Years, decades and even centuries later, the essence of these fights can often be glimpsed through their ephemera—the signs, slogans, and campaign buttons that both bolster true believers and aim to coax the reluctant into the fold. These objects can suggest campaign strategy as well as the temperament of the times. And they provide snapshots into that moment of possibility—physical artifacts with a potentially very short shelf life, infused as they are with the confidence of victory.

Nowhere are these stories better preserved than at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, where I work. The Museum’s political campaign collection is the largest holding of presidential campaign material in the United States and includes banners, signs, campaign ephemera, novelties, documents, photographs, voter registration material, ballots, and voting machines.

The museum’s collection includes artifacts that demonstrate an individual’s support for a specific politician, and reflect the pride with which many Americans have regarded their chosen presidential candidate:

—A ribbon advertising the Harding-Wilson ticket of 1920 also celebrates the newly-passed 19th amendment, which gave women the constitutional right to vote.

—A wooden axe carried in support of “railsplitter” Abraham Lincoln in an 1860 campaign parade assures the viewer that “Good time coming boys.”

—A banner from the election of 1800, one of the oldest surviving textiles carrying partisan imagery, glorifies the victory of Thomas Jefferson while declaring—gloating— “John Adams is no more.”

Other collections serve as physical record of major electoral events—the infamous “chads” from Broward County ballots were crucial to the outcome of the 2000 presidential election.

And some objects, like a coloring book about ecology produced by the 1972 McGovern campaign, demonstrate the different ways that political campaigns worked to connect with voters.

The post The Swag—and Swagger—Behind American Presidential Campaigns appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

I didn’t realize it at the time, but my great-grandmother’s collection would give me a window into the desires—and anxieties—of a world I would only later come to understand and appreciate as I pursued my doctorate in American history. Until I embarked on that journey, the cards often sat in the back of closets or under piles of other accumulated stuff. Still, every so often, I’d take them out, dust them off, and wonder at them anew. Once my long nights of historical study began, I returned to them more and more often, until they finally set me on a path of becoming a scholar of American holidays and culture, including the phenomenon of holiday postcards.

It turns out there was a good reason my ancestor had piles and piles of these rectangular cardboard artifacts. For a few years in the early 20th century, postcards were a massive phenomenon. Billions of postcards flowed through the mail, and billions more were bought and put into albums and boxes. And amid that prodigious output, holiday postcards were one of the most popular types, with Christmas reigning supreme, just as it had in my inherited collection.

The practice of sending Christmas cards pre-dated the broader postcard craze by several decades, largely thanks to the efforts of Louis Prang. Prang was a savvy printing entrepreneur who kept adding products and lithographic techniques to his ever-expanding business, including the introduction of Christmas greeting cards (perhaps at his wife’s suggestion) in 1875. By the 1880s he was publishing more than 5 million holiday cards each year. And once postcards fell out of favor, greeting card companies like American Greetings and Hallmark rushed in to fill the void. But for a few short years between 1907 and 1910, Christmas postcards created a visual conversation between Americans that was unique because it was also very public. They were in many ways a forerunner of today’s impulse to post selfies and holiday pictures on social media. Unlike a greeting card or letter that hides its contents within an envelope, a postcard was always on display—from the rack in the drugstore where it might be purchased to its final destination. And those billions of snowy landscapes and bag-toting Santas churning through the mail system—the Rural Free Delivery system in particular—revealed much of what was on people’s minds at the height of the Progressive Era.

Take mistletoe, for example. Mistletoe had long been part of the Christmas tradition, with young men using sprigs of the plant to claim the right to demand or steal a kiss. Yet this was an era when women were asking serious questions about their rights and questioning the assumed passivity of their lives in everything from courtship and marriage to education and work. This is why so many postcards feature a woman who has taken control of mistletoe, deciding when and where it will be hung, and when she will choose to be under it and for whom. Sure, the rowdy, sprig-wielding young man still shows up in Christmas postcards, but now he must contend with the “New Woman” who uses mistletoe as part of her new right to take the initiative.

