It looks like wet clay waiting to be shaped, like it would yield to a thumb pressed against it. The church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Ranchos de Taos dates back to the 1770s. 20th-century photographers Paul Strand and Ansel Adams made it famous, but it is Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings that we most remember. O’Keeffe painted the church’s soft geometric masses using delicious color gradations with almost no hard edges. It seems one with the earth from which it rises.

The actual church’s adobe is made from earth, dried in the sun, with a coating of mud re-applied by hand every year to prevent it from deteriorating. A 1967 attempt at repair using more modern materials—cinderblock, hard plaster—nearly destroyed the church from damp trapped inside the walls, and the traditional earthen materials and techniques were restored. Today, in a celebrated annual summer ritual, the community manually re-applies adobe mud to the church. One deacon said of the project, “This church is very picky. She has a lot of needs. She requires certain things, and not everything works.”

O’Keeffe herself was famously reclusive, a protective guardian of her legacy who resisted assumptions about what her art “meant.” The artist whose distinct painterly vocabulary made her a star in her lifetime also required certain things—privacy, solitude, nature—and not everything worked for her. Both O’Keeffe and the church she painted demanded a certain way of being handled, of being seen.

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Links:

• Throwing mud: Enjarre resumes at historic Ranchos church – Olivia Lewis, Taos News, September 10, 2025

• San Francisco de Assisi Mission Church, Ranchos de Taos, New Mexico – National Park Service

• Revisiting an Icon: Ranchos de Taos Church, New Mexico – Brad Nixon, Under Western Skies, December 12, 2016

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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On the page, it looked harmless, a simple machine. Eli Whitney was trying to solve the bottleneck of separating cotton lint from seeds, which was slow, painstaking work. It took a person a day to manually separate seeds from a pound of cotton. Whitney’s gin, or engine, spun cotton around a drum, stripping the seeds away with wire teeth. Now two or three people working a gin could crank out 50 pounds of lint a day.

Whitney imagined his invention might spell the end to slavery by reducing the labor involved in processing. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson hoped so, too.

Instead, Whitney’s gin—or rather, its many illegal knockoffs, since patents were barely enforceable—caused a boom in the southern plantation economy. Cotton production exploded. Planters moved into the southern interior, forcibly displacing Native tribes westward. And slavery increased. Cleaning cotton was easier, but picking it remained hard manual labor—and now there was far more cotton to pick. By midcentury, the United States produced three-quarters of the global supply. Cotton went from being a luxury item to a commodity.

Whitney went broke pursuing lawsuits against cotton gin imitators, so he pivoted to arms manufacturing, securing a government contract in 1798 to produce 10,000 muskets. He eventually pioneered the mass-production of guns with interchangeable parts. The same man whose invention made slavery pay also developed production methods that made the Civil War the first industrial, and the deadliest, war in American history.

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Special thanks to E. Philip Cannon for suggesting the cotton gin.

Links:

• Eli Whitney’s Patent for the Cotton Gin - National Archives, Fall 2004

• Cotton Gins – New Georgia Encyclopedia

• Eli Whitney and the Birth of the American Manufacturing System – Library of Congress

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All the old legendary guitar players—Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck—played factory-built guitars. Eddie Van Halen was the only one who built his own.

Electric guitars hadn’t changed much in 20 years by the time Van Halen picked one up. Gibson’s Les Paul (1952) had a thick, powerful tone, but no vibrato bar. Fender’s Stratocaster (1954) was brighter and glassier-sounding, with a built-in “whammy bar” to bend pitch. But at volume, the Strat hummed and sounded thin. Van Halen wanted both, but he couldn’t afford effects pedals. So he hacked one from discounted parts: he chiseled out a cheap, $50 Stratocaster-knockoff body to fit a Gibson-style pickup, wired one volume knob, and tossed the rest.

The guitar looked wild, but was technically quite simple: one pickup; one knob. His creation—the Frankenstrat, or Frankie, as he called it—permanently changed electric guitars, becoming the prototype for an entire generation of “superstrats.”

