O Say Can You See?

You asked, we answered: What did soldiers eat during the Revolutionary War?

After answering a question about what may have been in the pockets of Revolutionary War soldiers, another Revolutionary War question came in from a Facebook follower. Our answer by Marko Zlatich, a longtime volunteer in the museum's Division of Armed Forces History.

Barrel-shaped water canteens were uncommon. Their size and awkward shape made them impractical for most soldiers. It is likely that such a canteen would have been owned by a militia man who was called up and merely took what was available to him.

 

Even before a food supply system was organized, on June 10, 1775, the Massachusetts Provincial Council set the daily allowance or ration for its troops in Boston as:

1. One pound of bread
2. Half a pound of beef and half a pound of pork; and if pork cannot be had, one pound and a quarter of beef; and one day in seven they shall have one pound and one quarter of salt fish, instead of one day's allowance of meat
3. One pint of milk, or if milk cannot be had, one gill [half a cup] of rice
4. One quart of good spruce or malt beer
5. One gill of peas or beans, or other sauce equivalent
6. Six ounces of good butter per week
7. One pound of good common soap for six men per week
8. Half a pint of vinegar per week per man, if it can be had.

George Washington's well-appointed personal camp chest, or "mess kit," enabled him to dine in a manner reflecting his position as commander of the Continental Army.

According to The Private Soldier Under Washington, by Charles Knowles Bolton (New York, Scribner's, 1902): "Substantially the same ration was approved by Congress November 4, 1775, but with 'or cider' after the word 'beer.'"

In time, the ration changed due to problems with transporting the rations to the soldiers. For example, in spring of 1778, at Valley Forge, General Washington ordered that the 12,000 men encamped there, each was to receive daily: 1-1/2 pounds of flour or bread, 1 pound of beef or fish, 3/4 pound of pork, and 1 gill of whiskey or spirit; or 1-1/2 pounds of flour, 1/2 pound or pork or bacon, 1/2 pint of peas or beans, and 1 gill of whiskey or spirits, as or when they were available.

When in camp, the soldiers were housed in tents, except those in cold areas during winter; however, the basic plan was for six soldiers to share either a tent or a "hut" and, as at sea, the six created a "mess" or an eating unit which received the rations fit or available for six men and then cooked the food themselves.

Where soldiers had families on campaign with them, those women who were considered as companions for the men were also included in the rations and usually they served as cooks for their mess. A Commissary General of Purchases was appointed by the Continental Congress to arrange for the purchase of rations and their transport.

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Journeying west: Distinctive firearms travel to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West

We recently loaned 64 objects from our National Firearms Collection to the Buffalo Bill Center of the West, a Smithsonian Affiliate in Cody, Wyoming, for a display. Researcher Ashley Lynn Hlebinsky shares two highlights of the display.

 

Photo courtesy of Buffalo Bill Center of the West

This loan is the culmination of the efforts of many individuals from the east and west. Without the vision of Cody Firearms Museum Curator Warren Newman, the dedication of National Museum of American History Associate Curator of firearms David Miller, and the team at Smithsonian Affiliations, this exhibition might not have occurred.

Over the past two years, I have worked as the liaison between the two organizations, selecting firearms, writing text panels and labels, and aiding Newman with the design of the overall exhibition. Among these artifacts are numerous patent models documenting innovations in the field, international imagination, and historic distinction.

 

Presentation Jezail for Thomas Jefferson by the Bey of Tunis

Included in this exhibition is a seven-foot-long gold Miquelet lock musket. A Miquelet lock refers to a specific flintlock system found often in Spain, Portugal and North Africa. This musket was one of two given to President Thomas Jefferson in 1805 by the Bey of Tunis after the Tripolitan Wars. The gift influenced the inclusion of the lyrics "to the shores of Tripoli" in the Marine's Hymn.

 

Russian Jaeger Flintlock Rifle made by Permjakov for Catherine the Great of Russia

Another selected firearm is an embellished Jaeger rifle that belonged to empress Catherine the Great of Russia (1729–1796). A velvet cheek piece added to this firearm ensured her comfort while shooting. Additionally, a gold inlaid image of Catherine herself is on the barrel near the breech.

