"Is there room in Americans’ Thanksgiving celebrations for both thankfulness and mourning? That challenging question arose as my colleagues and I took a new look at encounters in the 1600s between English Pilgrims and the Wampanoag people in eastern Massachusetts. A showcase exhibition, titled

American women have always worked, but their work in the home is often unpaid and invisible. One way to see this work is through what women wore. This labor—cleaning, cooking, child rearing, and other care work—fused with notions of what it meant to be a woman and shaped Americans’ ideas ab

An Interactive Journey through Jewish History of Eastern Europe. The first exhibition, Beba Epstein: The Extraordinary Life of an Ordinary Girl uses interactive storytelling to contextualize hundreds of artifacts from the YIVO archives, taking the user on a journey of discovery. It is based on the l

Girlhood (It’s complicated) commemorates the anniversary of woman suffrage by exploring the concept of girlhood in the United States, but also how girls changed history in five areas: politics, education, work, health, and fashion. We argue that girlhood has an unexpected and complicated history a

“A former laundress who became a millionaire from her hair-care company, Madam C. J. Walker (1867–1919) was a leading philanthropist of the early 1900s. Because of her pioneering role in both business and philanthropy, she's featured in two museum exhibitions: American Enterprise and Giving in A

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

February 2017 marked the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, a document that President Roosevelt signed in 1942, two months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The order resulted in the imprisonment of 75,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and 45,000 Japanese nationals in prison ca

American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith traces the unfolding of America’s experiment with government “of, by, and for the people” and illustrates the fact that democracy involves civic engagement and participation. This exhibition and its 

February 2017 marked the 75th anniversary of Executive Order 9066, a document that President Roosevelt signed in 1942, two months after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. The order resulted in the imprisonment of 75,000 Americans of Japanese ancestry and 45,000 Japanese nationals in prison ca

The First World War remade the world geopolitically and transformed how societies engage and relate to military conflict. Artistic expression during the war contributed to this transformation. Before World War I, war art largely depicted heroic military leaders and romanticized battles,