65 Objects That Changed the World

What can an ordinary object tell us about the ways people change one another—and about what it means to be American?

For more than six decades, Peace Corps Volunteers have lived and worked alongside communities around the world. They carried pieces of home with them—books, photographs, music, clothing, expectations, skills, and ideas about America. They encountered people with their own histories, knowledge, traditions, aspirations, and ideas about the United States. And when Volunteers returned home, they carried something different back.

65 Objects That Changed the World tells this history through the things people carried, used, made, exchanged, saved, and brought home.

These are not monuments to diplomacy. They are ordinary things that became witnesses to extraordinary encounters.

Through 65 objects, photographs, oral histories, and first-person accounts, the exhibition explores what happened when Americans and communities around the world met across differences of language, culture, race, nationality, history, and power. The stories are sometimes joyful and sometimes complicated: friendship and service, identity and belonging, misunderstanding and discovery, assumptions challenged, relationships formed, and lives redirected.

Presented as the Peace Corps marks its 65th anniversary and the United States commemorates its 250th, the exhibition considers America not as a finished story, but as a nation continually shaped by encounters with others. Peace Corps Volunteers carried American ideals and assumptions into the world, but they also encountered perspectives that questioned, complicated, and expanded their understanding of those ideals.

Seen this way, being American is not simply about what we offer the world. It is also about our willingness to listen, to have our assumptions challenged, to recognize the limits of our own perspective, and to return home changed by what others have taught us.

The objects gathered here reveal an America seen from beyond its borders—welcomed and questioned, generous and imperfect, confident and still learning. Together, they suggest that one of the most meaningful expressions of American citizenship may be the capacity to encounter difference with curiosity, humility, and a willingness to change.

These are American stories because they show America in relationship—with the world, with others, and with the ideals it is still striving to become.