Posts tagged national museum of american history
the faux bohemian
“The Museum of History and Technology, Smithsonian Institution, Washington D.C.
Containing exhibits illustrating the cultural and technological development of our Nation from colonial times. Opened in 1964.”
wat is this place
I know that I’ve been bragging a lot about cool stuff I’ve been doing at work, but this is awesome.
Actually, I it’s really only that cool to me.
These guys doing the 3D scanning of the Gunboat Philadelphia are doing a good job of keeping the exhibit looking like a crazy science fiction movie with lasers and robotic arms and 3D models on laptop screens everywhere. Our in-house photographer was taking some shots of the process today and they’re going to look awesome!
I cleaned the Gunboat Philadelphia today! Which means that I was standing on the deck of a wooden boat built in the 1770s and under water for 150 years until it was retrieved from Lake Champlain. Which means that I obviously don’t need to diet in the new year.
Sound Recordings Heard for the First Time Ever
Pioneers Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Emile Berliner donated the recordings and other documentation to the Smithsonian in the late 19th century. Using equipment housed at the Library of Congress, those recordings are able to be heard for the first time.
This is awesome! Now I just need to get a grant to do this with some of the sounds film in Photo History…
(via americanroutes)
Like a poor kid outside a candy store…
I start drooling every time the museum’s library sends out its monthly summary of new books before the sad realization sets in that, between work and grad school and an out-of-town girlfriend, I’m not going to have time to read any of them.
But seriously, JUST LOOK:
The American style : Colonial revival and the modern metropolis / / Donald Albrecht, Thomas Mellins. Museum of the City of New York : Monacelli Press, c2011.
Easily the most recognizable architectural style in America, with its brick or shingled facades trimmed in white and ornamented with restrained classical detail, the Colonial Revival emerged in the late nineteenth century and is still the basis for classical design today. The American Style surveys the evolution of the Colonial Revival from the 1890s to the present, focusing on the period from 1900 to the 1930s when New York City was a major center of architecture and decorative arts. Leading architects, including McKim Mead & White, Delano & Aldrich, and Mott B. Schmidt, used its vocabulary for private residences and clubs as well as institutional buildings—banks, schools, churches, and museums. Richly illustrated with archival photographs and objects from the collections of the Museum of the City of New York and other major institutions, The American Style will be the definitive record of an enduring aesthetic in architecture and decorative arts.
Public markets / / Helen Tangires. W.W. Norton in association with Library of Congress, c2008.
An illustrated history of the buildings and spaces devoted to the urban marketplace for fresh food. The public market is a worldwide urban phenomenon with a tradition as old as cities themselves, continuing today in the greenmarket movement. Surveyed here by type are open-air marketplaces, street markets, street vendors, markets that occupy the ground floor of public buildings, open-sided sheds situated in the middle of wide streets, and fully-enclosed market houses, as well as central markets and wholesale markets, whose complex of buildings and streets encompass entire market districts.
Historygasm.
Hey: this is why I have a job!
“There, displayed for the first time, are sacred relics of 9/11: the crumpled piece of the fuselage where the American flag had been painted on the Boeing 757 that crashed in a Pennsylvania field, a flight-attendant call button from the plane, a window shade, a landing gear strut, and a log book with the pages intact. The exhibit is simple and raw, without glass or showcases. Some dried mud caked on an airplane seatbelt was flaking off onto a tablecloth. Nearby is the door from a fire truck crushed at Ground Zero and the beeper of a man who died in the South Tower. There’s a Pentagon clock frozen at about the time American Airlines Flight 77 struck the complex and the phone on which Ted Olson received the last call from his wife on the doomed plane. Most poignant, perhaps, is the postcard from another passenger, written to her sister the day before the crash to give the address of a new home in which she would never live.” - Dana Milbank, “Politics Without Purpose” We’re getting good press so far! (fingers crossed) I hope that DC folks will be able to come out and see the exhibit. It’s really a pretty powerful presentation.
It’s been a whirlwind couple of days as I helped to get the museum’s 9/11 anniversary exhibit together with my colleague Cedric. Here’s a video preview of the “objects out of storage” event which will be open for nine days starting tomorrow to commemorate the ten year anniversary.
It’s an unusual kind of exhibit for this museum - sparsely interpreted, emotional, and reflective, but honestly, I think it’s pretty cool.
FF to 1:29 and 3:00 for a sneak peek at the objects, which I helped to lay out yesterday.
Filming 9/11 objects for the Today show this morning. It’s depressing. I can’t wait for the exhibit where I’ll be talking about them all day…
“Well of course it’s a French uniform. Look how faaaaancy it is!”
This is the kind of thing that’s really hard to keep from poking one’s nose into at work.
National Museum of American History, 1976.
YOU USED TO BE COOL.
All I’ve been doing at work for the last week and a half is moving flags around. The North American Vexillogical Association is coming to check out our collection this week so we’ve been scrambling to get everything together for them. I’ve been leaning all kinds of interesting stuff though, like the fact that American flags are categorized by the number of stars they have, since that corresponds to the number of states in the union and thereby the year of manufacture. This one’s got 12 though… We’re still trying to figure that one out.
My day was just made.
