O Say Can You See?

A visit from the U.S. Secretary of Education

We were delighted to host a visit earlier this week by Secretary of Education Arne Duncan. He selected the Smithsonian Early Enrichment Center as a site to kick-off his back-to-school effort, and it was a tremendous honor for this excellent program. Secretary Duncan’s visit was also wonderful recognition of the educational role of museums.

The National Museum of American History is at heart an educational organization, serving pre-school through college and post-graduate students in addition to providing top-notch professional development. We put a lot of effort into developing the high quality resources for teachers, students and parents that can be found on Smithsonian’s History Explorer. However our educational activities reach even more widely into every aspect of our public operation. We define educational goals for every exhibition, Web site, public program and publication, so that every interaction with our museum presents a learning opportunity.

One of the great things about visiting and working in a museum is this ability to be constantly learning, in a fashion that is totally self-directed. We provide the inspiration and material to find or follow passions, and learning takes place every day on both our public floors and behind the scenes. This week I’m reviewing scripts for three new exhibits and learning more about the Revolutionary War, history of photography, and WWII era technology invention.

So while at home the start of school looms for my children and it is time to buy those back-to-school supplies and step up my harassment about completing summer homework, at work every day is gladly devoted to learning. Please let us know how we can better support your learning in school and out.

Judy Gradwohl is Associate Director for Public Programs at the National Museum of American History.

Recipe of the Week: Julia Child's Reine de Saba cake

“Above all, have a good time”

To celebrate Julia Child’s wall of copper pots joining the museum’s collections, we’re taking Julia’s philosophy to heart. Inspired by her admonitions to take to our kitchens, to muster the courage to try cooking something new, and to discover the pleasures of the table, we are preparing to cook some of her key recipes ourselves. Over the next few months we’ll be following Julia’s detailed instructions and reminding ourselves of her masterful teaching style and her enthusiasm for the tools and techniques of cooking. Along the way we will feature specific tools and gadgets in Julia’s home kitchen, which has been on view at the museum since 2002, and, true to her philosophy, we’ll share our experiences in this space. Finally, we invite you to join with us in this celebration of Julia Child’s life, work, and contributions to American culinary history.

About this Dish: Reine de Saba 

Find the recipe in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1, p. 677-78 or The Way to Cook, p. 471. 

In the hundredth episode of the television series, The French Chef, Julia made the Reine de Saba, or Queen of Sheba cake. One of the tools she used for making this special cake with the grand name was an ordinary rubber spatula. Essential for folding the smooth and shiny beaten egg whites into the batter, Julia also noted that the rubber spatula was one of America’s great culinary contributions. She kept her spatulas in a ceramic crock on a shelf above her stove.

Paula's story...

This week, curator Paula Johnson shares her experience of baking the cake in an authentically Julia way:

On a hot summer night in 2002, I lost my mind and thought I could make a cake. Not just any cake, but a Reine de Saba, Julia Child’s recipe for an “extremely good chocolate cake” also called the “Queen of Sheba.” I had made the cake many times before and had always enjoyed the process of transforming lots of butter, sugar, eggs, chocolate, and just a little flour into a beautiful cake with a creamy center. I always relished reaching the decision point—shall I melt the chocolate in rum or coffee?—and then sipping an unholy combination of the two as the cake baked.

I had no reason to believe I couldn’t do it again, but July 2002 was no ordinary time. It was exhibition installation time, that heady, exhausting phase experienced by museum staff, when the usual notions of time and space become scrambled. The Julia Child exhibition team, of which I was a member, was installing Julia’s kitchen in the museum gallery, galloping toward the goal of opening the exhibition in time for Julia’s 90th birthday in August. By mid-July we felt certain we would make that deadline, as long as the usual notions of time and space did not apply. Long hours spent standing, reaching, carrying, polishing, lifting, and fixing had become the norm.

With a shock, my colleague Nanci Edwards and I realized one of our team members, Rayna Green, was having a milestone birthday the following day. Ignoring the fact that it was already evening, I decided to go home and make a Reine de Saba to mark the occasion. “A Reine for Rayna!” I remember thinking. As I cleared space and lined up the ingredients, I looked at the clock. Hmmm. Ten p.m., shouldn’t be a problem. This is the deluded mind of someone in exhibition installation mode.

