Before Columbus : 525 million years ago to 1492. Burgess shale fossils ; Bald eagle ; Clovis stone points ; Mississippian birdman copper plate
New World : 1492 to mid-Eighteenth century. Christopher Columbus's portrait ; Spanish Mission hide painting of Saint Anthony ; Pocahontas's portrait ; Plymouth Rock fragment ; Slave shackles ; Americæ Nova Tabula (map)
Let freedom ring : 1760s to 1820s. Declaration of Independence ; George Washington's uniform and sword ; Benjamin Franklin's walking stick ; Gilbert Stuart's Lansdowne portrait of George Washington ; Star-spangled banner ; Thomas Jefferson's bible
Young nation : late Eighteenth century to 1850s. Conestoga wagon ; Eli Whitney's cotton gin ; John Deere's steel plow ; Isaac Singer's sewing machine ; Nauvoo Temple sun stone
Sea to shinning sea : 1800 to 1850s. Lewis and Clark's pocket compass ; John Bull steam locomotive ; Samuel Colt's revolver ; Morse-Vail telegraph ; Mexican army coat ; Gold discovery flake from Sutter's Mill ; Martha, the last passenger pigeon
A house divided : 1850 to 1865. Frederick Douglass's ambrotype portrait ; Harriet Tubman's hymnal and shawl ; Emancipation Proclamation pamphlet ; Christian Fleetwood's Medal of Honor ; Appomattox Court House furnishings ; Abraham Lincoln's hat
Manifest Destiny : 1845 to early Twentieth century. Albert Bierstadt's Among the Sierra Nevada, California ; King Kamehameha III's feather cape ; American buffalo ; Sitting Bull's drawing book ; Bugle from the U.S.S. Maine
Industrial Revolution : 1865 to early Twentieth century. Alexander Graham Bell's telephone ; Thomas Edison's lightbulb ; Frédéric Bartholdi's Liberty ; Andrew Carnegie's mansion ; Ford model T ; Wright brothers' Kitty Hawk Flyer ; Bakelizer plastic maker
Modern nation : 1870s to 1929. James Whistler's Harmony in Blue and Gold : the Peacock Room ; Bernice Palmer's Kodak Brownie camera ; Helen Keller's watch ; Suffragists' "Great Demand" banner ; Ku Klux Klan robe and hood ; World War I gas mask ; Louis Armstrong's trumpet ; Scopes "Monkey Trial" photograph ; Spirit of St. Louis ; Babe Ruth autographed baseball
Great Depression : 1929 to 1940. Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Fireside Chat" microphone ; John L. Lewis's union badge ; Marian Anderson's mink coat ; Dorothy's ruby slippers ; Woody Guthrie's "This Land is Your Land"
Greatest Generation : 1941 to 1945. U.S.S. Oklahoma postal hand stamps ; Spirit of Tuskegee ; "We Can Do It!" poster of Rosie the riveter ; Japanese American World War II internment art ; Audie Murphy's Eisenhower jacket ; Enola Gay
Cold War : 1946 to 1991. Fallout shelter ; Mercury Friendship 7 ; Huey helicopter ; Pandas from China ; Berlin Wall fragment
New frontiers : 1950s to 1980s. Jonas Salk's polio vaccine ; Jacqueline Kennedy's inaugural ball gown ; Julia Child's kitchen ; The pill and its dispenser ; Neil Armstrong's space suit ; "Mr. Cycle" PCR machine ; Space shuttle Discovery
Civil rights : 1947 to now. Greensboro lunch counter ; Muhammad Ali's boxing gear ; Bob Dylan poster by Milton Glaser ; Cesar Chavez's union jacket ; Gay civil rights picket signs ; AIDS memorial quilt panel
Pop culture : mid-Twentieth century to now. Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse ; RCA television set ; Chuck Berry's Gibson guitar ; Katharine Hepburn's Oscars ; Hope diamond ; Andy Warhol's Marilyn Monroe ; McDonald's golden arches sign ; Kermit the Frog ; Star Wars' R2-D2 and C-3PO
Digital age : 1945 to now. ENIAC ; Apples' Macintosh computer ; Nam June Paik's Electronic Superhighway
New millennium : 2000 to the future. New York Fire Department engine door from September 11 ; Shepard Fairey's Barack Obama "Hope" portrait ; David Boxley's Tsimshian totem pole ; Giant Magellan telescope
Object specifications and photographic credits
Time line of American history.