James H. Billington

James Hadley Billington (June 1, 1929 – November 20, 2018) was an American academic and author. He taught history at Harvard and Princeton before spending 42 years leading two federal cultural institutions. As the 13th Librarian of Congress, he was nominated by President Ronald Reagan in 1987 and confirmed unanimously by the Senate, retiring on September 30, 2015.

Billington was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and attended public schools in the Philadelphia area. He was valedictorian at Lower Merion High School and again at Princeton University, where he graduated with highest honors and a bachelor’s degree in history in 1950 after writing a senior thesis on Nicholas Berdyaev. Three years later, he earned a doctorate in Russian history from Balliol College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar studying under philosopher Isaiah Berlin. After serving in the U.S. Army and the Office of National Estimates, he taught at Harvard from 1957 to 1962 and then at Princeton as a history professor from 1964 to 1974. From 1973 to 1987, he directed the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, founding the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and the Wilson Quarterly. He married Marjorie Anne Brennan, and they had four children—Susan, Anne, James Jr., and Thomas—and 12 grandchildren.

As Librarian of Congress, sworn in on September 14, 1987, Billington doubled the analog collections from 85.5 million items to over 160 million by 2014. He acquired Lafayette’s previously inaccessible papers from France’s Château de la Grange-Bléneau in 1996, becoming the only non-Frenchman on the castle’s governing board. In 2003, he secured the only copy of the 1507 Waldseemüller map, called “America’s birth certificate,” for permanent display in the Thomas Jefferson Building. He led a privately funded reconstruction of Thomas Jefferson’s original library, put on permanent display in 2008, and expanded the Jefferson Building’s public spaces into a national exhibition venue, hosting over 100 exhibits—many featuring materials new to U.S. audiences, including those on the Vatican Library, the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, the Civil War and Lincoln, African-American culture, religion and the founding of the republic, and the early American republic.