Rural landscapes are another good example. On the surface, nothing seems particularly unusual about a Christmas greeting that features a little snow-covered house in the countryside. That sort of mythologized ideal has been around since before the Civil War, when Currier and Ives capitalized on rural nostalgia with their inexpensive prints. Still, rural and small-town America was far from a contented place in the first decade of the 20th century. Farm children seemed to be fleeing to cities in droves, with 1910 marking the last census of a majority-rural American population.

One reason billions of Christmas postcards circulated with nary a cityscape to be seen is that rural Americans were circulating an idealized vision of themselves. When times seemed tough, all those picture-perfect fields, barns, fences, and country homes became a way to create an alternative narrative—one that was beautiful, healthy, and prosperous. One could argue this instinct shares significant DNA with the practice of staging family photographs for Christmas cards, or for today’s Facebook postings. There is something comforting and empowering about controlling the visual elements of a holiday greeting to your friends and family. Those visuals are not just representing you but a perfected version of you, and your world.

These were also the years when the United States saw the peak of European immigration, particularly immigrants from Southern and Eastern European nations like Russia, Lithuania, Italy, and Greece. Partly as a reaction to this inflow, and its surrounding anxieties, people were eager to emphasize their longstanding roots in the country, as if to say “we came here generations ago, not yesterday.” Manifestations of this urge to claim native roots pop up in the period’s genealogical societies, colonial revival movements, and yes, holidays. An “Old Fashioned Christmas” is a phrase that appears with increasing regularity through the first two decades of the 20th century. It is also a repeated theme in Christmas postcards with plenty of “ye olden time” imagery of colonial homesteads, spinning wheels, lanterns, rocking chairs, muskets, and horse-drawn coaches.

The postcard fad ended when the best postcards—which were printed in Germany using superior lithographic techniques—were priced out of the market by a newly passed tariff in 1909. By 1910, interest was waning as American firms failed to produce postcards of equal quality. World War I put the final nail in the coffin. Yet whereas Halloween or Thanksgiving greeting cards never took off the way their postcard predecessors had, Christmas cards have remained an American tradition, if now dressed up in an envelope. Always a mirror of the times, popular Christmas card styles included Art Deco in the 1920s and patriotic cards during World War II.

Looking back, however, there was something distinctive about the old postcards. They put it all out there—hopes, dreams, worries, excitement, wonder, fear, pride, and more—for store clerks and mailmen, nosy neighbors and family members to see and read.

Certainly I wonder how my great-grandmother’s network of cousins, friends, and her future husband (who sent her plenty of courting postcards, including a few mistletoes of his own) picked the cards they sent. What appealed to them and why? As a kid my answer would have been “because they look cool,” but as a cultural historian I now look deeper for what might like beneath the surface. Like so many others who gravitated to postcards with an almost forceful passion, she was a young rural girl from a long line of rural Americans who saw the world changing quickly. Postcards were a way of dealing with those changes, some welcome I’m sure, and many not. Still, I do agree with my younger self … they were and remain pretty darn cool.

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I was born to immigrant parents from Mexico. My mother was from Tijuana, and my father was born and raised in Guadalajara, Jalisco. They met at the bailes (dances) that newly arrived immigrants frequented in downtown L.A. hotel ballrooms in the late 1960s. They decided to settle in California and start a family.

Music was at the center of our household. My father loved music, but was unable to live the life of a professional musician. Instead, he lived vicariously through my older brother’s innate talents. At an early age, my brother began to participate in the Mexican variedades (variety shows) that toured California. When the shows stopped at the historic Million Dollar Theatre in downtown L.A., my sister Claudia and I were encouraged to join my brother by singing harmonies—segunda. Our show became known as Gabrielito González, La Actuación Infantil, the “Children’s Act.”

