The Henry Ford Museum, Michigan

Author Bill Bryson sums up the Henry Ford Museum, "you find yourself in a great hangar of a building covering twelve acres of ground and filled with the most indescribable assortment of stuff...This was the way the Smithsonian once was and still should be - a cross between an attic and a junk shop." Henry Ford first started collecting historical objects in 1906. This collection was meant to document the genius of ordinary people by preserving the objects they used in the course of their everyday lives. His desire to share these with the public soon led to the completion of the Henry Ford Museum in 1929. Henry Ford's museum allowed him to collect "the history of our people as written into things their hands made and used.... When we are through, we shall have reproduced American life as lived, and that, I think, is the best way of preserving at least a part of our history and tradition..." .

The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village, also known as the Edison Institute, is located in Dearborn and is America's first and largest indoor-outdoor museum. It charts the country's evolution from a rural to an industrial society through exhibits covering communications, transportation, domestic life, agriculture, and industry. The museum's intent is to show how Americans lived and worked since the founding of the country.

The nuclear-powered Ford Nucleon automobile.
 The Oscar Mayer Wienermobile.
 President Kennedy's Death Car, a 1961 Lincoln Continental.
 The rocking chair from Ford's Theater in which President Abraham Lincoln was shot.
 George Washington's camp bed.
 Thomas Edison's alleged last breath in a sealed tube.
 Buckminster Fuller's prototype Dymaxion house.
 The bus Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on.
 Igor Sikorsky's prototype helicopter.
 Fokker Trimotor airplane that flew the first flight over the North Pole.
 Bill Elliott's record-breaking race car clocking in at over 212 MPH..