Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="371" caption="An exhibit case filled with West African wood carvings from an exhibition of the Herbert Ward African Collection in the United States National Museum (USNM), now the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), which opened March 1, 1922, Herbert Ward was an explorer, soldier, author, and artist, who collected objects of
Description: Preservation intern discusses working with oversize materials in the Archives collection, including information on the creation of custom enclosures, surface cleaning of blueprints, and humidification.
Description: The Freer Gallery of Art houses the Asian and impressionist art collection of Charles Lang Freer, who donated art works and an endowment to the Smithsonian in 1906. In 1982, Arthur M. Sackler donated a complementary collection housed in the Sackler Gallery in the Smithsonian Quadrangle Complex adjacent to the Freer. History of the Freer Gallery of Art and the Arthur M. Sackler
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_8206,size=350,right]Born around 1815, James Thomas Gant was one of twelve children born to free parents on a plantation a few miles northeast of the Washington DC-line.1 As a free black man who lived through nearly the entire nineteenth century, he would see the Civil War, the destruction of slavery, the rise and fall of an all-too-brief period of