All Stories

On January 15, 1967, the NFL champion Green Bay Packers played the AFL champion Kansas City Chiefs in what would later be known as Super Bowl I.  Sixty years earlier, American football looked much different.  Helmets resembled aviator caps.  Forward passes had been legal for less than a year.

The good girls and boys of the Coast Guard Air Station Brooklyn get a visit from Santa, December 1944.

Suitably clad in a custom-made flying suit and sporting a pair of goggles, President Warren G. Harding's 1921 Thanksgiving turkey, the gift of the Harding Girls' Club of Chicago, arrives at the College Park (Maryland) airport on a DH-4 mailplane.

The Boeing B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay is one of the National Air and Space Museum’s most heralded artifacts, but a new addition to the National Air and Space Museum Archives Division’s collections provides a glimpse into the lives of the crew before they became worldwide names.  In May, the Archives accepted an accession of three State of Utah individual liquor permits for 1944 to 1945 (Acc. No. 2012-0027). 

I knew Neil Armstrong, not all that well, but for a very long time.

During World War II, a group of young, enthusiastic and skilled African American men pressed the limits of flight and the boundaries of racial inequality by becoming Army Air Forces pilots. Most of these pilots trained at Moton Field in Tuskegee, Alabama.

When I learned Ray Bradbury died on June 5, 2012, two things came to mind.

Many older African Americans who grew up in the South painfully remember the time when black passengers had to sit in the back of busses or use separate train compartments; and when train stations and bus terminals provided separate but mostly unequal facilities such as drinking fountains, restrooms, waiting lounges, and eating facilities for black and white passengers.

Curator Dominick Pisano examines the public's fascination with celebrity airplane crashes.

When Disney•Pixar approached the National Air and Space Museum about donating the Buzz Lightyear figure that had flown to the International Space Station for 15 months, I was delighted.  As the curator for the Museum’s social and cultural space artifacts, I have the unique job of getting to take toys seriously.