Peoples from every land created and built the United States of America and it became the world’s economic, military, scientific and cultural leader. They forged a new kind of multicultural pluralistic nation ... and became a new kind of people.

The full story of the making of the American people starts with the first migrations to this land some 20,000 years ago and extends through waves of migration and immigration to the present. Yet nowhere is there a museum devoted to telling this full story.

Congress should establish the National Museum of the American People to tell this story. The Museum’s mission would be to advance and disseminate knowledge about the story of the making of the American people and to challenge visitors to reflect upon moral questions that are raised by that story as well as to take pride in it.

The Museum would tell:

• Who these people were
• Where they came from
• Why they left their homeland
• How they got here
• Where they first settled
• Who was already here
• Where they moved after they arrived
• How they became Americans
• How they transformed our nation

The story could be told in four chapters:

Chapter I — The First Peoples Come: 20,000 years before present (est.) – 1607; Indian migration and settlement, early European explorers, and first European settlement.

Chapter II — The Nation Takes Form: 1607 – 1820; the near extinction of Indians, Hispanic settlement in the Southwest, English and other Western European settlement, the African slave trade, the establishment of the nation, and its expansion westward taking in new peoples.

Chapter III — The Great In–Gathering: 1820 – 1924; a century of immigration. The ancestors of most Americans came during this period.