Must see: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs at the Truman Museum

So it’s a time of reflection. Local and national media outlets are thick with year-in-review — and, this time, decade-in-review — lists. Mostly, such look-backs provoke a sense of “oh, yeah, that happened” before the feeling quickly passes.

A much greater emotional and intellectual challenge — an opportunity for hardcore reflection on the past 60 years — awaits those who venture out to the Truman Library and Museum to see Capture the Moment: The Pulitzer Prize Photographs. Be warned: It takes courage.

Many of these pictures are famous: Joe Rosenthal’s 1945 Associated Press image of soldiers raising the American flag at Iwo Jima; Robert H. Jackson’s Dallas Times Herald photo of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald; the horrifying moment on a Saigon street in 1968 when the Associated Press’ Edward T. Adams saw Gen. Nguyen Ngoc Loan hold a gun to the head of a flannel-shirt-wearing Vietcong prisoner and then squeeze the trigger, indelibly recording the facial expression of a man with a bullet ripping through his brain; Charles Porter’s firefighter carrying a toddler out of the bombed federal building in Oklahoma City.

Less famous pictures also bring back important memories.