At the end of the 19th century, when ping-pong was coming into its own, the ball was generally made of string, rubber, or sometimes even a used champagne cork. It wasn’t until 1901, that James Gibb, ...

Not long after Intel introduced its 8080 chip, a small firm in Albuquerque, New Mexico, named MITS (Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems) announced a computer kit called the Altair, which met ...

At the center of this gallery is a partially reconstructed house that stood for 200 years at 16 Elm Street in Ipswich, Massachusetts, about 30 miles north of Boston. The house and the exhibition that ...

The website you attempted to reach has been discontinued. To view items in the museum's collections, including archives and libraries, please use our Collection Search. Or, use the general site search ...

This year marks the 10th anniversary of the National Museum of American History’s Smithsonian Food History Gala and the ...

The museum was designated as the steward for the medal by public law. The medal depicts five service members in silhouette standing over a crowd of people waiting to board a C-17 aircraft with the ...

New and future voters are sharing their perspectives to shape the world in many ways this election season. They join a long ...

A costume worn by actress Mariska Hargitay in her role as Capt. Olivia Benson in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is donated ...

Bathing, from the early 19th to the early 20th centuries, required stamina and fortitude. Without indoor plumbing, bathing involved filling small portable tubs with water, bucket by bucket. This, as ...

The National Numismatic Collection is comprised of approximately 1.6 million objects and is thought to be the largest collection of money and transactional objects in the world. Its diverse holdings ...

The Charleston Trio wind-up tin toy is part of Black Americana, a genre of objects reflecting African American history. The toy was created by the Louis Marx and Company in New York in 1921. It was ...

Racial segregation was still legal in the United States on February 1, 1960, when four African American college students sat down at this Woolworth counter in Greensboro, North Carolina. Politely ...