Museums & Collections

Discover treasures from Harvard’s museums and special collections, from ancient artifacts to modern art.

A long, patterned fabric ribbon in shades of blue and green, draped on a white background.

George Washington’s Sash on Display at Peabody Museum Starting May 25

A famous American fashion statement helps bring Revolutionary history to life.

by Nell Porter-Brown

A colorful Byzantine funerary tunic fragment depicts faces and vegetal patterns with a border of gemstones.

Byzantine Beauties

Textile treasures from Dumbarton Oaks

by John S. Rosenberg

Images from the Ballets Russes

Elegant photographs of dancing’s stars

by Nell Porter-Brown

A grinning woman in traditional Nigerian dress sits cross-legged on the floor surrounded by modern devices, including a power strip, a land-line telephone, and a desktop computer displaying on its screen a duplicate image of the entire montage.

Fatimah Tuggar at the Davis Museum

Fatimah Tuggar explores artisanship and technology, at the Davis Museum

by Nell Porter-Brown

A spoof passport written in Spanglish for the fictional country El Spirit Republic of Puerto Rico, with a domino in place of a national seal on its cover

Harvard Art Museums exhibit displays the ubiquity of cross-border movement

The ubiquity of movement across man-made borders

by Marina N. Bolotnikova

Photograph of worker between two enormously high stacked bookshelves at the Harvard Depository

Excerpt from “What We Talk About When We Talk about Books” by Leah Price

A visit to the Harvard Depository

A photograph of an eighteenth-century, three-inch pocket globe in its open case

A pocket globe at the Harvard Archives

Ebenezer Storer’s pocket globe

by Jacob Sweet

The “Rocking Horse Graveyard,” in Lincoln, Massachusetts

New England’s Oddities

Exploring New England’s more unusual sites with J.W. Ocker

by Nell Porter-Brown

Hikers stand in Purgatory Chasm, near Worcester, Massachusetts

Exploring Worcester, Massachusetts, and Purgatory Chasm

Pleasures to explore in and around Worcester

by Nell Porter-Brown

A color-paper collage used by Edwin Land to develop an influential theory of color vision

“Visual Science” exhibit at Harvard

New Harvard exhibit explores “Visual Science: The Art of Research”

by Nell Porter-Brown

Photo of the colonial-era Fairbanks House in Dedham, Massachusetts

Fairbanks House, Dedham, Massachusetts

Dedham’s Fairbanks House: “the oldest wood-frame structure still standing in North America”

by Nell Porter-Brown