Another view of Catherine the Great's rifle

This loan is an exciting opportunity to share the museum's diverse and historically rich firearms collection with a new audience in the West. It joins the Smithsonian Institution and the Buffalo Bill Center of the West together in an exhibition opening on May 4, 2013 titled Journeying West: Distinctive Firearms from the Smithsonian Institution.

Photo courtesy of Buffalo Bill Center of the West

Ashley Lynn Hlebinsky has been working as a firearms researcher and assistant between the National Museum of American History and the Cody Firearms Museum for the past few years. She is also completing her Masters Degree in American History and Museum Studies at the University of Delaware this May 2013.

Police in history and Hollywood

Two curators share interesting law enforcement-related artifacts in their collections, inspired by National Police Week.

Curator Eric Jentsch: Hollywood's version of police work

Police badge from "Barney Miller" television show

"Barney Miller," portrayed by actor Hal Linden (born in 1931,) was Captain of New York City's fictional 12th Precinct Detective's Office. There, Miller sensitively oversaw a diverse squad of wacky officers and their daily interactions with eccentric criminals and endless paperwork. The comedy was broadcast on ABC from 1975-1982.

 

Sgt. Pepper's badge from "Police Woman"

Angie Dickinson (born in 1931) portrayed LAPD undercover officer Sgt. "Pepper" Anderson on the NBC drama Police Woman (1974-1978.) A spin-off from the television series Police Story (1973-1978,) the show was one of the first and most successful police dramas to feature a female protagonist.

 

Badge from "Live Free or Die Hard"

Beginning with the 1988 film Die Hard, and through the course of four sequels, New York Police Department (NYPD) officer John McClane has relied on humor and wits to combat such bad guys as terrorists, mercenaries, and thieves. The role took Bruce Willis (born in 1955), from television comedy (ABC's Moonlighting, 1985-1989) to film, where the unlikely action hero became a box-office megastar. This badge comes from the fourth film in the series, 2007's Live Free or Die Hard.

 

Curator Tim Winkle: Real law enforcement

 

Prohibition agent's badge from the 1920s

Prohibition agents raid a lunch room on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., in 1923

Formed in 1920 by the Volstead Act to enforce the 18th Amendment, the Prohibition Bureau was originally organized as a unit within the Treasury Department's Bureau of Internal Revenue (later the Internal Revenue Service). It was tasked with enforcing the prohibition on the manufacture, transportation and sale (but not consumption) of "intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes." The exploits of well-known Prohibition Agents like Eliot Ness and his "Untouchables" in Chicago, Illinois, and the New York duo of "Izzy" Einstein and Moe Smith made newspaper headlines, but most "prohi" agents faced a daunting challenge from the start.

Elevated to a bureau within the Treasury in 1927 and put under the Justice Department in 1930, it returned to the Internal Revenue after Prohibition was repealed in 1933. In time, this service would form the basis of today's Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF).

 

Irene Gardner's Sergeant Badge c. 1965

Irene Gardner in her badge and uniform c. 1950

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) was an early proponent of women in law enforcement, appointing both the nation's first full-time salaried female police officer (Alice Stebbins Wells, 1910) and the first female detective (Isabella Goodwin, 1912). Originally from Omaha, Nebraska, Irene C. Gardner (nee Leveille) joined the growing ranks of policewomen in the LAPD in 1944, and was promoted to Sergeant in 1965. She served in the LAPD for over 30 years with distinction, working primarily with juvenile offenders and developing programs to help keep kids away from crime.

Irene was a good shot as well—in 1961, she won the award for highest pistol score among policewomen at the Los Angeles Police Revolver and Athletic Club.

 

Booklet of by-laws for the Tremont HTDA. The first proviso hints at an alternative agenda—members could only be "one hundred percent AMERICAN WHITE MALE" 

Badge for the Tremont Horse Thief Detective Association

This badge belonged to a member of the Tremont Horse Thief Detective Association, one of many such local law enforcement organizations established in the 1920s in Indiana. Beginning in the 1840s and unique to Indiana, the state granted police powers to citizens' groups who organized chapters of the Horse Thief Detective Association (HTDA) in their communities for the purpose of protecting property, horses in particular. With the advent of the automobile, membership was on the decline and the HTDA seemed increasingly obsolete.

