The Museum’s Textile Collection contains over four thousand patent models. The collection includes many examples of carding machines, spinning machines, knitting machines, rope making machines, looms, baskets, carpets, fabrics, and sewing machines. Even the simple clothespin is well represented

The advertising business shaped the relationship between producers and consumers. Starting with newspapers, advertising financed media in the U.S., ensuring that it all became commercialized. Advertisers defined the benefits of consumption for Americans, linking products to personal improvement,

How does American business affect you? How and why has it changed since the United States began? Come explore stories of business men and women who have changed the world. See hundreds of intriguing objects that illustrate transformations in society. Think about how Americans have mixed capitalis

People have long sought better ways to illustrate and understand the structure and functions of the human body. Paper dolls and wax, papier-mache, and plaster anatomical models have all been used as tools to teach human anatomy. In the wake of the launch of the Sputnik satellite, designer Marcel

One of two telephones used by Alexander Graham Bell in a demonstration that took place between Boston and Salem, Massachusetts on November 26, 1876. Critical features are the iron diaphragm (seen as a black circular disc mounted on the vertical wooden support), two electromagnets (seen in white,

Abraham Lincoln came to understand that to achieve a lasting peace, slavery must end. He had always opposed slavery, but had never sided with abolitionists who called for its immediate end. Lincoln had sought solutions that would make slavery gradually fade from white society—limit its location

Abraham Lincoln is typically portrayed as a gaunt, bearded man, both thoughtful and troubled. The story that goes along with this image is as familiar to Americans as any children’s fable. He was born in a log cabin. He became the 16th president. He freed the slaves and saved the Union. He was

This bus carried rural children to the Martinsburg, Indiana school in the 1940s. Busing enabled children to attend consolidated schools, which were larger than one-room schools and had better curricula, teachers, and facilities. All-steel school buses like this one were safer than earlier school

This teapot was made in England about 1766-1770, possibly by the Cockpit Hill Factory, Derby, England. Inscribed on one side of the teapot is “No Stamp Act” and on the other is “America, Liberty Restored,” both within flowerheads and stylized scrolling leaftips in black. The cover is pain

This robot was constructed in 1987 by Dr. Kenneth Kinzler and his colleagues at the Johns Hopkins Oncology Center's Molecular Genetics Lab run by Dr. Bert Vogelstein. It was used to conduct PCR in research on the p53 gene, which is linked to 50 percent of human cancers. Polymerase chain reaction,