The Holocaust Museum opened in 1993. In 2004 came the National Museum of the American Indian. But only now is work starting on a national museum that tackles head on, among other things, the original sin of the United States. As its director Lonnie Bunch told The Washington Post, slavery was central in shaping US history, but to this day remains "the last great unmentionable" in public discourse. "We will examine the dark corners of the American experience in a way we're not always comfortable in doing."

　　More than 100 black history museums already exist across the country, including the National Civil Rights Museum at the former Lorraine Motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where Dr King was assassinated in 1968. Others are reminders of the huge impact blacks had had on American, and indeed global, culture – like the small house on the west side of Detroit where Berry Gordy set up his recording studio called Hitsville USA, now the Motown museum. In Washington, all these strands will be meshed together.

　　The $500m (￡318m) project is being funded by $250m of private donations, and a similar amount from the federal budget. Already Mr Bunch has amassed 25,000 artefacts, spanning the entire range of African American experience, from slavery to civil rights, to their immense contributions in art, sport, music and almost every walk of national life.

　　There will be a detailed examination of slavery which, he says, may well focus on the miseries of individual people: their families, the slave auctions where they were bought and sold, and the plantations where they worked.

　　The African American museum will celebrate heroes of emancipation like Harriet Tubman (Mr Bunch has acquired the shawl given to Ms Tubman by Queen Victoria, which she wore two days before she died in 1913). There will be items that lift the heart – alongside exhibits on lynchings, and other brutalities and indignities perpetrated on blacks for much of the last century.

　　Visitors will see Louis Armstrong's trumpet, but also the original pine coffin that contained the body of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old boy bestially murdered in 1955 in Mississippi because he was reported to have wolf-whistled at a white woman. The coffin was deliberately left open at Till's funeral in Chicago by his mother, so the world could see the atrocities visited upon her son. The public outrage that followed gave powerful fresh impetus to the civil rights movement.

　　Today no one would dispute that the story of black America, for better and worse, is part of the story of all America. Even so, some see the new museum as part of a worrying trend, the subtle atomisation of a country that has always prided itself on being a sum greater than its disparate parts. Now, they worry, it's not so much E Pluribus Unum, ("out of many one" – the phrase on the Seal of the United States), but Ex uno plura ("out of one, many").

　　As the Virginia Congressman Jim Moran puts it: "I don't want a situation where whites go to the original museums, African Americans go to the African American museum, Indians to the Indian museum and Hispanics to the Latino American museum. That's not America."

　　【簡(jiǎn)析】 中 華 考 試 網(wǎng)

　　黑人歷史是美國(guó)歷史十分重要的一個(gè)部分，黑人從奴隸開始，到獲得自由，出現(xiàn)了像馬丁路德金那樣出色的領(lǐng)導(dǎo)人，甚至如今奧巴馬是第一位黑人總統(tǒng)。在美國(guó)，有許多的博物館是關(guān)于非裔美國(guó)人的苦難史奮斗史。但是，現(xiàn)在當(dāng)新的博物館拔地而起，奧巴馬為其做了開館演說，強(qiáng)調(diào)哪段歷史，人們不免擔(dān)心，當(dāng)一旦過分關(guān)注黑人，或者拉美裔美國(guó)人，或者是印第安人，美國(guó)這個(gè)民族就不是一個(gè)整體，而反而變得支離破碎。