 A lifelong advocate for social progress, Ruth Abram started her career advocating for women's and civil rights in the 1970s. These experiences led her to consider the relationship between history and social change. In the 1980s, Abram began to examine the history of immigration and its relevance to modern issues, and the idea of a museum dedicated to the immigrant experience was born. In 1988, Abram and her friend Anita Jacobson discovered a largely untouched tenement at 97 Orchard Street in New York City's Lower East Side. The building had been boarded up for 50 years, offering an authentic look at tenement life from the 1840s through the 1930s. Aware that they had struck gold, the two formed a relationship with the owners and co-founded the Lower East Side Tenement Museum. The revolutionary museum preserves and interprets a pair of 19th-century tenement buildings, the second located at 103 Orchard Street. The museum uses these buildings as a tool for addressing contemporary issues by telling the uniquely American stories of immigrants, migrants, refugees, and working-class peoples in the context of the places they live. Throughout her 20-year tenure as president of the museum, Abram focused on fostering empathy by inviting visitors to see America through the eyes of their immigrant ancestors. The museum works with local community members to share these stories, using the neighborhood as a backdrop. Abram also led efforts to create a New York City landmark historic district in the Lower East Side and pioneered the use of online digital tools such as the Immigrant Heritage Trail to help preserve the historic fabric of the neighborhood. In 1999, Abram's work in bridging history and activism became transnational when she organized, along with eight other leaders from around the world, the International Coalition of Sites of Conscience. Now encompassing sites in nearly 70 countries, the group leads the only global movement dedicated to spaces that remember and preserve the most traumatic memories, while encouraging their visitors to make connections between the past and related contemporary human rights issues. After her retirement from both organizations, Abram moved to New Lebanon, New York. In 2014, she founded Behold New Lebanon, a living museum of contemporary, rural American life that focused on cultural tourism. Ruth is now embarking on what she describes as her last big project, restoring the promised land plantation in Georgia to interpret the lives of the rural immigrants and migrants who settled there. Abram's paradigm-shifting leadership has directly inspired countless organizations and institutions to radically expand cultural and interpretive concepts at historic sites around the world.