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This yellow fire helmet represents an important life-saving partnership between the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Los Angeles County Fire Department (LACoFD). LACoFD’s Urban Search and Rescue Team serves with distinction as one of two departments in the U.S. trained and authorized to deploy with USAID disaster response teams…
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Rufus King, then American minister to Great Britain, issued this 1798 passport to David Hinckley, a wealthy Boston merchant who traveled frequently to London on business. It is the oldest in the museum’s collection and also one of the more intriguing. Corsairs of the Barbary states had captured David Hinckley in the…
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On the night of President Lincoln’s assassination, John Wilkes Booth’s co-conspirators attempted to assassinate Vice President Andrew Johnson and Secretary of State William Seward. The co-conspirators’ attempts failed. In the case of Secretary Seward, this was thanks to the actions of George Robinson, a soldier detailed to guard Seward. In 1871 the…
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The Treaties of Amity and Commerce and of Alliance were arguably the single most important diplomatic success of the colonists during the Revolutionary War. Signed in Paris on February 6, 1778, they created an alliance with France that was crucial to American victory in the conflict. Benjamin Franklin, Silas Deane, and Arthur…
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This inscribed ping-pong paddle was given to former Secretary of State Dr. Henry Kissinger by Chinese table tennis champion Zhuang Zedong in the fall of 2007. It was Zhuang’s chance encounter with a member of the U.S. table tennis team in 1971 that led to the “ping-pong diplomacy” with China of the…
