The blue dress worn by Constance Wu in the film "Crazy Rich Asians." The film was the first Hollywood film to star a mostly East Asian cast since 1993's "The Joy Luck Club." The Marchesa dress is a Grecian-style dress with light blue tulle. Learn more about the artifact!

For decades, teachers drilled American school children using flash cards that gave simple arithmetic problems. The advent of inexpensive electronic calculators in the 1970s made it possible to do much routine arithmetic automatically. To teach school children the meaning of basic operations, new dev

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

Monetary objects are powerful sources for exploring the past. The Value of Money connects American history to global histories of exchange, cultural interaction and expression, political change, and innovation through objects from the Smithsonian Institution’s National Numismatic Collection. T

"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

A box of soap baby that was sold as a campaign tool for Former President William McKinley during the 1896 United States presidential election. An identical box of soap baby was created for the opposing Democrat candidate, William Jennings Bryan. These were produced by the soap manufacturer and not t

Menarche, or the onset of menstruation, generated much advice and many attempts to manage girls' bodies in a public way. A box of tampons featuring "no belts, no pins, no pads" from Tampax, geared for young menstruating females. This object is featured in Girlhood (It's complicated).

Speaking before hundreds of thousands of people can be nerve-racking. But you'd never guess that watching Naomi Wadler. At age 11, she rose to national prominence as a leader in the 2018 March for Our Lives to end gun violence. She remembers becoming politically aware at age 5 when George Zimmerman