O Say Can You See?

Take a tour of the National Quilt Collection

The National Quilt Collection had its beginnings in the 1890s when three quilts were included in a donation of 18th and 19th century household and costume items from one New England family. Since then, the collection has expanded to more than 400 items that cover three centuries of American history. These quilts represent a wide range of style, content, history, and even personality. But few are on exhibition at any given time. Now you can take a virtual behind-the-scenes tour on the museum’s website and see where the collection resides when not on public view.

The quilts, unfinished quilt tops, and related pieces dating from the 1700s through the 1900s are part of the Division of Home and Community Life’s Textile Collection. They are preserved in special cabinets in a room with monitored temperature and humidity levels. In that room, curators and volunteers perform detailed examinations for the purposes of identification, verification, and preservation. The clues and leads offered by the quilts launch them on research that reveals interesting, surprising, and sometimes amusing perspectives on the nation’s history and its people. For example, one 1860s quilt made for a young married woman records for posterity the name of a suitor whom she rejected or “gave the mitten,” on a block with a tiny pair of embroidered red mittens. Another bears the image of the maker in 1897 when she began the work, and in 1929 when it was finished; each image is in the appropriate style of dress for the period.

Embroidered mittens, detail of quilt made for Mary Elizabeth Hitchcock Seamans in 1869.

Edna Force Davis, depicted with artistic license, as she appeared when she began her embroidered quilt in 1897 and when she finished in 1929.

What are the precautionary measures taken by the caretakers in storing and preserving the quilts? How does microscopic analysis play a part in better understanding a quilt’s historical context? Most importantly, how do these quilts serve as crucial indices of the makers’ political sentiments, artistic expression, or family concerns, and as mirrors—if even obliquely—of the cultural, economic, or technological developments of a moment in American history?

A quilt in the Textile Collection storage room of the National Museum of American History

Preservation, storage, research, and even the staff’s personal connections to objects are facets of museum work that may not manifest in exhibitions. These videos, through the specific lens of our quilt collection, shed light on the inner-workings of research-based collections at the museum.

Visit the National Quilt Collection, an online virtual tour made possible by a grant from Patty Stonesifer and Michael Kinsley through the Seattle Foundation, in honor of Mrs. Frances Quigley.

Doris Bowman is an Associate Curator in the Division of Home and Community Life of the National Museum of American History.

 

What can we learn from the gutter of Jefferson's bible?

Editor’s note: This blog is the second in a series of posts about the Jefferson Bible conservation project.

How does knowing how Jefferson’s Bible was put together help us take it apart?

Book conservators always want to know how a book was bound. Before you can even think about how to fix something, you first have to know how it was made. An important method for identifying elements of the binding structure involves investigating deep in the center folds—or gutter—of the book, a dark place most readers never venture but one full of information to a trained eye.

The gutter of Jefferson’s Bible posed many mysteries, including a series of paper “stubs” similar in color to the pages of Jefferson’s Bible, but only about 1 cm in width. These folds of paper were used to compensate for the added thickness of the clippings Jefferson glued into the book. As any scrap-booker can tell you, too many extra pieces of paper in the middle of a book without added room at the spine means your book will never close properly!

Unfortunately, these stubs are now causing damage to the pages of Jefferson’s Bible. The book no longer opens at the base of the pages close to the spine, but rather along this stub line. Because the volume’s paper is brittle and inflexible, it cannot bend well and instead breaks when it comes into contact with the much stronger stubs. Ninety-eight percent of the volume’s pages were creased, cracked, or torn in this vulnerable area.

Deeper investigation of the gutter of Jefferson’s Bible was a challenging task because of the manual care and delicate precision required. Due to the fragility of the pages and the binding, the book could only be opened about 30 degrees, about as wide open as the letter “V.” However, skill, and a little bit of luck, prevailed and a vital clue was revealed–sewing thread! After mapping the sewing structure of the entire book, an unusual pattern emerged. This pattern meant that Jefferson did NOT cut pages out of a blank book to create the stubs as was previously thought. Instead, he assembled his pages while they were single pieces of paper folded in half, folios, and sent them off to his book binder. The book binder then added the paper stubs before sewing it all together, and creating the beautiful leather binding.

Because the stubs are not original to Thomas Jefferson and instead came from the book binder, this opened the dialogue between conservators and curators about the possibility of modifying the binding structure for the benefit of the Jefferson material inside.

Stay tuned for the next in our series of posts on the conservation of the Jefferson’s Bible: chemical analysis!

Emily Rainwater is a postgraduate fellow in the paper conservation lab at the National Museum of American History.

A peek inside the conservation of the Jefferson Bible

Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of posts about critical conservation work being conducted on the Jefferson Bible, a treasured artifact that will go on exhibit in November. Stay tuned for monthly posts featuring photography and video of conservation professionals explaining the hows and whys of their careful work.

How do museum professionals define the condition of an artifact, and determine whether it can be used or exhibited without harm? The answer is by very, very careful investigation, especially when the artifact is the Jefferson Bible, otherwise known as The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth. Using excerpts from the Four Gospels of the New Testament, Thomas Jefferson arranged the text to tell a chronological and edited story of Jesus’ life and moral philosophy.

