A space lease was signed on September I for 9,000 square 

 fee: of office space at 601 Indiana Avenue, N W to house ap- 

 proximately 40 employees in the museum's Research and 

 Scholars Center and the Publications and New Media Initia- 

 tive Office. Renovations will proceed a move in January 1996. 



The museum's traveling exhibition program enjoyed a ban- 

 ner year, with a William H. Johnson retrospective scheduled 

 for seven museums across the country. Tours of contemporary 

 landscape photography, Thomas Cole and William H. 

 Johnson's Homecoming were successfully concluded. In other 

 travel-related activity, curators and the registranal staff 

 planned for 19 objects from the NMAA and Renwick collec- 

 tions to travel with the two-year national tour of "America's 

 Smithsonian," honoring the Institution's 150th anniversary. 



Natio?ial Museum of American History 



Spencer R. Creu; Director 



The National Museum of American History (NMAH) dedi- 

 cates its collections and scholarship to inspiring a broader un- 

 derstanding of our nation and its many peoples. Drawing on 

 more than 17 million objects in its collections and the hold- 

 ings of its Archives Center, the museum creates learning op- 

 portunities, stimulates imaginations, and presents 

 challenging ideas about our nation's past through original re- 

 search, exhibitions, publications, and public programs. 



The museum this year announced the founding of the Je- 

 rome and Dorothy Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention 

 and Innovation on May 31, 1995, through a $10.4 million gift 

 from the Lemelson Foundation. The center is named after its 

 benefactors, Jerome Lemelson, one of the nation's most pro- 

 lific inventors, and his wife, Dorothy. Their gift was the larg- 

 est cash donation ever presented to the Smithsonian 

 Institution. Lemelson holds more than 500 patents for a range 

 of inventions relating to videocassette recorders, cordless tele- 

 phones, and many other devices. His patented inventions in 

 robotics, machine vision, and flexible manufacturing have 

 profoundly influenced computer chip manufacturing and the 

 automotive industry. 



The primary mission of the Lemelson Center is to docu- 

 ment, interpret, and disseminate information about invention 

 and innovation. Through a variety of public programs, exhibi- 

 tions, research efforts, and electronic outreach projects, the 

 center hopes to encourage inventive creativity in young peo- 

 ple and foster an appreciation for the central role invention 

 plays in the history of the United States. 



On June I, the Lemelson Center kicked off its "Innovative 

 Lives" program for children and young adults with a series of 

 lecture-demonstrations by Hal Walker. An former aerospace 

 engineer, Walker shared his ideas on innovation as a career 

 and explained his research on lasers. He also helped illustrate 



the properties and applications of laser light for 85 middle- 

 school students in the museum's Hands On Science Center. 

 The center also immediately opened its own home page on 

 the World Wide Web. The address is http://www.si.edu/or- 

 ganiz/museums/nmah/homepage/lemel/ 



To serve the museum's large and diverse audiences, staff 

 members organized, produced, presented, and often per- 

 formed scores of other public programs — musical, dramatic, 

 scholarly, popular, and participatory. On October 7 and 8, the 

 continuing American Sampler series presented the first install- 

 ment of "The Guitar: Art and Soul." Hispanic artists per- 

 formed classical, flamenco, and traditional works, followed 

 later in the year by two more performance weekends featuring 

 jazz, blues, rhythm and blues, and gospel guitar styles. Ameri- 

 can Sampler also presented "Native American Women's 

 Music" in November to explore the often overlooked role of 

 women in Native Ametican music. In April, the continuing 

 series American Song presented "This Song Is You: A Centen- 

 nial Celebration of Oscar Hammerstein II," the preeminent 

 lyricist of the American musical theater's golden age. Another 

 American Song offering in June focused on the work of lyri- 

 cist Marilyn Bergman, cownter of such songs as "Windmills 

 of Your Mind" and the score for Yentl. The Office of Educa- 

 tion and Visitor Services organized programs throughout the 

 year, including "What's the Catch: Fish, Shellfish, and Fisher- 

 ies in America." In this the two-day conference, six panel dis- 

 cussions focused on American fisheries, their role in the life of 

 the nation, and how their harvests can be both bountiful and 

 safe. "Campfire Diary," presented in February, was a multime- 

 dia presentation by art professor Roger Shimomura that grew 

 out of a journal kept for fifty-six years by his grandmother, a 

 Japanese American pioneer and midwife sent to an intern- 

 ment camp during World War II. 



The Program in African American Culture (PAAC) offered 

 "Fighting Two Wars: African Americans in World War II" in 

 October. The conference, held at the historic Lincoln Theatre, 

 chronicled the experiences of African American men and 

 women in the U.S. Army during World War II. In January, 

 PAAC presented "Birthplace of a Whirlwind: The i960 

 Greensboro Sit-in," an afternoon program of reminiscences, a 

 song workshop, and a museum tour that commemorated the 

 birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr. A few weeks before the 

 program, the museum had put on display a section of the 

 lunch counter from the Woolworth's store in Greensboro, 

 North Carolina, which was the scene of one of the first organ- 

 ized sit-ins by college students to protest segregation during 

 the Civil Rights Movement. 



Hollywood filmmaker John Singleton, director of Boyz 'n 

 the Hood, was among the participants at the conference "100 

 Years of Black Film: Imaging African American Life, History, 

 and Culture" on February 1-4. The conference featured a series 

 of film screenings, a showing of Oscar Micheaux's classic si- 

 lent film Within Our Gates with live musical accompaniment, 

 and lectures by historians, filmmakers, and authors. The four- 

 day event was presented by PAAC and the Ethnic Imagery 



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