Over the last 250 years, America has become a dynamic, complex, and often inconceivable landscape. Recently, museums and archives have begun to illuminate the marginal, contested, and overlooked stories that also shaped the United States’ past and continue to inform the present. Museum professionals, historians, and archivists seek to integrate what has been excluded from dominant narratives back into the national narrative. Often, topics like enslaved and Indigenous peoples’ resistance to domination, immigration hardships, labor resistance movements, gendered and queer histories, and imperialist erasure are misrepresented or overlooked in the dominant U.S. historical record.

The 2026 Missouri Association of Museums and Archives Virtual Conference will explore how museum and archives professionals and public historians help to surface, preserve, and share these truths for communal reckoning and civic renewal. As we celebrate America’s 250^th birthday, it has become even more important to celebrate all the stories that made the nation.

Thank you for joining us to tell your story.