Two hundred and fifty years after its founding, the United States is still working to form a more perfect union.
The Putnam Museum & Science Center will welcome a Smithsonian Institution curator this Thursday, April 30 for a free talk, “Between Hope and History: Curating America at 250,” at 6 p.m. in the Putnam Giant Screen Theater, 1717 W. 12th St., Davenport.
As the nation approaches its 250th anniversary, the Smithsonian’s flagship exhibition, “American Aspirations” (at the Smithsonian Castle in Washington, D.C.) invites us to consider a defining paradox: the U.S. has never fully realized the ideals proclaimed in the 1776 Declaration of Independence — and yet, generation after generation, Americans have continued to reach toward them, according to the Putnam.
The Thursday presentation by Dr. Abeer Saha (curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History) will explore that enduring tension between history and hope.
At his talk at the Putnam (one of 200-plus Smithsonian affiliates nationwide), Saha will take the audience into the mind of the curator and ask, “How do you curate a national exhibition when there are so many stories and so many possible artifacts? How do you make these impossible choices?” he said in a Monday, April 27th phone interview.
“And we're calling the exhibition ‘American Aspirations,’ but how do you curate aspiration? How do you curate dreams”?” he asked. “So I'm going to take the visitors through five choices, curatorial choices that we made, or five prominent curatorial choices that we made between equally extraordinary objects, some stories that we wanted to, but ultimately couldn't include because of course we can't include everything. And I'm really excited to share that. I think it was some of the most challenging and still rewarding aspects of the work I've done over the last year and a half as project director.”
“The distance between the dreams and the reality is the engine of change in America,” Saha added. “And everyone has sought in their own way to realize those ideals first expressed in the Declaration that have animated so many Americans. And even if they haven't always agreed with them. At least inspired them to either reach for or to contest or to challenge or demand, as it were, something else. And so that difference between promise and reality is this extraordinary story of America for the last 250 years.”
From millions of objects stewarded by the Smithsonian, this new exhibition brings together artifacts that do not flatten complexity or sanitize struggle. Thomas Jefferson’s writing desk (where he penned the Declaration of Independence in Philadelphia) stands beside Harriet Tubman’s hymnal and Martin Luther King Jr.’s handwritten “I Have a Dream” speech — not as isolated icons, but as voices in an unfinished conversation.
In these divisive, fractured times, the exhibition asks a civic question: How do we create a space where every American can see a part of themselves? Perhaps, the exhibit will show, the answer lies not in consensus, but in shared dreams.
By presenting objects that embody the pursuits of liberty, hope, freedom, fairness, progress, democracy, and new horizons, “American Aspirations” becomes less a story about agreement and more an invitation to participate in the next chapter of the nation’s becoming.
The Smithsonian Castle (also free to visitors, to show “American Aspirations”) was completed in 1855, and has been closed for renovations since Feb. 1, 2023, its first major renovation in more than 50 years, as part of a $2-billion Smithsonian redevelopment plan.
The castle will temporarily reopen May 22 to Sept. 7, 2026, as part of Our Shared Future: 250 programming to commemorate the nation's 250th birthday. The castle will serve as the Smithsonian Visitor Center and feature a café, shop, and the special exhibition, American Aspirations (on view from June 2 to July 26).
The exhibit of 30 priceless treasures will only be displayed for less than two months partly because they’re from different units at the Smithsonian, Saha said Monday.
“It just doesn't happen. And so we really wanted to create the sense of anticipation and excitement that there was a short period where if you wanted to, if you were going to be in D.C. or you wanted to have this one-of-a-kind experience of bringing in these 30 objects from around the Smithsonian that had never been in the same room together before, then this is when you have to be there,” he said.
Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie Bunch “really wanted folks to feel the sort of sense of excitement around how rare and special this is,” Saha said. “Then there's also the practical part, which is that we want the Smithsonian Castle to be renovated. It's the oldest building at the Smithsonian and so we're opening it for a short time to have this exhibition and then it immediately goes back to the construction companies to be renovated to become the space that it is and deserves as the oldest and central Smithsonian building.”
A majority of the items are from the National Museum of American History, including Thomas Edison’s first light bulb, and the model for Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty. It also includes the flight suits from pioneering aviator Amelia Earhart, and Sally Ride, the first woman in space.
The handwritten “I Have a Dream” speech is from King’s iconic March on Washington, Aug. 28, 1963.
“It’s such a fantastic speech story. One of his interns, I believe, an intern working or in security just happened to pick up the handwritten speech after Dr. King gave it,” Saha said. “So the intern picked it up and eventually donated it to Villanova University and through them to the Smithsonian.”
