In my 20-plus years of working at the Missouri History Museum I have had the opportunity to work on many exhibits. While I have enjoyed the experiences each one brought, none gave me more pleasure than seeing the Lindbergh exhibit open in 2002. This exhibit celebrated the 75th anniversary of the famous aviator’s transatlantic flight from New York to Paris. I had been working on the exhibit for the better part of two years and felt like it was my baby. It was the first exhibit for which I had done the historical and artifact research, and it was a big step for me as a curator to see it come together. Read more »

One of the most memorable days of a mother-daughter trip would not have happened if I hadn’t double checked one of those “boring facts and dates” that many people complain about when they think of studying history. Read more »

I love having the opportunity to research individual artifacts in our collections. The January Mystery Tour gave me the chance to do just that with one of the lethal-looking objects suspended from the ceiling in the Currents gallery. The seed drill has a long row of curved “teeth” that hang down over visitors’ heads, a wooden box above the teeth, and a yoke. Read more »

A man in Siberia is claiming to have shot a video of a woolly mammoth, a creature that became extinct 10,000 years ago. Wouldn’t you just know it—the video is so blurry that you can’t make out the creature! (Come to think of it, do any crisp images exist of Nessie or Bigfoot?)

Illustration by Velizar Simeonovski © The Field Museum. Read more »

There is a memory I have from childhood. It’s the last week of school, and my best friend, Christa, and I are at recess. She has a cassette player and we are listening to a tape that she took from her sister’s room. I remember sitting there on the grass and just being wowed. It is unlike anything I have ever heard. Keyboards build, a guitar teases, a woman starts singing, followed by a male, then by another male who takes over the song. The three join together for the chorus, and then the magic words, “Tonight we’re gonna party like it’s 1999.” What an idea! Read more »

On March 26, the Missouri History Museum celebrated the opening of Chalkboards to Computers: A Lindbergh School Retrospective. The exhibition documents the history of Truman Elementary School, which was formerly Lindbergh-North Junior High, The Middle School, Harry S. Truman Middle School, Affton-Lindbergh Early Childhood Education Center, and the Kindergarten Center during the course of its 49-year history. Read more »

On Saturday, January 15, visitors to the Old Courthouse in St. Louis encountered a re-enactment of a slave auction staged to show the historic brutality involved in the selling of human beings. Here at the History Museum there are vivid reminders of slavery’s legacy all around me. On view in the Currents gallery is a large and powerful painting that never ceases to stir my emotions, The Last Sale of Slaves in St. Louis, as depicted by artist Thomas Satterwhite Noble (1835–1907). Read more »

Editor’s note: Sharon Smith, Curator of Civic and Personal Identity, recently curated the History Museum’s exhibition The Americans with Disabilities Act: Twenty Years Later. She writes about her experience:

In order to understand what the ADA has meant to the disability community, as well as society in general, we wanted to look at life before the passage up until the present day. We recognize that work is not complete: Some have fought the legislation. And still today there is work going on to keep the ADA in the minds of the public and businesses. Read more »

I enjoy a good ghost story, Halloween or not. Lucky for us, St. Louis is home to one of the top haunted houses in the country, the Lemp Mansion. The Lemp family history is riddled with tragedy. Most St. Louisans are familiar with the stories of the decline of the Lemp family—stories of beer brewing and prohibition, lost lives and fortunes, and ghosts of unhappy souls. Somehow, though, this knowledge about the cursed family did not deter my then-fiancé and me from planning our wedding reception at the Grand Hall, a banquet facility that is part of the Lemp Mansion grounds, in January 2000. Read more »

A co-worker emailed me a news story about National POW/MIA Day. The article featured a man who, for 39 years, has worn a bracelet bearing the name of a missing soldier from the Vietnam War, someone he had never met. It got me thinking about our own Vietnam display in the Reflections gallery of the Museum, specifically, the story of Richard D. Chorlins. His family has also been waiting more than 39 years for his return to St. Read more »