Many Voices, One Nation takes visitors on a chronological and thematic journey that maps the cultural geography of the unique and complex stories that animate the Latin emblem on the country’s Great Seal and the national ideal: E pluribus unum, Out of m

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

Join the National Museum of American History's for an online exploration into key social studies topics, highlighting museum resources from the Smithsonian. This series features museum educators and curators from different Smithsonian museums. Each video is about 30-60 minutes.

In this tour, take a close look at a life mask made of Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and gain insight into his life during the Civil War. Pair this tour with a 3D tour of a life mask made in 1860 to consider the impact of the war on Lincoln. Life masks we

In this thematic unit, students will use USS CONSTITUTION as a vehicle to explore a wide range of disciplines including language arts, reading, math, science, art, and social studies. The content scope of the curriculum is wide and var

In addition to artifacts and background information on the first ladies, this website features thematic overviews of the many roles of the first ladies, a timeline of first ladies, and behind-the-scenes details on the history of the first ladies exhibitions at the Smithsonian. The Smithsonia

Students will learn about American industrial creativity by looking at industrial drawings, considering their aesthetic value as well as their importance to the design process. Engineers, inventors, and designers produce drawings as part of their creative process. They draw to work