How to Define America in 30 Objects

George Washington, this nation’s first general, its inaugural president, the eponym of its capital city, left one of his most indelible marks on America from afar. Not one for a grand speech, Washington printed his Farewell Address in Philadelphia’s American Daily Advertiser on September 19, 1796, the same day he announced that he would voluntarily relinquish his power, departing the then-seat of government for his homestead at Mount Vernon.

No one said the speech aloud in a formal setting for decades, until the Civil War. Sensing that our Constitution was in crisis, a group of citizens from Philadelphia asked both chambers of Congress to recite the Farewell Address in 1862 to commemorate the 130th anniversary of Washington’s birth. In 1896, the Senate began the tradition of reading it every year. The custom, with the speakers alternating between our two political parties, continues to this day.

Washington originally wrote the address beside a brass candlestand, which was passed down through his family until 1878, when it was transferred to the United States government and then, a few years later, to the Smithsonian. Though permanently on display in the National Museum of American History, it has temporarily migrated across the National Mall this summer to the Smithsonian Castle in honor of the nation’s 250th anniversary, where visitors can take in this strikingly human artifact.

[Clint Smith: First the Kennedy Center, now the Smithsonian]

To the rest of the world, a country’s 250-year anniversary may seem somewhat unimpressive. Scholars suggest that China’s first dynasties date back more than 4,000 years. Ancient Greece was an America-and-a-half old when it constructed the Parthenon. Egypt’s King Mentuhotep II reunited his country’s upper and lower regions at the turn of the 20th century, B.C.E. Were the history of nations to be measured as a person’s life, America would scarcely be old enough to have learned how to ride a bicycle.

And yet, in only a handful of lifetimes, America has reshaped the world, as our notion of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness spread to the tiniest towns and the biggest stages. The words in the Declaration of Independence, 1,320 in all, have shaped modern society, inspiring well more than 100 similar declarations around the world since 1776 and transforming an unknowable number of lives.

Among the thousands of cities, hundreds of historical associations, 50 states, and five territories commemorating the 250th anniversary of the Declaration this year, countless stories explain what life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness have meant to Americans. Stories captured through torn songbooks and decorated journals, well-loved toys and patched-up jackets, family portraits and rumpled photographs, millions of which have found a home at the Smithsonian.

How the Smithsonian should commemorate the country’s semiquincentennial has been on the minds of researchers and curators for more than a decade. The anniversary is an opportunity to celebrate the impact of the Declaration and America globally as well as to demonstrate how the nation is a work in progress, how Americans have debated, voted, marched, and died to make concrete the ideals of the founding documents. How do you choose, from among all our nation’s treasures, which ones to tell these stories? And what, precisely, should Americans experience as they gather in our nation’s capital this summer?

No one, two, or even 1,776 responses are sufficient to answer those questions. That is why the Smithsonian is commemorating the 250th through manifold perspectives reflective of the entire country. The National Museum of American History is preserving a Revolutionary-era gunboat. The National Museum of Natural History is exploring the survival story of the American bison. The Hirshhorn is sending modern and contemporary art to every state, and the Folklife Festival is traveling cross-country, partnering with regional events across America. These endeavors are only a sample of the institution’s initiatives and events for the year, and yet, I felt that the Smithsonian’s observation of the 250th needed one more exhibition.

The Smithsonian

William Stone engraving of the Declaration of Independence

The Smithsonian

Thomas Jefferson’s portable wooden box desk

From the Smithsonian’s vast collection, more than 157 million letters, pieces of furniture, paintings, aircraft, and everything in between, my co-curators and I planned to select just a handful of artifacts that define our country. They would serve as an anchor, a capstone, a way to say “This is America, after all this time.”

While beginning to plan the exhibition, my co-curators and I landed on one nonnegotiable: We had to include Thomas Jefferson’s desk, the portable wooden box on which he drafted the Declaration of Independence, its ideas expanding in tandem with our nascent democracy as it traveled from Philadelphia to France to Monticello before arriving at the White House. The desk was where this nation was born, where life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness became our promised land.

The desk, along with a William Stone engraving of the Declaration of Independence, would become the gravitational force of the exhibition. Each object orbiting the desk would be a prism through which we would celebrate our founding ideals.

As we evaluated objects from across the institution, we soon realized that we could not limit ourselves to our preliminary plan of including only 15. We considered 20, then 25, eventually landing on 30 items and an assortment of campaign buttons. Each decision was not only a choice to include something but a choice to exclude something else. We asked ourselves how this exhibition could be one in which every American sees themselves without it turning into a catalog of communities and identities, without it being exhaustive of every angle and interpretation of American history.

Organizing an exhibition is more like editing an anthology than writing a novel. Curating requires combing through archives, then culling them into something cohesive. Time can be the wrong organizational principle. Although splitting up history by centuries or decades is a useful tool for scholars, we knew it would overgeneralize the intimate and encompassing exhibition we were aiming for.

The key, we realized, was to return to Jefferson and the Declaration.

What does it mean to celebrate a document that symbolizes freedom for all but did not grant it? Why talk about the origins of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness if it took America another 87 years for emancipation, another 144 for the Nineteenth Amendment, another 239 for marriage equality?

“I cannot contemplate their great deeds with less than admiration,” Frederick Douglass said of the signers of the Declaration in 1852. “With them, justice, liberty, and humanity were final; not slavery and oppression.”

“We hold these truths to be self-evident,” the Declaration of Sentiments stated in 1848, “that all men and women are created equal.”

