This buckskin coat was worn by Custer when he was Lieutenant Colonel with the 7th U. S. Cavalry in the Dakotas. It was one of several owned and worn by Custer, who prefered to dress like a frontiersman while out West. In 1912, Custer's widow, Elizabeth, donated this buckskin coat t

This online exhibition explore the role of the portable printing press in conveying information during the Civil War. The ability to communicate quickly in wartime can profoundly affect military actions and outcomes. The invention of portable tabletop printing presses at the time of the American

This beautiful daguerreotype by Boston-area photographer George K. Warren (1832–1884) is of the photographer's wife, Mary Ann Warren. The Photographic History Collection has a collection of letters, scrapbooks, daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, cartes-de-visites, cabinet cards, other paper prints, an

In 1794, Eli Whitney patented a new kind of cotton gin. His invention, using rotating brushes and teeth to remove the seeds from cotton, was quickly pirated by others. Southern plantation owners depended on slaves for labor-intensive crops such as rice, sugar, tobacco, and especially cotto

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 learn how fashion interacted with and reflected the Woman’s Suffrage movement of the early 1900s.  At the turn of the century, the tide of political change went hand-in-hand with the liberation of women’s bodies from corsets and close-fitting outfits.  An

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