Month: December 2018

This is the second of four blogs to describe how the National Museum of the American People will tell its story through four chapters.

The second chapter of the story that the National Museum of the American People will tell covers the major settlement groups who came to America from 1607 to 1820 and the consequences of this settlement on the native peoples in what is now the Eastern U.S. The chapter will also focus on the inflow of Western Europeans and Africans in the East, and Hispanics settling in what is now the U.S. Southwest. This chapter is bisected by the American Revolution and creation of the nation.

It will go on to explore the new nation’s westward expansion as it takes in new peoples with the Louisiana Purchase extending the nation to the Mississippi River and the annexation of Florida. The migration within what is now the United States by both settlers and natives will also be covered.

Chapter 2 begins with the first permanent English settlement in Jamestown in 1607. This is generally recognized as the beginning of the Colonial Period. While scholars will provide the essential history of this period, the NMAP will also explore myths and legends about these times, some of which persist.

Europeans in the 18th and 19th centuries, as they pushed west across the continent, reported encountering pristine forests and massive herds of bison and believed that it was always thus. Now, our best evidence suggests that humans settled and dominated most of the land and kept the vegetation and bison in check long before Europeans arrived. In the two hundred years after the near demise of the native population due to disease and government policies, both before and after the nation was formed, the bison population exploded, the land went to seed and “virgin forests” spread.

As visitors walk through this history from 1607 to the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1789 they will learn that about 600,000 Europeans who came and 300,000 Africans who were brought to the English colonies. Virtually all of the Africans came as slaves and about half of the Europeans were indentured servants or convicts.

While English immigrants dominated this influx and largely settled in Virginia, Maryland and New England, only a minority, even in New England — even on the Mayflower itself — were Pilgrims and Puritans. While some indeed came to escape religious persecution, most of the English came for economic opportunities. It took about a century before these colonies achieved a self-sustaining population.

The African slave trade with Europe began in the mid-15th Century, before Columbus’ voyage, with the Spanish and Portuguese importing slaves first to Europe and Atlantic islands and then to Spanish and Portuguese America.

It has been calculated that up to a third of all slaves taken out of Africa died aboard ships as they sailed across what was known as the Middle Passage. An unknown number of lives were also lost in Africa, mostly in a strip about 100 miles wide along the central West Coast, as a result of the slave trade from attempts to capture them and on their journey to ports of embarkation.

More than 10 percent of imported slaves — some 50,000 — came after Congress abolished the slave trade in 1810. Slaves brought to this land are the ancestors of more than 20 million Americans, the second largest group in the nation after German Americans.

This chapter also begins showing an inkling of the great diversity of peoples that will characterize the American people. By 1790 there were significant numbers of Scotch, Irish and German immigrants living side-by-side with the English colonists, with smaller numbers of Dutch, French, Swedish, Spanish and others. Each group added to and influenced the language, culture, economy and politics of the fledgling nation.

The Scotch settled primarily in the Carolinas, Georgia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. The first Irish immigrants tended toward the middle and southern states. Few Germans went to New England and instead migrated to the middle states, with Pennsylvania getting most of them.

The Dutch went mostly to New York and New Jersey where the early colony of New Amsterdam had been. The French settled almost entirely in the Northwest Territories of modern Canada and on a long and narrow swath that ran from Detroit down the Mississippi River to New Orleans.

The Spanish at this point were in territories in Florida, California and New Mexico. The largest of a small contingent of Swedes was in New Mexico. Jews were scattered throughout the colonies and established outposts in the port cities of New York, Newport, Savannah, Philadelphia and Charleston. Smaller numbers of many other European ethnicities came as well, mixed among other groups.

The National Museum of the American People will show where each group settled and how they contributed to the creation of the nation.

At the heart of this chapter is the story of the creation of the nation. The history about the relationship of the 13 colonies with England, the actions and reactions that led to that relationship souring to the point of being irreconcilable, the American Revolutionary War and the creation of the United States of America will all be told.

Groups that played significant roles in the lead-up to the Revolutionary War, played a major role during the war, and were represented among the Founding Fathers are part of this story. The museum will also explore where the ideas came from for our founding documents: the Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, the Federalist Papers and the Constitution.

