"O Say Can You See?" is a blog produced by the National Museum of American History (NMAH). The blog takes readers behind the scenes at the museum, sharing insights and information about our exhibitions, events, collections, research projects, and more. Readers are encouraged to use the comment area to dialogue with us about the work of the museum.
If you like history and museums, you might have taken a tour or two of a museum and thought about becoming a docent. What’s a docent, you ask? Docents are amazingly dedicated volunteers who support the museum’s mission by facilitating activity carts, leading tours, and engaging visitors in conversations about our exhibitions and programs.
Docent Ed Berkowitz at his activity cart.
But that description, while accurate, doesn’t really do the experience justice. Recently two of our volunteers, Mary Flury and Ed Berkowitz, shared why they enjoy being docents.
Have you ever seen an American flag up close? I don’t mean the kind you can wave at parades. How about an American flag that’s 30 feet tall, 42 feet long and fills up our museum’s Flag Hall? If you’ve answered “no” to either of these questions, come to the museum on a busy summer day and touch a piece of history!
Each June, July and August, visitors and staff fold a replica of the Star-Spangled Banner in the middle of our museum. The original flag was sewn by Mary Pickersgilland is a treasured part of our museum’s collection. It flew over Fort McHenry during the Battle of Baltimore in September 1814 and inspired Francis Scott Key to write the song that became our National Anthem in 1931.
Folding the flag requires a lot of helping hands and enthusiastic voices. Check out the video below to see how it all works!
To learn more, the Star-Spangled Banner exhibition is next to Flag Hall, where you can see the original flag and related objects. You can also meet Mary Pickersgill and learn more about the flag from her perspective by attending Broad Stripes and Bright Stars, a year-round theater program. Take a look at our museum’s Historic Theater calendar to plan your visit and meet her. Hope to see you soon!
Julia Imbriaco is Program Assistant in Education Outreach, Department of Public Programming at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.
We are just at the beginning of several years of marking the 150th anniversary of the Civil War; and we’ve still got a long way to go. As it turns out, there really is a lot to say about how photographs shaped the public’s knowledge and experience of the war. We can also reverse that and look at how people shaped photographs to leave a legacy of how they personally experienced and understood the war.
Boston-area photographer George K. Warren assembled cartes de visites that he and others made into an album. Close examination of the sitters begins to suggest what his political leanings might have been.
This summer, the museum started a collaboration with film-making students from American University’s School of Communication. My intern and I developed a plan for a series of short videos about Civil War-era images from the Photographic History Collection. Our first video is about cartes de visite albums.
This album page shows a variety of portrait posing styles. The compiler of this album added Civil War related portraits as a matter of course, suggesting the Civil War was just another of her life’s events.
While the photographs of battlefields are absolutely compelling, I’m really interested in the ways in which personal relationships with photography during a national crisis help us understand the nuances of past individual experiences. By drilling down to the personal, the complexities of the political, social and cultural life are revealed and create a richer history. For me, it all started with a 1860s yearbook from Rutgers. But that’s another story.
Shannon Perich is Associate Curator for the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History.
This summer, the National Museum of American History’s History Alive! Theater program brought visitors the Time Trial of John Brown. A controversial character in American history, John Brown was a radical abolitionist in the mid-19th century. Brown advocated violence to combat slavery and led armed insurrections that would lead to his execution.
This is the second show in the Time Trials series, which invites visitors to serve as jurors in a short hearing for a historical person. In the Time Trial of John Brown, audience members deliberate on John Brown’s contested legacy and decide how he should be remembered in American history.
Check out the video below to get a sense of the process behind the show and why we’re so interested in getting people talking about history.
How do you think John Brown should be remembered?
Susan Evans is Daily Programs and Theater Coordinator and Julia Imbriaco is Floor Manager at the National Museum of American History.
Editor’s Note: Don’t miss this video of museum technician Drew Robarge examining a mysterious pair of eyeglasses for clues about their origins. This history mystery is presented in American Sign Language (ASL).
When an inventory specialist working in the museum’s medicine collection announced that she had discovered a pair of Battlestar Galactica glasses, I—a huge science fiction fan who often likes to imagine that he defends the human race against the Cylons—quickly commandeered the glasses for a closer look.
The museum’s Medicine and Science collections hold approximately 1,000 historical eyeglasses that range widely in shape, size, color, and style, representing the vast diversity of methods of vision correction developed over the centuries. These objects allow historians to study not only the development of vision correction and its many forms, but also the cultural significance of the eyewear used. We’ve got everything from your standard nose-propped eyeglasses and lorgnettes(that is, spectacles with handles), to artificial eyes and modern-day contact lenses. But never did I think that we had Battlestar Galactica glasses.
At first glance, the brown glasses appeared rather uninteresting, but its intriguing elements began to shine in the little details. On the outside of each of the temples near the hinges, there lies a small rectangular, metal Battlestar Galactica logo plate. The words “Battlestar Galactica Universal Studios” are printed in white on the inside of the left temple. The lenses are non-prescription, and the glasses come with a red plastic case with a cloth-lined interior.
My encounter with the object brought to mind the peculiarity of owning a pair of glasses inscribed with something so specific. The glasses people wear are typically not accessories customized to show support for, say, a sports team, an organization, or a favorite television series. Glasses vary enough that they can reflect the wearer’s identity, but rarely do we view glasses as arenas for declaring one’s specific interests.
After closely examining the glasses, I hoped to gain more insight from the pair’s provenance (essentially the life history of an object, including its historical, social, and economic contexts). Using the catalog number marked on top of the bridge, I located the file that was created when the object was donated to the museum. According to the documents in the file, the object came to the museum as part of a 1982 donation from Dr. J. William Rosenthal that included 36 eyeglasses and 26 lenses considered modern at the time. The files had no details regarding the object’s original owner, or how Rosenthal—who had donated about 20 times to the museum’s medicine collection—had obtained the glasses in the first place.
I know for certain that the glasses have been in existence since 1982, but what is the earliest possible date at which the glasses could have been made? The world of Battlestar Galactica first premiered on television in 1978, and the American science fiction show documented the travails of an extraterrestrial human civilization warring with a cybernetic race. After one season, Battlestar Galactica was cancelled, a move loudly protested by loyal viewers. The show remained popular, and that same year, the Universal Studios Hollywood theme park in Los Angeles debuted a staged event for its studio tour entitled “Battle of Galactica,” which took visitors on a tram ride through a Cylon base as the crew of the Galactica fought against the evil Cylons. In 1980, Battlestar Galactica returned with six new episodes, and the show was reimagined with a different storyline from 2003 to 2009, attracting a new cadre of fans (including me). Given the year of the donation, the owner’s interest in Battlestar Galactica most likely concentrated on the earlier series.
A search for the glasses on eBay and other merchandise websites revealed no similar objects, which could mean that the glasses are rare. I thought that perhaps the glasses were a limited edition promotional item or merchandise purchased from the Universal Studios gift shop, but the latter hypothesis became harder to verify when Universal Studios Hollywood informed me that it does not have a comprehensive list of merchandise on sale during the time “Battle for Galactica” was in operation.
There are more questions than answers about this object, and I hope that with further research, I’ll be able to piece together its unique story. Do you own an unusual pair of glasses? Tell us your story below!
Drew P. Robarge is Museum Technician in the Division of Medicine and Science at the National Museum of American History.
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