Bronze doors guard the National Archives, the vault of American democracy. Behind those bronze doors and within a controlled, nitrogen-purged environment, three documents are displayed in bulletproof, argon-filled titanium and glass cases: the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution of the United States, and the Bill of Rights.
The parchment is fragile beyond belief. The Declaration has faded dramatically since 1776 — its copperplate signatures were pressed onto poor-quality parchment, and early display in sunlight bleached many of the words. Today it is lowered each night into a special vault fifty feet below ground level.
The National Archives holds eleven billion pages of government records, over forty million photographs, and more than five million maps and charts. Somewhere in these stacks are the military service records of your grandfather or great-grandfather, the census records listing your family's address in 1920, and the naturalization papers of every immigrant who became an American citizen.
The Rotunda was designed by John Russell Pope, who also designed the Jefferson Memorial. The enormous murals on either side show the Founders presenting the Constitution and the Declaration. The figures are imagined — no contemporaneous painting of either signing ceremony survives.
Above the main entrance is an inscription: 'What Is Past Is Prologue.' It is a line from Shakespeare's The Tempest. It means: the events of the past determine the events of the future. That is precisely why archives exist.