Today, he’s remembered less for the guitar than for what he did with it. He pushed a technique called tapping, using both hands on the neck to create cascading runs that sounded more like a piano than a guitar. The son of working-class Dutch immigrants, he arrived as a child with no English. By the time he was 21, he was on the Billboard charts. By 23, he was a superstar. Still is. Watching an old closeup of his hands playing his homemade guitar, it looks like the film has been sped up.

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Special thanks to Christina Rees for suggesting Eddie Van Halen’s guitar.

Links:

• “Frank 2” replica of the original Frankenstrat - Smithsonian Institution

• Good detailed photos: Frankenstrat in the exhibition Play it Loud, Metropolitan Museum of Art (2019) - Van Halen News Desk, 2019

• Eddie Van Halen’s 20 Greatest Solos - Richard Bienstock, Tom Beaujour, Kory Grow, Rolling Stone, October 6, 2020

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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The spacesuit worn on the moon was not developed from military-industrial expertise, but from underwear. In the greatest irony of the space race, the most reproduced Apollo artifact—the spacesuit—was a hand-crafted garment made by highly skilled seamstresses, custom fitted to each astronaut. With 21 layers sewn to tolerances of a sixty-fourth of an inch—smaller than a sewing needle’s eye—it was not a piece of NASA engineering, but the ultimate haute couture.

This drove NASA, a bureaucratic entity if there ever was one, crazy. And it almost didn’t happen. ILC, the company best known for Playtex underwear, had pioneered combining latex with nylon in its Cross Your Heart bra in 1957. When ILC threw its hat in the ring to design spacesuits, it was an unlikely underdog in a pool of government contractors. NASA was looking for a company that built aircraft, not girdles.

In test after test, ILC suits outperformed their competitors. But NASA was skeptical of ILC’s “ragged art” based on patterns and feel for fabric, not engineered drawings. In a last-ditch effort to win the contract, ILC produced a suit at its own expense and presented it along with a filmstrip of a subject in the pressurized suit playing football for the duration of a moon landing. Other companies could make a suit that kept a man alive in space, but only ILC could make that suit move. Afterwards, NASA grudgingly reported: “The ILC suit is in first place. There is no second place.”

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This is an extremely condensed summary of the book Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo, by Nicholas de Monchaux (MIT Press, 2011). Fascinating book; highly recommended.

Links:

• “Designing Spacesuits” from Expedition: Fashion from the Extreme – The Museum at FIT, 2017-2018

• Neil Armstrong’s Spacesuit Was Made by a Bra Manufacturer – Andrew Chaikin, Smithsonian Magazine, November 2013

• The Seamstresses Behind the Apollo Spacesuit | Profiles in Sewing History – Dana Finkle, threads, n.d.

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They weren’t just about keeping cool in packed pews during the summer. They were a prop, languidly swaying during dull moments of the service or fluttering energetically—in unison with others, like a murmuration of starlings—as the minister or choir reached a crescendo.

That is how Alvin Ailey used them in his seminal modern dance piece Revelations (1960). In the section Move, Members, Move, the dancers’ fans theatrically mimic the gossip and chatter, the hallelujahs of the congregation—or as Ailey put it, “The holy rollers and all the church happiness.”

Fans were ubiquitous in southern churches until postwar air conditioning spread. Many white congregations gradually left them behind while black churches, often unable to afford retrofits, kept the tradition. Printed fans typically featured colorful religious, family, or landscape images on one side, with advertisements for funeral homes or life insurance companies on the reverse.

For black churches in the Jim Crow years, the fans circulated positive imagery at a time when mainstream publishing often did not. Pictures of loving, affectionate families were paired with advertisements for local black-owned businesses. One antiques collector remembers: “The church hand fans I remember always had the faces of people who looked like me, even when my schoolbooks did not. Dick and Jane with their dog Spot may have been in my reader books, but on Sundays, little black girls and boys with smiling faces and loving moms and dads were in force.”

