This is the inaugural blog on this platform about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. I will be reporting regularly about a host of NMAP topics, American ethnic group histories, related museums, scholarship centered on the museum’s focus, relevant census and other demographic data, and pertinent political issues. The museum is a work in progress and we welcome thoughtful suggestions.
The National Museum of the American People is the most important museum in our country that doesn’t exist … Yet!
It could well be more valuable than any other museum in our country. The NMAP will tell the story about the making of the American People, a story that begins with the first humans in the Western Hemisphere and winds through millennia, centuries and decades to the present.
This story encompasses every person in our nation, whether they or their ancestors over the centuries came from Europe, Africa, Asia or the Americas … or were natives long before. This story is about crossing oceans and continents, whether voluntarily, indentured or enslaved, to get here. This story is one of the most compelling stories in human history. Yet we don’t tell this full story anywhere.
The recently opened National Museum of African American History and Culture was the first major national museum to tell a part of that story in our nation’s capital, and it does so brilliantly, covering a 500-year tale of oppression, slavery, segregation, discrimination struggle and glorious achievements. While the African American story is rightfully told, so must the story be told of all Americans … Americans whose ancestors came from Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, East Asia and Pacific Islands, South Asia, Central and South America, Africa, and our neighbors Canada and Mexico.
It was George Washington who said, “The bosom of America is open to receive not only the opulent and respectable stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions.” Following Washington’s invitation and that of many of our nation’s other founders, people came here from every land and nation and became Americans.
Some 90 percent of Americans recognize their ancestry with a hyphenated attribute to an ethnic, nationality or minority group and, more and more, Americans have fascinating combinations of ancestry. We’ve tried to forge an ideal nation based on the idea behind our original national motto: E Pluribus Unum … From Many, One!
When you’re in the U.S. military, you’re an American soldier no matter where your ancestors came from. That unifying theme begins with the first words of our Constitution: “We the People.” Those words are the basis of the first self-governing people based not on a race or ethnic or tribal or religious basis, but on an idea. Our founding documents, the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence, the Bill of Rights, all helped to shape the American character.
As that character is reshaped by each succeeding generation, we must continually renew and expand our commitments to our national ideals. The National Museum of the American People will make that task easier for future generations.
— Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People