O Say Can You See?

Working with the American Double Eagle

Curator’s Note: Jennica Rzepka added three hundred images of Double Eagles (20 dollar gold coins) into the National Numismatic Collection database. To do this she had to research the objects using specific numismatic references, create or complete database records, and learn proper coin handling methods. Jennica became so passionate on her subject that she wrote this post about her newfound knowledge.

When I first accepted my internship with the National Museum of American History in the National Numismatic Collection (NNC), I had no idea what “numismatic” meant. I discovered that “numismatics” was the “study of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money, and related objects.” My excitement for interning at the museum was somewhat diminished upon realizing that I’d be far from working with the Muppets or World War II memorabilia. To my surprise, however, it turns out that coins and tokens have as much beauty, mystery, and intrigue as the rest of the amazing collection at the museum.

I worked primarily with the “Double Eagle” 20-dollar gold pieces that date from 1849 to 1933. Right off the bat, I heard the word “gold” and was captivated. What girl doesn’t love shiny things? But my interest stalled there; they were still just coins. My lovely intern supervisor, Robyn Einhorn, opened my eyes to see the Double Eagles not merely as coins, but as miniature works of art. Gradually, I began to appreciate that these were little tokens of history (please excuse the pun!).

In 1848, the Gold Rush turned America on its head, and the gold pouring out of California was quickly turned into currency. The excess of gold allowed for a new denomination—the 20 dollar gold coin.

Double Eagles are extraordinary not only in their rarity, but in their design as well. From 1849 to 1907, the image on the obverse, or “head’s side,” of the Double Eagle was of Lady Liberty’s head facing left, with her hair gathered up, and surrounded by 13 stars. James Barton Longacre, chief engraver for the United States Mint from 1844 to 1869, designed the first Double Eagles, which highlighted his mastery of portrait engraving.

United States, 20 dollars, 1849, designer James Barton Longacre. This is one of two trial pattern coins struck in February 1850, but back dated to show the date 1849, when Congress authorized the striking of the first 20 dollar coins.

Although I think the Longacre design absolutely beautiful, President Roosevelt felt otherwise. In 1907, he enlisted famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create a design that was reminiscent of the beauty and high relief of ancient Greek coins. What Saint-Gaudens came up with is truly remarkable. Lady Liberty is shown striding forward, holding a torch in one hand and an olive branch in another. Her Grecian gown flows out and around her body, with sunbeams radiating from beneath her feet. The romanticism and the magnificence President Roosevelt believed American coinage lacked was found in the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagles.

Of course, all good things must come to an end, and eventually the mines were depleted. Due to massive gold and capital outflows, the United States departed from an exclusive gold reserve in 1931. By April 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered all Americans to surrender their gold, instantly making the 20 dollar gold pieces rare and even more valuable. So rare, in fact, that of the 445,000 Double Eagles produced in 1933, only three are known to exist in private and public collections. In 2001, one of the three went up for auction and fetched a record-breaking $7.5 million dollars. Talk about impressive! Where are the other two? Right here in the National Museum of American History.

United States, 20 dollars, 1933, designer Augustus Saint-Gaudens. This is of the two 1933 (the year most gold coins were called back to the mint and melted) Double Eagles in the collections of the National Museum of American History.

I feel incredibly fortunate to have worked with such a significant part of American history, and I encourage you to visit Stories on Money to see these legendary coins for yourself!

Jennica Rzepka is an Intern for the National Numismatic Collection at the National Museum of American History.

General Tso's Chicken: the most popular Hunanese dish in the USA

Curator’s Note: What started out as a simple research assignment for the Sweet & Sour Initiative turned into an interesting culinary experiment when I discovered that museum intern Nina had never had the dish before. We had to arrange for her to try it and see what she thought. The Sweet and Sour Initiative is a long term project at the National Museum of American History to further explore the culture and history of Chinese in America through food and restaurants. In doing so, we hope to tell a broader story of immigration and acculturation for all Americans. -Cedric Yeh

Hi everyone. I’m Nina and I’ve been working on the Sweet and Sour Initiative for almost five months now and every day I get so hungry researching all the Chinese food history.

One day while I was filing away papers and reviews on General Tso’s chicken, it suddenly dawned on me that I have never tasted this dish before. I told some of the others in the office and they were shocked. I have come to realize it is a staple of Chinese food in America, but having grown up in Taiwan, the dish was foreign to me. Not only had I not heard of the dish before, but what I imagined the dish to be was completely different as well. The first time my friend told me about her favorite Chinese dish with its strange name, it sounded like it came straight out of my high school history class. I thought she was talking about something similar to tsuai-gi (醉雞), which is chicken marinated in rice wine.

