DC -- U.S. Capitol (interior) -- National Statuary Hall:
- Bruce Guthrie Photos Home Page: [Click here] to go to Bruce Guthrie Photos home page.
- Recognize anyone? If you recognize specific folks (or other stuff) and I haven't labeled them, please identify them for the world. Click the little pencil icon
underneath the file name (just above the picture). Spammers need not apply.
- Copyrights: All pictures were taken by amateur photographer Bruce Guthrie (me!) who retains copyright on them. Free for non-commercial use with attribution. See the [Creative Commons] definition of what this means. "Photos (c) Bruce Guthrie" is fine for attribution. (Commercial use folks including AI scrapers can of course contact me.) Feel free to use in publications and pages with attribution but you don't have permission to sell the photos themselves. A free copy of any printed publication using any photographs is requested. Descriptive text, if any, is from a mixture of sources, quite frequently from signs at the location or from official web sites; copyrights, if any, are retained by their original owners.
- Accessing as Spider: The system has identified your IP as being a spider.
IP Address: 18.226.177.223 -- Domain: Amazon Technologies
I love well-behaved spiders! They are, in fact, how most people find my site. Unfortunately, my network has a limited bandwidth and pictures take up bandwidth. Spiders ask for lots and lots of pages and chew up lots and lots of bandwidth which slows things down considerably for regular folk. To counter this, you'll see all the text on the page but the images are being suppressed. Also, some system options like merges are being blocked for you.
Note: Permission is NOT granted for spiders, robots, etc to use the site for AI-generation purposes. I'm sure you're thrilled by your ability to make revenue from my work but there's nothing in that for my human users or for me.
If you are in fact human, please email me at guthrie.bruce@gmail.com and I can check if your designation was made in error. Given your number of hits, that's unlikely but what the hell.
- Help? The Medium (Email) links are for screen viewing and emailing. You'll want bigger sizes for printing. [Click here for additional help]
|
[1]
 CAPNSH_150304_02.JPG
|
[2]
CAPNSH_150304_06.JPG
|
[3]
CAPNSH_150304_09.JPG
|
- Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
- CAPNSH_150304_02.JPG: Dr. Norman E. Borlaug Statue
The Basics
Artist: Benjamin Victor
Materials: Bronze
Year: 2014
Location: National Statuary Hall
This statue of Dr. Norman E. Borlaug was given to the National Statuary Hall Collection by Iowa in 2014.
Norman Ernest Borlaug was born on March 25, 1914, on a farm near Cresco, Iowa. An energetic and inquisitive youth, he completed high school—unusual in that place and time—and then worked his way through the University of Minnesota. He never forgot his arrival in Minneapolis–St. Paul in 1932 during the Great Depression, when hungry, desperate people begged for food and were near rioting; that memory and his 1935 experience in the Civilian Conservation Corps, where many of the people who worked under him were starving, would have a profound influence on his life’s work.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in forestry, he worked for the U.S. Forest Service in Massachusetts and Idaho and then returned to his alma mater, earning a master's degree in 1940 and a doctorate in plant pathology and genetics in 1942. He worked first as a microbiologist investigating fungicides and preservatives for the du Pont de Nemours Foundation and then as a geneticist and plant pathologist for the Cooperative Wheat Research and Production Program, a joint project of the Mexican government and the Rockefeller Foundation; in the latter position he developed mutation techniques that adapted crops to specific climate regions. His accomplishments led to dramatic increases in crop yields in Latin America, the Near and Middle East, Africa, and Asia. This also helped reduce deforestation, for growing more food no longer required creating more farmland. Dr. Borlaug was later made director of the International Wheat Improvement Program, in which he taught research and production methods to young scientists. He established the World Food Prize Global Youth Institute to give high school students the opportunity to learn about food security and fighting hunger. He traveled to many famine-stricken regions around the world, working with scientists and governments to bring the benefits of agricultural science to local farmers. In 1984 he became a Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, a position he held for the rest of his life.