Facets of this chapter are told in partial ways at a variety of on-site museums and recreated exhibitions such as at Colonial Williamsburg, Jamestown, Plimoth Plantation, Savannah and Charleston. The new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington tells the story about African slavery in the United States during this period and the new American Revolution Museum in Philadelphia tells the story about that war.

But there are no institutions that tell the full and comprehensive story about this phase of the making of the American people. The National Museum of the American People will be the first to do so.

NOTE: The material herein is based in part on the books 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann and Coming to America: A History of Immigration and Ethnicity in American Life by Roger Daniels. Leading scholars will develop the museum’s story following the establishment of the museum.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on 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.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

This is the first of four blogs to describe how the National Museum of the American People will tell its story through four chapters.

Most histories about the making of the peoples of this nation begin with the arrival of European explorers after 1492 and the first European settlers around 1600. We propose that the full story must also encompass the history, so far as it is known, of the first peoples to have settled on this land, an occurrence thought to have taken place less than 20,000 years ago.

This seldom told and little understood story about great and diverse civilizations, cultures and peoples that prevailed in the Western Hemisphere and throughout North America before 1607 is an integral part of the history of the American People. The museum’s first chapter would start with the earliest known groups to come to what is now the United States.

Contemporary research indicates that there were probably more people living in the Americas than in Europe when Columbus landed. The people living here had transformed the land so completely that when Europeans arrived in the hemisphere, it had already been massively ‘landscaped’ by humans.

Using the latest findings from the fields of archeology, genetics, history, linguistics, demography, geography, anthropology, contemporary American Indians studies and other sources, the Museum would portray the long history of human settlement and accomplishment in this land before 1607.

The National Museum of the American People would try to answer a long list of questions: When did the first humans come to this land? How did they get here? Did they come in different waves? Why did they come? How did their cultures evolve from when they arrived to 2,000 years ago to 400 years ago? Answers to these questions will focus on the peoples who populated the Western Hemisphere, including the Caribbean and Pacific Islands that are now part of the United States.

In the century before Columbus, how were Indian tribes distributed across what is now the United States? What were their histories up to 1607? What was the nature of inter-tribal relationships? What are the population estimates for North America in 1607? What was the nature of native culture, economy, governing structures, communications, weapons, agriculture and health?

The first hundred years after Columbus’ voyages were marked largely by Spanish and Portuguese expeditions into what is now Latin America with forays into areas now occupied by Florida, Texas, Oklahoma and New Mexico. The Museum would explore Hispanic settlements in what is now the United States during this period. While the Spanish and Portuguese dominated the Western Hemisphere in the early part of the 16th Century, the English began their explorations in the 1580s when Sir Walter Raleigh led expeditions to the North Carolina coast.

The main purpose of the Spanish was to exploit the gold and other riches from the Western Hemisphere and to convert the natives to Christianity. Tragically, the Eurasian diseases that the conquistadors brought with them coupled with the natives’ lack of an immune response to fight those diseases led to waves of pandemics that spread throughout the Americas. There is evidence that these killed more than half of the native population, with some estimates ranging up to and above 90 percent, within 150 years of the first contacts.

Because of the spread of these diseases, when the Spanish, Portuguese and British came to the North, they found the Indian populations reeling; their millennia-old civilizations and cultures crashed in a matter of decades. In their weakened state, the Indians could only partially oppose these new settlers on their land.

Some museums, including the Smithsonian’s new National Museum of the American Indian, and the American Museum of Natural History in New York, depict the cultures, beliefs and art and artifacts of different Indian tribes. Others, such as the Pequot Museum in Connecticut, tell the story of a particular tribe. But all of these institutions only give hints about the overall history of native peoples, and can only partially answer the questions raised above due to their narrower focus. In the NMAP, the story of native peoples will be told in the context of all of the people who lived on the land of what is now the United States.

While some of the questions asked here could not have been answered a generation ago, or even a decade ago, new research and discoveries about early human life on this land is bringing more and more of the past into light.

This story of America’s earliest settlers and inhabitants as it is currently known and understood needs to be told, and it needs to be open to updating as new information is found. The National Museum of the American People, working with Native American organizations and scholars supporting the museum as well as others still to come, will stimulate the search for that information.

