All the World Is Here
All the World Is Here: Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Invention of American Anthropology
Ongoing Exhibition
On April 22, 2017, the Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology celebrated its 150th anniversary year by opening All the World Is Here: Harvard’s Peabody Museum and the Invention of American Anthropology. Located within a restored fourth-floor gallery, this exhibition features an array of over six hundred objects from Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, many on display for the very first time. Together they are woven into a compelling narrative tracing the early history of the museum’s collections and the birth of American anthropology as envisioned and shaped by the museum’s second director Frederic W. Putnam.
What is the purpose of a World's Fair?
Visitors enter the world of a late nineteenth-century museum and are transported into the midst of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition where Putnam and the Peabody presented their anthropological vision and collections to a wider world. The exhibits display remarkable and historically significant items including the dog sledge of Arctic explorer Admiral Robert Peary, historic Hopi pottery, and casts of the Hieroglyphic stairway at Copan which were exhibited at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago.
On view May 25–October 18, 2026
Presented within All the World Is Here to mark the 250th Anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence.
This blue sash, faded by time, symbolizes the dream of America. In 1776, American artist Charles Willson Peale painted a portrait of George Washington, commander-in-chief of the Continental Army. As part of his military regalia, Washington wears a blue taffeta sash across his chest. This is likely the same sash. Washington himself decided the system of colored sashes to denote rank. He wrote that the commander-in-chief would have “a light blue Ribband, wore across his breast, between his Coat and Waistcoat.”
The sash came to the Peabody Museum by way of the Philadelphia Museum. Learn more about Washington's sash and its journey to the Peabody Museum.
Silk taffeta sash, worn by George Washington. PM 979-13-10/58761. Gift of the heirs of David Kimball.
Today, we continue to revisit the interpretation of the Peabody Museum’s history and the history of early American anthropology presented in this exhibition. As we reckon with our colonial past, we are updating this exhibition to reflect more deeply on the consequences of anthropology and our own institutional entanglements with settler colonialism and imperialism. The changes we are making align with our institutional commitment to ethical stewardship.
Top: detail of Haida effigy pipe. Carved wood and ivory, with hinged arms. Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia, Canada. ca. 1840, Gift of Frederick H. Rindge, 1894, 94-57-10/R195. Shadow puppet, 11-49-70/83325.
Exhibition Videos
The Problem with Skin Color
Why Social Anthropologists Still Study Race
Measuring Human Variation
Human Evolution and Migrations
Indigenous Partnerships
The 1893 "Average Man and Woman"
Tracking Human Change
Hieroglyphic Staircase Reassembly and Epigraphy
Current and Contemporary Field Archaeology in Copan, Honduras
Early Putnam Era History of Peabody Harvard Archaeological Investigations at Copan