Tenement Museum program highlights complexity of American history amid national debate

Amid a national debate over how American history should be told, educators and curators are testing a different approach that foregrounds ordinary lives alongside the monumental moments that shape a nation.

The conversation has intensified since reports emerged that the White House sought to review exhibits across eight Smithsonian museums, a step framed by the administration's April executive order titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to Our American History.” The order emphasizes a positive view of history, highlighting uplifting monuments and a narrative of progress that aspires to unify the public. Administrators have left open how any content edits would be implemented, but the aim is to avoid what officials describe as “divisive” or partisan history. In New York City, a parallel story is playing out not in federal galleries but in a renovated tenement on the Lower East Side, where educators are confronting history in the classroom and in the community.

This summer, 45 teachers from 29 states gathered at the Tenement Museum for a weeklong intensive on teaching immigration history and Black history. Historians guided participants through a journey across the 19th and 20th centuries, tracing how Irish, German, Black, Jewish, Italian, Puerto Rican, and Chinese New Yorkers navigated the Civil War, Reconstruction Amendments, the Chinese Exclusion Act, industrialization, and the day-to-day politics and conditions of tenement life. The program underscored how history can be ordinary and exceptional at once, and how classrooms can reflect that complexity rather than a single, unambiguous founding story.

Lesson 1: The ordinary is extraordinary. While textbooks often center famous figures, the program urged teachers to illuminate the everyday people who shaped a nation. One participant recalled encountering a copy of Sermons and Addresses by Abraham Lincoln that originally belonged to Parthenia Lawrence, a Black teenager who lived in the tenements during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Considering a book once owned by a teen attending a segregated school in 1860s New York helped students connect with political history and imagine how speeches traveled through households, kitchens, and classrooms. Teachers emphasized that history gains vitality when multiple perspectives are considered, allowing students to engage with the evolving meanings of freedom, literacy, and citizenship.

Lesson 2: Americans progress through struggle and the formation of community. The teachers confronted the reality that the past includes violence, exploitation, and deprivation. The Civil War era, the Draft Riots in New York, the Panic of 1873, and the Great Depression all affected immigrant neighborhoods, while factory conditions produced tragic injuries and deaths—most notably the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which claimed 146 lives, many of them young Italian and Jewish women. Yet the tenement districts also became engines of social organization: mutual aid societies, churches, synagogues, fraternal clubs, labor unions, and literary and political groups helped residents articulate a shared sense of purpose. Large-scale mobilization—whether at Cooper Union’s Great Hall to celebrate the 15th Amendment, or in city and state reform movements—demonstrated how people from diverse backgrounds could unite around a common aim. The program highlighted how the gap between American ideals and reality catalyzed collective action, a dynamic teachers said could strengthen students’ understanding of what it means to strive toward a more perfect union.

Lesson 3: Difficult family histories can teach us resilience. The program drew on research from Emory University psychologists who describe an “intergenerational self”—the sense of identity that expands when students know their family histories include both setbacks and perseverance. Knowing their ancestors faced hardships and still carried forward can bolster resilience in students today. One participant described how memories of her own family home—its tiles, banister, and odors—surfaced during the week and offered strength she wished to pass along to her students. In a political climate where history has become a flashpoint, teachers observed that acknowledging both struggle and progress can help diverse communities connect. The group noted that history cannot be truly unifying unless it includes divisions and conflicts, and that recognizing past shortcomings can be a path to common ground.

In its broader arc, the Tenement Museum program reinforces a leadership claim frequently voiced in education and cultural circles: historical understanding deepens when it accommodates complexity and contradiction rather than smoothing them away. In that sense, the weeklong institute offered a practical model for how museums, schools, and communities can approach history as a shared resource that informs present-day dialogue without erasing the realities of less-than-ideal moments.

Taken together, the experiences described by participating teachers suggest a path for public-facing history that blends rigorous scholarship with lived experience. The juxtaposition with the federal discourse around historical narratives underscores a larger question about who gets to decide which histories are told—and how. Advocates of a broader, more nuanced approach argue that recognizing the full spectrum of immigrant and minority experiences strengthens civic literacy and fosters resilience in communities confronting polarization. Critics of a selective narrative caution against erasing difficult chapters in the name of unity. The Tenement Museum program, through its emphasis on everyday history and intergenerational continuity, offers a concrete example of how classrooms and museums can illuminate the past in ways that are both informative and restorative.

As museums and educators continue to navigate national debates over memory and meaning, the project in New York stands as a reminder that culture and entertainment institutions can play an essential role in shaping how history is understood. By foregrounding ordinary lives and the complexities of collective memory, the Tenement Museum program illustrates how communities can learn from the past while striving toward a more inclusive and resilient future.