So in order to see what all the fuss was about, I knew I needed to try it for myself. And try it I did—TWICE—to compare the experiences of take out and dine-in recipes.


General Tso. Image credit: Jennifer Lee

The dish first appeared in the 1970s in New York City. Chef Peng Chang-Kuei is widely credited with creating the dish and coining its unusual name. He had created an earlier version in Taiwan in the 1950s after he fled the Chinese civil war on the mainland. He named his dish after General Tso, a famous military leader from Peng’s home province of Hunan, who legend says enjoyed chicken very, very much. Peng later came to the U.S. and opened a restaurant in New York. Even though years later he closed his shop and went back to Taiwan, the dish stayed and became a mainstay of Chinese food in America.

(Curator’s Note: The original Chef Peng dish has a clear sauce and contains chopped garlic and red peppers with a Chinese vegetable, not broccoli. Very different from the dishes Nina is about to mention.)

I began first with the takeout version of the dish. I prepared myself with a good Chinese movie, The Last Emperor, to go along with the food. The chicken came in a black plastic container and the rice came in the takeout boxes. I was a bit surprised. Only knowing Chinese takeout from the movies, I thought all takeout came in those signature red and white boxes. There was some broccoli in the dish, which complimented the color of the meat, red and green, almost like Christmas. The taste was sweeter than I expected, without much of the spiciness I expected from a Hunan dish.

I invited some Taiwanese students to accompany me to the restaurant tasting of General Tso’s. My companions were very surprised when I ordered this dish. When it arrived the first thing I noticed was the brightness, much brighter than the take out version with a lot more sauce. It too had some broccoli on the side. You could also see the hot pepper in the dish, a clear sign that this version retained a bit of the Hunan spiciness. The dine-in version boasted much larger pieces of chicken than the takeout version. The chicken itself was quite firm and thickly battered, so it was easy to tell where the batter ended and the meat began. Although everyone at the table seemed to like the dish, at the end of the meal it was the only dish that had leftovers.

Take Out

Layout: Broccoli on the side. Came in plastic black containers. Rice came in the red/white takeout boxes.
Sauce: Slightly sweeter
Chicken: Can’t tell the difference of the batter and the chicken. The “meat” was very crispy and crunchy.

Dine-In

Layout: Rice was served separately in little bowls.
Sauce: More spicy and sticky
Chicken: The batter was pretty thick, but chicken pieces are still visible.

So what did I think? It’s sweet and salty at the same time, with a tangy taste of spice. It goes well with rice and it reminds me of one of my favorite dishes back home, “sugar and vinegar chicken.” Unfortunately, I don’t think General Tso’s chicken has made it to the top my personal favorite dishes list, but I can see why the dish became so popular. And seeing as this dish is only found in the USA, I think I am going to have it a few more times before I leave.

Nina Mei Han Yang is an intern for the Sweet and Sour Initiative and the Division of Armed Forces History at the National Museum of American History.

Pong, Atari, and the origins of the home video game

My mom’s family likes to save things. A product of the Great Depression and World War II, my grandmother taught my mom and her three siblings how to be frugal and that “you never know when you’ll need something.”

So when I went home for spring break and mentioned that I was writing something about video games for my internship at the Smithsonian, was I surprised when my uncle pulled out his video game console from 1977? Not really.

It was the Sears version of the Atari 2600 – the Cartridge Tele-Games System Video Arcade. My uncle still had the two joysticks and a collection of 11 games, including Space Invaders and his favorite, Asteroids. The most impressive thing was that if we had the right adapter, I could theoretically plug this machine into my TV and play the games my uncle grew up with in his teens.

This Tele-Game console was basically the Atari 2600, just with a Sears name. The Atari 2600 was Atari’s first cartridge-based game system. This meant the game code for, say, my uncle’s Pitfall! game, was in the removable cartridge instead of built into the game console. The Atari 2600 was the longest running console in history.

Back at the museum, I found an interesting connection between my uncle’s game console and something in the Electricity Collections – a Pong machine.

Atari Pong game in crate in 2009

The founder of Atari and the co-creator of Pong was engineer Nolan Bushnell. What came first, Atari or Pong? Bushnell started Atari in 1972 with Ted Dabney after Bushnell left Nutting Associates, an arcade-game manufacturer. He hired Al Alcorn and had him program a simple game to test his programming experience. The result was a table tennis video game called Pong.

