a particular context. Today
I want to repeat it and to generalize it. In the cooperative endeavor that
':'e. are t?ere is ~oom for all individuals who accept our purpose, and parti~ipate m the bigness of St. John's.
St. John's is bigger than any individual, even than Scott Buchanan. He himself realized this and left St.
John's because there was forced on him the state of being St.John's, which,
if St. John's was to be, could not be. Buchanan's angelic utterances will
echo forever through these grounds. They will, if we are true to our
purpose, be responded to by other voices, in a great chorus of learning.
St. J ohn'.s College ~s bigger than any group - students, faculty,
board, alumm, commumty. St. John's invites all individuals and all
groups, who share our purpose, to join with us in the task of buildina
the college for the future. It invites anyone, whether student, tutor, board
member, alumnus, who cannot join in this task to leave and let us get on
with the work we have to do.
I would not encl on a negative note. I would like to raise before you
the colors of St. John's, black and orange, and learn from them what we
are. The black is _the dep~hs of. Plato's. cave, the orange, the rising sun .
seen through the chsappearmg nusts of ignorance. We are always in the
cave and are the cave. It i~ our essence as learners. Let us hope that
'!"e may some clay come out mto the clear golden sunlight of the Platonic
ideas.
a
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
The Bulletin
Contributor
An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource
St. John's College Greenfield Library
Description
An account of the resource
<em>The Bulletin</em> was published quarterly by St. John's College from 1932 to 1968. It was distributed to alumni, faculty, and staff. Some issues include Reports of the Presidents and Dean's Statements.<br /><br />The publication was continued by <a href="https://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/collections/show/12" title="The College (1969-1981)"><em>The College</em> (1969-1981)</a>.<br /><br />Click on <strong><a title="The Bulletin" href="http://digitalarchives.sjc.edu/items/browse?collection=37&sort_field=Dublin+Core%2CDate&sort_dir=d">Items in The Bulletin Collection</a></strong> to view and sort all items in the collection.
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Page numeration
Number of pages in the original item.
9 pages
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
paper
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
Bulletin, July 1949 Vol. I, #3 Commencement Address of John Kieffer, June 6th, 1949
Title
A name given to the resource
Bulletin of St. John's College, June 1949
Description
An account of the resource
Volume I, Number 3 of the Bulletin of St. John's College, Address Delivered at the 157th Commencement of St. John's College on June 6th, 1949 by Mr. John S. Kieffer, the President of the College. Published in June 1949.
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
1949-06-06
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
St. John's College
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
St. John's College
Coverage
The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant
Annapolis, MD
Rights
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St. John's College owns the rights to this publication.
Type
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text
Format
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pdf
Language
A language of the resource
English
Subject
The topic of the resource
Kieffer, John Spangler
Presidents
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