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, ...

While the African American blacksmith and former slave Lewis Temple did not invent the harpoon toggle, his invention made it better. The first barb at the tip of the toggle iron was designed to ...

George F. Green (1832-1892), a resident of Kalamazoo, Mich., invented the first pneumatic dental drill operated by means of compressed air. This example has an “E. R. E. Carpenter / Sole Agent / ...

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 ...

Collections Chromolithograph Entitled "Custer's Last Fight" Custer’s Last Fight is considered one of if not the most reproduced lithographs of the late 19th and most of the 20th Centuries with over a ...

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 ...

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People with disabilities and ideas related to disability are everywhere in American history. Just as ethnicity and race are not Either/Or rigid classifications, neither is disability. A person is not ...

Benjamin Franklin's remarkable scientific accomplishments were, in part, enabled by slavery, pervasive in the British colonies both North and South. He chose to take advantage of that system. His ...

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 ...