It was a lucrative time for the Mexicano musical life in Los Angeles. Lucha Villa, Mercedes Castro, Aída Cuevas, Vicente Fernández, Federico Villa, and Yolanda Del Rió were some of the artists for whom we had the privilege to open. I still remember running on the Million Dollar Theatre’s sticky floors, through the backstage wings, while dodging rattraps. The smell of stale popcorn and nachos lingered in the air as we listened to the mariachis tune up in the basement.

My family spent a great deal of time in “Dog Town,” the William Mead Homes projects north of downtown. There, I was exposed to the art of street dancing—popping, locking, and breaking, while listening to early hip-hop like Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force. It is also where I was introduced to the power of music and dance in community.

I was 11 years old when my father left us, and although he was absent for the rest of my life, I inherited most of my musical interest from him. Our family had little money for formal musical training, so my mother sought out free extracurricular activities, most of which had an artistic or musical bent. At ballet folklórico mexicano classes, I first learned zapateado, a group of dance styles that involve striking your feet to rhythms from Mexican states like Jalisco, Nayarit, Zacatecas, and Michoacán. However, the music and dances of Veracruz, with its Afro-Mexican influence, was most fascinating to me. I would revisit the music and dance from this state many years later with the resurgence of a participatory music and dance practice known as fandango.

In the late 1990s, I was introduced to the fandango, a fiesta comunitaria (community fiesta) that produces the music popularly known as the son jarocho. Fandango has been my greatest rhythmic influence ever since, and I have joined my partner Quetzal (after whom our band is also named) and other community organizers in disseminating it. The son jarocho is rooted in indigenous, Spanish (Andalusian), and African cultures. Slave economies initiated by New Spain in the 17th century allowed for these cultures to mix and give birth to a unique music and dance culture that continues to thrive to this day.

Fandango is exercised as ritual celebration in honor of a town’s patron saint or at other community events such as weddings, baptisms, and funerals. Eventually, I adapted the style of zapateado fandanguero—a mix of fandango-rooted inflections blended with other African-derived rhythms—to the music of Quetzal, along with the many other styles of music and dance I studied as an undergraduate in ethnomusicology at UCLA. Koblah Ladzekpo introduced me to the sounds of Ghana; Francisco Aguabella, Scott Wardinski, and Teresita Dome Perez introduced me to Afro-Cuban traditions. My feet and hands started beating out an alchemy of these influences. What I learned with hands on drums I then translated to feet on wood.

You can hear and see all this in compositions such as Quetzal’s “Planta De Los Pies” (from our 2003 Sing the Real album). The cadence of the rhythms I tap out with my feet is in a typical, syncopated fandanguero style, but I stamp it out in a non-traditional 11/8 meter. I add a more pronounced sway to the hip and body movements than is traditional. And I do all this while I sing, in Spanish, “Although I really like the colors of [Mexico’s] sound, I feel my cadence is my own because the Chicano always invents.” There’s the context of heritage, and then there’s each person’s own voice. This experimental spirit has infused Quetzal’s collaborations with other artists interested in the son jarocho such as Ozomatli in “La Segunda Mano” for their studio album Don’t Mess With the Dragon.

Rhythms, like memories, travel to inform and influence new moments, people, and generations. The rhythms I play and dance met on the American continent and made it their home. I think of it as my duty to continue to share them with our audiences and with my students.

As I handed over my shoes and tarima, memories like these flashed before my eyes. I glanced for the last time at the rugged stomp box, now marked and scuffed with the wear and tear of countless trips. Who would have guessed that a small 4-by-6-foot plywood box and a pair of old black leather and tire-tread shoes would be significant to the National Museum of American History? The shoes and tarima reflect the life, effort, and labors of a daughter of Mexican immigrants contributing to this nation, as many others have. They were my tools. And I feel proud of the life and opportunities we found together, of the sounds we evoked upon this soil, for and about humanity.

