New Huntington Library Exhibition Celebrates Links Between Land and American History
One of The Huntington’s annotated July 1776 printings of the Declaration of Independence and a 1936 acoustic guitar owned by Woody Guthrie
Opening this summer at The Huntington will be its new exhibition This Land Is... which will focus on how land has shaped life in America since 1776 as part of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence celebrations.
Referencing Woody Guthrie's 1940s song This Land Is Your Land it will feature manuscripts, rare books, maps, photographs, and posters.
Highlights will include:
- two rare, annotated July 1776 printings of the Declaration of Independence
- a hand-drawn survey of Mount Vernon by George Washington and a hand-drawn design for a garden at Monticello by Thomas Jefferson
- a rare map of the 1760s survey of the Mason-Dixon Line plus a manuscript page from Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon
- documents related to Colonial Pennsylvania’s swindle of more than a million acres of Delaware/Lenape land in the infamous Walking Purchase
- literary evocations of land in manuscripts by Walt Whitman, Langston Hughes, and Octavia E. Butler
- a 1936 acoustic guitar owned by Woody Guthrie and inscribed “This Machine Kills Fascists" plus drawings, journal pages, and a painting of George Washington made by Guthrie
- explorations of the U.S.-Mexico border from a survey after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo to present-day art and political contestation
- Civil War and Reconstruction–era materials including photography, personal writings, and a Congressional resolution to pass the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery
- depictions of the national park system from its origins to the present
- family photographs and documents by Japanese American flower farmers in Los Angeles before, during, and after their World War II incarceration
“The Huntington Library is one of the nation’s leading repositories for historical Americana, from presidential and Colonial–era archives to materials on California and the West,” said Sandra Brooke Gordon, Avery Director of the Library. “With these extraordinarily deep and broad collections, The Huntington is uniquely positioned to tell American stories, bringing forward disparate historic voices to enlighten the national conversation.”
This Land Is... will run June 14 through Januyary 11, 2027.