“The generations that wrote and ratified the Bill of Rights and the Fourteenth Amendment did not presume to know the extent of freedom in all its dimensions,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in Obergefell v. Hodges in 2015. “And so they entrusted to future generations a charter protecting the right of all persons to enjoy liberty as we learn its meaning.”

From the country’s beginning, people have pushed and prodded, soared and fallen, for the truths that made 1776 an inflection point in the history of the world. Through Abigail Adams’s plea to “remember the ladies” and Nat Turner’s Rebellion, through Lewis and Clark’s adventures and the stories of John Steinbeck, through Jackie’s first stolen base and Sally’s first stellar ride, Americans have labored in countless ways to realize the nation’s promise. So while it may have been impossible to create an exhibition in which every American sees their exact reflection, we knew that we could capture our shared hopes. History has shown us that the very celebration of our shared longing for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness ensures that those values will endure.

The Smithsonian

Harriet Tubman’s book of hymns

The objects, we determined, would symbolize these “American Aspirations,” the eventual name of the exhibition. Visitors would find artifacts such as the candlestand, where Washington chose humility over ego and began the peaceful transfer of power. They would see Harriet Tubman’s book of hymns, a testament to faith in a country where most states forbade her from learning to read or write. They would read the text of Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, which did not include its titular line until the singer Mahalia Jackson shouted out, “Tell them about the dream, Martin!”

And alongside the names well trodden by biographies and documentaries, we decided visitors would find stories that are more commonly footnotes, lives that have been obscured by time but are quintessential parts of our national story.

Aspiring to be like Washington, I placed my own ego aside and included the jersey and bat of Roberto Clemente, the right fielder for the Pittsburgh Pirates who helped defeat my beloved Yankees in Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, breaking records and my 7-year-old heart. Clemente went on to become an all-time great, two World Series titles, 15 All-Star Games, 3,000 career hits. Born in Puerto Rico in 1934, he had every reason to enjoy his fame and money and keep his life focused on baseball.

Instead, he dedicated himself to philanthropic and humanitarian causes locally and globally. “I don’t think Clemente turned down many people who wanted his help, if anybody,” Joe Brown, the Pirates’ general manager, once said. In 1972, Clemente died in a plane crash on his way to deliver aid to victims of an earthquake in Nicaragua, leaving a legacy so revered that the Baseball Hall of Fame inducted him almost immediately afterward, waiving the traditional five-year waiting period. For all Clemente accomplished and all he stood for, he takes center stage in the exhibition’s “In Pursuit of Hope” section.

The Smithsonian

Clemente’s jersey

The Smithsonian

The Edison bulb

Another theme we chose, out of seven in total, is the pursuit of progress. Alongside more recognizable items such as Thomas Edison’s light bulb, the section features the earliest-known patent model of an automobile. Six years before Karl Benz’s first car and almost two decades prior to Henry Ford’s initial inventions, George Selden filed the first patent for a road engine, in 1879. Though he eventually got into reputational trouble for demanding royalties from car manufacturers, Selden represents the American spirit of ingenuity, of being unafraid to wonder what could be. Coincidentally, Selden was also an amateur photographer and helped mentor a man named George Eastman, whose name would gain fame as part of the Eastman Kodak Company.

Beyond the names that are less common in textbooks or that surface less readily in an online search, we felt it was crucial to recognize the idea of unknown valor. For every exhibition, book, and article that explores a sliver of our history, there are millions of stories that are not yet written, or that are still waiting for enough evidence to put together. Adjacent to famous wartime recruitment posters in the section “In Pursuit of Defending Freedom,” we have placed James Mifflin’s Medal of Honor. From roll-call slips on the USS Brooklyn, historians know that Mifflin was a Navy sailor who fought in the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864, but not much more about what he did that qualified as “conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty,” the requirements for the medal. Other than him being African American, we know little about his life. Yet the actions of these sorts of anonymous Americans, lost to history, have given us the freedoms we enjoy today.

The Smithsonian

George Selden’s 1879 road-engine patent

In the spring, the artifacts that make up “American Aspirations,” including some of the most valuable and revered objects in the Smithsonian’s collection, embarked on a journey across the Mall to the Castle, which since 2023 has been undergoing a facelift to improve its facilities and restore its historical features.

[Lily Meyer: The real fight for the Smithsonian]

Throughout my years at the institution, I have been a part of remarkable curatorial undertakings. I have traveled cross-country, digging through basements and attics for hidden heirlooms. I have stopped traffic on 14th Street in Washington, D.C., to lower a train car and guard tower into the National Museum of African American History and Culture. I have even ushered a space capsule along the highways of Japan, inflating and deflating the tires to get it under overpasses. To put the country’s most revered objects in one room is no small task, and I spent several nervous weeks wondering how the Castle would handle the physical tolls of building an exhibition. Could it support dozens of backlit display cases, thousands of visitors, and months of letting in the notorious D.C. humidity? The objects had to travel in vehicles with armed guards, then be placed in alarm-protected cases overseen by high-tech cameras and 24/7 personnel, all in an 180-year-old room actively under construction.

When I went to view the Castle, our preservationist handed me a hard hat. Amid metal beams and debris on the floor, I tried to imagine where the Declaration would go and how the objects would fit around it. When my colleagues nearby asked me what the exhibition would entail, I talked about how we were trying to portray a nation still being made, one working to attain the dreams of the Declaration.

I looked again at the dust of the unfinished Castle, and my worries dissipated. In that moment, I felt that I was in the most patriotic place I could imagine, a place that could help America remember what it once was, help us better understand who we are today, and point us to a united shared future.