Main Exhibit:
The Times That Changed Us: Technology & American Identity During Crises of the 19th & 20th Centuries

This exhibition traces five defining American crises—the Civil War, World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, and the Civil Rights Movement—to argue that American identity has never been fixed. It has been repeatedly remade in moments of national trial. Each crisis forced Americans to renegotiate the boundaries of citizenship, the state’s obligations to its people, and the meaning of “American.”

Technology both drove these upheavals and exposed their human cost: from Civil War battlefield photography to Depression-era documentary portraits to televised Civil Rights protests, the camera especially turned private suffering into public reckoning, making injustice visible enough to demand change. Taken together, the exhibit’s five crises reveal a nation perpetually rebuilding itself under pressure, and the journey culminates by asking visitors to locate themselves in that unfinished story: what does it mean to be American right now?