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Special thanks to David McGee for suggesting church fans.

Links:

• Church Fans - Tranae Chatman, Tennessee State Museum, August 15, 2023

• A time when hand fans cooled church-goers – My Auction Finds, July 23, 2014

• Revelations - Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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What must people in Boston have thought, observing from afar the hysteria in Salem? What must Jeremiah Dummer have thought? He was the first native-born American silversmith, a Bostonian who made communion cups for churches throughout Massachusetts and Connecticut, including this one. It was given to Salem’s First Church—the church at the heart of the witch trials—in 1684, eight years before the hysteria. This cup sat on the altar, was used by congregants and ministers. Passed among accused, accusers, and magistrates of the court alike.

Salem minister Samuel Parris, who would make church members in good standing suffer public penance for small infractions—and whose young daughter and niece were the primary accusers—contributed to the tension in the village. Junior minister Nicholas Noyes was a vocal persecutor, and two of the most famous victims, Rebecca Nurse and Giles Corey, were full members of the church. They all drank from this same cup.

Jeremiah Dummer had made it early in his career as a commission for a major landowner in Salem, who bequeathed it to the church, engraved with his name, Francis Skerry. Its design suited Puritan aesthetics: functional, unadorned, deliberately free of the ornamentation of a European chalice.

Looking back at Salem, we marvel at the cruel insanity. 19 people hanged, another 5 died in prison awaiting trial. And Corey, an 80-year-old man infamously crushed to death because he wouldn’t enter a plea, would only reply with “more weight.”

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Special thanks to Ellen Swain for suggesting the Salem witch trials.

Links:

• A Prize of Silver - Laura Turner Igoe, Harvard Art Museums, June 22, 2017

• Jeremiah Dummer, Two-Handled Cup, ca. 1690 – The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• Salem Witch Trials - Wikipedia

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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Bourbon is a storytelling spirit. It goes with sitting on a porch, with twilight, with noisy, happy Christmas parties, eggnog and Old Fashioneds. It goes with comfortable chairs by the fireplace and hard stools for wintertime hunting, a nip to release the warmth, a snort to awaken that place deep within us where our stories reside.

You don’t spin tales in the same way holding a Cosmo or a Tom Collins, a spritz or a Caipirinha. If a good dry martini is “razor-blade soup,” as Roy Blount, Jr. called it, then an Old Fashioned—or better yet, plain bourbon, neat or with a few cubes of ice—is storytelling ambrosia. It comforts the heart chilled by “the sadness of the old dying Western world,” Walker Percy’s phrase from his classic essay on the subject. Donna Tartt wrote that bourbon drinkers are some of the saddest people she’s ever known, that bourbon is “the smell of parties and hilarity but also of grief.”

Perhaps that’s what makes it so American: its sweet surface, its warm generosity, and its darker undertow of despair. Fittingly, bourbon is aged, by law, in brand-new, charred barrels. Burning the wood releases its sugars, imparting bourbon with its particular dark sweetness. It’s associated with Kentucky—the name either comes from Bourbon County, Kentucky, or Bourbon Street in New Orleans, nobody’s sure. But it can legally be made anywhere in the United States and still be called “bourbon,” the sweet sadness all our own.

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Links:

• Ode to Bourbon: Four writers’ sweet reflection on a sour mash - Donna Tartt, John Currence, John T. Edge, and Roy Blount Jr., Garden & Gun, Holiday 2007

• Bourbon - Walker Percy, Esquire, December 1975 (PDF)

• Bourbon demand fueling barrel business: “The magic comes from the barrel” – CBS News, 60 Minutes, April 6, 2025

• How Prohibition Nearly Killed American Rye Whiskey – Catherine Rickman, Food Republic, July 30, 2023

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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In 1994, almost nobody used the Internet outside of colleges and technology companies. Internet in a Box was one of the first products aimed at civilians to help them get online, inasmuch as there was an online to get to. Its brown cardboard looked unthreatening; it promised to get anyone connected to the Internet in 15 minutes. Inside were three floppy disks with a copy of Mosaic, the first successful web browser. The box featured a globe with “you are here” scattered across it—use it, and you would “be” anywhere in the whole wide world!

