Exhibition Rooms
Consigned To Darkness is more than shelves and shelves of books. These collection rooms bring objects together around the ideas, conflicts, and histories that connect them.
Each room below is a curated exhibition: a different window into the collection and a closer look at what happens when the stories of these books collide with power — and with each other.
Criminalized Expression
When identity, conscience, and expression collide with the law, communities can face persecution, lives can be destroyed, and sometimes the struggle transforms the law itself. These exhibitions explore people criminalized for who they are, prisoners punished for what they believe, and books whose right to exist had to be decided in court.
When People Were A Crime
The Cost of Conscience
When Books Were A Crime
Behind the Beaded Curtain
Few things are more intimate than sex—and few freedoms are more personal than the freedom to understand, discuss, express, and explore it. Sex can cross lines that matter when it violates the rights of others, but a free society cannot simply draw those lines anywhere its disgust, fear, or disapproval tell it to. Through literature, sexology, education, erotica, and pornography, the books in this room challenge who gets to draw those boundaries, where they are drawn, and ask a question at the heart of individual liberty: if power can govern what we know, say, read, and do in the most intimate corners of our lives, how free are we really?
Powerful Words, Dangerous Minds
Not every challenge to power leads to freedom, and not every powerful idea deserves admiration. To resist authoritarianism, we must preserve and confront not only the voices that opposed it, but also the words that helped build, justify, and sustain it. These objects reveal how ideas moved people, shaped movements, and changed history — sometimes for the better, but often for the worse.
What War Makes
We often measure war by what it destroys — infrastructure, communities, families, human lives. But war also creates. It makes soldiers and survivors, refugees and exiles, new borders, new histories, and new enemies, the wreckage of one conflict often giving rise to the next. These rooms examine war through those who fight it, those forced from home by it, and those who inherit the world it leaves behind.
As Only A Soldier Can
No Way Home
An Iron Curtain
The Force of Labor | The Labor of Force
Democracy promises ordinary people a voice in the forces that govern their lives, but it hasn't always kept that promise. In moments when wealth and industry hijacked public power to serve private interests and people felt forsaken by the democratic institutions meant to protect them, workers organized, marched, went on strike, boycotted, bled, and even died to take their power back. The books in this room explore that struggle at its best and its worst: the force created by ordinary workers demanding a fairer, freer society, and the forces of entrenched power determined to preserve their hold over it.
