Falmouth Historical Society [MA]

Description

The Falmouth Historical Society operates a selection of museums, which preserve and share the history of Falmouth, Massachusetts. Two 18th–century houses display fine art, furniture, and other decorative arts; while exhibits discuss pre–Civil War medical practice, the 1800's whaling industry, and the life of Katharine Lee Bates (1859–1929), author of "America, the Beautiful." The area surrounding the structures contains three gardens—one a Colonial–style flower garden—and a green which has been used for Colonial militia practice.

The society offers period rooms; exhibits; guided walking tours; trolley tours on maritime life and agricultural life; hands-on children's activities; and archives, including maritime log books.

American Jazz Museum [MO]

Description

The American Jazz Museum showcases the sights and sounds of a uniquely American art form through interactive exhibits and films; the Changing Gallery; the Blue Room jazz club; and the Gem Theater, a 500-seat performing arts center. The collections include artifacts related to jazz greats Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, and Charlie Parker, as well as over 100 recordings. Other highlights include the Charlie Parker Memorial and a major collection of more than 5,000 jazz films.

The museum offers exhibits, films, performances, educational programming, and 16 interactive listening and mixing stations.

Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site [TX]

Description

Eisenhower Birthplace State Historic Site features the modest two-story frame house in the railroad town of Denison where Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in 1890. Eisenhower's father worked for the railroad and the birthplace contains family possessions and period antiques demonstrating the lifestyle of a late 19th-century working family. The site includes six acres of scenic woods and creek bottomland intersected by an abandoned rail track turned into a hiking path. The visitor center is a historic structure filled with hundreds of items relating to Eisenhower and his role in U.S. and world history.

The site offers exhibits and tours.

Stumptown Historical Society [MT]

Description

The Stumptown Historical Society seeks to preserve and share the history of the Flathead Valley and Whitefish, Montana. The society operates a museum, housed within a working railway depot, built 1927. Collections include railroad and community artifacts.

The museum offers exhibits, and the website contains a number of historical photographs.

Salem County Historical Society [NJ]

Description

The Salem County Historical Society seeks to preserve and share the history of Salem County, New Jersey. Collections include furniture, paintings, textiles, glass, china, silver, documents, tools, Wistarburg glass, and the Colonial Benjamin Holme tall case clock taken by the British to General Howe's headquarters in New York. Structures include a 1959 stone barn, a 19th–century log cabin, and a museum; and styles range across Colonial, Federal and Italianate.

The society offers lectures; exhibits; specific field trip programming, designed to meet state educational standards; period rooms; a research library; traveling trunks and accompanying lesson plans for local rental; in-classroom presentations by docents; and a summer camp. The website offers a newsletter for students and teachers.

National Museum of Roller Skating [NE]

Description

The National Museum of Roller Skating contains the largest collection of historical roller skates, dating to 1819, in the world. It also contains patents, medals, trophies, photographs, artwork, films and videotapes, costumes, library and archival materials, and roller skating memorabilia. The museum holds approximately 1,500 volumes of roller skating books and periodicals, including over 125 titles (American and foreign) in its periodical collection. The archives also includes over 8,000 photographs; personal papers of individuals prominent in roller skating from 1800 to the present; programs and archival material for local, regional, national, and international roller skating competitions; and miscellaneous articles and images related to roller skating.

The museum offers exhibits and films.

Jacobsburg Historical Society [PA]

Description

The Jacobsburg Historical Society preserves and interprets the historical Henry family estate, early industrial properties, and the family's gun and iron making heritage. Henrys not only produced firearms for all U.S. major conflicts from the Revolutionary War through the Civil War, but they were also the primary suppliers of rifles for the largest American business enterprise of the early 19th century, John Jacob Astor's American Fur Company. The Henry firearm became the most prominent weapon of the western frontier due to its durability, accuracy, and relatively low cost. The society operates the Pennsylvania Long Rifle Museum; the 1832 John Joseph Henry House; and the Nicholas Hawk Gun Shop, a reconstruction of an 1802 structure.

The society offers visitor center exhibits, a historic house museum, living history encampments, school programs, a monthly community lecture series, a youth history day camp, a number of publications, and early American gunsmithing courses.