Goodrich Seminar Room

In the Goodrich Seminar Room in the Lilly Library at Wabash College, Crawfordsville, Indiana the limestone walls are engraved with the names of the political and legal documents and authors which Pierre Goodrich, the founder of Liberty Fund, believed had most contributed to our understanding of what it means to be free and responsible individuals. At the center of the large room is a circular table around which the seminar participants sit and discuss these ideas. The room was an attempt to demonstate through space and time the inter-relationships that exist between individuals and the ideas they hold, based upon the innovative design of the central circular discussion table and the arrangement of the names engraved on the walls of the seminar room.

An early effort to depict this relationship electronically was the Virtual Tour of the Goodrich Seminar Room. The OLL continues this experiment here. Links in the essay itself are to the Library so that readers can read for themselves the texts under discussion. Links in the box in the top right hand corner are to other essays about the individuals and documents whose names are engraved on the Seminaro Room walls.

The tables below roughly approximate the layout of the names on the walls. The links take you to additional infomation about the authors and to works by them in the Online Library of Liberty.

The symbol in the middle of the East Wall is the cuneiform script "amagi" which is believed to be the first written expression of the word "liberty." It appears in a reform of a legal code by the Sumerian Urukagina in around 2350 BC.

EAST WALL

			2000	1000
Ur-Nammu Code	Hammurabi Code
Urukagina	Rigveda
Gilgamesh	Moses
	Mahabharata

 

SOUTH WALL

900	800	700	600	500	400	300	200	100	BC
Psalms	Homer	Upanishads	Zarathushstra	Job	Sophocles	Euclid	Bhagavadgita	Cicero	Virgil
Shih Ching		Hesiod	Thales	Lao Tzu	Thucydides	Aristotle	Archimedes
		Amos	Jeremiah	Buddha	Socrates	Mencius
		Hosea		Confucius	Hippocrates	Plato
		Micah			Mo Tzu
		Isaiah			Aeschylus

 

WEST WALL

	AD 100	200	300	400	500	600	700	800
	Jesus Christ	Gaius	Origen	Ambrose	Kalidasa	Boethius	Mohammed	Beowulf
	Matthew	Galen	Plotinus	Augustine	Benedict	Roman Chant		Bede
	Mark	Plutarch
	Luke	Epictetus
	John	Tacitus
	Paul

 

NORTH WALL

900	1000	1100	1200	1300	1400	1500	1600	1700
Rhazes	Avicenna	Anselm	Averroes	Magna Carta	Petrarch	Savonarola	Calvin	Locke	Blackstone
	Burnt Njal	Al Ghazali	Maimonides	Thomas Aquinas	Wycliffe	Copernicus	Erasmus	Coke	Adam Smith
			Francis of Assisi	Dante	Chaucer		Galileo	Milton	Kant
			Heimskringla		Groote		Luther	Newton	Hume
					Huss		Reformation Chorale	Shakespeare	Burke
							Melanchthon	Grotius	Goethe
							Robinson		Declaration of Independence
							Zwingli