NOTE: The material herein is based in part on the book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus by Charles C. Mann. Leading scholars would be expected to develop a detailed outline of the museum’s story following the establishment of the museum.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on 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.

Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

There are only a handful great story-telling museums in the world and Washington, DC has two of them.

While all museums claim that they tell a story, only a few do so in the conventional use of the term. In a true story-telling museum the visitor is on a chronological path that tells a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum which opened in 1993 was one of the first … and the best … until the National Museum of African American History and Culture opened September 2016. Both the USHMM and the NMAAHC shared one crucial ingredient, the great museum exhibition designer Ralph Appelbaum.

MTFA Architecture of Arlington, Virginia developed a vision of what the National Museum of the American People could look like.

In the case of the Holocaust Museum, it’s director Shaike Weinberg did one simple and very brilliant thing. He teamed Appelbaum with a British documentary filmmaker, Martin Smith, who had made documentaries about a variety of World War II subjects. He was the perfect choice to address the huge task of presenting the Holocaust to a diverse audience. With Smith in charge of designing the flow of the permanent exhibition, that’s why when visitors walk through the Holocaust Museum it is like walking through a documentary film of that period from 1932 through 1945 and the aftermath.

Smith and Appelbaum worked so closely together that at presentations when the exhibition design was underway, each would often finish the other’s sentences. They took the history of the Holocaust from a range of scholars and witnesses and weaved a path through that history for the museum’s 40 million visitors (and counting).

A similar creative process was used more than 20 years later to tell the 500-year history of African Americans. The director of that museum, Lonnie Bunch, is a historian and quintessential story-teller.

Now it’s time for a third story-telling museum to be built in our nation’s capital, the National Museum of the American People.

The story about the making of the American People in the NMAP would use the same processes that made those two other great institutions. A premier museum exhibition designer teamed with a great filmmaker to tell about the 20,000-year history of the making of the American People based on the work of a vast range of great scholars.

In the case of the Holocaust and African American museums, the architects worked collaboratively with the exhibition designer, both inside and out, reflecting and amplifying the story-telling process. For example, both museums include a railcar to help tell their stories, the architects made special provisions for them and in both cases the railcars were placed in the museum during construction and the rest of the museum was built around them. The effectiveness of this approach can be seen in two symbiotic ways, the number of of visitors and the visitor experience.

At most museums, whether they focus on art, history or science, an average visit is around an hour and a half. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has found that its average visitor stay is closer to three hours going through its permanent exhibition with many spending five or more hours. The same has turned out to be true at the National Museum of African American History and Culture as well. In both cases the visitors are caught up in the incredible story being told and the way that it is told. They are literally walking through those compelling histories.

In the past, museums were centered on collections and designed their exhibitions around them. The collections dictated the content. But at the USHMM and the NMAAHC, the museums sought out artifacts from around the nation and from around the world to help them tell their stories. It was the stories that dictated the content with the artifacts bringing the story to life.

The effectiveness of this approach is also seen in the word-of-mouth generated by visitors to true story-telling museums. In the case of the USHMM, they instituted timed-tickets when the museum opened 25 years ago in April, 1993 but assumed they wouldn’t need them after that first summer. A quarter century later it still generates large numbers of visitors and timed tickets are still needed to control the flow through the museum. The NMAAHC shares that same popularity.

The next series of blogs will summarize the story that the NMAP will tell and prospective museum visitors can envision walking through that history where every American will see some part of their story along the way.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on 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.

— Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

Our nation’s airwaves, newsstands, twitter feeds and conversations are saturated these days about how our nation is split. It seems like a dream come true for every enemy and adversary of the United States.

No matter which side they are on, everyone wishes the rift would close. So how do we go about it? The National Museum of the American People can help provide the answer.

The NMAP is about the making of the American People — all of us. It will tell every group’s story from the first humans in the Western Hemisphere to today. The proposed museum will provide and foster a sense of belonging by all Americans and instill a renewed sense of identity as an American. At its core, the museum will be built atop our original national motto, E Pluribus Unum — From Many, One!

The museum has had bipartisan support in Congress and there are now more than 246 organizations representing 70 American ethnic, nationality and minority groups supporting this effort. Together, they represent virtually every American whose group’s story will be told in the museum.

