By: Missy Sullivan

10 Virtual History Museums and Experiences to Explore From Home

'Walk' among the terra cotta warriors. Tour Anne Frank's secret annex. Read letters to FDR. And more.

Smithsonian National Museum of American History

Alex Wong/Getty Images

Published: March 26, 2020

Last Updated: January 27, 2025

The need for social distancing may have forced museums and historic sites around the world to close their doors for now, but many have made their spaces, exhibits and collections available to anyone with a digital device and a decent web connection. Some offer 360-degree tours, like the one that takes you into every nook and cranny of George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. Others present virtual exhibits or browsable online archives, such as the dozens on Google Arts & Culture’s site, where partner museums share treasures like the Rosetta Stone and ancient Egyptian artifacts (The British Museum, London)...iconic 20th century photos (the LIFE Magazine archive)...or troves of sports history (the Olympic Museum, Lausanne, Switzerland). Here are 10 standout virtual history sites worth exploring:

Xi'an Warriors

Qin Dynasty Terracotta Warriors

Cecilia Alvarenga/Getty Images

Qin Dynasty Terracotta Warriors

Cecilia Alvarenga/Getty Images

It was one of the most stunning archaeological finds of the 20th century. In 1974, farmers digging a well stumbled across a life-sized clay figure that, government archaeologists later discovered, belonged to a vast army of terra cotta soldiers created to protect China’s first emperor, Qin Shi Huang, in the afterlife. The massive mausoleum, created around 210 B.C., houses some 8,000 warriors, along with hundreds of chariots and horses—all arranged in battle formation. In 2017, a Chinese company, inspired by Google Street View, created an awe-inspiring virtual experience that lets visitors swoop down into the tomb and “walk” among the soldiers, viewing their unique facial expressions and traces of their original colorful paint at close range. You don’t need to read Chinese to appreciate the enormity of it all.

Click HERE for the experience.

Smithsonian Museum of American History

James Montgomery Flagg’s ‘I Want You for U.S. Army’ poster, 1917, the most iconic image produced in support of the WWI recruitment effort.

James Montgomery Flagg/ Imperial War Museums/Getty Images

James Montgomery Flagg’s ‘I Want You for U.S. Army’ poster, 1917, the most iconic image produced in support of the WWI recruitment effort.

James Montgomery Flagg/ Imperial War Museums/Getty Images

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History bills itself as the greatest single collection of U.S. history in the world, home to more than 1.8 million objects that each, in some fundamental way, defines the American experience. The museum offers about 100 online exhibits from its encyclopedic collections, each with a mix of photos, video, graphics and text on topics ranging from the life of Abe Lincoln (yep, they’ve got the stovepipe hat) to the development of the first artificial heart to the evolution of voting machines and even an array of vintage lunch boxes.

Click HERE for the experience.

The Museum of Flight

Boeing 707-120, U.S. Air Force One

The first presidential plane to use jet technology, this specially built Boeing 707-120 was known as SAM (Special Air Missions) 970. It was delivered in 1959.  

Matt Sullivan/Getty Images

Boeing 707-120, U.S. Air Force One

The first presidential plane to use jet technology, this specially built Boeing 707-120 was known as SAM (Special Air Missions) 970. It was delivered in 1959.  

Matt Sullivan/Getty Images

War planes. Spy planes. Spacecraft. Gliders. Kit planes. Eccentric contraptions. This sprawling museum, adjacent to the Boeing complex south of Seattle, Washington, is considered one of the world’s largest and best air and space museums, with more than 150 aircraft, 25,000-plus aviation-related artifacts and a huge array of exhibits that collectively chronicle man's quest to take to the skies. Flight geeks could easily get lost in its vast searchable and browsable database of those collections while 360-degree tours let you step inside a dozen iconic aircraft—including the Boeing 747, the Concorde and the museum’s full-scale model of the space shuttle orbiter used for training astronauts.

Click HERE for the experience.

National Women's History Museum

Come for the deep well of biographies and digital classroom resources, stay for the wide array of virtual exhibits, many of which are enabled by Google Arts & Culture. For two decades, the National Women’s History Museum has been the largest online cultural institution telling the stories of women who helped transform the U.S. Heavy with slide shows and graphics, the virtual exhibits document women making waves in politics, sports, civil rights, science and technology and more. Check out its collection of oral histories from the American Rosie Movement, relaying women's contributions to the nation’s defense production.

Click HERE for the experience.

Anne Frank House

Anne Frank’s diary, chronicling her life in hiding during World War II, remains one of the most powerful testimonies to the horrors of the Holocaust. If a trip to Amsterdam to visit the Anne Frank House isn’t in the cards, AnneFrank.org offers the next best thing. In addition to tons of informative content about the teen, her diary and the war, there are bells and whistles galore: an interactive timeline, videos about her life, a 360-degree tour of the house, a virtual reality tour of the secret annex where she and her family hid for 761 days, and a companion exhibit on Google Arts & Culture.

Click HERE for the experience.

Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library & Museum

FDR

Franklin D. Roosevelt liked to be seen in public sitting in his car, since it hid his polio-ravaged legs while projecting an image of power and forward motion.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

FDR

Franklin D. Roosevelt liked to be seen in public sitting in his car, since it hid his polio-ravaged legs while projecting an image of power and forward motion.

Bettmann Archive/Getty Images

FDR, America’s only four-term president, presided over the nation during two of its most trying ordeals: the Great Depression and World War II. This online experience walks users room by room through the exhibits in his extensive presidential library and museum in Hyde Park, New York, drawing together a wealth of original documents, artifacts, videos, 360-degree tours and more. Together, they illustrate everything from FDR’s little-known assassination attempt to his New Deal policies and wartime decisions to Eleanor’s significant role. It’s easy to lose track of time clicking through all the fascinating letters, whether it’s from a constituent exhorting him to “discontinue being a smiling, wasteful and fickle prima donna politician” to one from Albert Einstein strenuously detailing his objections to the atomic bomb.

Click HERE for the experience.

NASA

Icing Research Tunnel at NASA

Inside the Icing Research Tunnel at NASA’s John Glenn Research Center. It’s one of the many NASA facilities available to be experienced in a virtual tour.

NASA

Icing Research Tunnel at NASA

Inside the Icing Research Tunnel at NASA’s John Glenn Research Center. It’s one of the many NASA facilities available to be experienced in a virtual tour.

NASA

Calling all space geeks: Report to the NASA site for ultimate fun in the final frontier. Get the full scoop on all the key NASA programs past and present, from the Hubble Telescope to the Mars Rover to the upcoming Parker Solar Probe. Check out the History hub to dive deep into photos, videos and articles about all their historic missions. Enjoy a motherlode of space images with the cache of ultra-high-def videos taken from various missions—like the virtual tour of the moon in 4K, enabled by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter Spacecraft. For astronaut wannabes, virtual tours abound of NASA’s various research and training facilities—putting users right inside a supersonic wind tunnel, a zero-gravity lab, flight simulators, a space environments complex and much more.

Click HERE for the experience.

READ MORE: The Space Race

American Battlefield Trust Virtual Battlefield Tours

Gettysburg National Military Park

The State of Pennsylvania Monument is the largest memorial at the Gettysburg battlefield, commemorating the tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians who fought there. 

Marjie Lambert/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

Gettysburg National Military Park

The State of Pennsylvania Monument is the largest memorial at the Gettysburg battlefield, commemorating the tens of thousands of Pennsylvanians who fought there. 

Marjie Lambert/Miami Herald/Tribune News Service/Getty Images

Most on-site battlefield tours require a leap of imagination: the ability to walk around a perfectly peaceful open field and overlay a mental movie of smoke and combat and fallen warriors, all the while considering the military strategy and broader political stakes. ABT’s website may not offer the sunshine on your back, but it marries the setting, action and context far more seamlessly, with its 360-degree virtual tours of more than 20 American Revolution and Civil War battlefields. In the Gettysburg tour alone, there are 15 different stops—no walking required—each of which features clickable icons with granular detail about all the whos, whats and whys. And when you’re done touring, be sure to explore the site’s other robust resources, from battle summaries to generals’ biographies.

Click HERE for the experience.

National Museum of African American History and Culture

National Museum of African-American History and Culture

A memorial to the black power salute by American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

National Museum of African-American History and Culture

A memorial to the black power salute by American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City.

Jahi Chikwendiu/The Washington Post via Getty Images

While there are plenty of current and past exhibits to explore online here, the real draw is the collections. In the site’s Collections Stories area, museum staff members share objects that resonate for them historically or culturally, whether it’s Muhammad Ali’s training gear...the dress Carlotta Walls, one of the so-called Little Rock Nine, wore when she walked the gauntlet of angry mobs on her first day integrating Little Rock Central High School...or shards of stained glass from the 16th Street Baptist Church bombing in Birmingham, Alabama that killed four little girls. And if you’ve got lots of time to explore, browse the museum’s vast open-source collections, brimming with letters, documents, photos and artifacts. They convey the wide-ranging African American experience—from a slave ship manifest to a poster of Sidney Poitier’s film To Sir, With Love.

Click HERE for the experience.

U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum

FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

The Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. presents powerful online exhibits brimming with resources such as videos, timelines, glossaries and image galleries rich with potent original artifacts. Themes include Collaboration & Complicity, Nazi Propaganda, Americans and the Holocaust, Racial Health Policies and more. Elsewhere on the museum’s site: a deep archive of survivor interviews, moving artifacts like a gallery of 600 ID cards of Holocaust victims and a place to browse the museum’s huge, sobering collections.

Click HERE for the experience.

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About the author

Missy Sullivan, special projects editor at HISTORY.com, is an award-winning journalist and editor who previously held editorial positions at The Wall Street Journal, SmartMoney magazine and Forbes.

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Citation Information

Article title
10 Virtual History Museums and Experiences to Explore From Home
Website Name
History
Date Accessed
March 21, 2025
Publisher
A&E Television Networks
Last Updated
January 27, 2025
Original Published Date
March 26, 2020

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