In the early 1960s, the Chicago firm of Playskool introduced this educational toy for children three to six years old, seeking to give them an early familiarity with numbers. It has two rows of relatively large rotating wooden rectangular blocks, each with a row of square rotating wooden blocks belo

During the late 1950s and 1960s, American scientists and educators proposed using machines for instruction. Teaching machines and related programmed textbooks used a careful sequence of questions for teaching. Jerome C. Meyer and later William R. Hafel, both of Sunnydale, California, believed that i

Introduced in mid-1976, the Little Professor is a non-printing electronic calculator modified to present simple arithmetic problems. A correct answer prompts another problem on the eight-digit display. An error delivers the message, "EEE." The colorful keyboard shows a professor with whiskers and gl

"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

"Although women's empowerment can have a revolutionary effect on society, it doesn't always look like a revolution. Today, organizations like UN Women work to empower women in rural areas through economic programs that help them “claim their rights to land, leadership, opportunities, and choices�

"The National Museum of American History has over 2 million items in its collections, spanning every topic you could think of. And from wooden crosses to baseball uniforms to costume butterfly wings, our collections show that Latinx people have been an important part of U.S. history since the nation

"One hundred years ago Marie Curie stood among the rose bushes, the press, and a crowd of White House guests, holding a golden key. The key opened a box that contained a gram of radium. Could it also unlock a cure to cancer? Women across America were led to believe as much, rising to the call sent

This Learning Lab collection explores the life of Anna Dickinson, an abolitionist who became a prominent public speaker as a teenager during the Civil War. Consider the following guiding and supporting questions as you navigate the collection: What is the power of youth voice in the fight against

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

What will the future of gender equity look like? The annual summit for 2021 will examine issues of gender, bias, and equity. History will be our guide as we unpack this question and envision our own answers to it.