He can’t believe he’s got this job at this point in America’s history.
“I'm still a little amazed,” Saha said. “I'm still a little amazed that of all the people who could be working on this exhibition, that I had a voice and a contribution. I imagine that probably hundreds of thousands of people will come through the doors of ‘American Aspirations’ in July and to have had a role in telling the nuanced, inspiring, and in some situations, sad, but also hopeful stories of America and it truly is an honor.”
Another immigrant success story
Saha is a 35-year-old native of India, who first came to the U.S. at 18, for college – the University of Virginia, founded in 1819 by Thomas Jefferson, author of the Declaration of Independence, and the nation’s third president (1801-1809).
Saha received his PhD in History (2021) and BS in Mechanical Engineering (2013) from the University of Virginia. His primary fields of research include science and technology studies, global environmental history, and agriculture in the twentieth century. His engineering background continues to inform his scholarship and curatorial work in public history.
In July 2023, he curated the exhibition, "Reconstructing Weatherbreak: Geodesic Domes in an Age of Extreme Weather" which was featured on CBS, the Weather Channel, and The New York Times.
In his time at the Smithsonian since 2020, Saha has striven to make the historic engineering collections of drawings and artifacts at the NMAH more accessible to the general public. He has done so by adding over 1,000 engineering photographs to the Smithsonian collections database (collections.si.edu), responding to hundreds of public queries, and shedding light on the vast technology collections in the museum's care at academic symposiums and conferences around the world.
“I enjoyed engineering, but I really loved thinking about technology and the ways in which it impacted society,” Saha said. “To delve into the social studies of tech and engineering. And so my professor then became my advisor.”
That PhD advisor recommended him to a job at the Smithsonian, where they “were looking for this rare combination of a person who has a history of technology PhD and also has an engineering or technical background and education,” Saha recalled. “That combination of factors really made me one of the best and few people for the job. And I ended up starting four years into my PhD at the Smithsonian and then finished up in the first couple years of my job.”
He’s technically in the same job today (without the scholar role), growing more into a “public historian, which is not something that honestly graduate school tends to prepare you for,” he said. “So I had to learn a lot of that on the job.”
The first time Saha came to D.C. was 2009, and “the Smithsonian really was the heart of that experience,” he said. “And I never imagined that I'd be working here, at least not then. And the museum that I ended up going to at the time was the Air and Space Museum. And it really left an impression.”
Managing many artifacts
Of the roughly 2 million objects in his museum’s collection (in contrast, the Putnam has 250,000 items), Saha is curator of engineering, agriculture, manufacturing, steel and iron hand tools, around 80,000 objects total.
It’s always a challenge to update the Smithsonian’s displays, to reflect recent years and changes in technology, he said.
“I think it's exciting when you are surrounded by colleagues and leadership that care about technology, and I think it can be frustrating when that's not there,” Saha said. “Thankfully, at American History, I feel really quite supported. I think one of our major challenges, honestly, is despite being the nation's premier American history museum, we still have so many space issues, which I think almost every museum does at some point or another.”
All the Smithsonian museums together have 150 million objects.
“Every few years, we know we've run out of space, and we have to really manage our collections in order to bring more in,” Saha said. “And I think that's the most challenging part. So it's exciting that we get to really stay as much as we can on top of sort of the latest developments that we feel will be important to historians of the future to document that. We also have to balance that with the fact that there are very real material constraints to being a cultural institution at this time where funding is drying out everywhere.”
He’s come to appreciate America and is blessed to be in his job that preserves its history.
“To be able to have a role to play in ‘American Aspirations’ (Saha is project director), the Smithsonian's landmark 250th anniversary exhibition, and to also be able to bring the perspectives of those millions of immigrants around America that want to call America home -- I think it makes it a really incredible and special opportunity to do that,” he said.
For nearly 250 years, Americans have been inspired by the ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence. American Aspirations brings together for the first time some of the Smithsonian’s most treasured objects to commemorate this founding document.
“The exhibition invites visitors to consider how the founding ideals of 1776 have been interpreted and how each generation has reached towards new understandings of freedom, opportunity, and a shared future,” says the exhibit website.
This July 4 also marks the bicentennial of the 1826 deaths of Jefferson and fellow Founding Father John Adams, who died the same day, 50 years after the Declaration’s signing.
The “Making History, Making Change” Lecture Series is a national collaboration between the Smithsonian and 25 Smithsonian Affiliate organizations, featuring expert-led talks that explore the people, moments, and ideals that have shaped—and continue to shape—the American experience.
For more information about “Making History, Making Change,” visit https://affiliations.si.edu/making-history-making-change.
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