O Say Can You See?

The pit, the pacifier, and the pennies

2009-11-04T12:15:00-05:00

When curator David Shayt passed away around the time the museum reopened in fall 2008, I inherited one of his many collections. Which is why I found myself this morning at the bottom of a deep, dark shaft in the museum’s basement with a supervisor, a lighting technician, and a hastily-recruited volunteer all crammed into the tiny space.

We were in the “pit” for the gigantic 13-ton piston in the Power Machinery exhibition, which is the only exhibit hall left of the original 1964 museum exhibits. The piston is from a colossal 1904 steam engine that made electricity for the New York City subway; it remained in use into the 1950s before coming to the Smithsonian.

There’s a grate on the floor of the exhibit hall, through which visitors can peer down at the foot of the immense steel “dinosaur bone” from an earlier epoch. They can also drop stuff through the grate, down to the floor 15+ feet below. The top of the piston goes up almost all the way to the ceiling, 14 feet overhead.

We went down there to clean out the bottom of the pit and replace burned-out bulbs in the three lamps that illuminate it. Judging from the depth of the dust covering the pit floor and the fact that all of the bulbs were shot, the pit hadn’t been visited since before the museum closed in the autumn of 2006. Maybe even longer . . .

Just getting there was a challenge in itself. Peter Liebhold, our division chair, checked out a room key at the Security Office and led us into a seldom-visited objects storage room in a faraway corner of the basement. We walked to the back of the room, around tall shelves packed with collections of old instruments and obscure paraphernalia. Behind one of the shelving units was a long wall with a narrow corridor to a door I’d never seen before. That door led to the pit.

The volunteer and I swept out the dust, torn pieces of paper, exhibit guides and other general detritus. Overhead, we could hear stray bits of conversations of staff arriving through the entrance at the back of the museum. I may have failed once or twice to stifle an urge to call out for help, just to see what the reaction overhead might be. Among the treasures on the deck was a well-used plastic baby’s pacifier, a purple plastic egg filled with tiny metal balls (like a jumping bean), and a handful of pocket change. After we finished, our lighting technician—Irvin—wrestled his 8-ft ladder through the 7-ft door and quickly put new bulbs into the lamps. I don’t think Irvin likes small, dark confined spaces at the bottom of deep holes.

Note to the public: Next time you throw money into the piston pit, please make it paper currency, for a bigger payoff (it’s also easier to pick up from the dirty floor than coins)!

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

Recipe of the Week: Julia Child's Beouf Bourguignon

2009-11-02T12:30:00-05:00

Today’s post is the eleventh in a series of weekly Julia Child recipes. This week’s contributor is Joe Criste, an exhibits specialist who headed-up the team that dismantled Julia’s Cambridge kitchen and reassembled it at the National Museum of American History. It took Joe and two other chefs three days to make boeuf bourguignon…was it worth it?

“The best beef stew known to man”

The covered, enameled cast-iron pot that sits on Julia’s stove was ideal for the long simmer in the oven required for this stew. Julia made Boeuf Bourguignon on the very first episode of The French Chef, which aired on WGBH (Boston) on February 11, 1963.

Where to find the master recipe for Beouf Bourguignon:

Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Volume I, p.315
The Way to Cook, p. 236
The French Chef cookbook, p. 271
The French Chef, episode “Boeuf Bourguignon”
Julia and Jacque Cooking at Home, p. 332
An online adaptation from Rouxbe

Julia’s Quick Dark Stock

Julia and Jacque Cooking at Home, p. 41

Joe’s Story: 3 Generations of Chefs and Julia

Joe’s mom, better known as Mema, chose this recipe after seeing the Julie & Julia movie. It took three chefs—Mema, Joe, and Joe’s son, Michael—to cook Julia Child’s famous Beouf Bourguignon.

First, I invested in a 5 qt. iron casserole (the pot needed to be able to go from stove top to oven) to cook this wonderful recipe. Our neighbor, Joyce, provided the cheesecloth for our vegetable bouquet. This earned her a bowlful of the Bourguignon.

On the first day, I made the dark stock. This was made from Julia’s Quick Dark Stock Recipe using beef broth flavored with carrots, onions, celery, and dry vermouth.

On the second day, I prepared the stew portion of the recipe. I seared the beef and salt pork and placed the meats in the casserole along with the herb and vegetable bouquet of onions, carrots, and garlic. The bouquet was placed in the cheesecloth and set in the middle of the beef. The meat and bouquet were covered with the dark stock and a bottle of pinot noir. Cooking time was approximately two hours. To further enhance the flavor, I refrigerated this stew overnight.