The post Creating a Mexican-Afro-Cuban-American Beat appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

As curator of the electricity collections at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, part of my job involves documenting and preserving the history of electric lighting so that future generations can study original objects and learn about that aspect of our everyday lives. The pace at which LEDs have come to dominate the market surprised everyone, both inside and outside the lighting profession. When we revamped our Lighting A Revolution exhibition in 2000, we left out LEDs because we lacked both gallery space and items to display. Little did we realize that most of the lighting technologies we explored in that exhibition, like tungsten halogen and compact fluorescent lamps, were about to become obsolete.

These days, electric lighting serves as a mostly invisible technology. But only a century ago, people accustomed to trimming candles, cleaning kerosene lamps, and smelling the odor of gas jets stood and gazed in awe at the steady glow of incandescent lamps developed by Thomas Edison and his contemporaries in the 1880s and 1890s. Clean, easily controllable, and simple to replace, incandescent lamps appeared in a host of applications, from deep sea diving to aviation. As electric power grids reached ever more people, lighting costs fell and reliability rose. Consumers adopted electric lighting to gain control over their interior–and ultimately exterior–environments. By the 1930s industrialized nations were awash in light. As one illumination engineer later noted, incandescent lamps were the perfect light source, except for one little problem: poor energy efficiency.

The constant search for improved energy efficiency has influenced the story of every lighting development since. During the 1930s, lamp makers introduced discharge lighting, which involved getting an enclosed gas or a vaporized metal such as mercury or sodium to produce usable amounts of light. Fluorescent tubes, introduced to the American public at the 1939 World’s Fair, were widely adopted by commercial and industrial users during World War II and quickly made their way into homes after the war. Engineers measure the amount of light output in lumens; fluorescent tubes could provide up to three times more lumens per watt than incandescent lamps, but many users objected to the artificial quality of the light. In most American homes in the 1960s, incandescents still reigned supreme.

The introduction of a new type of phosphor coating in the late 1970s addressed some of those concerns and allowed for the development of compact fluorescent lamps, which could be screwed into the same sockets as incandescent bulbs. By the early 2000s, steadily rising energy costs and a decrease in the cost of compact fluorescents created an incentive for replacement. Still, many users objected to the unfamiliar color and strange physical appearance of compact fluorescent lamps. Others were uneasy about the small amount of mercury present in compact fluorescents. There seemed little alternative for small, energy-efficient lamps until Akasaki and Amano’s, and especially Nakamura’s, breakthroughs in LEDs.

LEDs actually trace their history back to the invention of the transistor in 1947 and research on solid-state lasers in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Historians are still sorting out exactly who contributed what and when, but the published literature shows that in 1962, Robert Rediker at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated LEDs that glowed just below the spectrum of visible light in the infrared range, and Nick Holonyak at General Electric demonstrated red LEDs. Later that decade, GE’s miniature lamp department introduced a line of yellow-orange LEDs. Early LEDs were not very energy-efficient, and only a few colors could be reliably produced. Despite that, over the following 30 years, LEDs found a niche market as indicator lamps on circuit boards and for displays on digital clocks and pocket calculators. As more people adopted small electronic devices, producers gained more experience in the design and manufacture of LEDs.

Manipulating elements like gallium, phosphorus, arsenic, aluminum, and nitrogen on the molecular level in the 1970s and 1980s resulted in bright red and green LEDs. But white light requires a combination of red, green, and blue—and blue remained a problem. Building on work by Akasaki and Amano from the mid-1970s to late 1980s, Nakamura demonstrated the first bright blue LED in 1993. These breakthroughs have made LEDs near ubiquitous–now they appear in traffic signals, hallway exit signs, table lamps, computer and television screens, cell phone photo displays, and flashlights. Combined with digital controllers, LEDs can generate a spectrum of colors that actively changes in response to programmers’ needs. Most importantly, LEDs’ energy efficiency continues to rise while costs for manufacturing, materials, distribution, and design begin to fall.

