Many Voices, One Nation explores U.S. history through a powerful collection of artifacts and stories from America’s many peoples. Sixteen essays, composed by Smithsonian curators and affiliated scholars, offer distinctive insight into the peopling of the United States from the Europeans’ North American arrival in 1492 to the near present. Each chapter addresses a different historical era and considers what quintessentially American ideals like freedom, equality, and belonging have meant to Americans of all backgrounds, races, and national origins through the centuries. Much more than just an anthology, this book is a vibrant, cohesive presentation of everyday objects and ideas that connect us to our history and to one another. Using these objects and personal stories as a transmitter, the book invites readers to hear the voices of our many voices, and contemplate the complexity of our one nation. The stories and artifacts included in this volume bring our seemingly disparate pasts together to inspire possibilities for a shared future as we constantly reinterpret our e pluribus unum – our nation of many voices.

The buildings of the Smithsonian Institution not only contain impressive collections; they are themselves icons of great cultural significance, many of them part of the historic National Mall. The Smithsonian's unique buildings illustrate the changing styles and sensibilities of America as an evolving nation. Representing the work of major architects, each building evokes a specific time in history: the mid-19th-century turreted Castle, the sky-reflecting mid-century modern Air and Space Museum, and the golden, undulating, 21st-century American Indian Museum.

Explores how one group of Latin American artists express their relationship to American art, history and culture.

Exhibitions for Social Justice assesses the state of curatorial work for social justice in the Americas and Europe today. Analyzing best practices and new curatorial work to support all those working on exhibitions, Gonzales expounds curatorial practices that lie at the nexus of contemporary museology and neurology. From sharing authority, to inspiring action and building solidarity, the book demonstrates how curators can make the most of visitors’ physical and mental experience of exhibitions. Drawing on ethnographic and archival work at over twenty institutions with nearly eighty museum professionals, as well as scholarship in the public humanities, visual culture, cultural studies, memory studies, and brain science, this project steps back from the detailed institutional histories of how exhibitions come to be. Instead, it builds a set of curatorial practices by examining the work behind the finished product in the gallery. Demonstrating that museums have the power to help our society become more hospitable, equitable, and sustainable, Exhibitions for Social Justice will be of interest to scholars and students of museum and heritage studies, gallery studies, arts and heritage management, and politics. It will also be valuable reading for museum professionals and anyone else working with exhibitions who is looking for guidance on how to ensure their work attains maximum impact.

The National Museum of the American Indian is one of the world's great conservators of cultural heritage, and its collections hold more than 800,000 objects spanning 13,000 years of history of the Native peoples of the Western Hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego in the south to the Arctic in the north. Drawing on new insights from archaeology, history, and art history, Infinity of Nations uses culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant objects as a point of entry to understanding the people who created them. Following an introduction on the power of objects to engage our imagination, each chapter presents an overview of a region of the Americas and its cultural complexities, written by a noted specialist on that region. Community knowledge-keepers and an impressive new generation of Native scholars contribute highlights on objects that represent important ideas or that capture moments of social change. Together these writers create an extraordinary mosaic. What emerges is a portrait of a complex and dynamic world shaped from its earliest history by contact and exchange among peoples. Illustrated with more than 200 strikingly beautiful photographs published here for the first time, Infinity of Nations opens new avenues that extend well beyond those of conventional cultural studies. Authoritative and accessible, here is an important resource for anyone interested in learning about Native cultures of the Americas.

Since its founding in 1846 "for the increase and diffusion of knowledge," the Smithsonian Institution has been an important feature of the American cultural landscape. In A Living Exhibition, William S. Walker examines the tangled history of cultural exhibition at the Smithsonian from its early years to the chartering of the National Museum of the American Indian in 1989. He tracks the transformation of the institution from its original ideal as a "universal museum" intended to present the totality of human experience to the variegated museum and research complex of today. Walker pays particular attention to the half century following World War II, when the Smithsonian significantly expanded. Focusing on its exhibitions of cultural history, cultural anthropology, and folk life, he places the Smithsonian within the larger context of Cold War America and the social movements of the 1960s, '70s, and '80s. Organized chronologically, the book uses the lens of the Smithsonian's changing exhibitions to show how institutional decisions become intertwined with broader public debates about pluralism, multiculturalism, and decolonization. Yet if a trend toward more culturally specific museums and exhibitions characterized the postwar history of the institution, its leaders and curators did not abandon the vision of the universal museum. Instead, Walker shows, even as the Smithsonian evolved into an extensive complex of museums, galleries, and research centers, it continued to negotiate the imperatives of cultural convergence as well as divergence, embodying both a desire to put everything together and a need to take it all apart.