Shave Head uses a two-level drawing shows a buffalo hunt with four wounded animals, and a separate hunt and the wounding of an elk. The Cheyenne warriors wear full headdress and four of the five also wear their mountain lion bow and quiver, symbolically powerful pieces of hunting gear.

  Our Founding Fragments video series gets up close and personal with historical treasures in the collection of the National Museum of American History. This is our fifth episode in the series, and in it our host Tory joins curator Dr. Margaret S

In this episode of the History Explorer Podcast, curator Rayna Green discusses what we can learn from seemingly simple line drawings about the lives and memories of Plains Indians who lived over 130 years ago.  The resources include a teacher guide and related image. 

This ambrotype portrait of Mea-to-sa-bi-tchi-a, or Smutty Bear, a Yankton Dakota, is among the first photographic images of Native Americans. Smutty Bear was part of a large Native American delegation that came to Washington, D.C., during the winter of 1857–58. Under duress, members of the dele

According to legend, this coat was made from the skin of a buffalo killed by Buffalo Bill, and presented by him to Captain J. B. Irvine, Twenty-second U.S. Infantry. Irvine then presented it to Second Lieutenant Albert C. Dalton, Company A, U.S. Infantry. In a life that was part le

Students will learn the details of the Spanish-American war including: the causes of the war; the influence of Yellow Journalism; the successes of a modernized American navy; the war in Cuba and the Philippines, the Philippine Insurrection and the new foreign policy of expansionism in this s

In the decades following the Civil War, the U.S. Army fought dozens of engagements with Indians in the West. This website explores Federal Indian policies and conflicts that arose as Americans flooded west into the Great Plains. Through the use of images and objects from the Museum's collections,

In this post, readers will investigate a few examples of drawings made by Plains Indians who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were held in captivity by the U.S. Army at places like Fort Marion in Florida.  Curator Rayna Green describes how these images depict