Last month I attended a lighting trade show in Baltimore sponsored by the Illuminating Engineering Society where 30 or so vendors displayed a wide range of LED fixtures–for everything from accent lighting to large stage projectors. Similar to the way automotive engineers measure fuel efficiency in miles per gallon, lighting engineers have been looking for the maximum lumens per watt so they cost less to operate and are better for the environment. I learned that energy efficiency for LEDs has improved to around 140 lumens per watt and that experimental lamps giving 300 lumens per watt have been demonstrated in the lab. At best, incandescent lamps give about 30 lumens per watt and compact fluorescents about 90, while improved discharge lamps like metal halide and high-pressure sodium streetlights give around 130.

Unlike LEDs, incandescent lamps and discharge lamps are mature technologies without room for much improvement, so virtually no one, I learned, is now investing research and development money in them. Anyone who recalls the blackout during the 2013 Super Bowl will be pleased to learn that manufacturers are working on LED projectors suitable for use in large sports stadiums. The long interruption in the game came in part from the fact that the metal halide lamps being used to light the field had to cool off before they would relight. The issue with them reminds me of what Chief Engineer Scott once said to Captain Kirk on Star Trek: “I can’t change the laws of physics!” There are versions of these lamps that can restrike almost instantly, but they are very expensive and need special installations to operate. LEDs use a different physics. Because they cost much less per unit, they’re also much more economical for giant displays.

Of course there are problems still to be resolved. LEDs remain sensitive to ambient temperatures and don’t last as long when it’s hot out. Pilots and drivers alike complain about the sheer brightness of LEDs. The speed of innovation means that a given lighting product may only be available for about one year before being upgraded. Contractors on large installations that take a long time to complete may find that suppliers no longer stock a product they want by the time they go to install the lighting. Safety standards, design standards, and electrical codes governing the use of LED lights are still being developed; no one wants to lock something down today if that precludes something far better tomorrow.

Since Edison’s day, every time a novel light source was unveiled, commentators declared that the end of his incandescent lamp was at hand. This has never turned out to be the case in the past—but we may now actually witness that declaration coming to pass. I expect we’ll be seeing more and more applications for LEDs, especially since they’re already being integrated into smart environmental systems in buildings and homes. Long life spans, already 10 years and better, may mean that changing light bulbs becomes a once-in-a-lifetime experience–or a job for an electrician. LEDs may make lighting technology even more invisible than it is already.

The post A Future Awash in LED Light appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

In developing the exhibition American Democracy: A Great Leap of Faith, which will open—mark your calendars—July Fourth weekend, 2016, we want to explore some of the most elemental debates and issues that have confronted the founding revolutionary generation and that resonate to this day. Americans have viewed the right to petition—which plays out in our right to debate openly, lobby government officials, and mount Internet letter-writing campaigns—as a very basic democratic right. We’ve continued to exercise it to shape our country beyond the ballot box. We may take it for granted today (see this petition to start construction on a Star Wars-inspired Death Star by 2016), but it was under serious attack in the 19th century. Americans in the formative years of the country clashed over the most limited aspirations of its founding documents and helped define the practical meaning of democracy.

The elegant cane was presented to Massachusetts Congressman John Quincy Adams—the former president—in March 1844, by Henry Ellsworth, commissioner of the U.S. Patent Office. It featured Adams’ name and the Latin words Justum et tenacem propositi virum (“A man just and firm of purpose”) on a band below the knob. This was not a cane that served any practical purpose, but rather was a ceremonial object, a trophy to recognize Adams for his role in the ongoing battle to abolish slavery. The cane was a gift from Julius Pratt and Co. of Meriden, Connecticut, one of the country’s leading importers of ivory. Pratt, an active abolitionist, asked Ellsworth to present the cane to Adams to honor him for his long campaign to defend the right to protest the institution of slavery and his battle against what had become known as the House of Representatives “gag rule” covering all anti-slavery petitions.