At the time, everything computerish came in a box: WordPerfect, Quicken, Microsoft Office. Naturally, we assumed the Internet came in a box, too. We took a vast, intangible network and shrink-wrapped it, put it on a retail shelf, and sold it like tax software. We were using floppy disks and phone jacks, manually connecting to the Internet to send emails to the handful of people we knew who also had email.

O’Reilly & Associates, the company that created Internet in a Box, or IBox as it was called, reported customers calling in and asking to buy a copy of the Internet. We didn’t understand that this box wasn’t a product; it was a key to a door. And within two years, Internet access came automatically bundled with computers. The key in a box was no longer useful. It opened a door that was standing wide open.

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Links:

• Network World review of Internet in a Box, October 24, 1994 (via Google Books)

• Memoirs from the Browser Wars - Eric Sink, April 15, 2003

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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This is the weekly recap of The American 250, featuring objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

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We are a nation of condiments. But unlike ketchup, mustard, or mayonnaise, ranch dressing is entirely our own. OK: it’s very similar to England’s Heinz Salad Cream, developed 40 years earlier, but darn it, ranch is ours. Our national flavor.

A plumbing contractor named Steve Henson originally developed the dressing while feeding work crews in Alaska. In 1956, he and his wife Gayle purchased a California dude ranch they named Hidden Valley Ranch, where guests loved it so much that Henson started selling packets of dried dressing mix in stores. It was the height of Spaghetti Westerns, the Marlboro Man and cowboy-themed packaged goods, so the name had a whiff of cool. By the 1980s, it was the best-selling salad dressing in the country. In 1987, Cool Ranch Doritos were born.

Today, we have ranch dill pickles and dill pickle ranch; ranch-dusted popcorn, chips, and rice cakes. Indeed, over 70% of ranch consumption is outside the salad bowl. Whether it’s chicken tendies in Texas, baby carrots in Idaho, or pizza in Pennsylvania, it’s the condiment of choice, the “American” flavor with all specific American places sanded off.

During the 2026 World Cup, we reveled in social media posts by besotted Europeans, never mind that it’s been available in Europe for years. Is it Exhibit A of corporate, processed American food? Sure! Is it owned by the bleach company Clorox? You bet. Yes, we have many delicious regional foods, but our signature taste is a factory product. It’s our national terroir.

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Links:

• Homemade ranch dressing recipe - Epicurious

• Ranch Dressing: Why do Americans love it so much? – Brendan Koerner, Slate, August 5, 2005

• Is the World Cup ranch craze real or hype? – Caroline Hatchett, BBC, July 1, 2026

• BACK AT THE RANCH: SAGA OF A DRESSING CONTINUES – Colman Andrews, Los Angeles Times, October 4, 1987

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Our Navy’s submarines and aircraft carriers are all nuclear-powered. They have a small reactor that enables them to sail great distances without refueling—and without emitting air pollution by burning oil. Why can’t commercial cargo ships, which account for the vast majority of maritime traffic, be nuclear powered as well?

That was Eisenhower’s dream, anyway. In 1953, he delivered his Atoms for Peace speech at the UN, in which he argued that “the miraculous inventiveness of man” could be transformed from a scourge to a benefit for humanity. He wanted to take nuclear technology, which had been the province of the government and the military, and place it before the public.

It was, and is, a beautiful dream: abundant, cheap, clean energy powering everyday life. A cornerstone of Eisenhower’s initiative was the NS Savannah, our first nuclear-powered cargo and passenger ship. It was a showboat, with limited cargo space and sumptuous, space-age cabins, lounges, and bars, designed to sail the world less as a practical specimen than a demonstration of exciting possibility. The interiors were chic and smartly designed; the gleaming hull—never smudged with smoke—more like a yacht than a cargo ship.

