Levittown Historical Society And Museum

10/17/2026

Our technology exhibit at the Levittown Museum underscores the astonishing march of progress in just a few decades.

In 1956, about 3.75 megabytes needed a machine the size of two refrigerators.

That was IBM's first hard disk drive, the Model 350. It stored 5 million characters on fifty spinning metal disks, each 24 inches across, and it weighed nearly a ton. The computer system it belonged to rented for about $3,200 a month.

All of that held roughly what a single photo on your phone takes up today.

Now a microSD card smaller than your fingernail holds 1 terabyte. That's more than 250,000 times as much, and the card weighs less than a gram.

What's the first computer you ever used?

10/16/2026

Museum closure. Due to staff shortage, the museum will be closed today, Friday October16th. Sorry for any inconvenience.

10/13/2026

10/12/2026

Takapausha of the Massapequan Indians. He may have lived in what became the Levittown/Wantagh area.

One of your neighbors posted in Community Corner. Click through to read what they have to say. (The views expressed in this post are the author’s own.)

10/12/2026

LEVITTOWN KIDS ARE REALLY SMART.
Here I am teaching science at the Hicksville Gregory Museum to elementary school students from Levittown. I few weeks earlier, I taught American history to this same group of students in the Levittown Museum. One of the activities I do with the children at the Gregory is a scavenger hunt in which children compare manmade products with various minerals. When I asked this group to give an example of manmade products they shouted out things like 'Model T' 'Henry Ford', 'mass-production', 'Levitt houses', and 'consumer products' They remembered my lesson from a few weeks earlier.

10/10/2026

WHY ORIGINAL SOURCES ARE ESSENTIAL TO UNDERSTANDING HISTORY.

Without original documented sources, history too easily falls prey to myths, misconceptions, apocryphal tales, and conspiracy theories. Take the notion that people in 1492 thought the Earth was flat. There exists no dearth of documents predating Columbus' voyage to the New World that indicate that the spherical nature of the world was known - Toscinelli in 1471, the Catalan Atlas in 1375, Fra Mauro in 1459, Imago Mundi in 1410, Behaim in 1492, and Aneuas Sylvius, a.k.a. Pope Pius II in 1477. The existence of these documents are not recent discoveries, they have been known about for centuries. Yet, in the 19th Century, Washington Irving, John William Draper, and Andrew Dixon White perpetuated the notion of Medieval flat earthism and by the middle of the 20th Century school children in America were being taught that people in Columbus' time thought the world was flat. All any teacher, board of education, superintendent of schools, or state department of education in 1960 needed to do was consult with a professional historian who specialized in Medieval history and culture to know this was a myth.
PM

10/10/2026

Columbus no more discovered America than did the Vikings or any other Old World explorers that might have come here prior to 1492. When they arrived on these shores, the Americas were already populated by well-established tribes, cultures, nations, and civilizations and some of those were just as complex and sophisticated as the Medieval Europe whence came Columbus. But it is due to the events of 1492 that hitherto isolated realms of the New World were forevermore linked to the peoples of Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East; whereupon we see the beginning of the first truly global civilization. Columbus himself need not be celebrated or even admired. But the significance of his actions, his place in history, cannot be ignored and having a Columbus Day serves the function of reminding us of our origins. PM

President Benjamin Harrison established Columbus Day in 1892. He did that to honor the Italian Americans who were falsely accused and lynched in New Orleans in 1891. The holiday was created to celebrate the Italian American community and to recognize their contributions to the United States.

10/06/2026

SHARE YOUR MEMORABILIA.
Many people collect all manner of antiques, relics, heirlooms, curiosities, artifacts, and specimens. Share yours with the crowd at the Levittown Museum on October 19, 2026 at 730pm.