Peoples from every land created and built the United States of America and it became the world's economic, military, scientific and cultural leader. They forged a new kind of multicultural pluralistic nation and became a new kind of people.
The full history about the making of the American People starts with the first humans in the Western Hemisphere and extends through waves of free and forced migration and immigration to the present. Yet nowhere is there a museum devoted to telling this story – one of the most important stories in human history.
The Museum's mission is to advance and disseminate knowledge about the history of the making of the American People and to have visitors take pride in the story as well as to reflect upon moral questions that are raised by it.
The Museum would tell who these people are, where they came from, why they left their homeland, how they got here, when they arrived, where they first settled, who was already here, what they encountered, where they moved after they arrived, how they became Americans, what they contributed and how they transformed our nation.
The story will be told in four chapters:
Chapter I — The First Peoples Come: Est. 20,000 years ago – 1607; first peoples migration and settlement, Europeans coming to the Western Hemisphere and the first European settlement leading to creation of the nation.
Chapter II — The Nation Takes Form: 1607 – 1820; the near extinction of first peoples, Hispanic settlement in the Southwest, English and other Western European settlement, the African slave trade, the establishment of the nation and the beginning of its expansion westward taking in new peoples.
Chapter III — The Great In–Gathering: 1820 – 1924; a century of immigration from Europe, Asia, Africa and the Americas and continued expansion taking in new peoples. The ancestors of most Americans came or were incorporated into the nation during this period.
Chapter IV — And Still They Come: 1924 – present; the ongoing story of American immigration.