In this post, students will read an interview with Marcia Quackenbush, a social worker in San Francisco in the early 1980s. She wrote one of the early textbooks for K-12 teachers, Teaching AIDS. Interviewer John O’Keefe is a guest assistant curator of the showcase displa

In this post, students will learn how photographs shaped the public’s knowledge and experience of the Civil War, and how people shaped photographs to leave a legacy of how they personally experienced and understood the war. Written by Shannon Perich, Associate Curator for the Photogra

In this post, students will explore Louisa May Alcott's service as a nurse during the Civil War. While Alcott is perhaps best known as the author of the 19th-century classic Little Women, she also served as a Union nurse in Washington, D.C. at Georgetown’s Union Hotel Hospita

In this post, students will learn about the Civil War through a photographic album presented to Anna Lowell in 1864 by a group of attendants in D.C.'s Armory Square Hospital. In 1862, having recently been trained as a nurse, Lowell had traveled from Cambridge to D.C. and immediately gotten t

In this post, students will learn about George Westinghouse, Sr. during his Civil War service, before he became a pioneer of the electrical industry. A transcript of the letter is availalbe for download. Written by Hal Wallace, Associate Curator of Electricity Collections, this post is publi

In this post, students will learn how the Civil War impacted the development of the watch-making industry in the United States by studying one particular watch in the collection. Written by Carlene Stephens, Curator for the Division of Work and Industry, this post is published on the Mu

In this post, students will learn about an inscription hidden inside President Abraham Lincoln's watch that was a secret until the Museum investigated further in 2009. The message was put there by watchmaker Jonathan Dillon, who was repairing Lincoln's watch when the first shots were fired on For

In this post, students will learn about Washington during the Civil War. During the war, Washington’s busy wharves were the focal point for moving people and supplies into and out of the city. Here the wounded from the Virginia battlefields were off-loaded from steamboats to await transpor

In this post, students will learn how packaging—and the unspoken dialogue between consumers and producers—is one way to understand the connection between supermarkets and food consumption habits in the United States. Package colors, materials, and other design elements of food products a

Explore the role of squash in early American history, beyond its common use as fall decor. As a natively grown vegetable cultivated by the Wampanoag Indians, squash holds a special place in American history. There are dozens of squash varieties, ranging in shape, size, and color. Squash have