Exploring the American Civil War through 50 Historic Treasures brings together historic objects, documents, artwork, and the natural and built environments to tell the full story of this important event in American history. The American Civil War still matters. It matters because the war—its causes and its consequences— continue to influence America as a nation. At its core, the Civil War was about slavery. Began as a fight to secure the future of slavery, the Civil War resulted instead in the abolition of slavery. The complex racial issues at its core, however, remain with us today. Exploring the American Civil War through 50 Historic Treasures begins with the causes of the war, examining objects that tell the story of slavery and its expansion in the nineteenth century. Cultural treasures representing the war years explore the battlefield and the homefront and the men and women caught up in the war as well the ways in which the scale of the war forced technological innovations. Given the centrality of slavery, race, and emancipation in the story of the Civil War, one section presents objects that detail how free and enslaved blacks transformed the war effort and were in turn transformed by the war. In the final section, the historic treasures trace the ongoing impact of the war, including the dramatic increase in the removal of Confederate monuments in the summer of 2020. Each object's story is detailed with color photos that draw readers into the story of the American Civil War. Many of these objects appear here in print for the first time.

Who are the girls that helped build America? Conventional history books shed little light on the influence and impact of girls’ contributions to society and culture. This oversight is challenged by Girl Museum and their team, who give voices to the most neglected, yet profoundly impactful, historical narratives of American history: young girls. Exploring American Girls’ History through 50 Historic Treasures showcases girls and their experiences through the lens of place and material culture. Discover how the objects and sites that girls left behind tell stories about America that you have never heard before. Readers will journey from the first peoples who called the continent home, to 21st century struggles for civil rights, becoming immersed in stories that show how the local impacts the global and vice versa, as told by the girls who built America. Their stories, dreams, struggles, and triumphs are the centerpiece of the nation’s story as never before, helping to define both the struggle and meaning of being “American.” This full-color book is a must-read for those who yearn for more balanced representation in historic narratives, as well as an inspiration to young people, showing them that everyone makes history. It includes color photographs of all the treasured objects explored.

Healthcare history is more than leeches and drilling holes in skulls. It is stories of scientific failures and triumphs. Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures presents a visual and narrative history of health and medicine in the United States, tracing paradigm shifts such as the introduction of anesthesia, the adoption of germ theory, and advances in public health. In this book, museum artifacts are windows into both famous and ordinary people’s experiences with healthcare throughout American history, from patent medicines and faith healing to laboratory science. With 50 vignette-like chapters and 50 color photographs, Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures showcases little-known objects that illustrate the complexities of our relationship with health, such as a bottle from the short period when the Schlitz beer company sold lager that was supposed to be high in vitamin D during the first vitamin craze. It also highlights famous moments in medicine, such as the discovery of penicillin, as illustrated by a mold-culturing pan. Each artifact tells some piece of the story of how its creators or users approached fundamental questions in health. Some of these questions are, “What causes sickness, and what causes health?” and “How much can everyone master the principles of health, and how much do laypeople need to rely on outside authorities?” Exploring American Healthcare through 50 Historic Treasures describes the days when surgeons worked on patients without anesthesia and wiped their scalpels on their coats, and the day that EMTs raced to provide help when the Twin Towers were attacked in 2001. The book discusses social and cultural influences that have shaped healthcare, providing insight relevant to today’s problems and colorful anecdotes along the way.

Exploring American Jewish History through 50 Historic Treasures offers students and general readers new perspectives on the rich complexity of Jewish experiences in America. As one of America's most fascinating and enduring minorities, American Jews have played key roles in every era of American history and every region of the country. The 50 treasures are depicted in full color and range from a family cookbook to a college campus and include items that are iconic, ordinary, and whimsical. Each of the treasures is described in historical, material, and visual contexts, offering readers new, unexpected insights into the meanings of Jewish life, history, and culture.

No person in the world is more recognizable than an American president. These men are larger than life, and as the leader of the free world they have the opportunity to shape history in ways that most of us cannot imagine. Some objects, such as the Resolute desk, Air Force One, or the presidential seal, are symbolic of the position itself, but each president has at least one artifact that largely defines his life and his presidency. For example, George Washington’s ill-fitting dentures plagued him for most of his life, affecting the very image of his face that we have all come to recognize. Millions of Americans were comforted by Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fireside chats” as he spoke into a radio microphone during the Great Depression and World War II. John F. Kennedy memorialized a coconut husk, with a message he wrote after his PT boat was destroyed in the Pacific Ocean, into a paperweight he kept on his desk in the Oval Office. Bill Clinton appeared on late night television playing the saxophone to appeal to younger voters. Exploring the American Presidency through 50 Historic Treasures brings together significant artifacts from the lives of the men who have led our nation through times of great prosperity and terrible tragedy. When we look at our presidents through the lens of the material culture they left behind, it humanizes them and creates relevance to our own lives. This book features full-color images of 50 artifacts that were chosen by the very people who work at presidential sites and historical museums, stewarding the legacies of our presidents.

A full-color trip through the treasures of American Childhood from 1650 to today. Remember the toys you played with when you were growing up? Each of those objects has a story to tell about the history of American childhood and play. Construction toys like Lincoln Logs and Erector Set offer insight into America’s booming urban infrastructure in the early 1910s and 20s, and the important role toys played in preparing children for future careers in engineering and architecture. A stuffed toy monkey from Germany tells the story of young Jewish refugees to the United States during World War II. The board game Candyland has its origins in the dreaded polio epidemic of 1950s. Exploring Childhood and Play Through 50 Historic Treasures brings together a collection of beloved toys and games from the last two centuries to guide readers on a journey through the history of American childhood and play, 1840-2000. Through color photographs and short essays on each object, this book examines childhood against the backdrop of culture, politics, religion, technology, gender, parenting philosophies, and more. The book features ten categories of objects including board and electronic games, dolls, action figures, art toys, optical toys, animal toys, construction sets, and sports. Each essay tells the story of the individual object its historic context, and each passage builds upon one another to create a fascinating survey of how childhood and play changed over the course of two centuries.

This collection investigates the world of nineteenth-century Quaker women, bringing to light the issues and challenges Quaker women experienced and the dynamic ways in which they were active agents of social change, cultural contestation, and gender transgression in the nineteenth century. New research illuminates the complexities of Quaker testimonies of equality, slavery, and peace and how they were informed by questions of gender, race, ethnicity, and culture. The essays in this volume challenge the view that Quaker women were always treated equally with men and that people of color were welcomed into white Quaker activities. The contributors explore how diverse groups of Quaker women navigated the intersection of their theological positions and social conventions, asking how they challenged and supported traditional ideals of gender, race, and class. In doing so, this volume highlights the complexity of nineteenth-century Quakerism and the ways Quaker women put their faith to both expansive and limiting ends. Reaching beyond existing national studies focused solely on white American or British Quaker women, this interdisciplinary volume presents the most current research, providing a necessary and foundational resource for scholars, libraries, and universities. In addition to the editors, the contributors to this volume include Joan Allen, Richard C. Allen, Stephen W. Angell, Jennifer M. Buck, Nancy Jiwon Cho, Isabelle Cosgrave, Thomas D. Hamm, Julie L. Holcomb, Anna Vaughan Kett, Emma Lapsansky-Werner, Linda Palfreeman, Hannah Rumball, and Janet Scott.