The idea of a gag rule on petitions presented to Congress on any subject seemed a contradiction and assault on the very idea of democratic government. It was an ancient privilege that dated back to the rights of subjects to petition kings and lords to redress grievances or ask for favor. The First Amendment of the Constitution established that Congress shall make no law restricting “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” Not limiting their participation to electoral politics, individuals and groups with very different resources brought their interests and concerns before the nation: on the streets, in back rooms, and through the media of their times. In the early American republic, petitioning provided disenfranchised poor white men, women, free blacks, and other minorities a means to voice their concerns and to claim a role in determining the direction of the country.

Pratt requested that when Adams successfully defeated the rule, he add the date of his victory to the inscription. Adams wrote in his diary, “I accepted the cane as a trust to be returned when the date of the extinction of the gag-rule shall be accomplished,” and asked Ellsworth to keep the cane until that time.

The campaign to defeat the gag rule had become a major symbolic focus of the revitalized abolitionist movement. In an effort to promote a national debate on slavery, abolitionists had organized petitioning drives in the 1830s, calling on Congress to prohibit slavery in the nation’s capital, the one undisputed area the legislature controlled. Traditionally, petitions to the House of Representatives were presented individually and then assigned to the appropriate committee, which would recommend action. Southern representatives and their Northern allies argued that giving even this much attention to the subject served to heighten regional tensions and to promote violent slave rebellions. To cut off the abolitionists’ efforts, the House of Representatives adopted on May 25, 1836, a resolution that all petitions, resolutions, and memorials regarding slavery or abolition would be tabled without being read, referred on, or printed.

This original gag rule, which under the rules of the House of Representatives needed to be reaffirmed with each new session of Congress, and was, for roughly eight years, was denounced as an infringement of the First Amendment. Rather than discouraging petitioners, it actually energized the movement of those who argued that the suppression of debate was yet another example of the willingness of slave-holding Southern politicians to trample on the rights of all Americans so as to preserve their so-called “peculiar institution.” Abolitionists promised that the gag rule “shall be a ‘firebrand’ in our hands to light anew the flame of human sympathy and public indignation.”

Petitions from anti-slavery societies flooded the Capitol, thanks in large measure to the growing activism of women. The anti-slavery groups found additional support outside the movement from sympathizers who questioned how a democratic society could exist if people’s voices and debates were censored on the most central issues of the day.

The petitioners found a champion for their cause in Adams, who had returned to Congress in 1831. Year after year, Adams introduced anti-slavery petitions and railed against the gag rule. He argued that the refusal to accept the petitions was “beneath the dignity of the General Legislative Assembly of a nation, founding its existence upon natural and inalienable rights of man.” Each time, the House voted against his resolutions. The growing petitioning drives found popular support across the North and West, created mounting political pressure. On December 3, 1844, in a vote of 108-80, the gag rule was abolished.

Although this might seem like a small victory in the history to end slavery, at the time the vote was viewed as a major defeat for the South, a recognition that its power over Congress wasn’t absolute. And indeed, the feeling that their institutions were now under attack by significant hostile political forces helped to fuel a burgeoning Southern secessionist movement in the following decades.

The anti-slavery petitioning drives of the 1830s and ’40s strengthened the abolitionist movement and served as a training ground for future women’s and civil rights struggles in the years that followed. They also helped challenge and redefine the meaning of American democracy and the unfulfilled promises in the nation’s founding ideals, asserting the principle that beyond the ballot box, citizens have a role in shaping the debate and policies of their government.

Following Adams‘ victory, Ellsworth had engraved on the scroll above the eagle “Right of Petition Triumphant” and sent it on to Adams for him to add the date. On the tips of the eagle’s wings, Adams asked a jeweler to add “3 December” and “1844.” Adams, who normally refused gifts from political supporters, returned the cane to the Patent Office. In his will, Adams bequeathed it to the United States, and the Patent Office later transferred it to the Smithsonian.

Soon it will be on display, as an evocative—if not as well-known—icon of American democracy as the Constitution itself.

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