But I started in and chose coffee as the chocolate-melting medium on the theory that I could drink the rest of it (without rum) and stay wide awake. I creamed the butter and sugar together. Pale and fluffy, just like Julia says it should be. Blending the egg yolks—beautiful! As I prepared to beat the egg whites into soft peaks I had a moment of insanity: instead of using an electric mixer, why not do it the old-fashioned way, as Julia suggests by directing her students to page 159 of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. I, “How to beat egg whites by hand.” We had been living amongst Julia’s kitchen equipment and work space, and I could hear her rallying cry to “just try!” I scanned her instructions: “Start beating at a speed of 2 strokes per second with a vertical, circular motion for 20 to 30 seconds . . . Using your lower-arm and wrist muscles for beating—shoulder muscles tire quickly—gradually increase the beating speed to 4 strokes per second …”

Thus began my descent. Did I say it was July (in D.C.!)? That it was HOT? That by now it was 11 p.m.? Try as I might, I couldn’t get the peaks to form. My lower-arm and wrist muscles gave out so I tried putting what my dad used to call “elbow grease” behind the motion, with no improvement. The cacophony in the kitchen woke up the household and I soon had two cats rubbing against my ankles, creating even more heat. The preheated oven taunted me to get the job done, already. Channeling Julia again I kept at it and, finally, all at once it seemed, I had achieved “stiffly beaten egg whites.”

I stumbled through the rest of the recipe and stayed awake while the cake baked by giving myself another task: I melted more chocolate to chill for use in decorating the top of the cake. Insane.

The following day, in quiet comfort after another long day of installation, we toasted Rayna and shared the cake, which had illegible chocolate decorations on the top and a middle that wasn’t as creamy as it should have been (too much elbow grease, I think). But we followed Julia’s advice and, above all, we had a good time.

Do try this at home!

We invite you to join with us in this celebration of Julia Child’s life, work, and contributions to American culinary history. Please share your experiences making Julia Child’s Reine de Saba cake by posting your story, photos, or video on our Tumblr page for this recipe series. Don’t forget to check back next week for mashed potatoes.

Paula Johnson is a curator in the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History.

The strangest object in the Photographic History Collection

Most people wouldn’t expect to find a .36 caliber pistol in the nation’s Photographic History Collection. Frankly, neither did I. But in the summer of 2007, when I began working as an intern at the National Museum of American History, I stumbled upon just that—a Civil War-era Colt revolver alongside boxes of photographs by Mathew Brady and Ansel Adams. It may seem an unlikely match, but the stewardship of the gun within the Photographic History Collection says a lot about the deep and multi-faceted American story that this Museum is privileged to tell.

Legendary Western movie star William S. Hart’s Colt revolver.

The gun belonged to William S. Hart, one of the most famous Western actors of the silent film era. Long before Clint Eastwood and John Wayne became stars playing gritty cowboys and gunmen in the Old West, “Two Gun” Bill Hart helped to define the Western genre. Hart was a classically-trained actor with an obsession about the people and legends of the American West. In the 1910s, when he was already middle-aged, Hart left the stage to try out for movie roles as a gunslinger and quickly found success. Although the Western had been a popular movie genre since Edwin S. Porter’s groundbreaking 1903 film The Great Train Robbery, Hart thought that most of these productions were inauthentic and overly flashy. He quickly gained a reputation for playing gritty, realistic, and moral lawmen, and took pride in his historically accurate costumes. Hart would usually brandish his two Colt 1851 Navy Revolvers, for which he earned his nickname.

The six-chamber Navy Revolver, ironically, had been used primarily by armies on land. The gun got its name from the engraving on its revolving cylinder, which shows the 1843 Battle of Campeche, in which the navy of the Texas Republic broke the Mexican blockade of that city. It was also used by private individuals and was one of the most popular guns of the mid-19th century. The revolver fired so accurately that it became the handgun of choice for lawman “Wild Bill” Hickock and Confederate General Robert E. Lee, among others.

Hart’s two guns were used in the majority of his 77 films, during a career that spanned two decades. He was one of the nation’s most popular and profitable movie stars in the late 1910s and 1920s, when he made the then-unbelievable sum of $150,000 per picture. However, like many other silent film stars, Bill Hart’s star faded in the transition to “talkies.” Hart felt that Hollywood no longer had a place for him after he completed Tumbleweeds, his last film, in 1925. New cowboy stars like Tom Mix and Will Rogers emphasized fast action, horse tricks, and singing over Hart’s preferred style of complex and well-paced morality tales, and so he retired to his ranch outside Los Angeles.

