Associate Chief Joseph A. Banco Jr. is a highly decorated, 22-year-veteran of the U.S. Border Patrol. During his long and distinguished career, Mr. Banco served on our Nation’s southwestern, coastal, and northern borders as well as internationally.This uniform was worn during the late 1990s betwee

The monarch butterfly wings have morphed into a well-recognized symbol of the immigrant rights movement in less than a decade. Just as a monarch butterfly migrates across North America to find refuge (to from harsh weather), so do humans to find a better living situation. Popularized by Culture Stri

Many immigrants sought to preserve their cultural heritage while at the same time embracing their new identity as Americans. Manfred Anson did so in designing this Hanukkah lamp to mark the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. Anson, who escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager, later reunited wit

This Y2K advertisment was from Computer Associates, a system and application software company now owned by Broadcom of California. The front features a man standing before a very large chalk board pointing to an endlessly long scientific equation. Below the image it reads: “And Now, A Simple Expla

The TV dinner represented a change in the way Americans were thinking about food. Introduced in 1954 by Swanson & Sons, of Omaha, Nebraska, it offered women--more and more of whom were working outside the home but still assumed to be responsible for cooking--an alternative to time-consuming meal pre

This yellow, floral patterned tea length patterned dress was worn by Minnijean Brown during the Spingarn Award Ceremony in 1958. The Spingarn Medal is a gold medal that has been awarded annually since 1915 by the NAACP. According to the NAACP, the purpose is “to call the attention of the American

This exhibition is about Clotilde Arias, a Peruvian immigrant who came to New York City in 1923 at age twenty-two to study music. Decades later she translated the national anthem into the official Spanish version at the request of the U.S. government. Arias died in 1959 in Manhattan at age fifty-eig

Are the tactics used by suffragists to fight for political power still effective?  Suffrage and the passage of the 19th Amendment marked an important moment in the progression of women’s participation in our democracy and civic life. Yet it was an imperf

In the fictional universe of George Lucas' Star Wars films, robots called droids (short for android) come in many shapes and serve many purposes. Two droids-R2-D2 and C-3PO-have won enormous popularity for their supporting roles in all six of the series. In the collections of the museum are costu

In the fictional universe of George Lucas' Star Wars films, robots called droids (short for android) come in many shapes and serve many purposes. Two droids--R2-D2 and C-3PO--have won enormous popularity for their supporting roles in all six of the series. In the collections of the museum are cos