#business history
National Doughnut Day goals.
This pastry princess—check out that crown!—is from the Sally L. Steinberg Collection of Doughnut Ephemera in our National Museum of American History’s Archives Center. (Steinberg also considered herself a doughnut princess, as her grandfather Adolph Levitt was America’s original “doughnut king,” having developed the automatic doughnut making machine and founded the modern American doughnut industry.)
We’ve got more than a baker’s dozen in our collections. Find your favorite Smithsonian doughnut to snack on.
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Friday plans include a cold beverage? Meet the beer fridge of 1899.
It’s from a catalog of by L. H. Mace & Co. of New York, now in our @smithsonianlibraries. Early refrigerators used insulation (with an inch between two sets of walls) and circulation to move cool air from the ice chamber throughout the space.
Inside this refrigerator, there were places for kegs to rest and shelves in the lower part of the refrigerator could be removed, making it possible to chill two more kegs.
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Above: Macy’s Building and Herald Square in New York City, around 1907.
Launched in 1858, R.H. Macy & Co. was founded by American entrepreneur Rowland Hussey Macy. The business was the first to promote a woman, named Margaret Getchell, to an executive position.
(via Library of Congress)
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“Tracking the evolution of a century’s worth of targeted marketing, this history documents the sinister engineering of a Black consumer preference for menthol cigarettes. Wailoo details how Big Tobacco placed billboards in inner-city neighborhoods, strategically funded Black enterprises, and marshalled a vast network of influencers—from Ebony to the N.A.A.C.P.—to yoke ideas of Black authenticity to smoking menthols.”