Removing the bouquet and straining all the juices back into the stew.

The third day Mema and Michael prepared the mushroom and onion garnish. The small white onions and mushrooms were glazed in sugar, butter, and salt. After these vegetables were glazed, they were added to the stew.

Glazing the mushrooms and onions.

Mushrooms and onions added to the stew.

Mema then made Julia’s “lion’s tooth” croutons for added goodness and décor.

Overall, it was a very delicious dinner and well worth the three-day wait! Cooking this recipe made the house smell SO good. I do think that the ratio of meat to mushrooms and onions was out of balance, however. I recommend increasing these vegetables by half!

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 recipes by posting your story, photos, or video on our Tumblr page for this recipe series. Don’t forget to check back next week.

Joe Criste is an exhibits specialist at the National Museum of American History.

Want to change your seven-year-old's life?

2009-10-30T11:00:00-04:00

Many of the staff who work here at the National Museum of American History are “museum advocates” (AKA fans). Not only do we love visiting museums, but we believe in their power; for many of us, museum work becomes a life-long career. But there are plenty of museum advocates in the world who work outside of museums, can’t afford museum memberships, or don’t get to walk into a museum 5 days a week. They just love museums and try to get them into their lives and into the lives of the people around them.

Researchers have recently discovered that most people who grow up to be museum advocates had an important museum experience around the age of 7. Some of my colleagues heard this news with smiling nods, remembering their own experience that forever changed them into museum advocates. Unlike them, I drew a blank.

The author (at age 8) and her sister in front of the First Ladies exhibition in 1993.

As a kid, we went to tons of museums and zoos. But what was The Experience that changed me? Maybe it was the gopher tunnels at the Bronx Zoo that I could actually climb around in. Perhaps it was the historic barracks at Trenton that I visited in fifth grade. Or maybe, just maybe, it was a family trip to the First Ladies exhibition at the museum for which I now work. To this day, I continue to love the way historical clothing (like the fancy gowns in the First Ladies collection) brings history down to human-scale and immediately makes the stories of the past seem more relatable to my own times and life.

I hope what we do at the museum inspires some of our little visitors to become museum advocates. Maybe it will be seeing how a cotton gin works before they’re old enough to know there’s another definition for “gin.” Maybe it will be tinkering in Invention at Play. Or, maybe their parents will download one of my OurStory activities and spark a love of museums somewhere entirely outside of our museum in Washington, D.C.

In closing, I ask you: Are you a museum advocate? (If you’re reading this blog, I bet the chances are good.) Do you remember The Experience that made you into one? Tell us how YOU are encouraging kids to be museum advocates.

Jenny Wei is an education specialist at the National Museum of American History and is willing to put awful photos of herself on the Internet to spark conversation.

Internet uttered "lo" forty years ago

2009-10-29T13:50:46-04:00

On the bottom edge of this pigment print (a type of digitally printed photograph) by Robert Weingarten, is the text “29 Oct 69 22:30 Talked to SRI Host to Host.” It seems rather innocuous but, in fact, the quiet success it records enables you to read this very blog. Forty years ago, the first Internet message, under the supervision of Leonard Kleinrock, was sent to the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) from the UCLA computer lab. The “CSK” you see on the right edge of the image stands for Charley Klein, who recorded the log entry. According to Kleinrock’s Web site, they crashed the system the first time they tried. The message that was sent was simply, “lo”, the first two letters of “login.” They succeeded an hour later.

29 Oct 69 22:30 Talked to SRI CSLC Host to Host. Copyright Robert Weingarten.

This photograph was not collected for its Internet story, however. It is part of series of images by Weingarten who asked his subjects, all noted American icons, “What makes you who you are?” His subjects supply him with a list of meaningful ideas and objects. Weingarten then photographs those items from the lists and brings them together digitally to create a visual biography.

In this translucent composite are the diagrams—see those circles and arrows?—from Kleinrock’s 1963 Ph.D. dissertation in which he developed the mathematical theory of packet networks that is the technological underpinning of the Internet.

The very wires that sent the message are visible in the image, a filter that you look through. The brick exterior of the UCLA lab is also used as an overall texture. Leonard Kleinrock is not a household name to most of us, so—in case you needed a bit of a hint as to the subject of this photo—there is a clue in the upper right corner in the cover of a book with his name on it. Anyone for a quick read on stochastic message flow?

