Nothing New Under the Sun

Nothing New Under the Sun
The years that built modern America, and rhyme with our own.

A nation bitterly divided over its place in the world. A pandemic that empties the streets and rewrites the rules of daily life. Protesters at the White House gates demanding the right to vote. A presidential candidate jailed for a speech. A generation returning from a distant war profoundly changed.

It reads like this morning’s headlines. It was America, a little more than a century ago.

On June 28, 2026 the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum opens four new permanent galleries across an expanded second floor, the culmination of nearly a decade of planning. Spanning 1917 to 1924 and beyond, they trace the years that built modern America, and they argue that those years rhyme unmistakably with our own.

How much of our world began in those few turbulent years we were never taught to notice?

America at War

War is usually told through maps, battles, and generals. This gallery tells it through an entire society, from the family kitchen to the factory floor to the gates of the White House. Here are the rationed sugar and the service flag in the window; the women who entered the factories and kept the country running; and the Silent Sentinels, the suffragists who stood at the White House gates day after day and were arrested for demanding the vote.

It also turns to the animals of the war effort, from horses and dogs to camels and messenger pigeons, and the 1918 influenza pandemic, remembered as the Spanish flu though it likely didn't originate in Spain. Did you know the name stuck because Spain, neutral in the war, reported the outbreak openly while other nations censored the news?

Peace and Unrest

The war’s end brought no easy peace, at home or abroad. In Paris, the victorious powers met to redraw the map of the world. The gallery examines who sat at the table, what they wanted, and, just as tellingly, who was turned away. The delegations and aspiring nations denied a hearing raise a question that has not aged: whose voice counts when the future is decided?
At home, the Sedition Act made it a crime to speak against the war. The gallery confronts the case of Eugene Debs, who ran for president from a prison cell after being jailed for a speech, and with him the enduring tension between security and silence.

1919

Much of modern America took shape in these months when the country seemed to pull in every direction at once. The Red Summer brought racial violence to cities nationwide even as the Harlem Renaissance remade American art, music, and literature. The Red Scare spread fear of the radical next door. Labor organized for fair wages and safer conditions. Women neared the vote, and the nation moved to ban alcohol. Any one of these would have reshaped a country. They arrived together.

In the midst of it, President Wilson suffered a severe stroke. Gravely ill and kept from public view, he left behind a question historians still debate: was his wife, Edith, effectively running the government, deciding what reached his desk and what did not?

Presidential Legacies

The final gallery asks how a presidency is remembered: its achievements and its failures, the parts a nation celebrates and the parts it still debates, including the contradictions in Wilson's own record. It hands down no verdict, leaving visitors to weigh the evidence for themselves. It also follows Wilson into popular culture, from costumes worn in the 1944 Hollywood biopic Wilson to an original comic book that links him to the Marvel character Deadpool.

Why it matters

Together, these galleries take a few turbulent years more than a century ago, and connect them directly to the present. The Visitors will leave more curious, and more aware of how our lives today are so closely connected to the world made during Wilson’s presidency. There is nothing new under the sun, which may be the most reassuring lesson history has to offer.

Also on View

On the first floor, a smaller gallery, Behind the Exhibit: 1990 → 2026, traces how museum design has changed over the years and how we connect to today’s visitor.

The four permanent galleries open June 28, 2026 on the second floor of the Woodrow Wilson Presidential Library & Museum in Staunton, Virginia.