In summer 2015, ASHP redesigned and updated The Lost Museum as well as our primary site. Both designs embrace modern web standards and improve browsing on mobile devices, along with general usabilty and accessibility.

Visitors to The Lost Museum are given the opportunity explore a 3D recreation of P. T. Barnum’s American Museum in mid-nineteenth century New York. The redesigned site, launched to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the fire that destroyed the museum, includes larger, higher-resolution graphics and easier navigation of the museum. Visitors also have the option to seek out clues to discover who, among suspects representing social and political figures of the period, may have set the fatal 1865 fire. The site’s annotated digital archive of materials from the American Museum is improved as well and is now mobile-friendly and more easily searched. The virtual museum first launched in 2000 and was produced by the American Social History Project/Center for Media and Learning at the City University of New York Graduate Center and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, with support from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

ASHP’s primary site was relaunched with the goal of providing easier navigation, especially for mobile users, and improving communication with our varied constituencies. Improvements include a cleaner home page, integration of news and featured content across the site, easier than ever shopping for ASHP’s documentaries, and a news section for updates between issues of our newsletter.