Call it the attic of the nation: the National Museum of American History holds the most eclectic collection of American artifacts on the planet. This is the attic of the nation.
Inside, you can stand before the actual Star-Spangled Banner that flew over Fort McHenry on the morning of September 14, 1814, when Francis Scott Key saw it still waving after a night of British bombardment and wrote the poem that became the national anthem. The flag is massive — thirty feet by forty-two feet — and it is frayed and damaged from two centuries of handling before it was properly preserved. Fourteen of the original fifteen stars survive. Fragments were cut away and given as souvenirs in the nineteenth century.
The museum also holds Julia Child's actual kitchen, disassembled from her Cambridge, Massachusetts home and reinstalled here exactly as she used it. Walk through and see the pegboards where she hung her copper pots, the stove she cooked on while taping her television shows.
Other items: George Washington's false teeth — not wooden as legend holds, but made from ivory, human teeth, and horse teeth. The lunch counter from a Greensboro, North Carolina Woolworth's, where four Black college students sat down on February 1, 1960 and refused to leave, sparking the sit-in movement that spread across the South. The ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz.
This museum holds the first computer hard drive, a locomotive from 1831, Archie Bunker's chair from All in the Family, and the original Kermit the Frog puppet. American history is not just marble and bronze. It is also these.