She was never designed to be a money maker, although that’s why she was decommissioned in 1972. Oil was, and still is, just so cheap. But it has obvious drawbacks. Today, docked in Baltimore, the Savannah isn’t just a relic of atomic optimism; she still implicitly asks whether the atom can peacefully power a cleaner world.

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Special thanks to Peter Wallace for suggesting the NS Savannah.

Links:

• Haunting, and worth a read: Eisenhower’s Military Industrial Complex speech (full text)

• NS Savannah: A Nuclear Future That Never Was - The Shipyard, November 30, 2022

• Why Did The NS Savannah Fail? Can She Really be Called a Failure? - Rod Adams, Atomic Insights, April 2, 2011

• Nuclear Ship Savannah - U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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When we studied history in school, the past seemed so long ago, so alien—the funny clothes, the no-electricity. It may as well have happened on another world.

But as we age, we begin to see history as a continuum, intimately connected with the present, measured not in centuries but in generations. 125 years ago, towns like Medina, ND sprouted up as railroads snaked into the wilderness. These towns did not appear in a vacuum; the land they occupied had been crossed by the army, had been seasonal Dakota hunting and travel territory, had been empty prairie, near pre-Colombian earthlodge and mound building cities. Hell, had been Pangaea.

Sometime in there, this brick building was built as a fire station. And then it changed, outliving its purpose for whatever reason—and people gradually realized they were situated by the main breeding grounds of the American White Pelican. Their lake became a national wildlife refuge, and the town adapted into a destination for birders. Pelican enthusiasts. And so the old fire engine doors were enclosed with windows, and the building acquired a new, different life as a visitor center.

So many pasts and presents coexist in the place of this one brick building, a continuous unfolding. We pass our lives mostly among ordinary, invisible buildings that change and adapt over time, not monuments that don’t. The change can feel overwhelming. To change is to lose identity; yet to change is to be alive.1

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Note: This entry owes its existence to the Rural Indexing Project, a wonderful photographic archive of buildings in small towns across America.

Links:

• What tiny towns in rural America can teach the cities about adaptation – NPR All Things Considered, June 21, 2022

• Rural Indexing Project

• Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge - U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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There’s an old showbiz saying: you have to go away to come back. It’s shocking now, but there were multiple attempts to tear down the Las Vegas sign. It had been placed in 1959 on Route 91 from Los Angeles—the road that became the Strip—but by the early 1970s, Interstate 15 had bypassed it entirely. The old sign stood dark, a relic from another era on the edge of town, facing mostly wide-open desert. In a city that’s short on sentimentality, it seemed doomed.

But John Woodrum, a nearby motel owner, watched people stopping every day to photograph the sign. He ran a power line and fired it up. It remains lit to this day, powered by solar panels since 2014. None of the people who planned the original Strip—and none of the people who later commissioned the sign—could have dreamed it would become a beloved global icon, synonymous with the city.

The sign’s designer, Betty Willis, combined space-age Googie motifs (starbursts, asymmetry, boomerangs) with the outline of the Goodyear Tire logo to create the sign, with the circles behind WELCOME as silver dollars. Willis, one of eight children, had grown up in Las Vegas in the first two-story home built there. She never copyrighted the logo or profited from it, saying it was her gift to the city. In an interview late in life, she said, “I think it’s done mama proud.” Her tombstone has a recreation of the sign that reads WELCOME HOME.

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Special thanks to Sean Slattery for suggesting the Las Vegas sign.

Links:

• Googie: Architecture of the Space Age – Matt Novak, Smithsonian Magazine, June 15, 2012

• A Brief History of the Welcome Sign – The Neon Museum, Las Vegas, January 2, 2019

• Betty Willis, Whose ‘Fabulous’ Sign Defined Las Vegas, Dies at 91 – Sam Roberts, The New York Times, April 22, 2015

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What is a shilling, anyway? The old British monetary system was a mess: 12 pence to a shilling, 20 shillings to a pound, all awkward fractions and mental arithmetic. The Continental Congress wanted to throw that system out the window, replace it with a rational, base-10 currency, teachable to a child in an afternoon. In his 1784 Notes on the Establishment of a Money Unit, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

The most easy ratio of multiplication and division is that by ten, Everyone knows the facility of decimal arithmetic…. The bulk of mankind are schoolboys through life.