In summary, here are 28 reasons why our nation needs the National Museum of the American People:

1. It will be America’s only national institution devoted exclusively to telling the full story about the making of the American People;
2. Our nation was uniquely created and built by peoples from every land; they made us the world’s economic, military, scientific and cultural leader;
3. It will celebrate all of the peoples who came to this land and nation, from the very first to the most recent;
4. It will tell the compelling stories about every group’s migration and immigration to these shores and the story of their subsequent migrations within the country;
5. It will foster a sense of belonging to the nation by telling about the mosaic of people that have come here;
6. It will contribute to our national identity and unity;
7. The full story about the making of the American People is not well known or understood by the American People or by foreigners;
8. People from every American ethnic, nationality, minority and genealogical group will flock to the Museum to see how their own group’s story is told and to learn the stories of every other group;
9. It has the support of more than 246 diverse organizations representing virtually every major American ethnic and minority group;
10. Foreign visitors will come to learn about natives of their countries who became Americans;
11. It will be a top destination for school groups visiting Washington;
12. It will foster learning nationwide through its education and curriculum programs;
13. It can become a national pilgrimage destination and be among the most visited museums in the world;
14. Eminent scholars will provide the intellectual bedrock upon which it will be built;
15. It has the support of more than 144 scholars of immigration and migration history;
16. It will incorporate a Center for the Advanced Study of the American People to foster knowledge about who we are;
17. It will be a resource for state, local and ethnic museums throughout the nation;
18. It has had bipartisan support;
19. Canada and Mexico have major national museums in their capitals telling the story of their peoples and they’re among the most visited museums in those nations;
20. As the central story of our nation, it belongs near the National Mall in Washington;
21. It can incorporate these components: a film center, genealogical center, nationwide peopling of America sites, bookstore, public programs, collections and special and traveling exhibits;
22. It will provide a range of knowledge, learning, stimulation and entertainment for visitors;
23. No federal tax money is planned to design, build or operate it;
24. It will show how our central documents, the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, helped shape the American character;
25. Our Constitution begins “We the People of the United States…” This museum will tell who “We the People” are;
26. It will embody our original national motto: E Pluribus Unum — From Many, One!;
27. It will be the best story-telling museum in our nation;
28. It is the most important American museum that doesn’t exist … YET!

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on 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.

— Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People

The National Museum of the American People aspires to be the best story-telling museum in the world. The making of the American People is certainly one of the greatest stories in the history of the world and the proposed museum will serve an educational purpose that encompasses our planet.

Who are Americans? How did people from everywhere — Europe, Asia and Pacific Islands, Africa and the Americas — assemble to create this nation? This incredible and poignant story is poorly taught to Americans. And it is no wonder that people around the world must wonder about a nation where peoples from their own countries played an important role in building the United States. For Americans, what role did they and their ancestors play in building this nation? For foreigners, what role did their countrymen and women have in our nation-building project?

The museum will be at the top of places to visit for students from across the nation on school trips to Washington. It will foster learning nationwide as schools adopt lesson plans based on the museum’s story, developed in part by the museum’s education department.

There are now 144 leading scholars who signed on to support the museum. They and others cover fields including history, anthropology, archeology, genetics, linguistics and sociology. They will assure that the story the museum tells is based on the best scholarship available. The museum will be able to adjust the story it tells as new scholarship is brought to light.

The museum will host a Center for the Study of the American People with in-house scholars to coordinate a network of scholars throughout the United States and the world studying subjects related to the museum and its central story.

The NMAP would serve as a resource throughout the nation for museums and other institutions that focus on particular ethnic, nationality or race-related subjects and we imagine having a close relationship with such institutions across our national landscape.

The National Museum of the American People can be expected to use reams of data provided by the Census, from the first one mandated by the Constitution and continuing every ten years through today. The museum will use that information and adapt it to modern technology to track the growth of the American people in easily understood electronic graphics showing those who were here and those who are newcomers. Visitors leaving the museum will have an enhanced knowledge of their own stories about becoming Americans and a visceral sense of who the American People are.

This blog is about the proposed National Museum of the American People which is about the making of the American People. The blog will be reporting regularly on 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.

— Sam Eskenazi, Director, Coalition for the National Museum of the American People