Featured Image: Explore Boone
As many prepare to celebrate America 250, it’s important to pair all of those quintessential Americanisms we love, like cherry pie, fireworks, and sweet tea, with an honest look at American history. As you’re roadtripping this summer, between small town shopping and mom and pop dining, we encourage you to hit a museum or two that has a different story to tell.
From women’s history to Civil Rights and the World Wars, these seven museums are a worthy destination or detour, offering you a deeper look at the past 250 years.
Booth Western Art Museum | Cartersville, Georgia
A Western art museum in north Georgia may feel like a head-scratcher at first, but would you believe it holds the largest collection of Western art in the country? Past the cowboys and landscapes, the Carolyn & James Millar Presidential Gallery houses authenticated letters and memorabilia from every U.S. president, displayed up close and personal.
Two Mississippi Museums | Jackson, Mississippi
The Museum of Mississippi History and the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum sit side by side in Jackson, and together they cover everything from the Mississippi regiments who fought in 1815 to the marches and mugshots of the civil rights era. This March, the museums opened Mississippi Made, an exhibit pulling together 250 artifacts that trace the state’s impact on the rest of the country, from logging camps to rocket labs, Olympic athletes to music legends.
The Esse Purse Museum | Little Rock, Arkansas
Tucked into Little Rock’s super cool SoMa district, the Esse Purse Museum was founded by Anita Davis, who started with 250 purses from her own collection. Today, the museum holds more than 500 bags, tracing a full century of American womanhood (1900 to 1999) through the lipsticks, checkbooks, and car keys women carried close to their bodies decade by decade.
Hickory Ridge History Museum | Boone, North Carolina
2026 is a double anniversary for Hickory Ridge: the nation’s 250th and the 75th year of Horn in the West, the country’s oldest Revolutionary War outdoor drama, which is performed right on the museum grounds every summer. Beyond the show, this is a working living-history village complete with eighteenth-century cabins, blacksmithing demos, hearthside cooking, and more.
Clotilda: The Exhibition | Mobile, Alabama
In the summer of 1860, the Clotilda slipped into Mobile Bay carrying 110 enslaved Africans, the last known slave ship to reach American shores. It arrived 52 years after the international slave trade had been outlawed. The people aboard survived enslavement and went on to found Africatown, and in 2019, the wreck of the ship itself was discovered at the bottom of the Mobile River. The Clotilda exhibition carries visitors through the powerful full story.
Capitol Park Museum | Baton Rouge, Louisiana
Capitol Park Museum is a combination of two permanent exhibits, Grounds for Greatness: Louisiana and the Nation and The Louisiana Experience: Discovering the Soul of America. Each traces how Indigenous nations, European colonists, enslaved Africans, and Acadians (the folks that eventually became Cajuns) shaped the state. Artifacts onsite range from a Civil War submarine to a bugle once owned by Louis Armstrong and the actual door from the Fairview Plantation jail for enslaved people.
The National WWII Museum | New Orleans, Louisiana
Consistently ranked among the best museums in the country, the National WWII Museum tells the war through the people who lived it, service members and civilians alike. With so few WWII veterans left to share their stories firsthand, the museum’s role as keeper of that generation’s legacy only grows more important as the country marks 250 years of service and sacrifice.
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