Kat Lloyd stands in the dim light on the first-floor staircase of a dilapidated, New York City tenement building. Before her: a tour of wide-eyed teens on a field trip from their high school in Queens. Their guide, Lloyd, encourages the students to imagine the building's 22 apartments when they were new, back in 1863, and brimming with mostly German immigrants.
"I start to imagine, you know, babies crying and people yelling to each other across the hallway," Lloyd says, laughing.
A few students close their eyes and smile.
With the nation's 250th anniversary approaching, many teachers, parents and politicians are debating the best ways for students to learn about American history. The traditional approach, relying on the stories of the country's leaders and focusing on its founding documents, is important, to be sure, but doesn't capture the full spectrum of the American experience.
Lloyd is vice president of programs and interpretation at the Tenement Museum, which argues that it's also important to go small, studying history through the lives of ordinary people. The museum explores the American experience by recreating the apartments of real immigrant, migrant and African American families in New York City from the 1860s through the 1980s.
"Please use the banister," Lloyd urges the students, telling them it's her favorite part of the museum. "It's been here since 1863, so everyone who ever lived in this building also used [it]."
Mike Agovino, the students' history teacher, stands in the back, nodding.
"It makes the history more tangible," he says of the museum, which he grew up loving as a native of the Bronx. "You can smell it, touch it, see it," says Agovino, who earlier this year attended a summer training the museum held for K-12 teachers from all over the country.
The students tramp upstairs, to a room of artifacts owned by a Black family in the 1860s.
Raeleah Heusner, a sophomore, puzzles over a small copy of Abraham Lincoln's speeches.
"I was wondering if it was a common item in homes?"
Lloyd tells her the book belonged to a teenager. "Parthenia Lawrence was your age," she says.
Sophomore Aliyah Asrafally says the museum makes history feel so real.
"[Parthenia Lawrence] is normal. It just shows that it's not like they're just historical figures that we look at. They were real people."
"It's so different than the history that I learned growing up," says author Clint Smith, one of the few other adults on the tour. Smith helped the museum with that summer teacher training Agovino attended.
"The history that I learned focused only on ostensibly important people, like politicians or kings or generals or presidents," Smith says.
But this museum has an alternative – and powerful – message, Smith explains: "Even if you're just someone who washed clothes in a building in the middle of New York, or was the driver of a carriage, that you are still a part of the American story."
Smith's book, How the Word is Passed, is about slavery and its legacy. Today, he's along for the tour and to talk with students, who've been reading from a new, young adult edition of his book.
Upstairs, Kat Lloyd guides the teens to an apartment made to resemble one shared by two families soon after the Civil War.
"She's the first generation in her family to be born free," Lloyd says of Rachel Moore, one of the apartment's historical occupants. And of her husband, Joseph: "When he was 13, he was already working as a butcher."
The Moores and one of Rachel's daughters by a previous marriage were Black, and they shared their apartment with an Irish washerwoman and her teenage son, whose father was Black. Five people in all, squeezed into two rooms – one bedroom, one small kitchen.
In that kitchen, sophomore Catherine Brown recognizes a little whisk broom and kerosene lantern.
"Growing up in Jamaica," Brown says, "we have that broom, the lamp, and it's really interesting to see how these things have transcribed over time."
Teacher Mike Agovino gets excited when he hears students talk like this. "Kids need to see themselves first. And they were enthralled walking through today and seeing the different artifacts, and saying, 'Wow, this could be me.'"
In the Moores' kitchen, oysters, the cheap fast food of the day, fry on the stove. Above, a line of laundry dries in the heat. The tour doesn't shy away from talk of the families' poverty or the rampant discrimination they faced.
"[The Moores] get married in 1864, which is also just a year after the draft riots," Lloyd tells the group. "If you remember learning about the draft riots, right? This very intense moment of racial violence in the city perpetrated by a lot of white immigrants, right, Irish and German immigrants."
![Students and teachers go up an old staircase at the Tenement Museum. Kat Lloyd encourages visitors to use the banister: "It's been here since 1863, so everyone who ever lived in this building also used [it]."](https://npr.brightspotcdn.com/dims4/default/e4657f1/2147483647/strip/true/crop/8448x6336+0+0/resize/840x630!/format/webp/quality/90/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fnpr.brightspotcdn.com%2Fdims3%2Fdefault%2Fstrip%2Ffalse%2Fcrop%2F8448x6336%20528%200%2Fresize%2F8448x6336%21%2F%3Furl%3Dhttp%3A%2F%2Fnpr-brightspot.s3.amazonaws.com%2F12%2F36%2F081c9da8456ca6c9006534675996%2F20250929-tenementmuseum-kc-18.jpg)
Author Clint Smith says this approach to history isn't just good for students. It's patriotic.
"I think that the most patriotic thing one can do is to examine your country in the same way we examine ourselves, right? We don't look at ourselves and think we're perfect," Smith says.
But the museum also tries to balance these hard truths with a sense of hopefulness.
At one point, Lloyd tells the students about a parade near the Moores' tenement, celebrating the passage of the 15th Amendment, which granted Black men the right to vote. She says families decorated American flags with hopeful mottoes that they then waved during the parade.
"I think you can see, although there's a lot of setbacks and struggles, especially for minorities in New York City …" says Aliyah Asrafally, the sophomore, "they also made a lot of progress that they got to see in their lifetime."
Mike Agovino says he tries to strike this same balance in his classroom.
"I am a grandson of immigrants, and most of my students are immigrants. And there's a lot of stuff in this country that just doesn't make sense to what we are promising. We have this document, the Constitution, that promises so many beautiful things. We may not be there yet, but we're marching," Agovino says.
After the tour, the students sit for a quick Q&A with Smith, then it's a rush to the bus to get back to school. Kat Lloyd sees them off.
"I always hope that people leave with more questions, and get curious about their communities, their own history, their own family history," Lloyd says. "Then, of course, the past of our nation."
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