Museum Collections

The cowboy is an iconic figure in American culture. With his hat, boots, and trusty horse, the cowboy rides in at a moment of crisis to intervene against the forces of evil. In the 20th century, the cowboy of the Wild West took center stage in the realm of popular literature.

The Fantasy Fiction Collection contains: The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Jungle Book, Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There, Peter and Wendy, and Alice's Adventures Under Ground.

Abolitionism was the movement that strove to end slavery in the United States. The abolitionists saw slavery as a stain and an affliction on the United States and made it their goal to eradicate slave ownership. Abolitionists produced anti-slavery literature, sent petitions to Congress, and ran for political office.

One of the most studied and written about episodes in US history, the American Civil War remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. The conflict was one of the earliest industrial wars in which mass-produced weapons were employed. The mobilization of civilian factories, shipyards, transportation, and food supplies all foreshadowed the impact of industrialization in World War I, World War II, and subsequent conflicts.

Book 1: Jane Eyre is a novel by English writer Charlotte Brontë from 1847. Book 2: Little Women is a novel by Louisa May Alcott who was also an abolitionist and a feminist. Book 3: The Odd Women is an 1893 novel by the English novelist George Gissing. Book 4: Anna Howard Shaw (1847-1919) was a leader in the campaign for women’s suffrage. Book 5: Sojourner Truth’s autobiographical Narrative chronicles her life as a slave, and her transformation into an abolitionist, women’s rights activist, orator, and preacher. Book 6: "The Crisis" is a speech....

The Texas Rangers were created by Stephen F. Austin in 1823. The Rangers have taken part in many of the most important events of Texas history, such as preventing the assassination of presidents William Howard Taft and Porfirio Díaz in El Paso, and in some of the best-known criminal cases in the history of the Old West, like those of gunfighter John Wesley Hardin, bank robber Sam Bass, and the outlaws Bonnie and Clyde.

Py-Lieberman reflects on the profound connections between even outwardly dissimilar objects and offers insight and stories from Smithsonian experts. The book explores artworks, scientific specimens, historical artifacts, airplanes, spacecraft, plants, and so much more, contemplating how each item represents different facets of humanity and resonates with cultural meaning in surprising ways. Whimsical, affecting, and insightful, The Object at Hand offers an intimate and exclusive tour of the Smithsonian collections.

Examining the borders between one nation and another, between one person and another, Urrea reveals his mastery of the short form. This collection includes the Edgar-award winning "Amapola" and his now-classic "Bid Farewell to Her Many Horses," which had the honor of being chosen for NPR's "Selected Shorts" not once but twice.

In Bucak's dreamlike narratives, dead girls recount the effects of an earthquake and a chess-playing automaton falls in love. A student stops eating and no one knows whether her act is personal or political. A Turkish wrestler, a hero in the East, is seen as a brute in the West. The anguish of an Armenian refugee is "performed" at an American fund-raiser. An Ottoman ambassador in Paris amasses a tantalizing collection of erotic art. And Greek God Apollo confronts his personal history and bewails his Homeric reputation as he tries to memorialize, and make sense of, generations of war.

Although he is one of the world's most popular authors who continues to thrill and chill readers and listeners of all ages, Edgar Allan Poe's life is as enigmatic as his sudden, unexplained death. In a quest for solutions to the mysteries surrounding the poet's life and work, a group of Poe devotees founded the Poe Shrine in 1922. This body included the world's most prolific Poe collector, a psychiatrist who believed Poe was clairvoyant, and the grandson of Poe's worst enemy.

Many hybrid forms of the mystery-crime-thriller genre exists. All of them are narratives that keep one in suspense about what is about to happen. The thriller also shares a literary lineage with ancient epic and myth populated by monsters, terror and danger. Alexandre Dumas, Alfred Hitchcock, and Robert Ludlum are some of the masters of the genre.

Xenophon of Athens (c. 430 BC - 354 BC) was an Athenian historian, philosopher, and soldier. "Hiero", one of Xenophon’s minor works, is a dialogue between Hiero, tyrant of Syracuse, and the lyric poet Simonides, as a response to the assumption that a tyrant's life is more pleasant than that of a commoner. "On Horsemanship" is one of his two treatises on horsemanship. Military training and the duties of the cavalry commander are dealt with in the other, "Hipparchicus", while "On Horsemanship" deals with the selection, care, and training of horses in general.