See Kleinrock’s office receding into the background? You can imagine him donning the sweater and tie on the left when he needs to fill his professorial role at UCLA. The Eagle Scout award illustrates one of the defining experiences his life. As if this photograph isn’t enough of a visual puzzle already, a mind-bending print by illustrator M.C. Escher occupies the lower right corner.

What makes you who you are? What would you include in your visual biography? Perhaps you’ll help us celebrate this technological anniversary by sending the museum your own Internet message? You have a lot more options today than Leonard Kleinrock had in 1969. You can leave a comment at the end of this post, add a photo to our Flickr group, post a message on our Facebook wall, or—if you’d like to keep it short and sweet in honor of "lo"—send us a 140-character message on Twitter.

Shannon Perich is Associate Curator for the Photographic History Collection at the National Museum of American History.

Putting names with the faces of braceros

2009-10-28T12:44:09-04:00

I was interning at the National Museum of American History when I first encountered the photographic images of Leonard Nadel, who spent several years photographing bracero communities throughout the Southwestern United States and Mexico. I looked through the collection anxiously, thinking that perhaps I would find an image one of my uncles who participated in the Bracero Program. I never found them. But as we started collecting oral histories the possibility of coming across the men featured in these pictures seemed plausible. Like my own relatives, these men had names and I wanted to identify them. I felt that by adding names to faces it would somehow make them more human.

I began working on the Bracero History Project as a graduate student at Brown University. Although I had taken seminars in public humanities and was trained to carry out oral histories, nothing could prepare me for working directly on a national project focused on such a controversial part of American history. My experience working with ex-braceros forced me to grapple with questions of trauma, marginalization, and the role of public history.

We started the collecting process by inviting braceros to town hall meetings in several towns in the Southwest where we projected images of the Nadel photographs to explain the project. As the images appeared on the screen, the ex-braceros—who were now elderly men—added their own commentary. The men looked at the images with conviction—“That’s what really happened”—as if they needed to affirm to non-braceros the reality of their experiences. Many of the men felt the history of the Bracero Program was forgotten in a national amnesia about Mexican guest workers, and these photographs served as a reminder of their stories. In several of the town hall meetings former braceros asked to view the images a second time. They cherished the postcards we distributed featuring Nadel images and often asked for additional postcards for family members. Eventually, curator Steve Velasquez decided to make large prints out of the images so that ex-braceros could view at their own pace.

One image in particular from the collection always caused a stir: a cropped image depicting DDT sprayings of braceros. Nadel had cropped out the naked body of braceros from the waist down and we decided to show this version in consideration of young members of the audience. We chose this photograph because we were not sure how ex-braceros would react. I imagined that if I was the young man in the forefront of the photo, I would not want to encounter the uncropped image for the first time on a screen, sitting in an audience with my family members. We grappled with questions of ethics in public history.

Photograph by Leonard Nadel.

We later learned that the men wanted and needed to see the photos depicting the most humiliating circumstances. Men in the audience explained that the sprayings, along with medical inspections, were the most dehumanizing experiences of the contracting process and perhaps of their entire experience as braceros. An ex-bracero angrily explained what had been cropped—that the workers were naked—and argued that people should see the complete image. He felt we were hiding the truth with the cropped photograph and that the truth needed public exposure. “Where were human rights then? Were we not human?” I realized then that it was through the most dehumanizing experiences that many braceros made a claim to their humanity.

Some of the men’s voices would crack or their eyes would well up with tears as they pointed at the photographs and said things like, “I worked like that.” Because the meetings were large, I imagined the possibility that some of the braceros depicted in the images might be in the audience. I wanted someone in the audience to stand up and say, “That’s me.” It never happened but it came close.

For the meeting in El Paso, several of Nadel’s images were enlarged and placed around the room. The faces of the braceros in the photographs were almost life size. As families came in they viewed the enlargements and some even touched the images. It was there that an older gentleman pulled me aside and told me, “That is my brother, Santos, in that picture.” He explained with sadness that his brother had passed away and he had no images of his brother. He asked for a copy of the photograph. My heart sank at the news his brother was no longer alive. But I was encouraged that at least I finally had a name to one of the men I had so often looked at. Santos was no longer another face in a sea of anonymous braceros.

Mireya Loza is a fellow at the National Museum of American History.