
Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum
Full-scale environments, original artifacts, political cartoons, theaters, and a research library reconstruct Lincoln’s life while exposing how public memory is made.
Browse the published Explore collection for United States. Open a discovery for its field guide, practical details, and background.

Full-scale environments, original artifacts, political cartoons, theaters, and a research library reconstruct Lincoln’s life while exposing how public memory is made.

Fossils, Ice Age environments, Indigenous archaeology, decorative arts, and changing exhibitions explain Illinois as both a natural system and a human place.

Ancient forms, devotional objects, modern painting, photography, prints, and Chicago-made work present Mexican culture as plural, contemporary, and transnational.

Changing exhibitions, performance, postwar art, and a terraced Josef Paul Kleihues building make every visit a different proposition about the present.

Historic telescopes, immersive domes, hands-on astronomy, and Chicago’s lakefront horizon connect everyday observation with planetary science.

Manuscripts, typewriters, sound, games, changing exhibitions, and a long chronological wall explore how American writing is made, circulated, and contested.

Lincoln’s Springfield house and four preserved blocks reveal family life, neighborhood relationships, legal work, and the social world behind a presidency.

A planned company town, railcar works, landmark strike, Black labor history, and surviving row houses turn an intact neighborhood into industrial evidence.

The 1839 capitol’s recreated legislative rooms frame Lincoln’s House Divided speech, legal career, and the rough mechanics of antebellum Illinois government.

Log buildings, workshops, farms, and a wooded Sangamon River ridge reconstruct the commercial village where Lincoln worked before moving to Springfield.

The furnished brick house given to Grant after the Civil War connects national fame with family life, Galena neighbors, and a steep Mississippi River town.

More than four hundred pieces of Wright-designed art glass, furniture, and ornament make Susan Lawrence Dana’s house an unusually intact total work.

Five floors of science, world cultures, dinosaurs, art, and play make the world’s largest children’s museum a rare place where preschoolers and adults can stay equally absorbed.

Newfields joins the Indianapolis Museum of Art, Lilly House and gardens, seasonal installations, and a 100-acre art-and-nature park into a visit with several distinct rhythms.

Native art and cultures, Western art, contemporary voices, and Indiana’s own collecting history meet in a museum that rewards careful reading of who is speaking—and when.

Geology, ecology, archaeology, social history, art, and invention turn a state survey into an argument about how place shapes people and how people reshape place.

Cars, trophies, driver stories, engineering, strategy, and an active racetrack make the reimagined museum useful even to visitors who do not arrive as racing experts.

Prairietown, Lenape interpretation, aviation, animals, nature, and a new indoor museum turn a sprawling living-history campus into more than a costumed village.

Three floors follow a South Bend company from blacksmith shop to global automaker, using surviving vehicles to make design, labor, ambition, and collapse tangible.

Auburn, Cord, and Duesenberg automobiles occupy the company’s restored 1930 headquarters, where architecture, advertising, engineering, and Indiana manufacturing still speak together.

The 1896 Old Pathology Building preserves laboratories, amphitheater, specimens, records, and uneasy evidence of how psychiatric medicine once pursued knowledge inside Central State Hospital.

Bubbles, water, forces, live animals, sound, and construction turn a compact downtown museum into a laboratory for testing ideas with hands and bodies.

Art galleries, regional history, hands-on science, a planetarium, and a preserved train make one Ohio River museum unusually broad without losing its local center.

Ancient objects, prints, photographs, and modern art meet in a free university museum whose triangular building constantly changes how one work faces another.

Changing exhibitions, American glass, works on paper, and regional artists give this downtown museum a focused identity that reaches beyond a single permanent display.

A limestone memorial, soaring Shrine Room, military artifacts, and Hoosier biographies frame service from the Revolution through recent conflicts without reducing it to hardware.

Manuscripts, drawings, a typewriter, a Purple Heart, banned-book advocacy, and an Indiana Avenue home place Vonnegut’s jokes inside the moral questions that powered them.

Early camping trailers, motorhomes, manufactured housing, and industry archives explain why northern Indiana became the center of an American way of travel and building.

A small museum founded by Auschwitz survivor Eva Mozes Kor examines the Holocaust, Mengele’s twin experiments, forgiveness, testimony, and the responsibilities of witnesses.

Players, coaches, uniforms, photographs, records, and a working court trace high-school basketball as community ritual rather than simply a list of famous careers.

A forty-acre campus connects Ball family homes, design and industry, changing exhibitions, gardens, nature, and the Bob Ross Experience without pretending they are one simple narrative.

Championship artifacts, rankings, athlete stories, retro gym design, and physical interactives make the NCAA’s downtown museum broader than a football-and-basketball trophy room.

Immersive sets, changing exhibits, a serious research library, and statewide collections let visitors move between performed memory and the documents that support it.

A small social bat winters in a few cold caves, migrates to summer forest roosts, and carries the name of the state where science first described it.

This pale, eyeless fish lives entirely in southern Indiana groundwater, navigating cave streams through touch, chemistry, flow, and other senses rather than sight.

Twenty-plus garden rooms, ponds, islands, children’s spaces, sculpture, and working groundwater infrastructure make this a designed landscape with an unusually practical foundation.

Tropical forest, Sonoran desert, seasonal showcase displays, and outdoor courtyards make a compact conservatory useful for both close botany and a restorative winter hour.

Nearly 300 acres combine woody-plant collections, restored prairie, wetlands, woodland, trails, a children’s garden, and an intricate outdoor railway garden.

Orangutans overhead, underwater dolphins, sharks and rays, African plains, chimpanzee habitat, desert animals, and White River Gardens support a conservation-centered full day.

Indonesian forest, African journey, Australian animals, sea lions, giraffes, reef life, rides, and close viewing make this seasonal zoo unusually navigable for families.

Amazonia’s immersive forest, Lake Victoria hills, North American and African animals, botanical collections, and Indiana’s first-zoo history create a compact but physically varied visit.

Seasonally exposed fossil beds, Ohio River engineering, birdlife, and a strong interpretive center reveal a 390-million-year-old reef beneath a modern metropolitan river.

Upper and Lower Cataract Falls, broad bedrock ledges, a covered bridge, and Mill Creek’s changing flow create a powerful but highly seasonal central Indiana landmark.

Two guided cave routes reveal flowstone, stalactites, soda straws, pools, and layered passage forms in a commercial cavern discovered by children in 1883.

A guided boat enters a dark limestone river system where blind fish, pale crayfish, low ceilings, and immense silence make cave hydrology the central experience.

Nearly 13,000 acres of ridges, coves, peninsula shoreline, horse routes, backpack camps, and recovering forest offer solitude complicated by the visible history of former farms.

Overhanging cliffs, seasonal waterfalls, rock shelters, hemlocks, ferns, and archaeological traces make this short Hoosier National Forest loop feel ecologically displaced in latitude.

Roughly sixty miles of steep southern Indiana ridges, hollows, forest roads, scarce water, and primitive camps create a serious backpacking route without alpine elevation.