Learn how business and innovation helped the United States develop from a small dependent agricultural nation to one of the world's largest economies.

This exhibition reveals why a good clock is crucial to navigation -- for 18th-century mariners to current-day GPS users -- and how increasingly accurate timekeeping has influenced how we find our way.

The National Portrait Gallery presents 48 finalists' works that were selected from the third triennial Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition.

Explore the boundaries that once defined drawing and portraiture through the works of artists Mequitta Ahuja, Mary Borgman, Adam Chapman, Ben Durham, Till Freiwald, and Rob Matthews.

Learn about the contribution of poetry in American literature through portraits of and quotations by such poets as Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, and Allen Ginsberg.

Learn how music and dance continue to bind American Indian communities to all living things, to the earth, to the spirit world, and -- when people have deep ancestral claims to their dances -- to the past.

Learn about the life and times of Clotilde Arias, who in 1946 was commissioned by the US State Department to compose an official Spanish-language translation of the national anthem.

See Julia Child's kitchen, which contains hundreds of tools, appliances, and furnishings arranged exactly as they were when she donated the kitchen to the museum in 2001.

Julia's kitchen will introduce the upcoming exhibition Food: Transforming America’s Table, 1950-2000, opening November 20, 2012.

Portraits of aviator Amelia Earhart tell the story of her career and pay special attention to her work on behalf of women's rights.

See some 90 African art objects that were inspired by astronomical observations and phenomena, including rainbows and eclipses. 

Learn about key people who influenced the outcome of the War of 1812, which transformed and unified the United States.

Examine the far-reaching impact of Steve Jobs’ entrepreneurship and innovation in the global marketplace and in our daily lives.

Learn about the achievements of women in the late 18th century and see portraits of eight prominent American women of the period.

See more than 100 historic and cultural touchstones of American history from the museum’s vast holdings.

Selections from Kano Kazunobu's 100-painting series depicting Buddhist disciples at work are featured.

This exhibition explores the cultural integration and diffusion of African American and American Indian people, especially those of blended heritage.

Learn about slavery in America through the lives of six slave families living at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello plantation.

Learn how mail travels from sender to recipient and how the process has changed over the last 200 years!

View two dozen dresses worn by former first ladies.

Learn about Egyptian burial ritual and cosmology and what they reveal about life in ancient Egypt.