The National Cash Register Company produced this Model 421 cash register around 1914. The register was used in a Marshall Field & Company department store. The register has three columns of keys for entering numbers, and a fourth column of function keys. The operating crank is on the right si

Since the 1950s, demand has soared in the United States for cookbooks featuring diverse ethnic cuisines. Reflecting a heightened interest in foods and flavors from various cultures, the explosion of ethnic cookbooks—and ethnic restaurants and markets—serves to educate the general public while

Many immigrants sought to preserve their cultural heritage while at the same time embracing their new identity as Americans. Manfred Anson did so in designing this Hanukkah lamp to mark the centennial of the Statue of Liberty in 1986. Anson, who escaped Nazi Germany as a teenager, later reunited wit

Amber Melton made this robot at CompSciConnect, a University of Maryland camp. When few girls signed up for the university’s computer science classes, Dr. Jan Plane realized that something in the high schools wasn’t working. So she created a camp for middle schoolers to excite them about compute

AbioCor Total Artificial Heart is the first electro-hydraulic heart implanted in a human. Approved by the United States Food and Drug Administration for clinical trails, the AbioCor was implanted in Robert Tools by cardiac surgeons Laman Gray and Robert Dowling on July 2, 2001, at Jewish Hospital

In 1976, computer pioneers Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs began selling their Apple I computer in kit form to computer stores. A month later, Wozniak was working on a design for an improved version, the Apple II. They demonstrated a prototype in December, and then introduced it to the public in Apr

The Centro de Estudios Puertorriqueños is a research center dedicated to the study and interpretation of the Puerto Rican experience in the United States. Operating out of Hunter College, the City University of New York, the Centro is committed to making their research available and useful to th

Sixteen-year-old Judy Garland wore these sequined shoes as Dorothy Gale in the 1939 film classic The Wizard of Oz. In the original book by L. Frank Baum, Dorothy's magic slippers are silver; for the Technicolor movie, they were changed to ruby red to show up more vividly against the yell

La Malinche, the title of this lithograph, was the indigenous woman who translated for Cortés between Maya, Náhuatl, and Spanish during his first years in Mexico. Considered either as a traitor or a founding mother by some Mexicans, La Malinche was Cortés' lover and the mother of his

The March on Washington, August 28, 1963, was the largest civil rights demonstration the nation had ever witnessed. One hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation, 250,000 Americans of all races gathered to petition the government to pass meaningful civil rights legislation and enforce exi