In the 1920s, however, membership rebounded and new chapters were regularly founded, sometimes as many as four or five in a single county. Behind this resurgence was another organization—the Ku Klux Klan. Re-established in 1915, the Klan claimed over four million members nationwide by the mid-1920s, and it extended throughout the country, including mid-western states like Indiana. Klansmen usurped the state's idiosyncratic Horse Thief Detective Association as a means of legally providing police powers and government sanction to what would otherwise be gangs of armed vigilantes.

Eric W. Jentsch is the Deputy Chair for the Division of Culture and the Arts at the National Museum of American History. Tim Winkle is an associate curator with the Division of Home and Community Life.

Dear Mr. Weingarten

Editor's note: In this guest post, middle school teacher Suzanne Hadidi describes how she used portraits by artist Robert Weingarten to help students express themselves and better understand each other.

 

Portrait of Colin Powell by Robert Weingarten

In June of 2012, I had the opportunity to participate in the National Museum of American History's first Teach-it-Forward seminar for teachers in the Washington, D.C., metro area. During the seminar, we visited a new exhibit, Pushing Boundaries: Portraits by Robert Weingarten, which was enhanced by a discussion with the curator of the exhibit, Shannon Perich. As soon as I entered the gallery, I could see a variety of teaching opportunities. The portraits themselves held personal information about the subjects without the names of the subjects being revealed. The images of the subjects' life, achievements, interests, and special moments provide a range of emotions which lead to insightful thinking, reflection, and introspection on one’s own life.

I could see the faces of my students in each portrait. I could see their world open up to possibilities "unknown." In addition to the portraits, a personal letter from each subject was sent to the artist, Robert Weingarten. The letters were as diverse in writing style as in content. Knowing I needed to spend more time to create lessons which would fully reflect the meaning of the exhibition, at a later date I went back to the exhibit and took photographs of the letters. The letters became an important part of my Weingarten lessons. The exhibit opened up a whole new canvas to differentiate instruction and creatively incorporate the Common Core Standards for English/Language Arts.

 

Letter from Powell describing his selected objects for the portrait

Our Weingarten lessons began with a visual literacy strategy—See Think Wonder—where students recorded objects that they saw, what the portrait made them think about, and further questions or associations with the images. Our next lesson incorporated a lesson learned at the Teach-it-Forward seminar, using adjective cards to describe a portrait, in which students identified items in the portraits that they thought were valuable, accidental, sentimental, or held other similar qualities.

 

Describing the objects in the object portrait

Our third Weingarten lesson involved students listening to a podcast by Shannon Perich, discussing the Colin Powell portrait as well as a photograph of a Native American woman. Students were asked to listen and write what they learned from each image.

Example student response from the Powell portrait: 
What can you learn about him or her from the photographs?
Colin Powell wanted to change the world.
Is there anything that stands out to you about the way the portraits are framed?
He looks like he was busy and his life means something.

As the lessons continued, students became more involved with Robert Weingarten. They wanted to know more about his art as well as who he was. I became more involved as a teacher myself. I could feel the emotional and educational impact of this lesson journey I had taken. I couldn't wait to see my students come through the door. Incorporating parts of the Common Core Standards to the lessons, "They habitually perform the critical reading necessary to pick carefully through the staggering amount of information available today in print and digitally. They actively seek the wide, deep, and thoughtful engagement with high-quality literary and informational texts that builds knowledge, enlarges experience, and broadens worldviews." It became more and more clear—my students were "hooked."

Our next lesson was the clincher. I had students observe letters and portraits of eight additional Weingarten subjects. My sixth graders' minds were now open to expose themselves in their own "personal portrait." For the final project, each student wrote his or her own "Dear Mr. Weingarten" letter. Each letter to Mr. Weingarten included at least five items which represented who they are.

 

A student's letter to Weingarten

 

 

Letter to Weingarten by a student. In the letter, the student asks Weingarten to include an image of Howard University, "because that is where I want to go to college." 

They were also responsible for drawing a personal portrait that connected to their letter. The thought, quality, and the range of information each student shared went beyond anything I could have imagined. I learned so much about each individual student. That information still guides me today. I think about their connections to their family, religion, music, sports. I believe each child is their own portrait. Their letters and portraits serve as a constant reminder of how important personal connections are as a teacher.

