Whether you are in New York, Pennsylvania, Arkansas, Oregon, Colorado, Minneapolis, or Illinois, there's almost always a great museum nearby.
videos + essays
Thomas Cole, The Architect’s Dream
Cole, the great American landscape painter looks across the vast history of Western architecture
Thomas Hovenden, The Last Moments of John Brown
Martyr or murderer? John Brown has polarized political opinion from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement.
George Caleb Bingham, Country Politician
Before T.V. and Twitter, politicians talked to voters face-to-face.
The Morgan Leaf from The Winchester Bible
The Winchester Bible is among the most magnificent illuminated manuscripts made in England in the twelfth century.
Hicks’s The Peaceable Kingdom as Pennsylvania parable
Living in peace—predator and prey, and Native Americans and settler colonists—but for how long?
John Singleton Copley, Portrait of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Mifflin (Sarah Morris)
On the eve of the American Revolution, a glimpse of politics in portraiture
An African muslim among the founding fathers, Charles Willson Peale’s Yarrow Mamout
How a portrait of an African muslim came to hang side-by-side with the founding fathers in one of America's earliest museums.
The triangle trade and the colonial table, sugar, tea, and slavery
Global trade in a cup of tea: Colonial America, sugar and slavery.
Inventing America, Colt’s Experimental Pocket Pistol
The gun that "won the West" also transformed American manufacturing and marketing.
Albert Bierstadt, Hetch Hetchy Valley, California
Captured here in paint, this grand Californian landscape would soon disappear under water.
Nellie Two Bear Gates, Suitcase
This one-of-a-kind suitcase tells the surprising story of an artist, a wedding, and a people.