Our mission is to empower people to create a just and compassionate future by exploring, preserving, and sharing the complexity of our past.

This oil-wick lamp was made by an unknown maker during the 19th century. The oil-wick lamp was first invented in Scotland in 1850 and remained in use until the 1920’s. The font contained a mix of fat ...

Nineteenth-century Plains Indian drawings have often been called “ledger” drawings because they were made with pencil, ink, and watercolor on pages of old ledger or account books. When young Plains ...

The laces made in Belgium during World War One are an important part of the lace holdings of the Division of Home and Community Life’s Textile Collection in the Smithsonian’s National Museum of ...

African Americans turned to the courts to help protect their constitutional rights. But the courts challenged earlier civil rights legislation and handed down a series of decisions that permitted ...

Wristwatches are relative newcomers among timekeepers. Although no one knows precisely when or where they first appeared, it is likely that the modern wristwatch dates from around 1880. About that ...

This steel cabinet, which Phyllis Diller calls her Gag File, has fortyeight file drawers containing more than 50,000 3-by-5-inch index cards, each bearing a typewritten joke or gag that Diller used in ...

This 6-oz. metal can that once held frozen orange juice concentrate represents the way many Americans got their morning glass of juice in the 1950s and ‘60s. It contained a frozen cylinder of ...

Company Name: Miller Rubber Co., Inc.Related Companies: Miller Rubber Co. ; Div. of B. F. Goodrich Co.

In January 1917, discouraged by President Wilson’s continued opposition to the suffrage amendment, Alice Paul, the leader of the National Woman’s Party (NWP) posted pickets at the White House ...

At 29, Earl Shaffer was a capable and experienced outdoorsman, with hunting, fishing, trapping, and exploring skills honed in his youth in rural York County, Pennsylvania. He developed these talents ...