And so we have the little dime, ten times a penny, one-tenth a dollar—though it has always read ONE DIME on the coin, never “Ten Cents,” because everyone knows what it’s worth.

It is certainly our most charming and diminutive coin—the “Mercury” dime (1916-1945) is often said to be our prettiest. But the dime acquired, and lost, a second meaning in the 20th century: until the eradication of polio, it was associated with the March of Dimes, championed by FDR, the stricken president whose face would adorn it shortly after his death. Millions of Americans mailed dimes to the White House to help defeat polio.

For the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026, the US Mint released the “Emerging Liberty” dime, showing a tousled, wind-blown but determined profile of Lady Liberty, with an eagle on the reverse above the words LIBERTY OVER TYRANNY.

That phrase has never appeared on a US coin before.

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Links:

• Dime - US Mint

• Notes on the establisment [sic] of a money unit, and of a coinage for the United States, Thomas Jefferson, 1784 (via Internet Archive)

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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This is the weekly recap of The American 250, featuring objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026.

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Most of us recoil from superstition, apply the word to any ritual or belief we don’t personally adhere to—it can apply to any religion, anything that has to do with the spiritual, rather than the rational, material world.

Superstition literally means “to stand over,” or to “cause to remain in existence”—nobody knows how the word came to mean fearful, ignorant belief in the supernatural. But we know it when we see it, and we all see it in others. We steel ourselves against magical thinking, against chance, against irrational fear—or belief—in nature or God.

Bottle trees are a southern garden convention originally brought over from West Africa, used to trap evil spirits in the glittering bottles at night, keep them out of the house until the rising sun burns them up in the morning.

Such silliness! We can, and do, appreciate bottle trees for purely aesthetic reasons, for their charm and quirky regionality, admire them as we admire other crafts brought from Africa.

But what if superstition, that causing to remain in existence, isn’t literally about evil spirits that become trapped inside a colorful bottle—preferably a blue one, believed to be the threshold color, the veil between the living and the dead—what if it’s a simply a helpful metaphor for trapping fear, just another reminder among the thousands of rituals our species uses, to help us? Help us turn away from evil. Help us remember the good. Help us begin each morning anew.

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Links:

• “Livvie Is Back,” by Eudora Welty, The Atlantic, November 1942 (free link)

• Bottle Trees: A Beautiful Tradition With a Spiritual Past – Jesslyn Shields, HowStuffWorks, n.d. (good links embedded throughout)

• The bottle tree – Dave Tabler, Appalachian History, June 21, 2018

• The American Bottle Tree – Smithsonian Gardens, February 28, 2013

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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Disney had long been a savvy merchandising company; witness the Depression-era Mickey Mouse watch. But when the company launched the TV show Davy Crockett: Indian Fighter in late 1954, nobody could have predicted the craze they were about to ignite in coonskin caps—or the fortune to be made from that single piece of merchandise.

But the following year, when The Mickey Mouse Club debuted, Disney was ready. Cartoonist Roy Williams, a company veteran who appeared on the show as the “Big Mooseketeer,” was tasked with designing a uniform for the Mouseketeers, the new act that appeared the same week that Disneyland opened. He remembered a gag from the 1929 black-and-white cartoon The Karnival Kid, when Mickey tips his hat to Minnie, except he has no hat—the whole top of his head, including his two round ears, comes off like a cap.

The iconic mouse-ear beanie has been sold at Disney theme parks ever since. Yellow embroidered names were added in the 1980s, making the personalized cap the parks’ single most iconic souvenir. Still, like Hawaiian leis, nobody wears Mickey Mouse ears except at that place. There’s an old line about the Mona Lisa: you don’t go to see it, but to have seen it. Mickey Mouse ears are the same, proof of pilgrimage. Today, the silhouette has escaped Mickey himself and become a folk object that Disney projects anything onto: characters from other movies, bride and groom, graduation, holidays. They’ve sold upwards of 100 million of them.

