Imagine Traveling to the New American Frontier!

By Reema Ghazi, Youth Experience Coordinator

In our partnership with the Capitol Hill Cluster Schools, we (EdLab) arrange mission-based field trips to various Smithsonian museums and ask students to use museum objects as a launching point for further investigation into a broader challenge.

Recently, we took our Watkins Elementary fifth grade to our home base, the National Postal Museum, to investigate what it would have been like to travel out west onto the new American frontier in the 1800's-- and to investigate how travel has changed today, and how it's become a nearly universal part of life.

The students explored the museum galleries looking for clues into what travel to the West might have looked like, and then interviewed museum visitors about their experiences with travel and starting a new life. At the end, the students recorded audio entries about museum objects from the perspective of a 19th century traveller to the west-- to be built into broader podcast journals about the journeying life in the time of Manifest Destiny.