The specialists

BABY BOOMBOX The hi-fi and other period details at the Rolling Meadows Historical Museum are housed in a spot-on re-creation of a typical 1950s suburban home.

Rolling Meadows Historical Museum
3100 Central Rd, Rolling Meadows, 847-577-7086
This replica of a 1950s suburban home is furnished with all the modern amenities of that era—among them, an early model black-and-white TV playing looped episodes of Ozzie and Harriet and I Love Lucy, a heavy-duty, chrome-trimmed washer in the kitchen and a sleek hi-fi system complete with vinyl favorites from the period. The three-bedroom house, inhabited by a fictional couple named Fred and Mildred and their three kids, is authentic down to the last detail: Mildred's closet is full of Donna Reed–worthy dresses, Fred's dresser drawer is stocked with neatly folded vintage skivvies, and the medicine cabinet contains a supply of castor oil and an old bottle of Doane's aspirin. The house museum (and its interpretive center, in the garage) opened in 2002 to document the post–World War II housing boom that fueled Chicago's suburban sprawl. Unlike existing towns given a boost by the GI bill, however, Rolling Meadows was a planned community that sprang from the cornfields in just three years. A team of docents, many of whom bought some of the town's first homes, give detailed, firsthand accounts of life back in the day.

International Museum of Surgical Science
1524 N Lake Shore Dr between Burton Pl and North Ave, 312-642-6502, www.imss.org
Antiquated surgical devices, from a 3,000-year-old Peruvian skull drill for brain maladies to a Civil War–era amputee kit, are just a few of the hundreds of items on display throughout four floors of exhibit space in a historic lakefront mansion. Operated by the International College of Surgeons since 1954, the museum also features anatomy- and surgery-related art exhibitions; captivating, surgery-related murals by Gregorio Calvi di Bergolo; and for the kiddies, a walk-in re-creation of a 19th-century apothecary. If that hasn't made you queasy, get a dose of the 12 stone statues depicting great figures in medicine and the allied sciences in the "Hall of Immortals"; equipment from pioneering Chicago radiologist Dr. Emil Grubbe's turn-of-the-century X-ray lab; and a massive iron lung.

DuSable Museum of African American History
740 E 56th Pl at 57th St, 773-947-0600, www.dusablemuseum.org
In 1961, print maker and Chicago school teacher Margaret Burroughs cleared the furniture out of her Bronzeville home's living room, replaced it with her enviable collection of African-American art and artifacts, and hung a shingle that read AFRICAN AMERICAN MUSEUM. The DuSable Museum was born. One of the country's first museums dedicated to black history, it's now housed in a stately former Park District administration building in Washington Park and runs revolving exhibits that spotlight everything from African-American entrepreneurship and the civil-rights movement to traditional quilt-making techniques and paintings by such African-American artists as Archibald Motley and Henry Ossawa Tanner. The museum also documents Chicago's African-American history, as with an ongoing exhibit on the life of Bronzeville beauty-product pioneer Annie Malone.

Oriental Institute Museum
1155 E 58th St at University Ave, 773-702-9520, oi.uchicago.edu
This museum's vast collection of cuneiform tablets, mummies and larger-than-life stone statues from Egypt and the Near East evoke all the mystery and intrigue any whip-cracking, fedora-wearing action hero could handle. John D. Rockefeller bankrolled the institute as part of the University of Chicago in 1919 so that real-life archaeologist-Egyptologist James Henry Breasted and his colleagues could lead expeditions to excavate lost civilizations, learn more about their chronology and study the ancient languages found in their texts. The space is divided into Mesopotamian, Egyptian and Persian galleries, plus the new East Wing Galleries, which include the Assyrian, Syro-Anatolian and Megiddo collections. Parents be warned, you won't find any kid-friendly interactive displays or plasma-screen presentations here—just one of the world's most amazing collections of Near East artifacts. It's hard to miss the 16-foot-tall, solid-stone, human-headed, winged bull that guarded King Sargon II's palace court more than 2,700 years ago and the equally imposing 3,000-year-old King Tut statue that institute researchers uncovered in Thebes—so don't.

The Peace Museum
100 N Central Park Ave at Washington Blvd, 773-638-6450, www.peacemuseum.org
What this museum lacks in size it makes up for in location. Housed on the second floor of Garfield Park's stunning 1928 gold-domed field house flanking the park's vast lagoon, it offers twice the sights for the price. With the goal of "exploring the impact of war and peace through the arts," the museum was founded in 1981 by Chicago muralist Mark Rogovin and Marjorie Craig Benton, a former U.S. representative to UNICEF. The permanent collection contains more than 10,000 artifacts, including original paintings, sculptures, drawings and lithographs. While the museum remains a modest operation, it did receive an image boost in the mid-'80s when U2 dropped by for a visit. The group's album, The Unforgettable Fire, was inspired by an exhibit of artwork by atom-bomb survivors. Rotating exhibitions are the big draw here. Last year's programming featured a stirring photography exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, as well as an excellent photo essay on service-industry workers titled "Daily Meaning."