The Library of Congress, established in 1800 serves as the research arm of Congress and is recognized as the national library of the United States. Its collections comprise the world's most comprehensive record of human creativity and knowledge. Open to those above high school age without charge

A popular portrait method of photography from the 1839 announcement of its invention to about 1860, the Daguerreotype was a unique photograph with no negative—each photograph was exposed on a copper plate coated with silver-nitrate. This half-length Daguerreotype portrait of Louis Jacques MandÃ

With the right resources, learners of any age can engage with the topics of nonviolence and civil rights. This webpage is a gateway to lesson plans, videos, family activities, and instructional media related to the nonviolent civil rights movement in the 1950s and 1960s. The content within these

Cesar Estrada Chavez, the founder of the United Farm Workers of America, is one of the most recognized Latino civil rights leaders in the United States. A Mexican American born in Yuma, Arizona, his family lost their small farm in the Great Depression (1930s). Like many Americans, they joine

This wooden grain fork was used during the late 19th century. Wide tined pitch forks like this were used to pitch hay, grains, straw, and other agricultural products. Before the mechanization of harvesting by combines, reaping, threshing, and winnowing were done by hand with simple tools like thi

This Butsudan-Buddhist altar was made from scrap lumber in Jerome Relocation Center in Arkansas. Buddhism was among the religions that was practiced in the internment camps. However, it was not formally recognized in the camp or marked with a specific house of worship within the internment camp g

This Santa Cruz helmet was worn by downhill skateboarder Judi Oyama while racing during the late 1970's and into the 1980s. Oyama began skating as a teen and was sponsored by Santa Cruz Skateboards in the mid-seventies. She skated both vert and street but her passion was slalom and downhill racing w

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

The bread tin was designed to keep the doughboy's ration of hard bread dry; earlier bread rations were packaged in cardboard containers which became soggy and ruined the contents.    

Once a new national government had been established under a new Constitution, attention naturally turned to ways of proclaiming national identity. A new, national coinage was one way of doing so, especially if it featured patriotic new images, rather than the endless sequence of crowned monarchs