A national treasure, the Bible recently received microscopic-level examination by a team of conservators trained in both book and paper conservation and by conservation scientists who specialize in materials analysis. A University of Hawaii intern created a purpose-built database to capture all the data observed. How much data? The Jefferson Bible conservation survey database holds over 200 points of observation for each page, and over 20,000 for the entire book.

Take a sneak peek into the Paper Conservation Lab where survey and conservation work has begun on the Jefferson Bible.
Footage courtesy of Smithsonian Channel.

The Jefferson Bible was made by Thomas Jefferson himself between 1819 and 1820. He cut out Biblical passages which were important to him, and glued them, scrapbook style, into folios of blank paper. Verses were arranged chronologically and in columns in four translations. Next to the English language verses are columns of the same verses in French, Greek and Latin. Jefferson wrote notes in the margins in iron gall ink. The book is made from twelve different types of paper, six different printing inks, and at least three different home-mixed iron gall ink recipes. His bookbinder, Frederick Mayo, bound the forty three folio pages in a red morocco leather binding.

The Jefferson Bible is a magnificent exercise in complexity, and planning for its conservation is, too. The survey database captures vital details about all the materials Jefferson used to make the book, and organizes them into the categories: “Recto,” “Verso,” “Primary paper,” “Paper clippings,” “Iron-gall ink,” “Printing ink,” and “Adhesive, ” and then subdivides them again, “Greek text,” “Latin text,” “French text,””English text,””Page Number ink,””marginalia ink,” etc., and then subdivides them some more. These tiers of observation points were organized in a way that allowed the conservators to assess the book in a manner that minimizes the handling of this delicate bound artifact. Conservators worked in teams, as both collaborators and eye witnesses for each other, systematically calling out survey fields for each other and entering their responses in the database.

Twenty-thousand data-points later, the survey is not only a clear description of the artifact’s condition, but also an intimate view of Jefferson’s handwork and his intellectual clarity.

Stay tuned for a description of how the book was bound and how the binding affected the Jefferson document within.

Janice Ellis the Senior Paper Conservator at the National Museum of American History.

"Race to the Museum": moving day

Last month we asked you to vote on which historic car you’d most like to see on temporary display, and after 24,000 votes, the 1929 Miller race car and 1948 Tucker sedan proved to be your two favorites. This is the first time the National Museum of American History has asked the public to help us choose artifacts to display, and many of my colleagues have worked very hard to make the “Race to the Museum” a reality. As you voted, another group at the museum was busy planning how to turn a mouse click into a safe, 7 mile journey.

If there is a place that calls to mind the iconic last image from from Raiders of the Lost Ark of a warehouse packed with unimaginable treasures, my vote would be for the Paul E. Garber Facility. You’ll catch a glimpse of just one of the storage buildings in the video below, but I can sum up what it feels like to walk around the mountains of history with the following conversation:

“What’s under that cover?”

“Evel Knievel’s motorcycle.”

“Whoa.”

“Yep.”

While I’ve spent wonderful hours at Garber in countless “Whoa” moments, until now, I’d never been able to watch the process that brings those artifacts to the National Mall. In the case of the Race to the Museum, those artifacts aren’t tiny. You can banish any romantic notions of putting on a set of vintage driving goggles and taking the Miller out for a morning drive on the roads of suburban Washington. Banish may be too strong of a word, because that does sound like a lot of fun (at least in a daydream), but let’s say that the Smithsonian takes a rather more cautious approach: one that involves highly skilled technicians, curators, carpenters, exhibit designers, support staff, and one very large truck.

Can’t see the video above? You can find it on YouTube.

I hope you can visit the museum before the Miller and Tucker go back into storage. If you do, please take a moment while you’re enjoying the beauty and ingenuity of these iconic cars to think about the dozens of people who made it all possible.

The display has been extended through April 10, 2011!

If you’d like more information on all the Race to the Museum contestants you should read curator Roger White’s blog posts. I’ve also put up a few photos on the museum’s Flickr page.

What’s the future for our audience participation project? Well, why don’t you tell us?

Dave McOwen is the Internet Specialist for the National Museum of American History.

Benedict Arnold: American history’s most heroic traitor

“Time Trial of Benedict Arnold,” the museum’s new theater program, opened on December 27 to rave reviews! The program explores the complexities of history by examining the case of Benedict Arnold, America’s best-known traitor.

But how does historical understanding develop over time? What happens between the facts of an historical event and the memories of history? And why do many people only know that Benedict Arnold was a traitor, while never hearing about his actions as a hero of the early Revolutionary War?

In “Time Trial of Benedict Arnold” the audience becomes the jury, hears Benedict Arnold’s side of the story, and deliberates on his contested legacy. Check out the video clip below to get a glimpse of our rehearsals, the show, and what people are saying about it. We hope you can make it to the museum to see the show, but if not, never fear, the Internet is here! In the next few months, we’ll be posting more information and a full video of the show. We also invite all the teachers out there to join the conversation about Benedict Arnold happening in the online teacher community run by our partner, Verizon Thinkfinity.

And Benedict Arnold is just the beginning! In the future, we’ll be putting other controversial historical figures on trial and asking visitors, “Why do we know what we know about history?”

“Time Trial of Benedict Arnold” runs Fridays and Saturdays at 11:00am, 1:00pm, 2:30pm, and 4:00pm through March.

Let us know what you think! What would you ask Benedict Arnold if you had the chance? Which other historical characters would you like to put on trial?

Susan Evans is a floor manager at the National Museum of American History.