Pong was first introduced as an arcade video game in a small bar in Sunnyvale, California. It was such a hit that the machine broke down – not because there was something wrong with the programming, but because it was stuffed with quarters from the bar’s patrons.

Pong is a simple game, but it has a complicated history. It is widely accepted that when Bushnell was working on it, he studied contemporary computer games. He also was aware of the work of Ralph Baer, the designer of the first home video game, the Magnavox Odyssey. Bushnell tested the Odyssey and its table tennis video game at a trade show in California in 1972. That same year, Atari came out with Pong and in 1976, Magnavox took the company to court. Atari and Magnavox settled and Magnavox gave Atari an exclusive license to reproduce the game.

 

Games for the Tele-Game console

 

Atari brought Pong into people’s living rooms in 1975 when it released a home version, which Sears agreed to sell under its brand name, Tele-Game. Two years later, in 1977, Atari released the Atari 2600, the same year my uncle bought his Tele-Game console.

Like many other people, he spent hours in the basement defeating aliens, destroying asteroids, and trying to convince my grandmother to join him. At some point the game cartridges, console, and joysticks were boxed up and stored somewhere safe because “you never know when you’ll need something.”

Will my brother follow in my uncle's footsteps and be wiping the dust from his PlayStation 3 console 40 years from now? He swears he won't, but I have a funny feeling that he will save things just like all my other relatives - his Game Boy is already starting to collect dust under his bed.

Can’t get enough of video games? The Art of Video Games exhibition is at the Smithsonian American Art Museum until September 30.

Check out the Lemelson Center's latest podcast on on making music for video games and using video games to make music.

Angela Modany is an intern in the New Media Department at the National Museum of American History.

From the mouth of a 13-year-old visitor, wisdom flows

So there I was, in my self-assigned corner of Flag Hall, half-anxious and half-excited to share my knowledge of carnaval in Puerto Rico with whichever museum visitors decided to wander over to my educational cart. I set up the colorful and devilish papier-mache masks in front to attract curious little ones, followed by a güiro (an instrument native to Puerto Rico), tambourine, map of Puerto Rico, photos of carnaval celebrants, and something called a vejiga, which is actually a dried-out, inflated, balloon-like cow bladder used to whack the evil spirits off people’s shoulders. In terms of educational cart experiences, the day was going very well—I had a lot of interested and engaged visitors, but my last encounter of the day would top them all—in the best way possible.

A traditional güiro is made from gourd-like fruit of the higüero tree (Crescentia cujete) that is native to the region. This musical instrument, common throughout the Caribbean, takes on various forms and can be made from modern materials like metal or plastic. A musical instrument of Pre-Columbian origin, it is played by scraping the carved ridges with the tines of a special pick or scraper. This güiro is a part of the Teodoro Vidal Collection.

But before I relate that experience, I want to mention a current event that makes this story relevant. Today, a bus-load of school books that used to be read as part of the Tucson Unified School District’s Mexican-American ethnic studies program will be “smuggled” back across Arizona state lines by a group of activists, authors, educators, and students as part of the Librotraficante Caravan. (“Librotraficante” literally means book smuggler in Spanish.) The caravan, which will carry boxes of books including, Critical Race Theory by Richard Delgado; Chicano! The History of the Mexican Civil Rights Movement by Arturo Rosales and Rethinking Columbus: The Next 500 Years by Bill Bigelow, leaves Houston on Monday, travels through Texas and New Mexico and concludes in Tucson, Arizona.

Tucson Unified School District recently stated that these books are not banned from the classroom, but were only removed and placed in storage because the courses they accompany now violate a ban on certain ethnic studies in Arizona and are no longer taught. Now, regardless of which side of the political fence you fall on when it comes to immigration issues or the growing visibility and importance of Latinos, the unfolding of events in Arizona and other states underscores the increased visibility of something I’ve come to call “otherism” in the United States. It’s the idea that we’re all in a battle of us versus them, whomever “us” and whomever “them” are. This goes beyond immigration or ethnicity issues, presenting itself in terms of class (Example: “Oh, well that’s very 1% of you…”) and religion.

For those using a plethora of “otherisms” (maybe without even realizing it) our diversity of experience, background, perspectives, and culture is just cause to make us more suspicious of each other. What becomes implied is that diversity will become disunity and weakness. The opposite of this sentiment is something I call—since my encounter with this special museum visitor—“rainbowism.” And that brings me back to a boy I’ll call “Derek.”

Vanessa and her educational cart.

