Museum
Polish Museum of America
Ethnic heritage museum whose royal seals and revolutionary-era letters vanished for decades before a coin dealer helped recover them.
0:00≈ 2 min
Location
0:00≈ 2 min
About this audio guide
This guide to the Polish Museum of America in Chicago follows a Thomas Jefferson letter, about back pay owed to the Polish military engineer Thaddeus Kosciuszko, that vanished from the collection sometime in the nineteen eighties along with more than a hundred other artifacts. You'll hear how it resurfaced by accident in twenty eleven, when a group of young Chicagoans walked into a rare coin shop on North Clark Street carrying a bundle of old papers. Listen for how a careful dealer's questions set the recovery in motion.
This audio guide was created using AI.