Report cards and scraps of homework from a girl who grew up in Elizabeth, N.J., in the 1930s and 1940s. And, packed away for now, an entire classroom from a Cleveland elementary school. Room 201 is all that remains of a building where once thousands of children, many of them immigrants or sons and daughters of immigrants, learned to read, write, count, and, perhaps most of all, be Americans. Though such artifacts may lack the drawing power of some of the museum's other national treasures, like the original Star-Spangled Banner and the inaugural gowns of the First Ladies, in their own way they can tell stories just as moving. We try to slow that degradation down.
Schools come under the museum's cultural-history collections.
The museum itself, part of the complex of Smithsonian museums and public monuments along the national Mall that stretches from the U.S. Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, opened in 1964. It's impossible for everything to be on view, Shayt says, in a museum that houses millions of artifacts. Most of them, he adds, are small objects such as stamps and coins. Museums, for obvious reasons, discriminate against size. We've got thousands of thimbles, but only about a dozen locomotives.