As I mentioned earlier, I was getting ready to pack up my cultural, puertorriqueño (Puerto Rican) wares of the day, when a group of seventh-grade boys on a school trip from Dallas, Texas approached me. I talked to them a bit about the objects, and then one of the boys said to me, “I have a lot of respect for Latinos.”

I’m not making this up and I’m not paraphrasing. This 13-year-old, wiry, bespectacled kid really said this incredibly insightful and perceptive thing to me. I proceeded to ask him why that was and he responded by saying that Hispanics, like other minorities, face a lot of hurdles but they continue to share their culture, including food, music, and religion with and in America. As if he hadn’t already impressed me enough with his young, open mind, “Derek” then said, “America is like a rainbow because there’s all kinds of people who live here and that’s what makes us so great.”

Right there, in the corner of Flag Hall, at about 4:15 in the afternoon, I had a sense of renewed hope for the future of this nation. If this is how 13-year-olds are thinking about diversity in America and they are our future senators and judges, CEOs and teachers, parents and voters, then perhaps we’re headed in a really positive direction. Amidst negative media reports and divisive rhetoric from politicians and pundits, it was incredibly refreshing and encouraging to hear this young man say the things he did to me around my Latino and immigration-themed educational cart.

Maybe because I’m a product of a liberal arts education de la frontera (from the border) in El Paso, Texas or maybe because I grew up near Ft. Bliss, Texas, a military base that’s a magnet for diversity, but I truly believe that this nation can and must function as a place that appreciates all its multi-colored, “rainbow” people—and so do a few 13-year-olds, apparently.

Vanessa Marie Juarez is an intern for the Program in Latino History and Culture at the National Museum of American History.

Designing history: the day of an exhibition design intern

Editor’s note: This blog is the first in a series of posts about designing the new exhibition The First Ladies, which opened on November 19, 2011.

What does the day of a design intern at the National Museum of American History look like? It starts off with a lot of coffee. Then we spend the day designing exhibitions!

Jimin Lee, Office of Exhibition Services intern

In all seriousness, interning at the museum under the exhibition designers Clare Brown and Nigel Briggs has been an amazingly fun and rewarding experience. For the past year, I have been working with Clare on projects such as The First Ladies, a new gallery that will include Julia Child’s Kitchen, and a few other temporary exhibitions held in the Albert H. Small Documents Gallery.

Life as an intern at the exhibition design department involves a lot of drawing, detailing, and designing. For The First Ladies, I joined the team while the exhibition was in its early stage of completion. In order to take an exhibition from a script, drafts and sketches to a show ready for production, we regularly met with a team which included a curator, project manager, exhibition designer, productions lead, collections manager, and conservator. I learned to take direction from the team and the designer in particular and to problem-solve the new exhibition layout through sketching, measuring, and drawing the layout of objects in cases through programs such as Vectorworks and Adobe Illustrator.

One of the most rewarding lessons from this internship thus far has been learning the exhibition design process. The entire team must work together, communicate and exchange ideas of content and design, and ultimately collaborate until the very last step of the project.

While figuring out the layout of the history cases in The First Ladies, we needed to create a mock-up layout of objects and labels. Following the Americans with Disabilities Act guidelines of height and legibility became just as important as choosing the objects that create the story in each case. We found unused cabinets in storage and placed real objects and mock-up placeholders to test the layout of each case. In the exhibition design department, our job is to make sure that artifacts, labels, and images all work together to present to the visitor the story the museum wants to tell.

In this instance, the history cases created an intimate experience for each visitor, encouraging visitors to look closer into the cases to look at and read each artifact and label. Lighting played a big role in creating the right atmosphere and improving legibility for these cases as well as for the rest of the exhibition.

reusing old storage cabinets to mock-up new exhibit cases

The initial mock-up of the history cases took place in a rather humble unused old storage cabinet. Still, everything was carefully measured and documented, as the measurements and photographs from this mock-up session became the source for other computer aided drawings and illustrations.

illustration of the Dolley Madison cabinet

Once the case mock-up was complete and the team decided on the position of all the objects and labels, I took the measurements and photographs and drew illustrations. These illustrations are scaled to size and eventually became the team’s visual reference for the placement of objects and labels during the installation of the exhibition.

Dolley Madison cabinet as installed in the gallery

There are numerous other processes, steps, conversations, and challenges that become part of the exhibit design process. This is just a small hint of what we do at the exhibition design department!

Jimin Lee is an intern with the Museum’s Office of Exhibition Services, and a Masters in Exhibition Design candidate at the Corcoran College of Art + Design