The United States is celebrating its semiquincentennial next year—250 years since the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Patriotic events will take place all around the city and the country, and as a key institution dedicated to preserving our country’s past, the National Museum of American History will have a big role in marking the occasion. But how?
That wasn’t an easy question, but in the end it hit upon an intriguing solution: pick 250 items to put on display that will represent, in a broad way, the story of America. Given that the museum’s collection contains 1.8 million objects, winnowing it down was going to be a major challenge.
Though the exhibit won’t open until spring of 2026, the museum agreed to give us behind-the-scenes access to the difficult process of putting it all together, providing an early preview of how the museum will be thinking about the celebration of America’s 250th birthday.
“What we’re hoping to accomplish is a museum-wide exhibition rather than something that’s just bound by four walls and a door in a gallery space,” says Theodore S. Gonzalves, a curator who’s overseeing the project. “The whole building becomes the place to tell the story—because it’s that important.”
Some of the objects were easy to agree on, such as Abraham Lincoln’s famous top hat or the Gunboat Philadelphia, America’s oldest surviving naval ship. But the staff didn’t want the exhibit to merely consist of the most famous things the museum owns: They hoped to paint a bigger, more surprising portrait of the country. Jumping off of the Declaration of Independence’s phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” they chose “In Pursuit of Life, Liberty, and Happiness” as the name and theme of the exhibit, and each of the chosen artifacts fits that idea in one way or another, whether it’s gloves worn by a “Miracle on Ice” hockey player as he skated toward an underdog Olympics victory or a badge that belonged to a 19th-century African American firefighter seeking equality in a segregated system.
While 76 of the 250 items will be in glass cases lining the entry halls, the rest will be located throughout the entire museum. Once the project is unveiled to the public, visitors will be able to try to see all 250 items, as in a scavenger hunt. “This is unusual for us in that it really touches all of the museum,” says Megan Howell Smith, the head of experience development who leads the committee planning the museum’s overall semiquincentennial programming. “We have a massive collection that spans communities and time periods. We can do what not a lot of other museums can, which is to show those reverberations of the Declaration throughout American history.”
Recently, I went to the museum to learn more about the process of narrowing down the collection. I met with some key members of the team—including museum director Anthea M. Hartig, Smith, and Gonzalves—and we gathered in a conference room on the fourth floor, where design ideas and display mockups covered a huge corkboard. This is where a lot of the debate has occurred; the board was full of index cards featuring words that were crossed out and written over.
The David Drake jar was made by an enslaved potter, and it was illegal for enslaved people to read or write. His revolutionary act: He inscribed his name on the pot.
The process had been long and complex, they told me. It started in December 2023, when the project committee emailed a questionnaire to roughly 265 museum staffers, docents, and volunteers, asking each to suggest items for inclusion. That yielded 483 nominations—almost double what they had room for. From there, the committee started debating. Some favorites emerged, such as the David Drake jar, a stoneware ceramic made by an enslaved potter in South Carolina. At the time, it was illegal for enslaved people to read or write. Drake’s revolutionary act was small in form but large in meaning: He had inscribed a short message and his name on the pot.
But while there was consensus on many artifacts, settling on a final list was a jigsaw puzzle. Certain items told too similar a story, and there were some big conceptual holes that none of the nominees quite captured. “It becomes a negotiation,” says Gonzalves. “Because it’s not necessarily the object per se, it’s the story it tells. It’s the maker, it’s the audience, it’s the context.”
It was important to the committee to represent the country’s regional, ethnic, and racial diversity, and also to ensure that the museum’s different areas of focus be included: science, technology, the arts, and so forth. For example, after the nomination process, the committee realized modern physics was underrepresented. The museum’s science team invited the committee to walk through storage spaces with them, explaining some of the human stories behind the objects. “We went shopping, basically,” says Howard Morrison, one of the exhibit developers. That visit led to the inclusion of a cylindrical device that had proved a theory proposed by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose.
Then there were objects that posed logistical issues, such as a wool quilt depicting the solar system, made in the late 1800s by Iowa teacher Ellen Harding Baker. It’s a work of art and science that highlights the story of an enlightened woman in the 19th century. But it’s a highly fragile piece that isn’t usually on display, and conservators were nervous about the exposure to light, air, and moisture. Ultimately, they found a way to include it while protecting it from harm.
At last, after more than a year of effort, the final list of 250 will be solidified in March. The next step is to prepare each item for exhibition and create all the display materials: design elements, explanatory text, and the like. One challenge is to figure out how to make clear which objects throughout the museum are part of the 250. (There will likely be colored markings along with other visual signposts.)
A sample display of “In Pursuit” will be previewed in one of the lobby artifact walls this year. “We’ll do a lot of user testing to make sure all of our hopes and dreams and ambitions are being realized and as effective as we want them to be,” says the exhibit’s design director, Mike Denison, “or else we need to make some tweaks before we install the whole thing.”
During my visit, Denison offered to show me an example of how the 250 objects may look in the final exhibit. He brought me over to a prototype design that displays one of the items: a simple metal lettuce carrier once used by workers on farms in Southern California. A small card in front of it bore a single word: “Toil.” (As part of the exhibit, each object has been assigned a one-word concept that serves to illuminate its significance.)
People think history is made by famous people. It’s hard to get people to see themselves as currently in the process of making history.
Standing in front of that unremarkable cart, I got a taste of how powerful “In Pursuit” might end up being. It’s hard to imagine a simpler, less impressive object, yet it captures something about America that felt meaningful in a way that a more historically significant item might not. The workers who used the cart were part of the Bracero Program, which brought people from Mexico to California for stints in the lettuce fields. Though they were helping feed the nation, these migrants were often invisible or looked down on. Now they’re being acknowledged as an important part of the nation’s history—as significant, in the context of this exhibit, as Thomas Jefferson’s desk or the original Star-Spangled Banner. “One thing we struggle with here is that people tend to think history is made by famous people—it’s George Washington, it’s all the Presidents,” Smith had told me earlier. “It’s hard to get people to see themselves as currently in the process of making history.”
Ideally, everything on display will make visitors consider some aspect of American life more deeply. “Two hundred fifty stories, 250 lives, 250 challenges, corners turned, decisions faced—it’s quite a lot,” says Gonzalves. “Some of it is sobering. Some of it is challenging. Other parts can be quite inspiring. We hope folks will walk away and think, ‘I hadn’t really thought about that object in that particular way.’ ”
This article appears in the March 2025 issue of Washingtonian.
Daniella Byck joined Washingtonian in 2022. She was previously with Outside Magazine and lives in Northeast DC.