 

Student object portrait

As a sixth grade teacher I plan on using and further developing the Weingarten lessons to learn about each and every student as they transition to middle school. I'm looking forward to knowing what makes each of my future students unique in his or her own right. I am also planning on sharing this lesson with other middle school teachers in Montgomery County, Maryland.

Dear Mr. Weingarten,
Thank you so much for "pushing my educational boundaries." Your personal portraits have brought inspiration, additional dedication, and personal rejuvenation to a teacher. I look forward to sharing your artwork with my students every school year.
Best regards,
Suzanne Hadidi
Grade 6 Reading Teacher
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School
Montgomery County, MD

For additional resources on these unique portraits, see the Weingarten Portrait blog series and for ideas for integrating this activity into a beginning- or end-of-year activity, see the post Who Are You? In Five Objects.

Guest post on history and poetry: Bottled bitter-sweetness

To close out National Poetry Month, writer Scott Ruescher reflects on how history, memory, and the National Museum of American History influence his poetry.

Call me pointlessly sentimental, but I'm more nostalgic for events I never directly experienced than for those I did. That's why I love haunted buildings—the old barns we explored in central Ohio in the 1960s, on farms bought by suburbanizing developers, or the quiet white structure I spotted in the woods near Lincoln's birthplace, which turned out to be the ruins of an African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, abandoned, perhaps, by worshipers headed north during the Great Migration.

Sooner or later, I get around to writing about those things, with that nostalgic feeling, in poems.

 

Hart House architectural elements from Ipswich, Massachusetts. Today, the house is the center piece of "Within These Walls."

On one recent visit to the National Museum of American History, I loved the exhibition that included a colonial house the curators had dragged all the way from Massachusetts (Within These Walls), where I've lived since leaving Ohio—and the one about the German Jewish immigrant who drifted down the Ohio in the 1830s to be a merchant in Cincinnati, then the largest city west of the Alleghenies. I also loved the massive Civil Rights exhibition the museum hosted two years ago. These themes of home and travel come out in my poem "Homecoming."

Like Whitman I wish I could say, "I am the man, I suffered, I was there." If I put myself in the period and build its atmosphere and activate it somehow, I might make a poem that bottles that bitter-sweetness. I might assume someone else's identity and be there in that interesting other era, that interesting other existence.

 

Just before departing for Ford's Theater for the last time, President Abraham Lincoln left this cup on a windowsill. A White House servant preserved it as a relic of that tragic night.

I explored that AME church in the woods near Lincoln's birthplace in "At the Birthplace of Lincoln," the opening poem of my chapbook [a small-format book], Sidewalk Tectonics, and in the final poem of the sequence, "At the Lorraine Motel," I stood on the balcony where, a century later, Martin Luther King, Jr. died for the same cause, more or less, as Lincoln.

 

Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. at at the pulpit in the Howard University chapel. Scurlock Studio Records, ca. 1905-1994, Archives Center, National Museum of American History.

Excerpt from "At the Lorraine Motel"

Now that I'd been to the birthplace of Lincoln, closed
For the season, a replica of the simple log cabin 
In Hodgenville, Kentucky, where Abe first learned 
To be honest and earnest, and twice to the site of his assassination
At the Ford Theater in Washington, first on a school trip
From Ohio with a history class, then on my own at the end
Of the Reagan administration, well, I wanted to visit the site
Of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination, too,
Having already been to his birthplace in Atlanta 
And his apartment on the border of Roxbury in Boston
And hoping to give iconic weight and gravity to a trip
That started out as an escape into reality, turned 
To true adventure, and ended up as some version
Of New Age pilgrimage or Native American vision quest.

I write not just to witness the course of history but to feel the history coursing through me—and, if I may, to get it coursing through the reader.

Scott Ruescher is a writer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He coordinates the Arts in Education program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and and volunteers in a bilingual reading program at the Amigos School in Cambridge. Sidewalk Tectonics, his 2009 chapbook from Pudding House Publications, takes the reader on a road-trip from Lincoln's birthplace in Hodgenville, Kentucky, to the site of Martin Luther King Jr.'s murder in Memphis, Tennessee. You can read more of Scott's poems at Agni online and from the City of Cambridge.