News

Museum Collections Database Now Online

Our shift to remote work this spring provided an opportunity to launch our museum collections database online, making our collection of art and artifacts accessible to everyone. Those objects include important portraits of Revolutionary War soldiers, the weapons they carried and hundreds of objects made in the generations since to commemorate the legacy of American independence. They also include the world’s best collection of Society of the Cincinnati Eagle insignias—from the first Eagles commissioned by Pierre L’Enfant in Paris to the most recent designs. You can now explore high-resolution images and descriptions of five hundred works of art and artifacts any time, from any computer or mobile device. More objects will be added to the database every week.

Explore the Database

 

 

Now Online

Lesson Plans for Classroom or Home Use

We’re gearing up for the 2020-2021 school year with more online lessons, including one on the 1780 Siege of Charleston created by Rikki Davenport, one of our Master Teachers from Mount Pleasant, S.C. The lesson features a nineteenth-century toy from our collections called the “Historiscope,” a moving scroll of scenes of the American Revolution set in a miniature cardboard theater, and asks students to create their own version.

Exhibitions

America’s First Veterans

Over a quarter of a million Americans served in the armed forces that won our independence. Those who survived became America’s first veterans—the world’s first veterans of an army of free men. This exhibition explores their stories and traces how the American republic finally acknowledged its debt and expressed its gratitude to the soldiers who secured the nation’s freedom.

Blog

Lessons from a Revolutionary Epidemic

George Washington’s aggressive response to epidemic disease during the Revolutionary War offers lessons for today. That war was fought not just against British forces, but against an enemy far more dangerous—smallpox.

Smallpox was one of the most dreaded diseases of the eighteenth century […]