In Tumbleweeds, Hart played a courageous cowboy who defended Western settlers from unscrupulous “Sooners” with his trusty pistol. This poster is part of the William S. Hart Collection in the Photographic History Collection.

After retirement, Hart became friends with a Virginia projectionist and movie collector named Gatewood Dunston, and over time, gave his friend some of the most treasured items from his years of cowboy stardom. Hart died in 1946 and Dunston donated his collection of motion picture equipment, films, and Bill Hart memorabilia to the Photographic History Collection in 1956, when it was known as the National Museum’s Photographic Section.

The staff from the Photographic History Collection is dedicated to researching the history of the photographic image in American life. In this digital age, it’s sometimes hard to remember that movies are composed of thousands of tiny photographic images, but Smithsonian photography curators have been collecting motion pictures as long as they’ve existed. In order to tell the story of America’s movie culture, it’s important to have more than just reels of film. That’s why the Photographic History Collection includes 32 motion picture cameras; 105 projectors, including the first ever made in America; over 120 pieces of miscellaneous movie editing, sound, and other apparatus; and over 200 posters, photographs, and other documents related to the cinema. The icing on the cake is “Two Gun” Hart’s famous revolver, the strangest object in the Photographic History Collection.

Ryan Lintelman is the Project Assistant in the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History.

Museums making headlines

Being a minor-league news junkie, a former student journalist, and a habitual reader of the morning newspaper along with my breakfast cereal, a recent item from the e-zine Slate about the virtues of print vs. online media caught my eye. Anyone who reads the news is probably aware of the dramatic changes happening in the business of journalism today, with local daily newspapers buckling one by one under the inexorable rise of instant, free, online sources of information. Many ask what would be lost if the traditional print newspaper—a staple of American life for much of our history—were to die out, and what, if anything, will take its place.

To begin to answer that question, a group of Slate journalists undertook an experiment. For a period of time, half of them got all their news from local print sources; the other half was restricted to Web-only media outlets. Each day, they came together to compare notes about their experience and their exposure to national and international events.

The results interested me, and not only for what they revealed about the state of news media. Museums, like journalists, are being told from some quarters that the era of “editorial control” over information is over. The democratization of online publishing means that anyone can create, curate, and disseminate information, whether about the day’s headlines, or scientific discovery, or the interpretation of art, or the meaning of history. But it is important to ask whether such sweeping generalizations throw out the proverbial baby with the bathwater.

The key, I think, is in that word I used above—“headlines.” The Slate writers mused that the news world would be much more chaotic without the daily ritual undertaken by the editorial teams of major newspapers to filter, sort, and package the day’s top stories. This more or less sets the agenda not only for water cooler conversation among the well-informed, but for the many others that rely in one way or another on the high-quality, original reporting that is now done by fewer and fewer news organizations. Does that mean that the freewheeling, democratic Internet has no virtues of its own? Of course not. The same group agreed that for information and commentary that is up-to-the-minute, hyper-local, representative of an exciting diversity of voices, or otherwise fills in the cracks that the major media outlets missed, the Web can’t be beat.

I’m convinced there are lessons here for museums. In journalistic terms, I see an institution like the Smithsonian as the major news organization that provides a steady source of reliable, high-quality “reporting"–in the case of this museum, on American history and culture. (Based on the response to my previous blog posts, many of you agree with me.) Not every topic, fact, or worthy voice is represented in our halls—we don’t have the resources to do that, just as a newspaper cannot be encyclopedic about current events. Hopefully, our own editorial process results in wise choices about what to collect, research, and display for the public.

But, like newspapers, we ignore the Internet-driven forces of change at our peril. These days, anyone has the capacity to be a published armchair historian—and why not? We can only gain from a multiplicity of voices telling the American story from a million points of view. Does it diminish the role we play? I don’t see why it should (in fact I think it enhances it in a number of ways). But it does mean we might need to change some things about how we relate to our audience. I remain hopeful that the electronic age will hold bright new possibilities for museums—as well as that pillar of democracy, a robust free press.

Matthew MacArthur is Director of New Media at the National Museum of American History.