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.)
The first Cinco de Mayo celebrations didn’t include margaritas, because they weren’t invented until the 1940s. By the 1970s, the margarita surpassed the martini as the most popular American cocktail.
This is the first frozen margarita machine, invented at a restaurant owned by Mariano Martinez. When blenders couldn’t keep up with the high demand for margs, he found inspiration in the 7-Eleven Slurpee machine. The original retired when Martinez’ restaurant moved 34 years later, and now it’s in our National Museum of American History.
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.
A collection of photographs of Harpers Ferry, Virginia (now West Virginia), and the Potomac River taken between 1859 and 1861. These are some of the earliest photographs taken in Harpers Ferry. The photos were published by Edward Anthony and the New York Stereoscopic Company.
#OTD in 1974, Hank Aaron (who died in January 2021) hit his 715th home run, breaking Babe Ruth’s legendary record before a crowd of 53,775 people, the largest in the history of Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium. This achievement was bittersweet; at each step of his historic rise, he faced systemic and extreme racism that included hate mail and death threats. He described the effects of this vitriol on his family and his heart:
“It really made me see for the first time a clear picture of what this country is about. My kids had to live like they were in prison because of kidnap threats, and I had to live like a pig in a slaughter camp. I had to duck. I had to go out the back door of the ball parks. I had to have a police escort with me all the time. I was getting threatening letters every single day. All of these things have put a bad taste in my mouth, and it won’t go away. They carved a piece of my heart away.” NYT interview.
Aaron saved many of those letters and even the death threats.
“To remind myself that we are not that far removed from when I was chasing the record. If you think that, you are fooling yourself. A lot of things have happened in this country, but we have so far to go. There’s not a whole lot that has changed.” USA Today interview.
Such hatred didn’t stop him. Instead, Aaron seized the opportunity for greatness and advancement on the field and beyond (from here): :
“In playing ball, and in life, a person occasionally gets the opportunity to do something great. When that time comes, only two things matter: being prepared to seize the moment and having the courage to take your best swing.” - Hank Aaron
President Carter welcomes Hank Aaron to the White House, 8/15/1978, Carter Library, NARA IDs 180805 and180806.
“A breaker of records and racial barriers, his remarkable legacy will continue to inspire countless athletes and admirers for generations to come.” –President Carter
President George W. Bush Presents Presidential Medal of Freedom to Hank Aaron, 7/9/2002, George W. Bush Library, NARA ID 6734115.
On the left is a painting of George Washington, the first President of the United States, riding a majestic white stallion.
On the right is a photo of Sir John A. Macdonald, first Prime Minister of Canada, hungover and sitting on the steps of Government House the morning following the Charlottetown Conference, which set Confederation in motion, surrounded by other hungover delegates.
A number of Massachusetts Reform School boys locked bayonets with the VMI cadets at the Battle of New Market. I wrote about three of these forgotten soldiers for a recent guest article on Irish in the American Civil War.
