Donna Curtin, PhD, Executive Director, Pilgrim Hall Museum
Pilgrim Hall Museum, Plymouth, Massachusetts
Through an extraordinary 17th-century collection, Pilgrim Hall Museum (pilgrimhall.org) in historic Plymouth, Massachusetts, tells the stories of English settlers and Wampanoag residents in early Plymouth Colony and seeks to foster new conversations about the meaning and significance of the American colonial experience.
Donna Curtin, PhD, is Executive Director of Pilgrim Hall Museum (pilgrimhall.org). Established in 1820, and the nation’s oldest continuously operating public museum, the Pilgrim Hall Museum embrace a commitment to telling this story with historical accuracy, inclusion, and renewed recognition for histories that traditionally have been submerged, silenced, or erased.
Pilgrim Hall Museum houses an unmatched collection of Pilgrim possessions, revealing the stories of ordinary yet determined men and women building new lives and homes for their families in a new world. Our core focus also encompasses the presence and experiences of the Wampanoag, “People of the Dawn,” the Native People who inhabited this area for 10,000 years before the arrival of the English colonists and who are still here today. Exhibitions and programs trace the story of the interrelationship between the Wampanoag and the early colonial settlers from first encounters through the disastrous conflict of the 1670s, known as King Philip’s War.