In-Gallery Experience

The Museum offers themed guides to enhance your visit. Start with our Museum Guide & Map, the Guide for Kids and Families, the Touch Guide, and the Sensory Guide and look out for the following gallery guides during your visit:

• Celebrating Revolutionary Women
• Drumming Up Attention: Fifers and Drummers in the Continental Army
• Finding Freedom: African Americans and the Revolution
• The Marketplace of Revolution
• Occupied or Liberated? American Cities Under British Rule
• The People Between: Native Americans in a Revolutionary Era
• Remembering Fallen Revolutionaries
• Supplying the Army
• Touch the Revolution: Sensory Experiences in the Museum

Be sure to call ahead before you visit if you are interested in seeing a particular object, because exciting changes happen all the time!

The Museum often offers short 10-minute, in-gallery talks included in regular Museum admission such as short talks discussing a life-like tableau scene or unpacking the sea chest aboard the recreated sloop.

We also offer additional ticketed experinces. Consider booking a special guided tour, talk, or workshop! The Museum offers Highlights Tours for groups and on weekends, Walking Tours of the neighborhood, audio tours, special tours for families, Touch Tours for guests with visual disabilities, and add-on talks and workshops about special topics for visiting groups.

Throughout the Museum at special, themed discovery carts, view replica objects and documents with a Museum educator to dig deeper into stories and peoples of the Revolution.

Explore digital versions of several discovery carts, including Harry Washington, camp followers, tools used by artisans and makers of the era. 

Living history at the Museum brings the people and events of the Revolution to life through costumed programs and craft demonstrations. Living history programs invite guests to understand the Revolution through the material culture of the period. You can see replica objects, watch demonstrations of 18th-century crafts, and imagine what it was like to wear the clothing and do the work of Revolutionaries, in order to understand diverse historical perspectives.

Museum educators use many different interpretive techniques and exceptional material accuracy to create immersive environments and experiences both within and beyond the Museum. The everyday people of the Revolution become more human and their experiences more relatable to people today. Living history programs, as well as our Meet the Revolution program, inspire guests and others to make new connections and view themselves as part of the ongoing story of the American Revolution.

The Museum is pleased to offer original first-person theatrical performances that bring to life the diverse lives, perspectives, and experiences of people from the Revolutionary era. Performances take place on most weekends and select holidays in the Alan B. Miller Theater on the second floor at the Museum.

Please note that performances are available on a rotating basis. Please call the front desk if inquiring about the schedule of a specific performance.

The Museum's current rotating linup of performances includes Meet Young James Forten, Meet Elder James Forten, Meet Joseph Plumb Martin, and Meet Elizabeth Freeman. Filmed versions of the performances are available to view online as they become available.

The Museum offers a robust slate of family-friendly crafts and activities throughout the year as well as seasonal, themed crafts and activities for select holidays and historical dates.

The Museum's family-friendly discovery center, Revolution Place, is located on the lower level and is open on Saturdays, Sundays, and select holidays from 11 a.m. - 4 p.m. (Revolution Place is open daily from Flag Day through Labor Day from 11 a.m. - 4 p.m.) Revolution Place brings to life the Museum’s lively, diverse Old City neighborhood during the 1700s and invites visitors to learn through hands-on exploration. It features four key recreated historical environments – a military encampment, a tavern, a home, and an 18th-century meeting house – to immerse and engage families, especially kids 5-12 years-old, in the places where the American Revolution took root.