You may have heard about the Great White Fleet of sixteen battleships, which President Theodore Roosevelt sent around the world in December of 1907 as a show of American naval strength. This was after Japan had defeated Russia in a Pacific war and just as the United States was preparing to complete the Panama Canal.

When the practice of the law in Atlanta failed to interest Wilson and did not seem to offer a clear route to the political world, he decided that a PhD from the Johns Hopkins University would open new doors. He had already succeeded in publishing his senior paper at Princeton on government and several articles during his time at Charlottesville. In the fall of 1883 he gave up on the law, parted from his fiance, and moved to Baltimore to pursue a degree in hopes of becoming a professor.

Here at the museum, we often meet people who are traveling the United States in order to see the many presidential sites around the country. That recently got me thinking that you really could do a good tour of the East Coast just by focusing on the life of Woodrow Wilson. Stretching from Atlanta to Middlebury, Connecticut, the homes of Woodrow Wilson could show the dramatic changes that happened in our country just by tracking the lifetime of one man who lived from before the Civil War to middle of the 1920s. He was born into a household where the work was done by enslaved people and he led the world to forge mechanisms for international peace and to outline the steps to start decolonization.