American museums went from private cabinets of curiosities for the wealthy to public institutions built for education, and this program traces that hundred-year shift coast to coast. Narrator Susan Stamberg guides visits to museums across the country, using their founders, directors, and benefactors to tell a story about who got to decide what counted as culture worth preserving. The film's title frames the fight plainly: rich patrons who bankrolled collections, rival institutions competing for prestige and donors, and radicals who pushed museums to open their doors beyond high society and represent broader American life. Produced for public television by Great Museums, the film moves through decades of changing missions, from temples of fine art to spaces expected to serve communities, educate schoolchildren, and reckon with whose history gets displayed. Without a single flagship museum or figure at its center, the film builds its case out of many smaller institutional stories, treating the museum itself, as an American idea, as the real subject.