When Benjamin Franklin and friends decided in 1743 to establish America’s first “learned society,” they called it the American Philosophical Society because they practiced the objective study of nature and called themselves natural philosophers. Now we’d call them scientists. But the word “philosophical” stuck. In the first half-century of the republic APS served as a national library, museum, and academy of science. In 2001, the American Philosophical Society opened a museum in Philosophical Hall for the first time since Charles Willson Peale created American’s first successful museum there in 1794. Today the APS Museum presents both ambitious exhibitions and challenging work by contemporary artists that that present the Society’s treasure trove of important documents, scientific specimens, patent models, portraits, maps 300,000 books, 8 million manuscripts, art works and objects that traces American history from the Founding Fathers to the computer age in new and thought-provoking ways.