Official U.S. Senate photo by Dan Rios

This year our nation celebrates a significant milestone, and in celebrating America’s 250th birthday, we might wonder how the founding generation did it. What gave them the courage and wisdom necessary at that pivotal moment in our history? For at least part of that answer, I think we need to look only as far as the nearest bookshelf.

Those first Americans were courageous, and they were daring. They were also thinkers and readers. Abigail Adams drew from her extensive reading in letters to her husband, John, throughout the war. Benjamin Franklin is credited with founding the first lending library. And I don’t need to tell any reader of this publication of the vast personal libraries amassed by Founding Fathers like Thomas Jefferson, whose collection of books is the cornerstone of the Library of Congress. Our founders were familiar with the accumulated wisdom of the past, and the great ideas of both past and present.

Books — the written word — played a key role in the founding of our country. What did George Washington do before he received his commission to lead the Continental Army? He ordered military books. Henry Knox, a bookseller by trade, read anything he could find about military strategy and put that knowledge to use from the war’s early days to its finish at Yorktown. And we cannot underestimate the impact of writers like Thomas Paine and Phillis Wheatley on the patriot cause.

Then there is our founding document itself. In the Declaration of Independence, Jefferson brought together the contents of entire libraries, drawing from the greatest ideas in human history to put forward something entirely new in human history: a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

You might be considering how best to celebrate this milestone birthday for our country. Countless historic sites across the United States tell parts of our story, and this year calls for an especially grand Fourth of July celebration. But I would make another suggestion: a visit to the local library. There we can find the people and ideas that have made our country exceptional for these 250 years, and there we can draw inspiration to uphold our ideals for the next 250 years and beyond.

The Library of Congress is, as always, leading the way in telling that story. Through the Revolution Crossroads project, the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian Institution are using cutting-edge technology to discover yet-untold stories of the Revolution. The Library is also compiling an oral history of America today, and initiatives like “American Stories: A Reading Road Trip” celebrate the richness of American literature from every corner of our country.

My mom was the librarian at our high school in small-town Murdo, South Dakota, and she taught us the great power of books. The Founding Fathers knew this power, too, and at that pivotal moment in our history, they mobilized the knowledge they gained from books to great ends. For us, too, the next frontier may be just the flip of a page away.