Field Museum

Chicago’s Field Museum traces its origin to the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, when the fair’s collections were reshaped into a permanent institution for scientific research and public knowledge. Renamed for merchant Marshall Field in 1905 and based since 1921 in its lakefront building, it brings deep time and human history into the same frame, from fossils and biodiversity to ethnographic works such as Haida house posts. The museum endures as a civic archive of life on Earth and the cultures that interpret it.