“In 2017, in response to a slew of racist incidents in the Gayborhood, Philadelphia added black and brown stripes to the traditional six-color LGBT rainbow flag. The backlash was severe. Many rejected the alteration of such a supposedly sacred symbol. Apart from failing to recognize the intersecti

Spark!Lab is a hands -on invention studio in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Spark!Lab activities communicate that invention is a process, rather than a single “Aha!” moment; provide visitors with opportunities to explore the invention process and their own inventiveness;

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).

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

Spend time exploring Globalization and Food, two topics from the Global Era.

Take a closer look at the Global Era topics of Finance and Discount Retail.

Dig deeper into the Global Era topics of Networks and Earnings.

In this post, readers will see what a Civil War-era lithograph reveals about life in a prisoner of war camp early in the Civil War.  The significance of the piece, however, lies both in that insight and in the contrast between living conditions in the camp in 1862 and in the later war years.

In this post, readers will investigate a few examples of drawings made by Plains Indians who, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, were held in captivity by the U.S. Army at places like Fort Marion in Florida.  Curator Rayna Green describes how these images depict

In this post, readers will be introduced to our engineering collections via the architectural masterpiece Grand Central Station, which celebrated its 100th anniversary on February 2, 2013.  Written by Goldman Sachs Fellow Allison Marsh, a researcher in the Division of Work and