Throughout his career, Borlaug was well served not only by his education and intelligence but also by the capacity for hard physical exertion that he had developed as an Iowa farm boy and displayed as a star wrestler in high school and college. Prolonged time in the field was a major part of his work; in fact, he was working in a wheat field outside Mexico City when he learned that he was to receive the Nobel Prize. Characteristically humble, he first believed that the announcement was a joke. When convinced that it was true, he decided to keep working and celebrate later.
Borlaug remained active and interested in the challenge of feeding the world’s increasing population throughout his life. For his achievements in this field, he became one of only three Americans (and seven people worldwide) awarded the Nobel Peace Prize (1970), the Presidential Medal of Freedom (1977), and the Congressional Gold Medal (2007). He was also recognized by humanitarian and professional organizations and by governments around the world, including honors from the United Nations, Canada, Mexico, Norway, Hungary, India, and Bangladesh as well as the United States. A wing of a science building at the University of Minnesota bears his name, as do a building at Texas A&M University and an Iowa City elementary school; the Dr. Norman E. Borlaug Hall of Laureates in Des Moines, Iowa, is the home of the World Food Prize, the organization Dr. Borlaug created to be the equivalent of a "Nobel Prize for food and agriculture." He was especially satisfied when the people of Ciudad Obregón in Sonora, Mexico, where he did some of his first experiments, named a street for him. He died at the age of 95 on September 12, 2009, at his home in Dallas, Texas.
The Statue
The seven-foot bronze statue of Dr. Borlaug depicts him at work in a field and is based on a photograph of him taken in 1964 near Ciudad Obregón as he checked the resistance of wheat plants to disease. He wears a narrow-brimmed hat for protection from the sun, a shirt with open collar and rolled sleeves, and work pants and boots. His gaze is focused in concentration; on his left arm he supports a clipboard and his right hand holds a pencil with which he records his observations. Stalks of wheat bend behind him in the breeze, growing from the earth of the self base on which he stands. The front of the Iowa limestone pedestal carries the main inscription:
IOWA
DR. NORMAN E. BORLAUG
1914 – 2009
[Bronze replicas of three medals]
FATHER OF THE GREEN REVOLUTION
On the proper right side of the pedestal is inscribed "THE MAN WHO SAVED A BILLION LIVES"; on the proper left are listed the medals shown on the front:
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE
PRESIDENTIAL MEDAL OF FREEDOM
CONGRESSIONAL GOLD MEDAL
The statue of Dr. Borlaug was unveiled in National Statuary Hall on March 25, 2014, the centennial of his birth. It replaces one of college president, United States Senator, and Secretary of the Interior James Harlan, which the state of Iowa donated to the National Statuary Hall Collection in 1910.
The Sculptor
Sculptor Benjamin Victor (1979– ), who works in Idaho, is also represented in the National Statuary Hall Collection by the bronze statues of Sarah Winnemucca, donated by the state of Nevada in 2005, and Chief Standing Bear, donated by the state of Nebraska in 2019.
The above was from https://www.aoc.gov/explore-capitol-campus/art/dr-norman-e-borlaug-statue
- CAPNSH_150304_06.JPG: Rosa Parks
- CAPNSH_150304_09.JPG: Alexander Hamilton Stephens
- AAA "Gem": AAA considers this location to be a "must see" point of interest. To see pictures of other areas that AAA considers to be Gems, click here.
- Bigger photos? To save server space, the full-sized versions of these images have either not been loaded to the server or have been removed from the server. (Only some pages are loaded with full-sized images and those usually get removed after three months.)
I still have them though. If you want me to email them to you, please send an email to guthrie.bruce@gmail.com
and I can email them to you, or, depending on the number of images, just repost the page again will the full-sized images.
- Connection Not Secure messages? Those warnings you get from your browser about this site not having secure connections worry some people. This means this site does not have SSL installed (the link is http:, not https:). That's bad if you're entering credit card numbers, passwords, or other personal information. But this site doesn't collect any personal information so SSL is not necessary. Life's good!
- Photo Contact: [Email Bruce Guthrie].
