December 2010

The U.S. Army Artillery Museum tells the story of Artillery from 1775 to the present with over 70 guns and artillery pieces and numerous other artifacts from head gear and ammo to small arms and uniforms.

The collection is housed in three galleries. The Central Gallery features the four principle components of Artillery: Guns, Rockets, Forward Observation, and Fire Direction Control.

The South Gallery history is from the 1700s to the 1900s. The North Gallery starts with World War I and continues to the present day Artillery, which includes a prototype of the M777 Howitzer.

Boston National Historical Park tells the story of the events that led to the American Revolution and the Navy that kept the nation strong.

Many of the historic sites that make up Boston National Historical Park can be found along the Freedom Trail. In downtown Boston, Old South Meeting House, Old State House, Faneuil Hall, the Paul Revere House and Old North Church bring to life the American ideals of freedom of speech, religion, government, and self-determination.

In Charlestown, visit the Bunker Hill Monument, the site of the first major battle of the American Revolution. Nearby is the Charlestown Navy Yard, one of the nation's first naval shipyards and home to USS Constitution, the oldest commissioned warship afloat in the world.

Located in South Boston and separate from the Freedom Trail, Dorchester Heights is significant for its role in the evacuation of the British from Boston during the Revolutionary War.

The American Heritage Archives contain thousands of original drawings, paintings, and photographs that touch upon every period of American history.

This online collection presents a carefully curated selection of records from the archives.

It includes depictions of Revolutionary soldiers in a variety of uniforms, drawings and photographs of the Antietam Campaign of the Civil War, portraits of Andrew Jackson, political cartoons, pictures of early 20th-century Ford Motor Company plants, and photographs of the Wright brothers' halting progress towards flight.

In February 1837, Treasury Secretary Levi Woodbury called for information from the “most intelligent sources” to help prepare a report to Congress on the propriety of establishing a “system of telegraphs” for the United States. Of the 18 responses he received, 17 assumed that the telegraph would be optical and its motive power human. The only respondent to envision a different operating force was Samuel F. B. Morse, a painter turned professor long intrigued by the moral implications of technical advance; he proposed instead a new kind of telegraph of his own devising that would transmit information by electrical impulses carried by wire. Woodbury’s request inspired Morse to build a demonstration project, which he completed in May 1844 in the form of a 40-mile line between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore. Congress funded the effort with an award of $30,000. It was not the first of its kind: by May 1844 the British telegraph promoters Charles Wheatstone and William F. Cooke had installed special-purpose electric telegraphs on several railroads in Great Britain.

The Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation was founded in 1995 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History through a generous gift from the Lemelson Foundation. Its collection documents the history of invention and technology.

The online catalog features a various guitars, from early 20th-century harp guitars to modern electric guitars.