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

Ventriloquist dummy Jerry Mahoney, created by Paul Winchell around 1938. This is the first of many "Jerrys" which the puppeteer used over the course of his decades-long career as a performer on stage ...

Ernest Beaux created the perfume “Soir de Paris” (“Evening in Paris”) for French perfumer Bourjois in 1928. Established in Paris in 1863 to manufacture make up and face powders, Bourjois has been ...

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 ...

Jack Kilby’s demonstration of the first working integrated circuit (IC) in 1958 revolutionized the field of microelectronics. Instead of using discrete transistors, resistors, and capacitors to form a ...

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 ...

Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation dramatically changed the meaning of the war by declaring that all persons held as slaves in states still in rebellion were "thenceforward, and forever free." ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...