What can you see at the History Museum?

This exhibit highlights historical narratives of transgender people in the West and considers how westward migration provided opportunities for self-expression and fulfillment. Traversing unfamiliar territory, these individuals crossed both physical boundaries and the perceptual boundaries of their earlier lives. Join us in learning more about the history of gender, identity, and changing cultural perceptions in the West and the connections between transgender history and the LGBTQ+ community today.

The WSHS and UW collaborated to provide a unique learning experience for students in the capstone course for the Public Health/Global Health major. This exhibition is the result of the student's work. By exploring poignant personal accounts of people in our community, you'll come away with a clearer, more diverse understanding of the reach and ramifications of this global crisis as it played out right here at home.

Looking across city blocks and quilt blocks, roadways and seams, one can see a visible kinship between quilt making and cartography. Both are built upon established systems that use color, pattern, and symbols to create whole compositions from a network of interlocked parts. Quilts and maps are also infused with history and memory—similarly living records of traditions, experiences, relationships, beliefs, and future aspirations.

See a selection of bird’s-eye view maps from the Historical Society's collections illustrating cities and towns from across Washington. Also called panoramic maps, they were drawn to give the viewer a sense of looking down at a city and its major features as if they were flying above it. Maps on view are from the late 1800s -early 1900s as well as more recently created maps inspired by the panoramic style. Also featuring historic surveying, mapmaking, and illustration tools.

Take a journey through the marvelously detailed world of model trains! The Washington State History Museum’s 25th Annual Model Train Festival rolls into town Friday, December 17, 2021 and runs through Sunday, January 2, 2022.

Over the past ten years, acclaimed artist Judy Gelles has interviewed and photographed more than 300 fourth-grade students from a wide range of economic and cultural backgrounds. These students’ stories capture the gamut of societal issues that we face today.

UW students are working with Borderland Collective to create work that explores migrant farmworker family life. Explore their photographs, documents, and objects, alongside items from the permanent collection of the Washington State Historical Society.

Visitors are transported back to a time when, if you were Black, it took bravery and a Green-Book to cross the country safely. The exhibition includes film, photographs, art installations, interactives, oral histories from travelers and Green-Book business owners, and comparisons of Green-Book sites then and now. It also features historical objects from the Smithsonian and from Green-Book sites, including a rare example of a Green-Book, matchbooks, business signs, brochures, "sundown" signs, and historical documents.

Explore the history, artistry, and production of Hawaii’s enduring fashion statement, the Aloha Shirt. This exhibition of sixty objects, including original textile artwork, production sketches and swatches, advertisements, and vintage shirts tells the story of an early innovator, John “Keoni” Meigs, in an industry that has left an indelible mark on fashion in the United States and the world. Meigs was a self-taught painter whose talent became known to the early shirt manufacturers in Honolulu. In 1938, he created his first designs, concentrating on Polynesian tapa patterns inspired by the originals he had studied at the local Bishop Museum.