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 ...

With daily bathing becoming more accepted by the 1880s, many attempted to develop innovative ways to heat bath water and to incorporate the portable bathtub within a room setting. The Mosely Folding ...

A desire to remove employees from Manhattan’s teeming humanity, particularly organized labor and “the machinations of the anarchists and socialists,” inspired William to purchase 400 acres across the ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

Three-dimensional images called holograms were first shown in the early 1960s and required laser light to reconstruct the image. Inventors quickly developed holograms that could be seen in regular ...

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 ...

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 ...

Most drawings focused on warrior deeds and exploits—attacking, killing, or counting coup on enemies—and on warriors’ injuries and death during battle with Indian and non-Indian adversaries. Many ...

Cookie Monster is a live-hand puppet originally performed by Frank Oz and currently performed by David Rudman. In a live-hand puppet, like Cookie Monster, one of the performer’s hands is in the puppet ...

Collections 100 Yuan, The Central Reserve Bank of China, China, 1943 ...