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Special thanks to Brandon Zech for suggesting Mickey Mouse ears.

Links:

• The Mad Hatter Shop on Main Street USA - Disneyland.com

• History of the Mickey Mouse Club – Stacia Martin, DisneyParksBlog, October 25, 2022

• Mouseketeer hat worn by Lonnie Burr – National Museum of American History, The Smithsonian

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

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In 1824, Lafayette visited Monticello as part of his grand tour of the country. The French hero of the American Revolution was treated like a celebrity at every stop, but the Monticello visit was special; Thomas Jefferson had known Lafayette well, and helped him draft the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen in 1789, a cornerstone of French political thought whose first words read, “Men are born and remain free and equal in rights.” The two elderly men openly wept as they greeted each other.

Years later, Israel Jefferson, a slave at Monticello who eventually purchased his freedom, would remember a conversation between Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson as he drove the two on a carriage ride:

Lafayette remarked that he thought that the slaves ought to be free; that no man could rightly hold ownership in his brother man; that he gave his best services to and spent his money in behalf of the Americans freely because he felt that they were fighting for a great and noble principle — the freedom of mankind; that instead of all being free a portion were held in bondage (which seemed to grieve his noble heart)… Mr. Jefferson replied that he thought the time would come when the slaves would be free, but did not indicate when or in what manner they would get their freedom. He seemed to think that the time had not then arrived.

This conversation was very gratifying to me, and I treasured it up in my heart.

Israel Jefferson, “Life Among the Lowly, No. III,” Pike County (Ohio) Republican, December 25, 1873.

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Links:

• Israel Gillette Jefferson - Getting Word: African American History at Monticello

• Great read: Why Don’t the French Celebrate Lafayette? - Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, August 16, 2021 (PDF)

• Lafayette’s 1824 visit to Monticello - Monticello.org

• The Marquis de Lafayette’s 1824-1825 United States Tour – Museum of the American Revolution

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This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

I’m looking for ideas for this series — have something you’d like me to consider for inclusion? Please feel free to leave a comment!

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The breakthrough came during the war. In 1921, Danish immigrant William Petersen invented the locking plier, which could be clamped firmly into place, freeing the user’s hand. The company had survived the Depression, but didn’t take off until it landed a government contract in the wartime “Arsenal of Democracy” mobilization.

The pressure was so intense, deadlines so tight, that workers used any shortcut they could to build ships fast. And so untold thousands of Vise-Grip pliers, after being used to hold two pieces of steel together, were simply welded into place. We’ll never know how many of the pliers went to war, welded into the hulls of ships and fuselages of airplanes.

Petersen founded the company in DeWitt, Nebraska, where the factory remained for decades. In a village of 600 residents, the Petersen factory was the primary employer, civic pride rolling out with every truckload of pliers bound for the world. Workers never unionized; the Petersens, who owned the company until 2002, treated them like family. Generations of workers were hired on a handshake, helped with mortgages, given candy and bonuses at the holidays.

But after the company was sold and passed through a series of acquisitions, in 2008 Newell Rubbermaid closed the DeWitt factory and moved production to China. Most people who used a Vise-Grip never knew where DeWitt was, but every pair carried a little piece of that town into the world. When the factory closed, DeWitt lost the thing that had connected it to everyone else.

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Special thanks to Riley Robinson for suggesting Vise-Grip Pliers.

Links:

• DeWitt, Nebraska town history

• Vise-Grip History - Wessels Living History Farm

Too many emails? Instructions for receiving a weekly summary can be found here.

This post is part of The American 250, a series featuring 250 words on 250 objects made by Americans, located in America, in honor of the country’s 250th anniversary. Through December 31, 2026.

I’m looking for ideas for this series — have something you’d like me to consider for inclusion? Please feel free to leave a comment!

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