Civil War battle rattle used on smaller ships to call all hands to battle stations.

A match safe, lantern, frying pan, and cup would have been part of a soldier’s equipment. Hardtack is the name given to a thick cracker made of flour, water, and sometimes salt.

The Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 allowed the two states to decide the issue of slavery by a popular ballot. The fight in Kansas was so intense that the state earned the nickname “Bleeding Kansas.” John Brown bought 2,000 of these revolvers and sent them to Kansas for the “Free-Soilers.”

In this lesson plan students will examine primary sources to determine the level of threat caused by the buildup of Soviet nuclear missiles and weapons sites in Cuba during the Cuban Missile Crisis and will analyze President Kennedy’s response.  This resource was produced to accompany the

This panel from the AIDS Memorial Quilt honors activist Roger Lyon, who died of AIDS in 1984. Shortly before his death, Lyon testified before Congress to appeal for funding to combat the growing epidemic. One of the greatest challenges in the fight against AIDS was changing public

"I want to talk for a few minutes with the people of the United States about banking." So began on March 12, 1933, the first of about thirty informal "Fireside Chat" addresses that President Franklin D. Roosevelt would deliver over the radio. His ability to communicate over this new medium direct

Aladdin Industries profited from the success of The Jetsons television cartoon series in the fall of 1963 by introducing a domed lunch box featuring that space-traveling suburban family and their robotic maid. American notions of family life in the 1960s traveled effortlessly outward to

America's worst accident at a civilian nuclear power plant occurred on March 28, 1979. This online exhibition provides information about the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, the course of the accident there and the steps-extending over almost 15 years-through which the nature and extent of

When the Depression and resulting banking crisis hit their community, the residents of the coastal town of Pismo Beach, California picked an unusual but logical medium of exchange. Perhaps with tongue in cheek, the merchants and officials of Pismo Beach decided to make the best of a bad situation

Students will learn how a "cold war" between the United States and the Soviet Union began after World War II in this section of the online exhibition The Price of Freedom: Americans at War. Americans led Western efforts to contain Communism. The Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlif