it was gary jenks. he's on the wall. so this flag and note were left on veteran's day 1992. the ten-year anniversary of the wall. and it was left by john sparks who was a prisoner of war for five years in vietnam. he coincidentally has done an oral history project with the library of congress which is very interesting, if you want go into the veterans history project, you can hear about his experience as a prisoner of war. but he left this flag which was presented to him upon his return to the united states after he was released. on it is a crucifix which he made out of a toothpaste tube and the tie is from his prison uniform. and right here there's a pin for the p.o.w. m.i.a., prisoners of war, missing in action. the note is saying he is

dedicating his flag to all the other men who are still missing in action or prisoners of war in vietnam. a lot of times veterans, if they want to come see the things that they left, we are always willing to give them a tour and show them around. it also helps us because we can connect specific names, donors to what they left. we have a big barrel that was left. i think it was left in 2002. i am too young to know what it was. but i have been told that in vietnam they used it as a letrine. an unfortunate soldier was given the job of burning it. but they came and they gave us a bit of context about what it was and when they left it and why. so that's really cool.

there's some donors who are still really active and want to see the things that they left. so this, as you may or may not know, is a roll of toilet paper. you may wonder why we have it in our collection. but toilet paper was as good as gold in vietnam, because if you were out in the field and you didn't have any toilet paper, you had to make due with something else less desirable. so we get little rolls of toilet paper. we get the little -- in the rations they were given sometimes a little thing of toilet paper. we get those left at the wall often, too. because vietnam veterans understand, when they see toilet painer in this context, they know what it was left for. but this one was left with this little note. it says, the jungle, it won't wash off. the sounds, the smells, like the

waves that come and go in the occasi ocean in my mind, the memories remain. left in 1992. these two photographs were left on veteran's day 1993, of which the dedication of the women's memorial. the women's memorial is dedicated to the women who served and died in vietnam. you don't often talk about the women of the war. there are eight women names on the member oral. there are 60 women who died in vietnam. they weren't enlisted in the military like the other eight women were. these are two photographs of doughnut dollies who are essentially american red cross volunteers. those were the other 60 women who died were volunteers or something of that sort. often were nurses in vietnam. they staffed the field hospitals. so these two are dedicated to

the boys at cameron army. it says all gave some, some gave all. it lists the ladies of the american red cross. they are from -- they were there from november 1971 to january 1972. this object was left at the vietnam veterans memorial june 4, 1992. it has a countdown of 365 numbers which 356 days is the standard tour that veteransgnyó served in vietnam. so i am assuming -- we don't have any other information about this. no background information, no note or anything. but i assume that he printed this out and counted down the days that he had to serve in vietnam. because it's titled, the long road home. on the bottom down here it says, my vietnam holiday. and this is really interesting,

because as he was crossing off the days, he would put a little bit more information about what his 280th day was. he points here, 269th day was christmas. he was at landing zone sue when he was in the hump for these days. his first anniversary, we don't know of what. doesn't describe what the anniversary is. i'm assuming as he would experience a day, he would cross it off. it has some other interesting days here, too. because we have the 4th of july. his 62nd day -- well, his day that he only had 62 more days was man has landed on the moon. and then his last five days, five-day drop. and then here he says, caution, vietnam may be hazardous to your health.

so this is what we see often for people who -- we get a lot of things for short timers where that was people who had 30 days or less in vietnam. so we have a lot of short timer sticks where they would notch off the days they had left. we have a lot of calendars where they were counting down the days until they got to go home. it's really interesting to see things like this, personalshls they carried it in vietnam. the park service is guided by certain rules that we follow. the antiquities act, the organic act that kind of -- i don't know. they set the basis for all museum collections in our nation. and specifically, for us, our collection is guided by a statement. every museum collection in the park service has a specific museum -- scope of collection statement and ta dehat dictatest

we keep, what we're interested in and our theeps a themes are, falls within our parameters and it also tells you what does not fall within the parameters of the collection. once they are brought here, we do what we call processing. that's kind of sorting through them, putting things together that go together, they were left by the same person or group of people. organic items like flowers and leaves and stuff that you really should not become part of a museum collection, food. we don't keep things that are hazardous to our health, obviously. that would include things like live ammunition, stuff like that. we don't keep unaltered, unpersonalized things. miniature flags that no one has written anything on. once we process it, we put them

into archival standard containers, bags and folders and stuff like that, boxes. then it gets cataloged into our cataloging database. then we -- we can use the objects for interpretation, for exhibits, for loans for things like that. so this is an example of a box that has been cataloged. everything in it is in our database. we could look up an object by its catalog number, which we see right here. this is the number which tells us when we received it into our collection. that's important for us to know when we took property of it, essentially. and as you can see, they are nicely folded. they have tags that will associate them if we have to take it out of the bag. we know what catalog number it is. we tie up nicely the american

flags. and we put archival objects, paper objects, in these folders. it's all organized that way. so if i need to pull something for a researcher or for an exhibit or something, i can look into our database and it will tell me where the object is and i go to that box and it's fairly easy to find, either in our folders or in a bag. this box is all this one -- they were all left at the wall around the same time. we organize everything by when it was left at the wall. this box i think is from around the ten-year anniversary. maybe just after the ten-year anniversary, which was november of 1992. so this is maybe around christmastime, which is why you would see these types of

ribbons, you know, bows and stuff like that. >> the oldest box in here would be 1984? >> we have four boxes from the two-year period, 1982 to 1984. when they were just initially collecting things. and that's one -- this is one of thechl right here. and you can see, a lot of the same types of things as were in the other box. it's a lot of the same types of things being left today. we have a lot of patches and pins. badges of all kinds, religious items. we have a lot of newspaper clippings. what we call documentary artifacts, the largest -- it's the largest category of objects that are left at the wall. paper objects essentially.

it includes letters, notes, poems, clippings, greeting cards, business cards, things like that. we get a lot of flags. a lot of plaques. so this card was left in 2000. it was left by ellen for barry bausch who was killed in vietnam. i'm just going to read it. it says, my dearest barry, it has been over 31 years since you were taken away from me. but you remain in my heart, my truest love always. as i visit the memorial wall today in washington, d.c., i leave with you the ring i gave you on your 18th birthday, the first summer we met. always know that i love you still. although i am married and have three beautiful children, laura, named affidav ed after your sis and raina. will mourn for the family we

were never given the chance to have. when the lord takes me home, i know i will meet you again and share many memories. so this letter and the trophy were left on october 30, 1988. for joseph craig peters. i believe it was left by his son. the trophy on the back says, with all my love, christmas, 1969, dad. so i assume that maybe his dad gave it to the son. the son came to the wall and left it. the note says, were you afraid? of course you were. the trick is not to be always fearless but never to be hopeless. the brave again -- to be brave again for those who have been brave for us and for those who will yet depend on us. it's a beautiful day. we would be playing golf. i would be beating you by two strokes, sucker. and it's always, michael. it has a peace pendant on it.

we have to kind of infer the background information for this. maybe they would always play golf together. before his dad went away to war. we don't really know. this note is all we have. this harmonica and the note was left on october 10, 1995. it was in an envelope addressed to gary thomas. he served as a radio telegraph operator for the third reconnaissance third marine. dear brother, ever since you were killed, i have been blowing the blues. i leave my harp here at the wall for you to blow some heavenly blueses for all those you left behind in this veil of tears. i miss you daily, brother bob.

so this is an in-country photograph left at the wall on august 9, 1989. it depicts first and second platoon c company, first battalion fifth marines. they are honoring three dead, which you can see three rifles stuck in the ground here with helmets on top of them. on the back he wrote what he knew of the men. one he named his name was robert sowia. another he called the new guy. and another he called mr. point. i looked -- i can look up the names. mr. sowia was killed on december 15, 1967. and so by looking up the people who were in that company who died on the same day, i found out that the other two men are probably william edwin pierson, who was the new guy, and eddie

lee jackson, who was mr. point. the one-fifth command chronology gave the reason for the deaths as company c squad patrol was hit by a command detonated booby trap consisting of two or three artillery rounds. the area was searched on 16 december and lead wires were found and followed with negative results. the incident resulted in one killed in action and six wounded in action. two of the men obviously later died. the new guy, mr. pierson, he had been in vietnam for just 24 days. before he was killed. both of these notes were left in august of 1986. i assume they're from the same woman. although, they both touch on two very different topics. in one she's describing about how she was a nurse in vietnam. she signs it, lieutenant d. baker, r.n. the other one is talking about

her husband tom who died in vietnam. she signs it dana. the one she -- when she was a nurse, it starts off, i went to vietnam to heal and came home silently wounded. i went to vietnam to heal and still awaken from nightmares about those we couldn't save. i went to vietnam to heal and came home to grieve for those that we sent home blind, paralyzed, limbless, mindless. i went to vietnam to heal and discovered i am not god. and then the other one she talks about her husband tom. we would have been married 21 years this year. they got married when he was on leave in san diego. and i assume they both went back to the war where he was killed. so they were only married a very short time. but she leaves this letter in honor of him 21 years later. we get a lot of very similar

objects left at the wall. a lot of poems, a lot of cards, notes and stuff like this. but this one was left just this past july. it was pretty spectacular, i thought. it doesn't look exactly like it did when it was left at the wall. but it was 13 letters. they were written by this young man. his name is jim arbuthnon. addressed to his potential girlfriend back home. they are letters from when he was in basic training, up to ten from when he was first in vietnam. and so he was enlisted -- well, i think he joined voluntarily, not drafted. jim went to vietnam in early 1966. and he learned quickly that he

only had to serve five months instead of the regular year-long tour because of some previous experience or some previous work that he had done. so he was very excited to get home and maybe get to know patricia better who he had just met before he went to vietnam. so his letters kind of show him putting his feelers out, trying to get to know her personality. they also show the types of things he was experiencing in vietnam like just going there for first time. the heat. the smells. all these men around him. no women anywhere. and he continued to send her letters until he was killed in march of 1966. he was only there for two months of his five-month tour before he was killed. his last letter to patricia is

dated 24th march 1966. he was killed on march 30th. the last thing he ever wrote to her was, it won't be long now. signed, jim. the collection -- i feel like the purpose of the collection is to help people -- the purpose of the wall was to help people heal, to get over their -- the things that happened to them in the past and to remember specifically the men who died in vietnam and this collection kind of lends a helping hand to that. people will leave things that are folk art that just make the process of making a craft helps them heal. there's a lot of things in the collection that have to do with ptsd. we have a lot of ptsd groups that go to -- they do a therapy group and make something and

they leave it at the wall. that's helping the healing process. then we have a lot of things that give just a little bit more information about a specific soldier's life. so when you go to the wall, you see all the names on the wall. but the collection kind of gives a little background history to those names. as long as somebody left something for a specific person, we can tell just a little bit more about that person's life. that's really what i think is the purpose of the collection. i am a history buff. i do enjoy seeing the fabric of our country and how things just how they work and how they're made. >> i love american history tv. the presidency. american artifacts. they are fantastic shows. >> i had no idea they did history. that's something i would really enjoy. >> with american history tv, it gives you that perspective. >> i'm a c-span fan.

each week american history tv's american artifacts visits museums and historic places. and up next, we travel to philadelphia's independence national historical park to learn about congress hall. the meeting place of the u.s. house and senate between 1790 and 1800. our guide is park ranger matthew aifel. >> we are in the old house of representatives in a building we call congress hall. originally, it was built as a county courthouse for philadelphia. for most of its history, that's what it was. in the years that the city of washington, d.c. is being built, philadelphia serves as our temporary u.s. capitol. this room serves for the house of representatives, the second floor of the building that we will see in a moment was the united states senate. the house of representatives, each representative at that point in our history represented 30,000 people.

we had a population at our first census of about three and three-quarters million. we had 106 members of the house would sit in this room. and eventually, from 16 states. the story of philadelphia as the u.s. capital is the story where we take a new constitution and actually operating it, doing things like adding new states to the original 13. also the bill of rights would become a part of our constitution while philadelphia was the capitol. in fact, the setting of state thomas jefferson would announce the amendments to the constitution by basically coming to congress here in this building and officially announcing that we have changed our constitution. which, of course, the bill of rights is a huge part of our history and will be in the future continuing talking point in our political life. but also, it's the amendment process itself. we're proving that that part of the constitution works, that we

can update and make changes to that constitution without having to start completely over again from the beginning. but really, for this building, it's to a large degree -- it is creating the american political system. the two party system that we know today is going to begin here. and it's going to begin with issues much as you would expect. early issues that we face as the united states would be debt. we had debt and spending arguments and debates in this building. it's not any different except for the details as to what we do today in washington, d.c. we argue about debt from the revolutionary war, our early government alexander hamilton, treasury secretary wanted all the debt from the states to come to the federal government and then to use that debt paying it off to build credit for the young united states. not everybody agreed with his plans. so you start seeing division. and then foreign policy questions would arise. britain and france go to war in the 1790s.

a lot of americans would feel like we owed france. they helped us in our war. we still don't line the british very much. for george washington, the first president, the notion of neutrality is preferable. we don't really have any money. we didn't really have a navy at all. and our army was not much to speak of. so we certainly weren't in a position to go and fight a war. certainly not in europe and probably not even fighting our neighbors in british canada in those days. so he is going to present with his cabinet approval a neutrality proclamation which starts dividing us into this question of ought we be doing more to help france. in the same notion of keeping us out of war, george washington will send john jay, who was at that time our first chief justice of the supreme court, send him to britain to negotiate a new treaty with the british. with the idea of keeping us out of this european war and

settling some of those questions of border and ocean rights and such that we were arguing with the british. john jay had been on the team that negotiated the peace treaty that ended the revolutionary war. he seemed like a good candidate for washington to send. the treaty that he brought back becomes very controversial and one of the tipping points in creating the two parties as sort of leading to what we know today. the treaty is basically starts becoming publically attacks in the press. the press of the -- what would become the democratic republican party, the party of thomas jefferson and james madison would start vilifying this treaty. what's interesting is nobody has read it. it hasn't been published. but yet, it's going to be pilloried in the press to people hate the treaty that they don't know anything about. the federalist side, of the john

adams and alexander hamiltons, is in favor of the treaty. they are in favor of building the young economy of the united states, staying out of a war, trading with all sides in europe, not being limited by alliance to france or something like this. so we're really seeing this treaty become kind of of a symbolic head point between these two sides. and the senate approves the treaty. now according to the constitution senate approves treaties and they're done. the problem is the house of representatives -- this is our first treaty. the house of representatives says, we want a chance to discuss this treaty as well. and so they demand of washington to see all the papers and so on. well, he says, no. senate approves it. you don't have anything do with it. what the house essentially is going doing is they say, maybe what we will try do is take away the funding. we won't pay for this treaty. anything that has to be paid

for, we will not spend the money. therefore, the treaty will die at this point this time. that's not necessarily a new strategy that you see with things in washington, d.c. today. so the big fight in the house of representatives in this room is whether or not to pay for this treaty. there's days of debates. on the last day, there's a big crowd in our public balcony. you have men like vice president john adams, supreme court justices in the balcony. the big -- this is, of course, an era where we love speeches, long, political speeches, deep, infused with rhetoric. the best speaker of the time is a man named fisher ames. he is a federalist. he is definitely wanting this treaty to survive. he has been ill. he hasn't said anything. of course, this last day everyone is waiting to see if he with i will make the last statement. he does. he says, if my strength can hold up, i would like to say a few

words. he speaks over an hour. it's about 55 pages in the congressional record, his speech. he collapses at the end. he talked about the last war we fought with the british and if people remembered all the devastation and did we really want to do this again, fight another war for years. apparently, some of the men have tears in their eyes. when he finally finishes, a supreme court justice turns to the vice president and says, isn't that man great? adams says, yes, he is. so the treaty will end up passing by just a couple of votes. at one point there is a committee of the whole vote, the head of the committeemuhlenberg speaker of the house. he breaks the tie. he is on the democratic republican and jefferson side. he is yshould be against it. he is convinced maybe not going to war is a good idea.

he ends up voting to pass the bill for the funding of this treaty. and he is vilified. he is vilified that he voted for this treaty against his side to the point where he loses his seat in his next election to congress. but even worse, in the short-term, he is stabbed on the sidewalk of philadelphia by his brother-in-law because of his vote. he survives but i'm sure family gathers are awkward. it tells us how high our political tensions can be in our early days. yet, yet at the same time, we're also proving that that new constitution, despite the difficulties, works. probably the best day in this room's history in a lot of ways is the day john adams is inaugurated by the speaker of the house's platform. he will stand on the platform with thomas jefferson at the front of the room, outgoing president george washington. this is a big deal. changing presidents for us today is a fairly normal thing. we have parades and parties.

it's a big thing. but this was a really important day. because this is where we are proving that the system where we the voters elect our leaders and we change them when we vote, we're proving that that system works. because the john adams election is a lot of firsts. it's the first time we will not have george washington as our president. george washington is the only man to be unanimously elected president, which he was twice. he did not particularly run for office. at the end of the first term, he didn't want a second term. he was talked into it. essentially kind of almost guys on both sides talk him into another four years. he doesn't really run. he is unanimously re-elected. at the end of the second term, people try to talk him into a third. he is not having it. he wants to retire at this point in time. it's somebody else's turn. he will step aside for john adams. now, we don't know if this works. we have never done this before.

we have never changed our president. will the people accept this? we don't know. the other thing to remember is john adams was contested in his election. he actually had to fight a battle against his opponent who was thomas jefferson. these two had been friends, obviously, they wrote the declaration of independence together. now opposite sides of the fence. they don't want to talk to each other. the election is very ugly, it's nasty, very close. it's sort of for us today a normal presidential election. john adams wins by three electoral votes. we have never had a president who got half the votes. we have never had a president who had to really fight for an election. of course, the other problem in the early daze ys is if you comn second, you are vice president. the new president is one party. the new vice president is the other party. pincknck any modern election ant them together and you can see how neither would be

particularly happy. they are not happy to be up in the front of the room together. this is a full house that day. the balcony, seats, you have most of the government here. a lot of curiosity. you can also figure about half of the men in this room are not very happy to see john adams standing up there. the other half of the men in the room are not happy to see tophos jefferson up there. nobody is happy that george washington is leaving us in this time. john adams would kind of look around the room and see a lot of people who weren't very happy. he would see people with almost tears in their eyes that washington was leaving them. he kind of would later say that as he looked around, he only saw one person that day who particularly looked happy, which was, of course, george washington who had a look on his face that said, you are in and i'm out. now let's find out who is the happier. washington would quietly go to private life and i think very happily withdraw from the scene.

adams himself would be inaugurated. he would have a difficult presidency because now really we are seeing the throws of political fighting going on. but it happened peacefully. we proved that constitution worked. we proved that we could continue in times of difficulty like this that we could continue forward with the system in place. in 1800, they would leave this building and move to the current capitol in washington, d.c. adams and jefferson would have another difficult election at that time. this time jefferson winning. he would be the first president inaugurated in the new capitol of washington, d.c. but these years in philadelphia are setting the tone for the rest of our early history. and all the way up to today. so the room itself will start out as a courthouse. so this would have been a courtroom. but around the time this building is finished construction, it's being built during the constitutional

convention. so when they are finished construction is around the time that philadelphia offers it to the u.s. government. i think philadelphia's secret hope is if we're nice, they will stay here and not go to the new city. so they give them the new courthouse building. they end up actually expanding it a little bit to make more room for congress. we think the setup looks like this. we have a seating chart from one session of congress that shows the design of the desks and all we don't have any of the desks that have survived. we're fortunate we have some of the chairs today. unfortunately, we only have about 30 of them between the two houses of congress and most of them we don't know necessarily which house they were in. so today all of our original chairs are in the senate. for this room as far as original items goes, the chair on the platform for the speaker of the house is an original. we have three chairs exactly like this. we don't necessarily know which

was which. we have one today that we assume was for the speaker of the house, one for the vice president as president of the senate and the third for the chief justice of the supreme court. now, we don't again know which one is which. so what we can fairly say is that somebody important sat in that chair for the speaker of the house, whether it was the speaker of the house or not we're not sure. as far as this room went, in the early 1800s when the federal government moved out, it went to become a courthouse again. in fact, this was divided into two rooms for a long number of years. they built a hallway down the mi middle to have two courtrooms instead of one large one. about the time of the first world war, the city government has left this block and moved to our current city hall in philadelphia. the city is recognizing the historic value of the buildings, has some restoration work done. they kind of want to turn them into museum space. if you visited this building in the years around the first world war, the 1920s, you would have

seen the building -- the room rather restored back to the big single room it would have been. but it would have been just a room filled with old stuff. kind of the old-fashion museum. after world war ii when the national park service comes in to take over the historic builds here, again, the goal is to get them back to how they looked in the important days. that's where we try to study, how did they have the seating set up? we have one chart that we have been able to find. one of the members drew showing who was sitting where at least for one snapshot of a session of congress. we have some -- enough sketches and show the platform for the speaker of the house. we have enough original furniture that we can match up things that were -- we think were here. unfortunately, a lot of the items that are here, if the city needed them, like chairs, they kept using them. desks, not so much. they didn't save. things that the government might have owned, for example, the library of congress started in this building.

they started buying books for congress here in philadelphia. wasn't the library of congress as we know it today, but it does begin here. a lot of the things that went to washington, d.c. are burned when washington is burned in the war of 1812. we lose a lot of the early things. that's one of the challenges with a building like this, you don't necessarily have all the thing things, but you make due the best you can to give people the sense when they come in to see them of what it looked like when men like james madison or young andrew jackson were sitting in this room as members of the house of representatives. we're in the senate chamber here at congress hall in philadelphia. the room as you can see is quite a bit more grand than the house of representatives would have been. there's a couple of reasons for that. our roots as a nation go back to when we were british, of course. the british have a parliament with two houses.

an upper house, the house of lords, lower house, house of commons. there's definitely parallels with our congress today. the house of representatives is very similarly set up to the house of commons. and then the senate would, therefore, be left to be based on the house of lords. we don't have dukes and earls and noble titles like that. we have states. every state is equal in the senate. so the states kind of take the place of our house of lords and our senate chamber. the british often using that green color in government. the colonies would use it and into the american government. but the red would be much more the house of lords kind of color. you will see red in that early senate here in philadelphia. definitely has that kind of look tore to it that seems higher end. the interesting thing about the senate is they are created with more power. the power is a tie to the president that the house of representatives does not have.

treaties in the united states are with the advice and consent of the senate, approved by the advice and consent of the senate. the senate has to approve all treaties. the house does not. the senate does. so there's one power. also any time the president makes an appointment to his cabinet, ambassador, supreme court, of course, those folks would have to come in front of the senate and be approved by the senate or rejected. so here in philadelphia, we have our very first treaty approved by the senate, which is the jay treaty. that led to the big fight in the house of representatives over whether or not to pay for it. but over that same issue, we have the first rejection of a presidential nominee by the senate. john rutledge, who is actually a signer of the u.s. constitution, actually one of the players in creating that constitution, is one of washington's first choices for the original six justices on the supreme court.

he accepts but then resigns the post without ever really having served on the supreme court. he will later become the chief justice of the south carolina supreme court when john jay, who was the first united states supreme court chief justice, resigns, he is elected governor of new york, he he leaves the post of chief justice. that leaves it empty. washington will eventually tap john rutledge of south carolina. rutledge will come back to philadelphia this time and serve as chief justice. however, he is appointed during a recess of congress, and so technically the senate hasn't confirmed him but he actually serves a session of the court as chief justice and leads them through some cases. when the senate comes back later that year to return to session, they then take up the question of approving john rutledge. now, george washington's never had anyone rejected that he's appointed, so this has never happened in our young history. john rutledge has a couple of

things going against him. there are guys in the senate that think the guy's a little crazy. he's had some kind of strange things that he's had to say in the years in the 1790s so he's got a reputation but also where he's going to get into trouble is he made very pointed comments about that j treaty that was negotiated by his predecessor. he was very critical in some speeches and they tended to be a bit of rambly speeches. he was very critical about the senate itself which of course senators would read the newspapers and they would read what the south carolina supreme court chief justice had to say about them and when he came in front of them they would remember these sorts of things and then they would decide perhaps this guy is not the best choice to be the chief justice of the supreme court. so even though he'd run the court for a while he was sent packing and back home. so the very first rejection of a presidential nominee.

so here in philadelphia you're seeing the constitution in a lot of different directions being explored and used for the first time and of course you go through our history and you see other occurrences where this happened. the one other power of the senate that's not going to get exercised here in philadelphia is the power of impeaching if the president is impeached, the house would vote to have an impeachment. the senate would be basically the jury in what is essentially a trial to decide whether the president should be removed from office. so again, you look at the powers of the senate and you see these things that you can do that tie them to the president in a lot of ways, and so therefore, give them that little bit of extra advantage over the house of representatives. plus, they're a smaller body of men with only two senators per state. you represent an entire state, which means if you're from a large state you represent a lot of people. finally, the other thing about

the senate that makes it a bit unique is you get that longer term, the longest elected term in the united states with six-year term, but early on, senators were not even elected. senators are appointed on the basis of the constitution originally. senators are appointed by their state legislatures. so senators do not have to run for office. so as a result, senators here in philadelphia met in private. they did not meet in public. the house of repts alwaresentat always did. the senate gets into their own controversial bills like the j trayty. one of the early senators that is sent by pennsylvania is a man most famous for being a long-time secretary of treasury and he is of the democratic/republican side and so the federal aside of the

early senate and basically locking at the strict rules would say that albert galton has not lived in the united states for the requisite number of years to be in the senate. so the senate voted him out. he's later elected to the house of representatives but he's rejected from the senate. so they want to know why their senator has been kicked out of the senate. so you start getting this growing public feeling that we want to see what's going on when the senate meets here in philadelphia and add to that the press, obviously wants to know what's going on because they've got guys sitting in the balcony watching the house, they want to have guys sitting up here watching the senate because that's news. finally, i am sure of it, that the house of representatives is sitting in public saying why do those guys get to meet in private when we have to sit in front of all these people? so finally after about five years of meeting behind closed

doors, the senate relents and they start to as well meet in public here in philadelphia. and that's one of those long standing traditions. but this is where you're seeing that they don't have everything set in stone. they have a constitution that's only four pages long. these men have to figure out what their job is all about based on a few paragraphs that say duties and powers that they have. george washington essentially invents the job of president here in philadelphia. again, just going on some, you know, paragraphs in the constitution and figuring out, okay, what does that mean i do every day? so when he wants to negotiate a treaty with various indian tribes, what he'll do, the first time he's going to do something with this is he'll come into the senate and sit down and say, well, i'm supposed to do treaties with your advice and consent so i want your advice and consent on these issues i want to discuss and the senate goes wait a minute, yeah, weir

not interested in talking about that with you in the room. why don't you give us some stuff and we'll talk and get back to you later. and so that's when the president comes and goes from the senate. it's that more strict separation that we're used to. now, for washington, he's not a guy who likes tons of, you know, public accolade and he doesn't like to give a lot of speeches if he can avoid it. he will do an address to congress every year. they don't call it the state of the union yet, but his address to congress which he writes with his cabinet. he will come to the senate for his inauguration for his second term as president. he kind of keeps it low key. he doesn't do the bigger event that we saw downstairs in the house of representatives with john adams which was a much bigger deal. washington just going to a second term basically comes in and takes his oath of office and more or less goes back to work because he didn't really want the big public ceremony to take place, but that's something that

would change with adams' inauguration and of course when you move down to washington you start having inaugurations at the new capitol building so that would be a change. so we're growing into what the united states is today. as you look around this room, a lot of the guys that sat here in the senate were the architects of our constitution because senators being chosen by their states, a lot of the guys that had a big impact on writing that constitution would be then sent by their states to philadelphia. one of the ones that's not as is james madison and he runs into the problem in virginia that patrick henry is one of the great powers in virginia. henry's not a big fan of madison and his big role in the constitution so essentially madison is sort of -- we call him the father of the constitution, the obvious plumb of getting a seat in the constitution doesn't happen. he has to suffer through getting elected and becoming a member of the house. but as for election of senators

that's a recent phenomenon in our history. so 1913 when he'd start electing our senators. so all the men prior to that just have to court their state legislature, so you think of the lincoln/douglas debates over senate, they're not debating for people to vote for them, they're debating for people to vote for the people of the state government to vote for them. so it's a very complicated system. and people are saying you know what? we want to be able to vote for our own senators. we vote for everyone else in government, why not the senate, so that's one of the things that changes, but we have to grow into how some of these things work. but the remarkable thing when you go back to these years if philadelphia, other than that, most everything does operate pretty well the same way. we're using the system designed in independence hall that they take into this building and use and continue on when they move

to washington in 1800. now, as you look at this room, unlike downstairs in the house of representatives, the second floor of the building with the senate is a lot more original as far as the things in the building go. we have -- we have the setting for 32 senators. we start with just of course 26 representing 13 states, and as each new state, vermont, kentucky, tennessee, up to the 32, now, when they leave for washington, 32 senators would go, the room would turn into a courtroom, eventually actually it was the united states federal district courtroom in the 19th century. they don't necessarily need the stuff that's here. so desks kind of go away. we don't know what happened to them. these are sort of our best guess, but chairs you always need. so when the mid-1800s when

people start thinking about american history like we do so much of today, they started saying, well, we need to collect things for independence hall and somebody says well, we've got a bunch of these chairs, a couple dozen chairs and at some point somebody thinks maybe they were the chairs for the continental congress so they stuck them in the room but of course they were for the federal congress but these were displayed in independence hall for a long time and when we are restoring congress hall, the old u.s. capitol to look as it would have we had 29 original chairs. some of them were in the house based on simple proportion, but a couple of them were marked senate, a couple of them had bits of different colored upholstery. some of these are probably in the house. we said, well, let's just put them all in the senate chamber. so we'll fill it with 29 of the 32 chairs being original.

the eagle on the ceiling is -- we're not 100% sure of the date on that. the one thing i can tell you is there's 15 stars above it so it's sometime after the 15th state enters the union. we don't know exactly when and may no never know when that was painted, but the seal was another thing created here in philadelphia actually by the continental congress and independence hall in 1782. something they'd worked on throughout the war, the different committees and kept changing a little bit here and there until they worked out the final version of the seal. we have a carpet on the floor that is a reproduction of the original carpet. the original carpet more than likely went to washington when they moved, but whatever happened to it, it's long gone. we don't know what happened to the senate carpet but it was made specifically for the room here and there was actually enough written description of exactly what it was that enabled us to sort of recreate the

carpet and it would have also featured the seal of the united states, but it would have been encircled by the original state seals. it's set up as a chain which was a common motif of the time. chaining the states together. so a lot of those interesting symbols whether for the states themselves or the united states have their roots here in philadelphia. the one original desk we still have is the secretary's desk and the vice president would sit in the back of the room and that's another interesting part of our story. the vice president which we'll start with john adams and he'll be succeeded by doms jefferson, they would be here a good bit of the time. probably a lot more than the vice president today. today the vice president can sit in the senate any day they want, but early on they made it clear to john adams they didn't want him talking so he can sit there and run the meetings, which left him very disappointed. he's the first, but certainly not the last vice president to

complain about the limitations of that job. he is allowed to vote only to break ties, which again, that carries through the years, so if there's a tie vote the vice president is always the tie breaker. so any big day, any big vote, the vice president will be there and other than that, the vice president, you know, john adams would find he was kind of stuck here in philadelphia running a bunch of meetings with a bunch of guys who wouldn't let him talk and found it dissatisfying and for thomas jefferson, when he's vice president his opponent is the president so he doesn't necessarily agree with a lot of the policies that he has to be part of the executive over so it was a very difficult situation which is what leads to creating the system where we're going to elect president and vice president a little bit more carefully because rather than the electoral college voting for two men, the guy who gets the most votes being president and the guy who gets the second most being vice president we would create a system where it's a

candidate for president and a candidate for vice president and the real impo tus to that is the jefferson election in 1800 which is when they're packing up and moving to washington, d.c. so there's no one election day in those days but they will start meeting in the new capitol december of 1800. they're leaving philadelphia that summer and in the midst of this we're electing adams versus jefferson, but they've learned their lesson. they say we'll run two guys but you can't specify which is which. so when jefferson wins the election he ties his own vice president candidate and of course burr and jefferson being tied means by the constitution the election goes to the house of representatives so the first thing we do in our new capitol is basically the house of representatives has to elect the new president and they have to vote more than 30 times before the tie can be broken so now you're saying okay. we've learned our lesson, let's

fix it. so the 12th amendment comes along to straighten out the way of electing a president. but you look back to these early days and they're managing to find out what doesn't work which isn't much and find out that most of that constitution does, and so we're able to today look at that room that's much smaller than the senate today but the senators who sat here, pretty much do the same things as the senators in washington today. american artifacts continues with a tour of the whitney plantation shavery museum in indiana.

each week we take you to museums andph[z historic place today we visit whitney plantation to learn about the history of slavery in america. >> my name is ashley rogers. i'm the director of museum operations at the whitney plantation and we are beginning our tour today in a historic friedmann's church which was build 1870 by people who lived on the opposite side of the river in pallina, louisiana. this was donated by the descendants of the original founders of that congregation. they bought the land in 1870, two parcells of land for the express purpose of building a house of worship. in the sale document they named their structure the anti -- they

named their an gre gacongregati antiyolk congregation. this was a significant church for newly freed slaves on the east bank of the river and so it's really important in talking about the lives of people who saw freedom at the end of the war. so we like to start here in this building so we can see what happened to people, some of the things that they cared about after freedom came. >> the whitney plantation is the only plantation in the state of louisiana that is exclusively dedicated to telling the stories of enslaved people and so this land that we're on right now is -- was historically known as habitation hi dell and our owner purchased the property about 15 years ago and began restoring

it, restoring the original structures that were here and also moving in buildings like this one. and so we had to kind of build in -- build some things here, restore existing buildings and bring in historic structures, all of these things help us tell the story of slavery. so when this -- when john comings bought the property in 1999 we did not have any original slave cabins. they had all been torn down for some 20 years and so we had to move in those from elsewhere in louisiana. this structure, like i said, just kind of helps us round out that story of enslavement till after the civil war and we have some other buildings that were here at one time and we have rebuilt. >> we have a collection of statues created by an ohio artist and he built these -- put together these statues for us to represent people who were enslaved at the end of slavery and then later gave their testimony to works progress

administration? 1930s. we use the narratives of slaves taken in the 1930s throughout our interpretation on this site. and so these give life to who they were. taking the narratives of formerly enslaved people, they were talking to people in their 80s, 90s or 100s who when they were slaves had just been childr children. at the highest end maybe 15 when freedom came but most of them were under the age of 10. and this is to remind us who those voices are coming from. those people were talking about their experiences in slavery as children and often times recalling the things that happened to their parents or their grandparents. this plantation was initially founded in 1752. it was founded by a german immigrant. he came in the company of john

law with his family -- they sailed from france and came here. when he founded this plantation finance much smaller and he grew rice and indigoprincipally as the main cash crops and indigowas the significant cash crop here in the 18th century. he and his children continued until the late 18th century, beginning of the 19 century. in 1795 the first crop of sugar in louisiana. we're in a strange climate zone so it couldn't really -- nobody had been really to take it the full way before that. so in 1795 with the help of somebody from haiti who had come over after the revolution, he granulated a crop and all of the planters followed suit after

that. sugar could make a whole lo more money than indigo could. and so right around the same time that that first sugar crop was being granulated, indigo was not really a viable crop anymore. so this plantation transitioned at some point after that by about 1805. it was planted in sugar and it remains planted in sugar till today. sugar is still a huge industry in south louisiana and all around us our historic cane fields still planted in cane that is still sent off to the domino sugar refineries. so three generations in this plantation. over the course of the 100 plus years that they owned this land, there were many successful

generations of people who were enslaved here and so the population would have shifted over time with market forces. the highest number that we ever have recorded at one single time of enslaved people in this land is 101, but we believe that that's a little low. we think there were perhaps as many as 200 people enslaved at the highest point. we have record of people that we've found, 357 over the course of that 100 plus years, but there are going to be a lot of people missing from that. so where we will really start introducing that population is on our first memorial where we're going to begin in some memorials where we've built to people enslaved in louisiana and enslaved on this land. >> this is a wall of honor and on this memorial we have recorded the names and some basic information about 354 individuals that we have been

able to find who were enslaved on this land. this memorial is -- it moves through time roughly chronologically so in the earlier -- on this side we have people who were born in the 18th century, but we're missing the entire first generation of enslaved people here. we don't know anyone -- we don't know anyone's name who was enslaved here from the very beginning in 1752. all of these people were born after the founding of this plantation. so there's some example of people that we're already missing. this information comes mostly from sale documents. people's names were not always recorded when they were enslaved. so if you look at things like the census records, it will just include a tally of how many men and how many women but i won't tell you any names so we have to look for those names in sale documents, in the city of new orleans, there was a notary involved and so we go to the notary archives to find sales and purchases.

and all of the information that we have here, this biographic cal information is related to selling. so where someone came from, how old they were, whether they came with children, the jobs that they knew how to do, these were all things that would affect their price at sale. louisiana had different laws than other states and territories in the united states. so in -- in louisiana for a very long time it was illegal to sell children away from parents under the code that was beforeóírwñ py and later it was actually before the age of ten and so you see things like this. here's agatha and these are people being sold together in a lot. so we have basic information here and there's really not a lot that this information can

tell us, but we're able to tease out just a little bit. so one thing that we notice here is that all of these people, we can see that most of them are born in africa and that's listed here. their places of origin and yet their names are european names. in this case they're french. we also see in the early years a few spanish names as well. and so we know that these people who have these european derived names were not born in africa with those names so that tells us something about that cultural annihilati annihilation. slave traders often renamed people and it's something that continued to happen throughout the course of slavery in the united states over the course of the 19th century when people were sold from one plantation to another, their new owner could choose to rename them and here in louisiana, we use the example

of solomon northup. he was sold as a slave for years and then the movie that was recently made about it. the reason he was lost for that time is he was never sold under the name of solomon. the first slave trader called him plat and so he was living for 12 years under the name of plat which was not his given name and that's an experience that a lot of people had and you can see that written in various narratives. but even though there is this problem of people's names being taken away from them, there are a few people who remain here who have african names. so here is a person named mingo which is an african name. we also have someone named samba and we have coacou. it means a male born on a wednesday. these are names that tell us something about the circumstances of those people's birth. and also interesting enough, here is someone named moussa.

this is an islamic name so this person was a mus muslim. people who came from north africa were likely to be exposed to islam. there were long standing trade networks so this is something that tells us a little bit about the religion and culture of people who came to the new world as slaves. people came from widely different groups, so people who came to the americas enslaved were in some cases muslim and in some cases catholic. the kingdom of congo was oinitially catholic. and of course there was especially in louisiana a connection with the caribbean, a lot of the ships made stops off in the caribbean before coming into the mainland of the united states, and so there was there again, another chance for that kind of blending and synchrotism

with west african and caribbean religions there coming into louisiana. and it's also important to note that these people were selected by slave traders for specific skills and traits that they had. so most of the people enslaved in louisiana, about 60% were people that came to the different parts of the u.s. as slaves for different reasons. a lot of that had to do with the crops that they were familiar with growing. so the first two slave ships that came to louisiana in 1719, the captains of those ships were under orders to go find skilled indigo growers. because they were trying to establish an indigo economy here in louisiana and the european planters did not have the skills in planting indigo. it wasn't grown in europe. so they had to go find people who already knew how to grow it, who already knew how to process it which is a complicated

process and who knew how to build those fields. same thing with rice. skilled rice growers brought into louisiana and south carolina. so you find these very directed, you know, trading going along the western coast of africa, going into specific markets in the united states to fill the plantations there and build that crop wealth. so most of the people here were coming as we said, from west and central africa. a few people born in the caribbean who had already been, you know, coming from long trading there. but most people are coming internationally. and so something that's important to note about the movement across the atlantic during the time of the atlantic slave trade is that the vast majority of settlement of the new world was african compulsory settlement. so of all of the people who

crossed from the old world to the new world until 1807, four out of five came from africa. so the vast majority of movement was enslaved africans being forced on ships across the atlantic and they're not really good estimates about the actual number. the figure that's kind of come at is about 12.5 million people. and that's not including people who didn't make it to the coast. people who are being driven from the interior and died enroute and then were not even able to get on the boat and come across. so about 12.5 million people involved in the middle passage. of that 12.5 million people less than 12% came to the territory that became the united states. the vast majority of movement into slave societies was into

the caribbean and into brazil. in the united states we outlawed the international slave trade in 1807 which did not fully cut it off, but it significantly lowered that movement, because people were still being pirated. they were being smul smuggled into the united states. the last slave ship it's estimated arrived 1859 or 1860 and that's right up until the end of the civil war. but it did cut off the majority of that trade and this is an interesting time around 1807 that at the exact same time the lands down here in the mississippi river valley were just beginning to be developed. so the louisiana purchase happens in 1803. 1807 you can't get any more slaves into the united states and so at the same time that people are buying up large tracts of land and really increasing their need and reliance upon compulsory labor,

slave labor, they didn't have a supply of enslaved people coming from africa. and so what we -- this changes the culture here and what happened is that a very robust domestic slave trade developed in the wake of that. and we can see this happening on our wall here where you can already see them sort of str trickling in. there's a few people born on what's called the east coast instead of in the old world or in the caribbean and on the reverse side of the wall you'll see a large collection of them. so here all of a sudden, all of these people are listed east coast. east coast is probably virginia. and you can see that they came from an english owned plantation by their names. ed win, jack, tom, sam, these are all english names. so they no longer have french or

spanish names. not as many african names. so the domestic slave trade was an enormous movement of people across this country. so in total, from after the conclusion of the international slave trade in 1807, 1 million people were moved from the upper south and the upper south is virginia, maryland, tennessee, north carolina, south carolina a little bit, but mostly centered in virginia and north carolina and 1 million people were moved down the river to louisiana, alabama, mississippi, where there was large -- large scale plantations. so to give you an idea of this -- the difference in labor there, i come from north carolina. a lot of our plantations that we had in north carolina tobacco plantations, tobacco is really awful for the soil. and the fields have to lay fallow for a very long time to recover after growing tobacco and so it really cuts down on

the amount of land that they could work. and also they needed smaller scale labor. a lot of the plantations had 55, 60 slaves and here in louisiana, they had over 100. and just on another plantation they had 750 slave people. so there was a greater need for large scale labor and in the upper south, they had a larger population of women. they were encouraging family units and family growth. part of the value of an enslaved woman was her reproductive potential. and enslaifvers talked about th by using the word increase. so if a woman were given to another family member in a will, they would give sally and her increase, sally and all of the potential children that she

could have forever and her children's children, all of that sombre reproductive potential belonged to that woman. so there was a great value in encouraging the growth of families because they could make more money on selling off those children. so the majority of people who came down from the upper south were in their late teens to early 20s in the prime of their working life that would be born and raised on plantations in the upper south and most of them marched over land. most of that movement was over land. some of it was on a river boat coming down the mississippi. some of it was on boats coming down the atlantic seaboard and into the gulf of mexico from there. but new orleans was the heart of that trade. so new orleans was tied to virginia and to alexandria and virginia and there was this constant flow of people coming down to new orleans to be spread out to the territories from there. so this is where you can see all of that happening. on this plantation we have an

oral history given to us by the descendants of one of the people enslaved here that describes this process of being taken from the upper south and sold in the lower south. anna is a girl who was born on the east coast, probably virginia, and the story was she was bought to be a gift to the woman of this house. anna as the family has related to us lived inside of the big house and so would have had a -- an interesting kind of relationship with the family. people who lived in the big house who were slaves often had a strange kind of relationship that we can't really understand today. she was a slave and would have been treated as such, but also would have been very close to the family as well.

and the reason for that significance is because of her son victor hidell. so anna's mistress had a brother who impregnated anna and we don't know -- this was so long ago we don't know if anna was raped by him or if they had some kind of relationship although for enslaved women there was no such thing as consent because they did not own their bodies. and so victor was born of a family member and an enslaved woman who was as listed on her documents, american, mixed race woman and so victor would have been considered here what they call a quadroon. one quarter african descendant and enslaved by his own family. this is one instance that we know of for certain of all of

these 354 people over 100 years of ownership of the family, we know that there were many, many, many more people born here of enslaved mothers and white hidell fathers and this can kind of thing was common throughout the south and those children born of those enslaved women belonged to their own family and would not necessarily be treated any better and in many cases you can read in narratives of where those children would be treated just a little bit worse because usually there was a white wife somewhere in there who understood where those children were coming from. so the accept rations between enslaved people and the enslavers were not really there. there was a lot of mixing in terms of sexual assault, in terms of actual relationships. certainly here in louisiana a lot of free people of color existed here because of consensual relationships where enslaved women would then be

freed and given their own property. so in louisiana it's a very different class that's kind of created here. free people of color and people enslaved by their own families as well. >> this is a memorial where we have trabs scribnscribed of 107 people enslaved. this is based on the information that hall has put together and that database ends in 1820. there's talk now of about extending it to 1865. we have just their first names and again, these are mostly coming from sale documents and then what we've also done here is recorded little snippets from the works progress slaves

narratives so we allow people to walk through on their own and take a few minutes to reflect and read those names and those testimonials. >> this is the last memorial that we visit before we move into the historic grounds of the plantation. we put this for children who died in the parish that we are in here at the whitney plantation. it's centered by a sculpture by rod moore head. he's from mississippi and this is called coming home. so we have along the walls here the names, date of death, ages and names of the mother of all of these children who died and these are recorded in the church records. so our historian did the research in pulling those records out of the church and recording them here. so here's a large collection of

people that are not listed with any name whatsoever. these are all people that are just listed as little slave, negro slave girl, negro slave boy. these perhaps died too young to be named but sometimes we see this notation when people were two or three years old, people who had names but even at death were just, you know, when they were born they were born into a lower class of course as enslaved people and it was not seen as important enough to record the names that they had or to look into it to find out what their name was in life. >> so the whitney plantation for the longest amount of time was a sugar plantation. today our sugar fields come right up to the edge of where we

interpret, and historically the land had a sugar mill on its site as well. so the people who were enslaved on this land worked in the fields, and probably the majority of them would have been occupied in sugar. so they worked in the fields. they also worked as domestics, as herdsmen. this is kind of like a little village. all of the jobs that needed to sustain this group of 100 plus people were done here, you know, they made all of the food here, they grew the food here, and also worked on, you know, text tiles and things like that. carpenters and the like. shaug g sugar processing happens at the end of the year. sugar is very much growing and it's going to continue to grow until late october or early november. the goal with sugar is to have everything processed and done by christmas time.

so christmas day, they want the entire field done and granulated. these kettles were used in the granulation of sugar. we brought these kettles in from other places, but historically at our sugar mill there would have been eight kettles like this and they would go from large down to small. you can see that this has a lip on it so these would be sitting in a brick structure, and then open on the bottom where there would be a fire underneath. so the goal with these kettles is to take ground down sugar stalks, they would grind all of the cane using animal power and then using a steam engine later on. they would take the juice that comes out of that sugar cane and boil it in these giant kettles. these would have to be tended. this is a 24-hour a day process for about one month and the people who worked in making sugar would be standing next to

kettles like this using long handled ladles and physically scooping the juice from one kettle to the next to the next to the next and putting it in cooling pans where it would granulate. this would be as you can imagine a very hot and dangerous process. it's sticky, so not only would it get crusty and attached to the bottom there and burn, which made an inferior product but it could also burn the people who were making the sugar so it was dangerous in that way. and they worked in shifts, 24 hours a day. the thing that makes sugar difficult and kind of unique in the cash crops grown in the new world is that it had to be processed as soon as it was cut. so they couldn't, in other words, just cut it and sit on it for a little while and then process it later. as soon as it's cut it starts to die and it's not going to make good sugar. so that's why that harvesting season or grinding season was

extremely grueling and all of the physical labor done outside was also done in a very, very cold time of the year. south louisiana does get bitterly cold, humid cold in november and december and enslaved workers would be working outside constantly in that. all of the original slave cabins were torn down by the 70s and they looked about like this. this is pretty typical and it's essentially a duplex. it's -- it would be a family on each side or if not a real family, a fictive family. the slave cabins that were on this site were arranged the way that we've brought these in, so we have -- there would be two

rows facing each other with a central courtyard in the center and so you can imagine that that would have created a kind of community there. and these were also set back from the plantation big house by about a half a mile and so there was some physical distance where the family lived and where the enslaved workers lived and that distance is important in creating a sense of autonomy although their movements were not controlled. overseer would be monitoring them at all stages of the day to ensure that they got up at the right time, they were at work at the right time and they were back at the cabins at the right time. that said, especially because there's that distance and there is so much space here, there are a lot of plantations out here on the river road, something that was very common in particular in this region, but other reasgion

as well. especially since families tended to be separated and that wasn't a long distance, necessarily. if a husband and wife were on neighboring plantations they might be away from each other for two or three miles and so running away for that two miles to go see a loved one and come back before dawn is something that was extremely common but that was all done with a certain degree of risk. if they left and even if they intended to come back they would be considered a runaway and could be punished for that. enslaved people would be in the cabins mostly at night. their work days stretched from what they said was can't see to can't see, so in other words, from dawn until dusk they would be out at their jobs and then come back to the cabins at nighttime. nighttime back at the cabins would be a time for communion with people who are there, their families or like we said, the fictive families and also food

preparation. enslaved people were given rations by the plantation owner and typically the most common thing that you can read about in slave narratives are corn meal and bacon. bacon would be essentially fat backed. lots of fat. not a nutritious cut and not considered really the high cut, the good cut that the family would be eating. they would also receive things like intestines, like pig feet, these are all things that of course have been sustained for a very long time in southern cooking, but have their roots in those kind of lower cuts that were given to enslaved people during slavery times. also very common in terms of food of enslaved people are things that orange nate in africa. black eyed peas, watermelon, these are things that came to the new world with enslaved people, okra and people brought with them their african food

ways and supplemented it the best they could. people cooked in their cabins. there were usually fireplaces in the cabins where they could prepare meals but in a place like south louisiana where it's very, very hot, a lot of the time we imagine they would be preparing almost like a campfire outside so they didn't have that smoke and heat in their cabins. all of these things are going to be different in the different plantations. the way people were treated was different and what we have represented here are a few things that you can read about in slave narratives when people talk about the types of furnishings that hthey had. a rope bed like this is something that is common. and we have this rough kind of

fabric with hay in the middle so you can see how that's constructed. in louisiana it was also common to use moss, spanish moss for stuffing for a bed. a lot of people experienced at different plantations. in fact, solomon northup, he never described sleeping in a bed for that full 12 years. he also described sleeping on a pallet on a floor. beds like this about the size of a full bed today, this would be a bed for an entire family. children, mom and dad, they'd all be sharing space and you can see there's not a lot of space in these cabins so there wouldn't be much of a sense of privacy, what we would think of being appropriate in a family and being private. all of that living was done in just a couple of rooms,

everybody together. this is an 1868 jail that we brought in. this is not a slave jail. it's from a few years after the conclusion of slavery. but we brought it in as a learning tool so that we can see the types of typical spaces where enslaved people were confined, especially leading up to sales. this is a very typical design of that era and you can see there are a few photographs of pens in the backs of auction houses that are similar in design to this. so typically at an auction houssay like you would find in the city of new orleans there would be a front room where the auction would take place and then in the back a small courtyard with a row of cells enclosed in a courtyard so people could come out during the day and sleep in the cells at night. in addition to pens that were used in the marketing of

enslaved people, there were also slave jails. in the city of new orleans, in the central business district there were two dozen slave jails at one time. additional enslaved people were locked up at the state penitentiary as well. so all of the same rules applied to enslaved people if they were convicted of murder or theft or any of those other infractions, they could be locked up just the way that a free person could. but of course, a lot of the punishment of enslaved people was done in an extra legal fashion on the plantations. plantations did also have jail like structures sometimes where people could be confined as punishment. but typically they were not iron structures like this. they might be made of wood or brick or people might just be confined in a barn or an extra room somewhere. but those -- that kind of confinement was very typical. a lot of people who were enslaved in the state of louisiana would at one time or another experience being sold at

an auction. especially since so many people who were enslaved in the lower south had come from the upper south. so they had been sold off of a plantation and then purchased by a slave trader, and brought down to new orleans to be sold at auction. this whole transaction of moving people from one part of the country to another to sell them is something that kind of i elucidates the markets. of course the raw goods that we were producing in the south supplied the northern and foreign factories, but also that slave trade itself involved people like insurance agents, like mortgage brokers and bankers. there was a lot of industry, northern and southern involved in that. so to give you an example there. if a slave trader working out of virginia and new orleans and that would be the biggest one

would be isaac franklin. if he purchased an enslaved person off of a plantation, the upper south, he would sometimes pay full cash value for them up there, but it would be a wholesale rate so this is, you know, you can see how people were sold. they were paid for a wholesale rate. if he didn't have the cash amount he could put a mortgage on that person and they would be ensured for the time in transit and then brought, he would cover all of the expenses of moving them down and then sell them here at a retail rate. about 100% more than what he bought them for in the upper south. if he had a note, a mortgage on that person, he would pay off that mortgage and pocket the profit. and so the same way that we comodify houses and cars and livestock, these are the exact same market forces that were in the comodification of human beings during the time of enslavement and all of that is being transacted in this

calculated way, but on the ground floor, on the human side of it, what that story is is of course separation from loved ones, when people were being locked up in pens similar to this, they might be with their family and about to be sold away from their family or they've just traveled long distance away from everything they've ever known and all of that is being done with a price tag. people who were locked up in slave pens also sometimes had to wait for long periods of time for the market to be at an appropriate value to sell them at the highest return. so if people made it to an auction house in new orleans and the price for slaves was low, sometimes they would wait and keep them locked up in a jail or keep them locked up in the boat that they had come on and wait for those markets to improve so they could make a higher return on their investment. as far as the actual dollar amount, what people were being sold for here in louisiana, a good rate that you see pretty commonly is about 900 to $1,000.

for somebody who was skilled that might go up to $1,500. and there's a -- another sort of seedy underbelly of the slave trade which was called the fancy trade. girls who might be used as sex slaves could be sold at a higher rate. that 1,500 or $2,000 and we're talking about 19th century money, so when you translate it to today it's an enormous amount of money that people were spending on those individuals. >> this area that we're standing in right now is the whitney plantation historic district and this is where we have the highest concentration of original structures. all centered around the 1790 big house. over here we have the original site of the kitchen, and there was a kitchen here from as far as we can tell, the earliest time the construction of this

big house. this structure is a little bit later -- it was here by about 1830. and it was in very poor condition when our owner john comings bought the land in 1999. it was just about falling over so he had to right the building and rebuild the hearth entirely. but a lot of these structures were really just falling apart into the ground. so hidell, his son built this big house and then later it was occupied by his sons. they operated it in a partnership until 17 -- or excuse me, until 1839 at which point the widow took over and she ran the plantation from 1840 to 1860. so really the longest period of ownership was a woman.

and this was also during the most profitable years and also during the time of the greatest -- the largest slave population was under the ownership of a woman. the kitchen where we are right now is where the enslaved cook would prepare meals for the family. and we have record of a couple of cooks that were listed on different inventories. marie and marie joseph. cooks would be assisted by domestics, people who lived either inside the big house or close to the big house and assisted the family and they would do things, you know, ranging from cleaning inside the big house to helping out the cook and moving food, serving it in the big house for meals. the cook's day in a kitchen like this would start very early in the morning, because all of the preparing of food, all of the cooking was done on the hearth. this is called hearth cooking. so she would build a fire in the center here, and most of her cooking is again, not done on

those flames, but done on the embers that are built up by that fire. so the reason that she would have to start so early is that she would have to get a large supply of coals by burning lots and lots of wood and then raking those coals out on to the hearth to prepare food. so we have a couple of examples of ways that people prepared food on those coals. this works almost like an eye and we also have something called a spider pot. so the coals go underneath and then there would be a top here to retain that heat and the coals would go on top of the pot as well. you can see a good example of this right here where this is constructed with almost like fingers coming up so those can retain all of the coals on the top. so a lot of the cook's day in preparing all of the various food that the family wanted to eat would be spent bent over pots like this. or crouching down trying to get

close to what she was preparing. anything that we prepare today, say in a slow cooker or in an oven could be prepared in pots like this over a hearth. basically it creates a dutch oven. and so we -- we know that the food that they eating here would be kind of a cultural mix. the family was jer monodescended but this was french louisiana. we had native american ingredients and if you think about the food ways of south louisiana, this is kind of an african center there. they would also be preparing any types of foods that the family had requested and we have remains, archaeological remains here of cow, apparently an extraordinary amount of beef,

and there were cow teeth found on this site so that tells us the cook was doing everything from butchering all the way to preparing the food. it was complete to this configurati configuration. in the 1830s they added dormers. but it remains prethety much unchanged. the house was lived in by two generations of hidels and then after slavery, a number of different families lived here when it was operated as a wage

labor farm, free labor farm. so we're going to enter into the ground floor. any domestic slaves that worked on this plantation would come into this house through the back. so we've made a choice to enter the house through the back as enslaved people would enter it. the front of the house is really where you get the kind of grand vista. but the back is really more of the labor center. so there would be a path that cut all the way from the kitchen to the back. and enslaved people would go into a pantry over here to prepare the food for plating and service and then take it into the dining room. so we are in the dining room of the whitney plantation big house. the dining room is on the ground floor. and the floor has spanish tile, which we had recreated. we did find restoration.

enslaved people built the levies along the mississippi. it was set back from the mississippi river not terribly far. and so all of the people who were enslaved on the particular plantations along the river road were responsible for building the levy, maintaining the le vi right in front of that place. so some of these big houses, and this may have been one of them, but some of them were originally open air on the ground floor to allow for kind of flooding. s this the dining area where enslaved people, we have furnished this big house using not any original pieces from this family because they stopped living here in 1867. but we have inventories taken at two points in the 19th century. and we used those as our guide.

basically like an insurance adjuster, they would just walk room to room and record everything down to each individual fork. over to the side here, we also have another pantry that would be used for service. and around the corner on the floor, there's an interesting feature which is an olive jar sunk into the floor for refrigeration and this is original. so the slave domestics who worked here could use this to cool down food or wine. if they were serving a chilled dessert, that would be a good place to let it chill before service. the oaks in the front of the house are actually not that old. they're only about 50 years old, added much later. and the best thing we know is that in a photograph in the 1920s, there was a fence coming up kind of close to the house

and there were gardens coming right up against the front of the house, which is really kind of an old fashioned configuration for landscape design. so that would be sometimes flowers and just a real militshh of things grown right up to the house. so the way this house is constructed is typical of french design, french and caribbean. something that's a little bit unusual for people who live in areas settled by the english. it does not have interior hallways or staircases. however, the porch would act almost like a hallway. you could walk from one room on the end to one room on the other just on the porch. it's also important to note they are african in origin. and the people who built these houses were african and african descended slaves, building things that were familiar to them.

something that is really significant about the whitney big house is the original murals which are here. this is the only part that we have had reconstructed, our conservator had to redo this pattern because it was so deteriorated. however, we do have the original on the posts here. and these are from the 1840s. this is from a time of great sugar wealth and so that's why this is really significant. some people in the 1840s, 1850s, built enormous mangss. and most of our visitors here are expecting to see something like tara, you know, something they've read about or seen in movies. and by comparison, these are really pretty modest houses. but they were able to make enough money using the forced labor of african descended slaves to pay someone to come out and hand paint faux marble on their base boards, on their fireplaces, on the outside

walls, on these posts. and all of this attention to detail, all of that cost a lot of money. and that money came from that forced labor in the fields. so we're walking into one of the large bedrooms and this has typical furnishing of the era. mid 1th century. and also again, has more of this decorative mural work on the fireplace. you can see the marbling on the fireplace as well. this was the family's home, but enslaved people were in every room of this house. performing labor. in a bedroom like this, the family members might have personal servants, people who sometimes even in some houses,

we don't know here, but in some houses they slept on pallets on the floor, next to the bed of their owners. they would perform labor in this room, like cleaning, of course, dusting, getting autoof the clothing ready for people to wear, lighting the fire. and we have a bed warmer on the bed as well. so in the wintertime, enslaved domestics would fill a bed warmer like that with coals and then run it underneath the sheets to get the bed warm before the family got in. of course, also enslaved people would be tending to the personal hygiene of their owners as well. there were chamber pots in here that enslaied domestics had to empty out. so everything from start to finish was done by enslaved workers. including, of course, raising children. so any children who were raised in this house, any heidel children would be physically nursed and cared for by enslaved wet nurses.

so enslaved nurses usually slept in the same room as the children and formed a real bond with those children. and this again is a really interesting kind of relationship where one person is enslaved and one person is the enslaifr, yet there is an intimate bond there that has this division right in the middle. the center salon also retains a lot of that original yurl work. and the most elaborate is on the ceiling. we believe that this work was commissioned. she was the owner from 1840 to 1860. her husband had died in 1839. we believe this may have been a commemorative piece. this room, it's really difficult when we come in here, not to just sort of gawk at how beautiful it is. there's a lot of really remarkable furniture. the decor is really quite lovely. and most visitors imagine themselves as the people who

would be relaxing. they think wouldn't it be nice to relax in a room like this. but it's important to think about the different ways this room would be used. it would be a site of relaxation, but it would again be a site of labor for the enslaied people. one thing we draw from the era that was common, if there were slave enslaved people who were skilled musicians or in any form of entertainment, they might be called upon after their work in the field concluded to entertain the family. solomon northup was a skilled fiddle player. he all he wanted to do was rest in his cabin. he had to come into the house and perform fiddle for dances and balls all night long. you can understand that being forced or compelled to entertain when all you want to do is relax

and be by yourself would be another form of psychological torment for enslaved people. in the last big bedroom here, these people lived inside the big house as well. we'll go from here out on to the back porch. here you can see the end of those historic murals. these patterns, by the way, come from a standard pattern book, a french pattern book. this was a motif done from a pattern book. or conservator game out here and uncovered all of this painting. you can see the condition it was in right here. there's a couple of spots that were dark, so you can see how

deteriorated it had been. something that's expressive a little bit of life after the civil war. you can see all of these scribbles. these are children who lived in this house after slavery ended. some of these are dated. these are heights. so hooer we have, says 14th of july, 1894. lillian at 10 years old right here. the family lived here for many years after slavery ended. and these are written in krinch as well. that's also interesting in learning about the cull choor here. so after slavery ended, this plantation continued operating as a cain and rice plantation for many, many years. in the front of house, close to the river road, we have the original plantation you can see

it as a method of oppression in these types of labor forms. these plantations will build stores. it's kind of like a company store. you hear that in the north, too, a company store. the workers would have to shop there for all of their goods. they would deduct that from the money that they would make working in the fields. sharecropping is actually not common in sugar because you can't really sharecrop sugar. you need the whole crop to make anything. you can't just grow this amount and get anything from it. so they had wage laborers. and the wage laborers on this plantation would live in the same slave cabins. many of them would be the former slave themselves or their desen daents. people were living in these slave cabins until the 1960s and working the same fields. we have a lot of records from the plantation store and worked

currently beginning on a project processing those. they had a whole different experience, but some things stayed very much the same as they had been during slavery times. >> you're watching american history tv. for information on our upcoming programs and to keep up on the latest history news. and there's more on american history tv's facebook page, including video of recent programs and viewer comments. that's at facebook.com/cspan history. >> the supreme court cases that shaped our history come to life with the c-span series "landmark cases." our 12-part series explores real life experiences.

>> john marshall said in marbury versus madison says the constitution is a political document. it setups the political structures, but it's also a law. and if it's a law, we have the courts to tell what it means and that's binding on the other branches. >> what sets dread scott apart is the fact that it is the ultimate anti-press dential case. it's exactly what you don't want to do. >> who should make the decisions about those debates. >> each week, american history tv's american artifacts visits museums and historic places. up next, a visit to the national museum of the american jewish history in philadelphia. to learn about their poor exhibition, tracing the history of the jewish people in america

from 1654 to the present day. this is part one of a two-part program. >> welcome to the national museum of jewish american history in philadelphia, pennsylvania. i name is claire pingle. i'm the associate curator her s at the museum. i'm happy to give you a tour today. the museum was started in 1976 by one of the five original jewish congregations that date back to the colonial period. it's half a block north from us. we shared a building with them for 35 years and opened in this location in november 2010. we are right in the middle of independence mall here in philadelphia. we are halfway between independence hall where the nation really got its start even the national constitution center which explores the founding dopts of this nation.

we like to think that we are an example of what happens when a people are allowed to live in liberty. our museum is organized so that we have a big atrium right in the middle of the building. on this side of the atrium, we have some orientation spaces, and on the other side of the atrium is where the bulk of our exhibition is, where all the artifacts and stories unfold. in the orientation areas of the museum, we want to give visitors a little bit of breathing space and set them in the mood of what they're about to see on the other side of our atrium. so in this area, we talk a little bit about who jews are, where they came from. we knew that we would have a lot of jewish visitors coming in, but we've also been pleased that we've had a lot of people coming in who aren't jewish, who might need a little bit more explanation of who these people are, who they're about to learn about in our exhibition on the other side of our atrium.

>> these settlers came from brazil, which had just been taken over by the portuguese. so the jewish colonists in brazil had to leave. most colonists had already left when these 23 boarded a ship and came to north america. this is the earliest known record of their arrival here. it refers to these 23 original jewish permanent settlers. there had been other jews here prior to these people, but they were not people who stayed and built a community.

these settlers arrived in new amsterdam where they quickly became part of the local fabric of the community, setting up organizations like a synagogue and other organizations that make them a community of people who stayed in new york and new amsterdam. one of these people was named asur levy. he became part of that original jewish community there. new amsterdam was not a very friendly place for jews in 1654. the governor of new amsterdam didn't really want the jews there, but they were allowed to stay and levy became a champion for jews in the new colony, fighting for their right to serve in the militia and be full citizens of the colony.

historians believe that levy kept a kosher home. we have here his estate inventory, and it lists two of many kitchen implements. which would indicate, could indicate that he used one for meat and one for dairy, keeping those separate. we explore the five original colonies. the jews who live here are people historians now refer to as port jews. many were involved in commerce and trade and in port cities all over the atlantic. we have some portraits of some of these people here. most notably to us is the portrait here in the top left corner. he came from central europe and

he chose to depict himself posed with the five books of moses. one is on the table here. there are four other volumes up here on the bookshelf of. this is unusual in colonial jewish portrait chur. jews generally didn't include any indication that they were jewish in their portraits. this is a model of the sin nothing in new port, rhode island. you'll notice the balcony up above where the women would have sat. everything is to scale. this was made by a model maker in illinois who was not jewish but was very interested in the synagogue and went to the library of congress and studied the floor plans for benjamin peter harrison's design for the synagogue, which ask a very new port building. there are no outward signs that this is a jewish building. new port's jews were just

building a colonial building. he was one of the finest architects in the colonies at the time. it's a pa laidian building. the next gallery of the exhibition explores the american jewish experience in the revolutionary war. not all jews were yankees, but it would have been very difficult for people to choose to follow the revolution. this was a very new idea to rebel against the crown. so we do talk about jews who were torys as well as those who were patriots. and one of the most famous patriots, of course, is haim solomon who helped finance the revolution by selling bonds for the revolutionary army to help raise money. so we have a little -- a few

arty fangts from his life, including his marriage certificate, an advertisement for his business, and a receipt, a ledger sheet right here in james madison's hand where madison is recording expenses and the receipt of funds from various people who were helping to raise money for the revolution including on the second line there, haim solomon. solomon was a congregation of the synagogue that started this museum. one of the big stars of our exhibition is right here. this is correspondent between george washington and the jewish congregation of newport, rhode island. these are on loan to us from the morguen zs stern foundation. we're very excited to have these on loan.

when he arrived, various groups addressed him, including the jewish community of new port. and this is the address that was read outloud to washington that day on august 17. a very quickly afterwards, probably within a day or a few days, washington would write back to the congregation a very eloquent letter confirming his belief that the new nation should -- and his commitment to religious tolerance in the new nation. it's really one of the founding document for american jewish history. it's a very important thing for us to have on display here. new port was not the only community to address washington and receive a well considered letter confirming washington's

belief in religious libtd in response. we have a couple more letters across the way here. the community of savannah also wrote to washington, as did many other religious groups. we have a list here of different groups that wrote to him. despite this confirmation of commit by the federal government of religious wlibt, jews haed to overcome obstacles to complete liberty. many states had religious tests that blocked jews from holding office at the state level. generally that would be -- you would have to take an oath on a christian bible in order to hold office. jews can't do that. so those laws were struck down one by one in the states that help held them.

the latest was in 1877. so it took a very long time for this. in this gallery, we look at the mid 19th century from the period of about 1820 to right around the civil war, the 1860s. in this gallery, especially over here in this gallery, you'll notice that we paid a lot of attention to our youngest visitors while we were organizing this exhibition. we didn't want kids to be bored when they were walking through this history museum. it's no not a dry history. we really nougt about ways to keep children engaged while they're here. throughout the building you'll find stations with kids books where parents or grandparents can sit down with children and read to them and different activities that can engage children. i even see adult visitors trying on costumes in our pioneer gallery here.

the pioneer gallery is a story around fannie brookser who was a young woman, a teenager in central europe who married a man who had already been to america and came back to europe and was planning to come back to america and join a wagon train. she set off on thissed a men chur with him and came to america and traveled all over the country with him in a wagon. she left very detailed memoirs for her daughter, for her children, with allowed us to recreate the wagon she traveled on on her journey. and gave us a lot of information about the types of supplies they brought with them on their journey. these are two basically 16-year-old kids off in america by themselves.

the children can try on costumes, think about what they would pack if they were going on a journey like this. they can pretend to cook dinner around a campfire and visit a trading post. the types of people coming here are expanding in variety and the nation itself is geographically expanding as the boundaries move west. and jews are traveling along with those boundaries, going out west for the gold rush and for different opportunities and to get, you know, to be out in the open and for adventure as well. for exploration. in this gallery, we talk about the civil war. we know that jews found themselves on both sides of the conflict, like other americans. they divided mainly along geographic lines.

if you lived in the north, you were likely to support the union. and if you lived in the south, you were likely to support secession. jews also were on both sides of the debate over slavery. this is a very vivid artifact. the original is in the mangun collection in california. it's a lithograph of a rabbi in neat. at some point in the war, he apologized for not speaking out against slairy saying right must be right whatever the consequences. and coming out on the side of abolition. one of his former supporters, a man named jacob cullen of new orleans dei faced his portrait and sent it back to him in protest. the family kept this and eventually donated it to the

magnus museum. there were about 10,000 jews who fought in the civil war. 7,000 for the union, and we think about 3,000 for the confederacy. that disparity of numbers might just have to do with where jews lived. there were more jews in the north. in 1852, up with of the more well known instances of the civil war for jews is grants order number 11. general grant was in charge of keeping track of the cotton industry during the war. it needed to continue because the north needed cotton. the south needed funds. so grant was charged with making sure there was no black market, which there was. i believe it was during hanukka, grant issued orders that because

jews as a class were trading in cotton on a black market they all needed to be expelled from several states, kentucky, tennessee, other states. and about 300 families were displaced because of these orders. the jews were incensed about lumping people in one group and protested directly to lincoln. this is a letter frto abraham lincoln in early january 1863. as soon as lincoln heard about this, it seems that he wrote to grant and told him that he needed to rescind these orders. grant later protested that he had not read the orders, that he just signed them, that they had been written by a subordinate. and a lot of people thought that this might come back to haunt him when he ran for office a few

years later. the thought was maybe jews wouldn't vote for grant, but we know that jews did vote for grant. they forgave him for this. >> we look at several aspects of the jewish experience in the civil war. the home front, fighting in the war, as well as serving in government. this woman is particularly interesting. she was from a prominent family in charleston. she had married a man from pennsylvania who was a general in the union army. she went to war with him, which many women did with their husbandss. she wrote a memoir and it includes photographs about the war and her experience. in those memoirs she wrote that she had never really fully

realized the fraternal side aspect of the conflict until she was nursing her brother one day and her northern husband the next. this really embodies that concept. one development we saw was the first jewish chaplains came into being during that time. up until the civil war, a chaplain in the army had to be a regularly ordained minister of some congregation. jews fought to have that law changed so that it was just a regularly ordained minister. of a congregation. so this is the first charter for a jewish chaplain signed by abraham lincoln, just above those flags.

this is on loan to us from a congregation here in philadelphia. the first jewish chaplain was rabbi jacob frankel. we explore the story of judah benjamin who was a high ranking official in the confederacy. we look at reform judaism, which was not an american movement originally. it was a european movement that was sort of imported over here to america. it has three main aspects. one is that prayers in english are introduced, or whatever country the reform is happening in. in america, that's english. not everyone could understand the he brew prayers anymore and it was important for people to understand what they were saying during services.

as well as mixed seating was being introduced so that unlike the torha synagogue model we looked at earlier, there were women seated in a balcony with children and men would sit down on the level of the bema where the reader is positioned. at this time, family seating was being introduced. in this image of temple emanuel in new york, you can see that there are women down here with their husbands and families. and we have an orchestra in the balcony. music and choirs and instruments were introduced during services. reform judaism was not without controversy. there were a lot of people who did not think reform was good. some people thought that it was a die lugs of jewish tradition

and they should stay the same and follow from generation to generation very closely. people went as far to say that reform judaism was a way of making judaism more like protestant christianity. in 1883, the first rabbis were being ordained. before the 1880s, all rabbis had been ordained in europe. there were no american ordained rabbis. there were a couple in 1875, but generally rabbis came from europe and came over here and worked. people all over the country were invited to a banquet including a lot of different rab lies in

different areas. they sat down to a meal that included food that was not kosher. so this is a menu from that event. this is an oyster fork from the caterer that is onloan to us. this was a big controversy obviously. not all of the rabbis who came were reform minded. a lot of people kept kosher and were faced with all these nonkosher foods at this meal. and it was a big controversy. it became known as the trefa banquet, meaning nonkosher food. at the end of the century, we're here in about the 1870s, 1880s in this gallery. a lot of the central european jews who had emigrated from europe in the mid 19th century had kind of made their way in america and settled in and they have professions and jobs now. they become interested in giving back to the community, back to

the wider community as well as the jewish community. they start to get organized and old balls in support of different charitable causes. this is around the time when some of the first jewish federations of jewish charities get founded. a popular time for these balls is a holiday of purin which is focused on charity. we have a few ar fi tacts related to purim balls. the charities could include hospitals to orphanages to support for the immigrants who are starting to come over in greater numbers from eastern europe. each floor in our building ends

with a time line. we wanted to give people an idea of when things happened in relation to other things. so our time line has three levels. american history, american jewish history, and world history. some of these events are cover ed on the floor we just left, others are not, like the building of taj mahal. i was surprised to learn that the taj mahal was completed only 11 years before the first 23 jewish refugees came here to our shores. it's a nice way to orient people to review what we've just seen and see how it fits in with other things we know about. my title is jeff rerj star and associate curator my main focus is our artifact collection. i oversee its preservation and see that it's getting processed

correctly and that it's accessible to researchers. i also write text and do research for our exhibitions. artifacts help us tell stories about history in a way that we can't get out of books. when you're stanning in sfront of an artifact, it's a different experience than reading a book. it's a direct witness to the history you're learning about. and it's really a special experience. >> this was the first of a two-part look at jewish history. >> each week, american history tv's american artifacts visit museums and historic places. up next, a visit to philadelphia's national museum

of american jewish history for a tour of their exhibition, tracing the history of jewish people in america from 1654 to the present day. the second of a two-part visit, we pick up the story in the 1880s when the era of mass immigration brought thousands of jewish immigrants to eastern europe every year. our guide is curator claire pingel. >> in the 1880s we saw big waves of immigrants coming to america. they included jews, i rash, italians. all kinds of people were coming in to ellis island. people were all coming into boston as well as from places you wouldn't think.

everything from passports to visas. luggage tags, health inspection certificates. and these are things that people tended to save for a very long time afterwards. and each pass down to their children. jews left here for many different reasons. one of the most well known, of course, is anti-semitic violence that happened in europe. things called pagras whi. they were very traumatic experiences and they were remembered by the grandchildren. however, they're not the only reason people left. people left for geographic freedom, for economic opportunity, and to avoid

military conscription. one of my favorite stories in this area is that of albert hatchwell and his family. hatchwell was an algerian jew. he lived in algeria in the 1890s. of course we always think of these jews who came here in this time period as being from eastern europe, but hatchwell stands here to let us know that not everyone was coming from eastern europe. people were coming from all over the place. his descendants gave us his fez and we have on loan a pair of coffee pots that descended down through his family. when people arrived here in america, they both a welcoming harbor and not always a welcoming harbor. some weren't happy about immigrants coming, but others

were helping these immigrants become acclimated to their new surroundings. we have several books on display here that were written for these incoming immigrants to help them figure out what american life was like. so the books ranged from how to get your citizenship started, how to find employment, how to be socially accepted in some cases. we have a few examples of the types of things immigrants brought with them. it's always surprising to see the large objects people brought with them when they didn't have a lot of luggage space. you see pictures of immigrants traveling with a basket or a satchel or their back. but some people managed to drag over from europe entire cooking sets. things they could much more easily got here when they got

themselves established, but they just chose to bring them with them. a lot of times people stopped using these things when they got here and got new american things, but they kept the european things and passed them down to their families. which is nice for us because those families then donate them to museums and help us tell stories. eva bane was 17 years old when she came to america by herself, following a brother who had already come here. eva is the one standing in the middle in that photograph where she's appearing with her family back home in europe. she came to philadelphia, lived with an uncle for a while and she later told her daughter that she had em gritted because she had finished the educational opportunities had run out for her at home and she wanted to continue going to school. and she felt that she could only do that here in america.

whej you talk about the different reasons people come here, that's a compelling one for all of us. she brought a muffin tin. it belonged to her grandmother. she brought with her this table runner that she stitched while she was on the journey. before the museum opened, we had this table runner reviewed by a textile conservator to make sure that we knew that we were displaying it in a way that would best preserve it. one interest thing the conservator told me was that it was made from a kit that would have been purchased. so i like to think about ava thinking about this long ocean voyage ahead of her and thinking about what am i going to do i'm on the boat and going out and buying a kit so she could do some embroidery while she was sitting on the ship waiting to get to america. in this area, we call this our street scape.

it is a typical immigrant urban neighborhood. we have different smaller galleries that go off from this area where we talk about different subjects, including the way that people lived, their home life, a lot of people lived in tenements. many had borders living with them in a small two-room apartment. so this was a different experience. people were living very close to each other close to people of other nationalities and learning about them in this situation. one gallery that surprises a lot of our visitors is this one where we explore the farming experience.

not all immigrants ended up in urban experiences. some took up farming. this afghan and tools belonged to the kalof family. rachel kalof came to america and promptly moved to a homestead in north dakota where she lived with her husband. for seven year before the family moved to chicago. in this gallery we learn about the work the jews were doing at this time in urban communities. a lot of factory work, a lot of manufacturing and, of course, the garment industry was a major area that employed a lot of jews in factories. this was a time when the labor unions started getting more traction here in america. people began fighting for rights like shorter working hours and

basic safety in their factory settings. this is from a man who came to america and worked in a garment factory where he met his wife. they left the factory together and started a tailor shop. and he worked at this sewing machine for 30 years. we learn about the jewish experience in world war i. this uniform was worn by a doctor in the american expeditionary forces stationed in france did you know there were 300 female marines in 1851. these women mostly had clerical positions. the marines were really looking to open up positions so that

have more men could go overseas. she worked in washington, d.c. where she worked as a payroll person. in the 1920s, the fears of immigrants which had been boiling during the time of the great migration to america started to come to a head and eventually leading to the johnson reed act of 1984 which effectively ended immigration by ins instituting quotas. this would of course become a very difficult thing, an obstacle ten years later when a lot of european jews could have used another safe harbor during the rise of the nazis. the 1920s was a rise of anti-semiti anti-semitism, largely due to the immigration surge that had happened up until the 1920s.

so here we talk a little bit about that, about henry ford's anti-semitism and the protocols of zion, this was a fraudulent document purportedly outlining a jewish conspiracy to take over the world. it was published during the 1920s. in the 1930s, there was a sort of cultural flourishing in america despite the depression. a lot of really rich artistic activity and so in this area, we look at the rise of the movies in the 1930s, as well as yiddish theatre. we look at the wpa that supported artists in the 1930s. we also look at the political situation in america, a lot of people were espousing different concepts like socialism or

zionism. we also explore religion in the 1930s. congregation shari eli was a south philadelphia immigrant synagogue that opened its doors in 1918. by the 1980s, membership slacked off and the congregation would soon be closing its doors. people moved out of the neighborhood and they didn't need the big sin nothing anymore. someone from the congregation called our museum and asked if we would like to go in and see their torah arc, which our curators did in 1984. they entered the synagogue and saw a monumental hand carved, hand painted torah arc that had been maid by these immigrants in south philadelphia 70 years earlier. we salvaged the entire tora torah arc. part is on display now,

including these lions that were up near the ceiling. we think that a lot of the carving was done by people who were carving care zell animals. you can see that kind of in the face of the lion. in this era, we look at the american experience of world war ii and the holocaust. jewish leaders were faced with a dilemma. should they boycott germany and rally in the streets and make lots of noise? or should they quietly work behind the scenes to come to a diplomatic solution to this rising problem of the nazi rise in europe. there was domestic anti-semitism. we saw in an earlier gallery, henry ford's publications, espousing virulent anti-semitic

believes. you had people like father coughlin, who was a catholic priest who had a radio show and was a national figure who spoke up against jews, very ant anti-semitic. of course, during this time, there were very strict quotas for who could enter america and when. the visa system was very controlled. this is a steamer trunk from a family that attempted to immigrate in 1939 on a luxury ship that was carrying 937 passengers from germany to cuba. most of these people were jewish and most of them had visas to enter the united states a the a later date. they were going to wait out the time period before that in cuba. when they arrived in havana, they realized that their landing

permits were fraudulent. they had been sold to them by a corrupt government official. so only a few people were able to get off the boat in cuba. the jewish community in america scrambled to try to figure out how to give these 930 people refuge in america. and they were ultimately unable to do so because those quota system was so very strict. the ship had to turn back to europe. joseph josephs who was on the ship with his wife lily and daughter leisle, this is their trunk, was part of the passenger committee that the captain who was ship, who was not jewish organized in order to boost spirits of the passengers as they were on their trip back to europe. people were terrified of what would happen to them when they had to get off the ship again. this particular family made their way to america the following year. they got off the ship in great britain and came to philadelphia

the following year. in 1997, we got a call from an auction house the auctioneer is a friend of the museum. the steamer trunk was put on consignment and he was looking at it and he noticed a sticker that said st. louis on it and he knew about the journey of the st. louis, so he called us and asked us if we were interested in the trunk. and he very generously purchased it from the consigner and donated it to the museum and it's now one of our really special artifacts here. by 1944, it was widely known that the holocaust was happening in europe.

we were immersed in world war ii and the secretary general asked several of his aides to write a report on this subject, what the government was doing to help aid european jews. these aides, including josiah dubois wrote a long report to him after studying the subject. he titled it on the acquiesce sense of this government on the murder of the jews. very explicit statement of what was happening. morganthal condensed this report, presented it to roosevelt and several days later, the war refugee board was instituted to try to help get people out of europe and give them refuge in america. despite that, very few people were able to come here. more went to england or other places.

but one of the phenomena that we saw was that a lot of americas s jewish and nonjewish started organizing and trying to figure out ways, grassroots ways to get threatened people out of hostile territory to america. one of those stories was that of helga weiss and 49 other children who were saved by a couple and the jewish fraternal organization. this couple gilbert and eleanor krause were able to obtain 50 visas to help bring unaccompanied children from europe to america. they traveled to europe to interview the families of people who applied for these visas. and one of them was helga weiss. her parents rosa and emil weiss

applied for her to be in this transport. they had already sent their older daughter to palestine so she could be safe there and they were happy to find a spot for helga on this transport. helga brought with her this teddy bear, a set of pajamas that her mother had made for her. and her mother's hair brush. this is helga in her passport here. she strongly remembered the application process. she was only 8 years old at the time, but she later said she always remembered having to write everything forgetly and the amount of pressure that was on her to do efrl perfectly during this application because her parents were so frightened that fe she didn't -- if her handwriting wasn't perfect then she might not be chosen to go on this trip and be rescued. helg a's mother died in the holocaust. her father managed to come to america and she had been living

with a foster family during this time. about a year when they were separated and they moved to detroit where she grew up. a very sweet lady. she trained seeing eye dogs later in life. and used this teddy bear in school presentations that in he experience of jewish people during the holocaust. >> so in this gallery, we look at the experience of jewish soldiers fighting in the war, both men and women.

we look at culture during this time meperiod, cold war and establishment of the state of israel, as well as carrying on jewish traditions. both of the floors above us started with an immigration story. this floor starts really more with a migration story. a lot more of them went to israel, some stayed in europe, some came to america. the establishment of the state of israel was a roop really momentous story.

it carried a lot. a safe refuge, a jewish home. during the 1950s, we experienced the red scare. and this was a very frightening time for jewish for jewish people, many of whom had been involved in communism in the period before in the urban neighborhoods. a lot of ideas were percolating about how to improve america, how to make things work well for everybody. and communism was one of those ideas that people had. one of the big news stories at the time was the trial of julius and ethel rosenberg who were a jewish couple. we know now that julius was -- we're not sure of ethel's involvement in the plot, but

they were executed. at the time, people didn't necessarily believe they were spies, but they were anti-semitic and certainly there were anti-semitic aspects to the way that americans were reacted to their trial. you hear about the hundred black list, and it was a real thing. this is a book called red channels. it was written and published in 1950. if you open up the book, you'll see all kinds of famous names of very well known people, and it goes through and it lists everything that they did that was considered unamerican. this is the summons for screen writer alb bessie to come before the house on american activity committee. she became what was known as part of the hollywood ten, which

were a group of hollywood people who were imprisoned. bessie was in jail for a year in contempt of congress, who would never work in hollywood again. in this area, we look at the experience of jewish families who moved out of the urban areas into the suburbs that were opening up. at the end of world war ii, a lot of people had the opportunity to get an education, start a business, and buy a house. in a nicer place than the immigrant neighborhoods they had been in. so a lot of people were moving to the new suburbs outside of the city. here we talk about the catskill, very famous, and also the leisure activities in the post war period, going to resorts for vacation, where the catskills

were of course a mountain area in upstate new york that became popular with artists in the 19th century, and then with vacationers later on, people looking to get out of the city. that's the hotel book, they wouldn't accept jews to register at the hotel. so jews started to build their own hotels, including classics like the concord, kutcher's. a lot of the clientele was jewish. they would have kosher services and facilities in the fall. one of the results of people moving out to these suburbs was

that weren't in such tight-knit communities anymore. they wanted to help the children remain jewish, support jewish tradition in their children and meet other jews in their community where they have a lot of christian neighbors. so this is a time period when the first jewish community centers were established in america and people are making an effort to send their children to jewish schools or to supplemental jewish schools after school and on the weekends. here we look at jewish summer camp. along with sendingt 1200

>> she made hundreds and hundreds of them. and brought them to schools and taught kids about the bible. she eventually opened a commercial business, the american bible doll company, which sold bible dolls in department stores in the 1950s and '60s and eventually a large collection of these bible dolls came to the museum in the 1980s that came directly from diana foreman, that she had made. so in this area, we start to

look at the 1960s, 1970s, a time of great social fermenting of different ideas. we look at jews who were involved in the civil rights moment. we look at feminism, and the jewish relationship with israel in this time period as well. the last area of our exhibition, where we have artifacts is this area, where we look at the 1980s and jewish culture in this time period, as well as just identity, what is means to be a jew in the late 20th and early 21st century. this is a hanukkah mennora that was designed by a holocaust survivor from germany. he collected a lot of artifacts. he designed this in 2011 when the statue of liberty turned 125

years old. he made a cast of a little statue of liberty souvenir statueett. and turned it into a mennora. we have it on display here, and we actually loaned it out to the white house a couple of years ago. president obama lit it for hanukkah. we wanted to give our visitors a chance to talk back to us and talk with each other after making their way through this exhibition and learning about the history of the jewish people in america. so in this gallery, we project four questions all the time. we change them according to current events. if something happens, we ask a new question, and visitors get a chance to fill out a post-it note with their opinion and put it on the wall and see how people are reacting to contemporary events, which have a lot to do with historical

events. >> this was the second of a two-part look at the national museum of american jewish history. you can watch this and all other american history programs at c-span.org/history. >> american artifacts continues with items that have been left at the vietnam veterans memorial in washington, d.c. later we'll in louisiana. and later, a look at what's on display at the national museum of american jewish history. each week, american history tv's american artifacts visits museums and historic places. the vietnam veterans memorial collection includes 400,000 items left at the memorial since it apriled in 1982. the collections are stored in the blue boxes. next, we visited the national

park service to see a selection of items left at the wall. >> hi. i'm the museum technician for the national park service. i work specifically for the vietnam veterans memorial collection, which is housed here in the museum resource center. the building is for the national capital region parks. but our collection specifically is housed entirely in this building. we are a collection of objects that are left at a memorial in d.c., vietnam veterans memorial. visitors come by every day, leave objects at the memorial which our park rangers collect. and then every two weeks or so, we do a pickup at the memorial. we bring them out here to our moo zeal resource center where we sourt through them and catalog them and make them part of our collection. i have chosen objects to show you from the collection.

they kind of cover the range of topics that the collection interprets, including ptsd, mothers and fathers who lost children. they are objects that will go on display soon. they are good examples of the tin things in the collection. this was left at the wall in the '90s. this is part of a door that was in this man's -- corporal petals' room when he was in high sk school or so. the note sfr his from his broth. it tells you the context of the scene you see here. petal drew this on his door when he was still at home. it depicts a serviceman over the body of maybe a dead soldier. after he drew it, he drew his own name on the dog tags of the dead soldier. his mother was not okay with

that. she didn't think that very was cool. she made him erase it. soon after, he went into the military, went to vietnam and he was killed in action. and his brother cut this out of the door and brought it to the wall after he wrote michael's name again on the dog tags. he left it at the wall for his brother. and i don't know if you can get a close-up of the letter here. it's a really good letter. it tells the same story. in a much better way than i could ever. big brother, you never made it home so i brought a piece of home to you. here is the picture you drew on your bedroom door before you went to vietnam. i know you put your name on the dog tags and mom made you erase it. so i filled it back in. you seemed old when you went to vietnam. now i know you were a young man. i remember the things we did together, the motorcycle rides

and the handstands up the stairs. i wanted to thank you for watching out for me. these are some of the objects that we have selected for potentially going on loan to the ronald reagan library. they are having an exhibit in november. so we have done some initial selections for them. we're waiting on them to make the final approvals. they showcase kind of what is in the collection, what things the collection speaks about. this one specifically is a really good example of something left from a mother to a son. this was left on veteran's day in 1983. it was left by a woman called eleanor wimbish whose son, spanky, was killed in action in vietnam. she has leaving this type of

object since the wall was first dedicated. this one specifically mentions -- it was from '83. but this one specifically mentions her diary she wrote the year previous in 1982. she was there the day the wall w was dedicated. she describes seeing his name on the wall for first time and walking up to the wall, seeing his name and what she felt seeing his name. but then also looking around and seeing all the other people around her who was also touching the names of their loved ones. so it describes how overwhelming that was for her. she continued to leave letters like this, wrapped in plastic, on a poster board for at least ten, 15 years. for her son. and she would do it on his birthday, on the day he died,

mother's day, veteran's day, christmas, easter, things like that. just for the holidays that he missed. the day was unseasonably warm and sunny when we arrived in washington, d.c. we got out of the car and started walking towards this memorial. i could feel the pull towards this black wall and yet my feet didn't want to move. i was so scared. i was afraid i would find your name on the black wall and yet i was afraid some mistake had been made and your name had been left out. so how does one try to explain such mixed emotions? i will never forget the day as your father and i started looking for your name. we had been looking for about a half an hour when your father quietly said, honey, here he is. as i looked to where his hand was touching the black wall, i saw your name. william r. stocks. my heart seemed to stop. i felt as though i couldn't breathe. it was like a bad dream. my teeth chattered.

i felt as though i were freezing. god, how it hurt. i looked around at all the people and then up and down this black wall. this memorial to all these men and women who lost their lives in vietnam, these thousands and thousands of names. the collection started unexpectedly in 1982 from the very, very beginning of the memorial people started leaving things. right from the dedication people were leaving things at the memorial for their loved ones, for their missing loved ones, for those who came back and were wounded in action. it was an unexpected phenomena that kind of sprung up out of nowhere. for first two years, the park service wasn't sure what to do with things being left at the wall. it was unprecedented. no one had ever done anything -- no one had seen something like this happen before.

and for the first two years, they kept the objects isolated out of the way, trying to figure out what do with them. in 1984, our previous regional curator decided to make this -- all the objects an official park service collection. so after 1984, it became an official park service collection. we started collecting things regularly. and we have been doing it ever since. the blue boxes are kind of anticipate iconic -- what people see when they come here to the museum resource center to see the vietnam veterans memorial collection. they are made specifically for our collection. they are large. they are made out of plastic that won't decay or cause damage to the objects. they store all of the objects from vietnam veterans memorial collection. this is a letter left for a man

named gary from gritt. it was left august 5, 1989. the letter describes gary and gritt's interaction in vietnam. they were comrades in arms. apparently, gritt would always ask gary for the time. he never knew what time it was even though he was the radio operator and could easily call in and ask what the time was. so gary would always tell him. he also always lost his -- he called it his john wayne, which is the can opener here. so he would always have to use gary's can opener. and gary was killed after an explosive device detonated near him. and the letter describes how gritt held him if his arms as he grew cold and he wouldn't let him go. and finally, in 1989, he decided to leave his watch and his can opener at the wall for gary.

it was gary jenks. he's on the wall. so this flag and note were left on veteran's day 1992. the ten-year anniversary of the wall. and it was left by john sparks who was a prisoner of war for five years in vietnam. he coincidentally has done an oral history project with the library of congress which is very interesting, if you want go into the veterans history project, you can hear about his experience as a prisoner of war. but he left this flag which was presented to him upon his return to the united states after he was released. on it is a crucifix which he made out of a toothpaste tube and the tie is from his prison uniform. and right here there's a pin for the p.o.w. m.i.a., prisoners of

war, missing in action. the note is saying he is dedicating his flag to all the other men who are still missing in action or prisoners of war in vietnam. a lot of times veterans, if they want to come see the things that they left, we are always willing to give them a tour and show them around. it also helps us because we can connect specific names, donors to what they left. we have a big barrel that was left. i think it was left in 2002. i am too young to know what it was. but i have been told that in vietnam they used it as a letrine. an unfortunate soldier was given the job of burning it. but they came and they gave us a bit of context about what it was

and when they left it and why. so that's really cool. there's some donors who are still really active and want to see the things that they left. so this, as you may or may not know, is a roll of toilet paper. you may wonder why we have it in our collection. but toilet paper was as good as gold in vietnam, because if you were out in the field and you didn't have any toilet paper, you had to make due with something else less desirable. so we get little rolls of toilet paper. we get the little -- in the rations they were given sometimes a little thing of toilet paper. we get those left at the wall often, too. because vietnam veterans understand, when they see toilet painer in this context, they know what it was left for. but this one was left with this little note. it says, the jungle, it won't

wash off. the sounds, the smells, like the waves that come and go in the occasi ocean in my mind, the memories remain. left in 1992. these two photographs were left on veteran's day 1993, of which the dedication of the women's memorial. the women's memorial is dedicated to the women who served and died in vietnam. you don't often talk about the women of the war. there are eight women names on the member oral. there are 60 women who died in vietnam. they weren't enlisted in the military like the other eight women were. these are two photographs of doughnut dollies who are essentially american red cross volunteers. those were the other 60 women who died were volunteers or something of that sort. often were nurses in vietnam. they staffed the field

hospitals. so these two are dedicated to the boys at cameron army. it says all gave some, some gave all. it lists the ladies of the american red cross. they are from -- they were there from november 1971 to january 1972. this object was left at the vietnam veterans memorial june 4, 1992. it has a countdown of 365 numbers which 356 days is the standard tour that veteransgnyó served in vietnam. so i am assuming -- we don't have any other information about this. no background information, no note or anything. but i assume that he printed this out and counted down the days that he had to serve in vietnam. because it's titled, the long road home. on the bottom down here it says, my vietnam holiday.

and this is really interesting, because as he was crossing off the days, he would put a little bit more information about what his 280th day was. he points here, 269th day was christmas. he was at landing zone sue when he was in the hump for these days. his first anniversary, we don't know of what. doesn't describe what the anniversary is. i'm assuming as he would experience a day, he would cross it off. it has some other interesting days here, too. because we have the 4th of july. his 62nd day -- well, his day that he only had 62 more days was man has landed on the moon. and then his last five days, five-day drop. and then here he says, caution,

vietnam may be hazardous to your health. so this is what we see often for people who -- we get a lot of things for short timers where that was people who had 30 days or less in vietnam. so we have a lot of short timer sticks where they would notch off the days they had left. we have a lot of calendars where they were counting down the days until they got to go home. it's really interesting to see things like this, personalshls they carried it in vietnam. the park service is guided by certain rules that we follow. the antiquities act, the organic act that kind of -- i don't know. they set the basis for all museum collections in our nation. and specifically, for us, our collection is guided by a statement. every museum collection in the park service has a specific museum -- scope of collection

statement and ta dehat dictatest we keep, what we're interested in and our theeps a themes are, falls within our parameters and it also tells you what does not fall within the parameters of the collection. once they are brought here, we do what we call processing. that's kind of sorting through them, putting things together that go together, they were left by the same person or group of people. organic items like flowers and leaves and stuff that you really should not become part of a museum collection, food. we don't keep things that are hazardous to our health, obviously. that would include things like live ammunition, stuff like that. we don't keep unaltered, unpersonalized things. miniature flags that no one has written anything on.

once we process it, we put them into archival standard containers, bags and folders and stuff like that, boxes. then it gets cataloged into our cataloging database. then we -- we can use the objects for interpretation, for exhibits, for loans for things like that. so this is an example of a box that has been cataloged. everything in it is in our database. we could look up an object by its catalog number, which we see right here. this is the number which tells us when we received it into our collection. that's important for us to know when we took property of it, essentially. and as you can see, they are nicely folded. they have tags that will associate them if we have to take it out of the bag. we know what catalog number it is.

we tie up nicely the american flags. and we put archival objects, paper objects, in these folders. it's all organized that way. so if i need to pull something for a researcher or for an exhibit or something, i can look into our database and it will tell me where the object is and i go to that box and it's fairly easy to find, either in our folders or in a bag. this box is all this one -- they were all left at the wall around the same time. we organize everything by when it was left at the wall. this box i think is from around the ten-year anniversary. maybe just after the ten-year anniversary, which was november of 1992. so this is maybe around

christmastime, which is why you would see these types of ribbons, you know, bows and stuff like that. >> the oldest box in here would be 1984? >> we have four boxes from the two-year period, 1982 to 1984. when they were just initially collecting things. and that's one -- this is one of thechl right here. and you can see, a lot of the same types of things as were in the other box. it's a lot of the same types of things being left today. we have a lot of patches and pins. badges of all kinds, religious items. we have a lot of newspaper clippings. what we call documentary artifacts, the largest -- it's the largest category of objects

that are left at the wall. paper objects essentially. it includes letters, notes, poems, clippings, greeting cards, business cards, things like that. we get a lot of flags. a lot of plaques. so this card was left in 2000. it was left by ellen for barry bausch who was killed in vietnam. i'm just going to read it. it says, my dearest barry, it has been over 31 years since you were taken away from me. but you remain in my heart, my truest love always. as i visit the memorial wall today in washington, d.c., i leave with you the ring i gave you on your 18th birthday, the first summer we met. always know that i love you still. although i am married and have three beautiful children, laura, named affidav ed after your sis

and raina. will mourn for the family we were never given the chance to have. when the lord takes me home, i know i will meet you again and share many memories. so this letter and the trophy were left on october 30, 1988. for joseph craig peters. i believe it was left by his son. the trophy on the back says, with all my love, christmas, 1969, dad. so i assume that maybe his dad gave it to the son. the son came to the wall and left it. the note says, were you afraid? of course you were. the trick is not to be always fearless but never to be hopeless. the brave again -- to be brave again for those who have been brave for us and for those who will yet depend on us. it's a beautiful day. we would be playing golf. i would be beating you by two strokes, sucker.

and it's always, michael. it has a peace pendant on it. we have to kind of infer the background information for this. maybe they would always play golf together. before his dad went away to war. we don't really know. this note is all we have. this harmonica and the note was left on october 10, 1995. it was in an envelope addressed to gary thomas. he served as a radio telegraph operator for the third reconnaissance third marine. dear brother, ever since you were killed, i have been blowing the blues. i leave my harp here at the wall for you to blow some heavenly blueses for all those you left behind in this veil of tears. i miss you daily, brother bob.

so this is an in-country photograph left at the wall on august 9, 1989. it depicts first and second platoon c company, first battalion fifth marines. they are honoring three dead, which you can see three rifles stuck in the ground here with helmets on top of them. on the back he wrote what he knew of the men. one he named his name was robert sowia. another he called the new guy. and another he called mr. point. i looked -- i can look up the names. mr. sowia was killed on december 15, 1967. and so by looking up the people who were in that company who died on the same day, i found out that the other two men are probably william edwin pierson,

who was the new guy, and eddie lee jackson, who was mr. point. the one-fifth command chronology gave the reason for the deaths as company c squad patrol was hit by a command detonated booby trap consisting of two or three artillery rounds. the area was searched on 16 december and lead wires were found and followed with negative results. the incident resulted in one killed in action and six wounded in action. two of the men obviously later died. the new guy, mr. pierson, he had been in vietnam for just 24 days. before he was killed. both of these notes were left in august of 1986. i assume they're from the same woman. although, they both touch on two very different topics. in one she'ou how she was a nurse in vietnam. she signs it, lieutenant d.

baker, r.n. the other one is talking about her husband tom who died in vietnam. she signs it dana. the one she -- when she was a nurse, it starts off, i went to vietnam to heal and came home silently wounded. i went to vietnam to heal and still awaken from nightmares about those we couldn't save. i went to vietnam to heal and came home to grieve for those that we sent home blind, paralyzed, limbless, mindless. i went to vietnam to heal and discovered i am not god. and then the other one she talks about her husband tom. we would have been married 21 years this year. they got married when he was on leave in san diego. and i assume they both went back to the war where he was killed. so they were only married a very short time. but she leaves this letter in honor of him 21 years later. we get a lot of very similar

objects left at the wall. a lot of poems, a lot of cards, notes and stuff like this. but this one was left just this past july. it was pretty spectacular, i thought. it doesn't look exactly like it did when it was left at the wall. but it was 13 letters. they were written by this young man. his name is jim arbuthnon. addressed to his potential girlfriend back home. they are letters from when he was in basic training, up to ten from when he was first in vietnam. and so he was enlisted -- well, i think he joined voluntarily, not drafted. jim went to vietnam in early

1966. and he learned quickly that he only had to serve five months instead of the regular year-long tour because of some previous experience or some previous work that he had done. so he was very excited to get home and maybe get to know patricia better who he had just met before he went to vietnam. so his letters kind of show him putting his feelers out, trying to get to know her personality. they also show the types of things he was experiencing in vietnam like just going there for first time. the heat. the smells. all these men around him. no women anywhere. and he continued to send her letters until he was killed in march of 1966. he was only there for two months of his five-month tour before he was killed.

his last letter to patricia is dated 24th march 1966. he was killed on march 30th. the last thing he ever wrote to her was, it won't be long now. signed, jim. the collection -- i feel like the purpose of the collection is to help people -- the purpose of the wall was to help people heal, to get over their -- the things that happened to them in the past and to remember specifically the men who died in vietnam and this collection kind of lends a helping hand to that. people will leave things that are folk art that just make the process of making a craft helps them heal. there's a lot of things in the collection that have to do with ptsd. we have a lot of ptsd groups

that go to -- they do a therapy group and make something and they leave it at the wall. that's helping the healing process. then we have a lot of things that give just a little bit more information about a specific soldier's life. so when you go to the wall, you see all the names on the wall. but the collection kind of gives a little background history to those names. as long as somebody left something for a specific person, we can tell just a little bit more about that person's life. that's really what i think is the purpose of the collection. i am a history buff. i do enjoy seeing the fabric of our country and how things just how they work and how they're made. >> i love american history tv. the presidency. american artifacts. they are fantastic shows. >> i had no idea they did history. that's something i would really enjoy. >> with american history tv, it

gives you that perspective. >> i'm a c-span fan. each week american history tv's american artifacts visits museums and historic places. and up next, we travel to philadelphia's independence national historical park to learn about congress hall. the meeting place of the u.s. house and senate between 1790 and 1800. our guide is park ranger matthew aifel. >> we are in the old house of representatives in a building we call congress hall. originally, it was built as a county courthouse for philadelphia. for most of its history, that's what it was. in the years that the city of washington, d.c. is being built, philadelphia serves as our temporary u.s. capitol. this room serves for the house of representatives, the second floor of the building that we will see in a moment was the united states senate. the house of representatives, each representative at that point in our history represented

30,000 people. we had a population at our first census of about three and three-quarters million. we had 106 members of the house would sit in this room. and eventually, from 16 states. the story of philadelphia as the u.s. capital is the story where we take a new constitution and actually operating it, doing things like adding new states to the original 13. also the bill of rights would become a part of our constitution while philadelphia was the capitol. in fact, the setting of state thomas jefferson would announce the amendments to the constitution by basically coming to congress here in this building and officially announcing that we have changed our constitution. which, of course, the bill of rights is a huge part of our history and will be in the future continuing talking point in our political life. but also, it's the amendment process itself. we're proving that that part of

the constitution works, that we can update and make changes to that constitution without having to start completely over again from the beginning. but really, for this building, it's to a large degree -- it is creating the american political system. the two party system that we know today is going to begin here. and it's going to begin with issues much as you would expect. early issues that we face as the united states would be debt. we had debt and spending arguments and debates in this building. it's not any different except for the details as to what we do today in washington, d.c. we argue about debt from the revolutionary war, our early government alexander hamilton, treasury secretary wanted all the debt from the states to come to the federal government and then to use that debt paying it off to build credit for the young united states. not everybody agreed with his plans. so you start seeing division. and then foreign policy questions would arise.

britain and france go to war in the 1790s. a lot of americans would feel like we owed france. they helped us in our war. we still don't line the british very much. for george washington, the first president, the notion of neutrality is preferable. we don't really have any money. we didn't really have a navy at all. and our army was not much to speak of. so we certainly weren't in a position to go and fight a war. certainly not in europe and probably not even fighting our neighbors in british canada in those days. so he is going to present with his cabinet approval a neutrality proclamation which starts dividing us into this question of ought we be doing more to help france. in the same notion of keeping us out of war, george washington will send john jay, who was at that time our first chief justice of the supreme court, send him to britain to negotiate a new treaty with the british. with the idea of keeping us out

of this european war and settling some of those questions of border and ocean rights and such that we were arguing with the british. john jay had been on the team that negotiated the peace treaty that ended the revolutionary war. he seemed like a good candidate for washington to send. the treaty that he brought back becomes very controversial and one of the tipping points in creating the two parties as sort of leading to what we know today. the treaty is basically starts becoming publically attacks in the press. the press of the -- what would become the democratic republican party, the party of thomas jefferson and james madison would start vilifying this treaty. what's interesting is nobody has read it. it hasn't been published. but yet, it's going to be pilloried in the press to people hate the treaty that they don't

know anything about. the federalist side, of the john adams and alexander hamiltons, is in favor of the treaty. they are in favor of building the young economy of the united states, staying out of a war, trading with all sides in europe, not being limited by alliance to france or something like this. so we're really seeing this treaty become kind of of a symbolic head point between these two sides. and the senate approves the treaty. now according to the constitution senate approves treaties and they're done. the problem is the house of representatives -- this is our first treaty. the house of representatives says, we want a chance to discuss this treaty as well. and so they demand of washington to see all the papers and so on. well, he says, no. senate approves it. you don't have anything do with it. what the house essentially is going doing is they say, maybe what we will try do is take away

the funding. we won't pay for this treaty. anything that has to be paid for, we will not spend the money. therefore, the treaty will die at this point this time. that's not necessarily a new strategy that you see with things in washington, d.c. today. so the big fight in the house of representatives in this room is whether or not to pay for this treaty. there's days of debates. on the last day, there's a big crowd in our public balcony. you have men like vice president john adams, supreme court justices in the balcony. the big -- this is, of course, an era where we love speeches, long, political speeches, deep, infused with rhetoric. the best speaker of the time is a man named fisher ames. he is a federalist. he is definitely wanting this treaty to survive. he has been ill. he hasn't said anything. of course, this last day everyone is waiting to see if he with i will make the last statement. he does. he says, if my strength can hold

up, i would like to say a few words. he speaks over an hour. it's about 55 pages in the congressional record, his speech. he collapses at the end. he talked about the last war we fought with the british and if people remembered all the devastation and did we really want to do this again, fight another war for years. apparently, some of the men have tears in their eyes. when he finally finishes, a supreme court justice turns to the vice president and says, isn't that man great? adams says, yes, he is. so the treaty will end up passing by just a couple of votes. at one point there is a committee of the whole vote, the head of the committeemuhlenberg speaker of the house. he breaks the tie. he is on the democratic republican and jefferson side. he is yshould be against it.

he is convinced maybe not going to war is a good idea. he ends up voting to pass the bill for the funding of this treaty. and he is vilified. he is vilified that he voted for this treaty against his side to the point where he loses his seat in his next election to congress. but even worse, in the short-term, he is stabbed on the sidewalk of philadelphia by his brother-in-law because of his vote. he survives but i'm sure family gathers are awkward. it tells us how high our political tensions can be in our early days. yet, yet at the same time, we're also proving that that new constitution, despite the difficulties, works. probably the best day in this room's history in a lot of ways is the day john adams is inaugurated by the speaker of the house's platform. he will stand on the platform with thomas jefferson at the front of the room, outgoing president george washington. this is a big deal. changing presidents for us today is a fairly normal thing.

we have parades and parties. it's a big thing. but this was a really important day. because this is where we are proving that the system where we the voters elect our leaders and we change them when we vote, we're proving that that system works. because the john adams election is a lot of firsts. it's the first time we will not have george washington as our president. george washington is the only man to be unanimously elected president, which he was twice. he did not particularly run for office. at the end of the first term, he didn't want a second term. he was talked into it. essentially kind of almost guys on both sides talk him into another four years. he doesn't really run. he is unanimously re-elected. at the end of the second term, people try to talk him into a third. he is not having it. he wants to retire at this point in time. it's somebody else's turn. he will step aside for john adams. now, we don't know if this

works. we have never done this before. we have never changed our president. will the people accept this? we don't know. the other thing to remember is john adams was contested in his election. he actually had to fight a battle against his opponent who was thomas jefferson. these two had been friends, obviously, they wrote the declaration of independence together. now opposite sides of the fence. they don't want to talk to each other. the election is very ugly, it's nasty, very close. it's sort of for us today a normal presidential election. john adams wins by three electoral votes. we have never had a president who got half the votes. we have never had a president who had to really fight for an election. of course, the other problem in the early daze ys is if you comn second, you are vice president. the new president is one party. the new vice president is the other party. pincknck any modern election ant

them together and you can see how neither would be particularly happy. they are not happy to be up in the front of the room together. this is a full house that day. the balcony, seats, you have most of the government here. a lot of curiosity. you can also figure about half of the men in this room are not very happy to see john adams standing up there. the other half of the men in the room are not happy to see tophos jefferson up there. nobody is happy that george washington is leaving us in this time. john adams would kind of look around the room and see a lot of people who weren't very happy. he would see people with almost tears in their eyes that washington was leaving them. he kind of would later say that as he looked around, he only saw one person that day who particularly looked happy, which was, of course, george washington who had a look on his face that said, you are in and i'm out. now let's find out who is the happier. washington would quietly go to

private life and i think very happily withdraw from the scene. adams himself would be inaugurated. he would have a difficult presidency because now really we are seeing the throws of political fighting going on. but it happened peacefully. we proved that constitution worked. we proved that we could continue in times of difficulty like this that we could continue forward with the system in place. in 1800, they would leave this building and move to the current capitol in washington, d.c. adams and jefferson would have another difficult election at that time. this time jefferson winning. he would be the first president inaugurated in the new capitol of washington, d.c. but these years in philadelphia are setting the tone for the rest of our early history. and all the way up to today. so the room itself will start out as a courthouse. so this would have been a courtroom. but around the time this building is finished construction, it's being built

during the constitutional convention. so when they are finished construction is around the time that philadelphia offers it to the u.s. government. i think philadelphia's secret hope is if we're nice, they will stay here and not go to the new city. so they give them the new courthouse building. they end up actually expanding it a little bit to make more room for congress. we think the setup looks like this. we have a seating chart from one session of congress that shows the design of the desks and all we don't have any of the desks that have survived. we're fortunate we have some of the chairs today. unfortunately, we only have about 30 of them between the two houses of congress and most of them we don't know necessarily which house they were in. so today all of our original chairs are in the senate. for this room as far as original items goes, the chair on the platform for the speaker of the house is an original. we have three chairs exactly

like this. we don't necessarily know which was which. we have one today that we assume was for the speaker of the house, one for the vice president as president of the senate and the third for the chief justice of the supreme court. now, we don't again know which one is which. so what we can fairly say is that somebody important sat in that chair for the speaker of the house, whether it was the speaker of the house or not we're not sure. as far as this room went, in the early 1800s when the federal government moved out, it went to become a courthouse again. in fact, this was divided into two rooms for a long number of years. they built a hallway down the mi middle to have two courtrooms instead of one large one. about the time of the first world war, the city government has left this block and moved to our current city hall in philadelphia. the city is recognizing the historic value of the buildings, has some restoration work done. they kind of want to turn them into museum space. if you visited this building in

the years around the first world war, the 1920s, you would have seen the building -- the room rather restored back to the big single room it would have been. but it would have been just a room filled with old stuff. kind of the old-fashion museum. after world war ii when the national park service comes in to take over the historic builds here, again, the goal is to get them back to how they looked in the important days. that's where we try to study, how did they have the seating set up? we have one chart that we have been able to find. one of the members drew showing who was sitting where at least for one snapshot of a session of congress. we have some -- enough sketches and show the platform for the speaker of the house. we have enough original furniture that we can match up things that were -- we think were here. unfortunately, a lot of the items that are here, if the city needed them, like chairs, they kept using them. desks, not so much. they didn't save. things that the government might have owned, for example, the

library of congress started in this building. they started buying books for congress here in philadelphia. wasn't the library of congress as we know it today, but it does begin here. a lot of the things that went to washington, d.c. are burned when washington is burned in the war of 1812. we lose a lot of the early things. that's one of the challenges with a building like this, you don't necessarily have all the thing things, but you make due the best you can to give people the sense when they come in to see them of what it looked like when men like james madison or young andrew jackson were sitting in this room as members of the house of representatives. we're in the senate chamber here at congress hall in philadelphia. the room as you can see is quite a bit more grand than the house of representatives would have been. there's a couple of reasons for that. our roots as a nation go back to when we were british, of course. the british have a parliament

with two houses. an upper house, the house of lords, lower house, house of commons. there's definitely parallels with our congress today. the house of representatives is very similarly set up to the house of commons. and then the senate would, therefore, be left to be based on the house of lords. we don't have dukes and earls and noble titles like that. we have states. every state is equal in the senate. so the states kind of take the place of our house of lords and our senate chamber. the british often using that green color in government. the colonies would use it and into the american government. but the red would be much more the house of lords kind of color. you will see red in that early senate here in philadelphia. definitely has that kind of look tore to it that seems higher end. the interesting thing about the senate is they are created with more power. the power is a tie to the president that the house of

representatives does not have. treaties in the united states are with the advice and consent of the senate, approved by the advice and consent of the senate. the senate has to approve all treaties. the house does not. the senate does. so there's one power. also any time the president makes an appointment to his cabinet, ambassador, supreme court, of course, those folks would have to come in front of the senate and be approved by the senate or rejected. so here in philadelphia, we have our very first treaty approved by the senate, which is the jay treaty. that led to the big fight in the house of representatives over whether or not to pay for it. but over that same issue, we have the first rejection of a presidential nominee by the senate. john rutledge, who is actually a signer of the u.s. constitution, actually one of the players in creating that constitution, is one of washington's first choices for the original six

justices on the supreme court. he accepts but then resigns the post without ever really having served on the supreme court. he will later become the chief justice of the south carolina supreme court when john jay, who was the first united states supreme court chief justice, resigns, he is elected governor of new york, he he leaves the post of chief justice. that leaves it empty. washington will eventually tap john rutledge of south carolina. rutledge will come back to philadelphia this time and serve as chief justice. however, he is appointed during a recess of congress, and so technically the senate hasn't confirmed him but he actually serves a session of the court as chief justice and leads them through some cases. when the senate comes back later that year to return to session, they then take up the question of approving john rutledge. now, george washington's never had anyone rejected that he's appointed, so this has never happened in our young history.

john rutledge has a couple of things going against him. there are guys in the senate that think the guy's a little crazy. he's had some kind of strange things that he's had to say in the years in the 1790s so he's got a reputation but also where he's going to get into trouble is he made very pointed comments about that j treaty that was negotiated by his predecessor. he was very critical in some speeches and they tended to be a bit of rambly speeches. he was very critical about the senate itself which of course senators would read the newspapers and they would read what the south carolina supreme court chief justice had to say about them and when he came in front of them they would remember these sorts of things and then they would decide perhaps this guy is not the best choice to be the chief justice of the supreme court. so even though he'd run the court for a while he was sent packing and back home.

so the very first rejection of a presidential nominee. so here in philadelphia you're seeing the constitution in a lot of different directions being explored and used for the first time and of course you go through our history and you see other occurrences where this happened. the one other power of the senate that's not going to get exercised here in philadelphia is the power of impeaching if the president is impeached, the house would vote to have an impeachment. the senate would be basically the jury in what is essentially a trial to decide whether the president should be removed from office. so again, you look at the powers of the senate and you see these things that you can do that tie them to the president in a lot of ways, and so therefore, give them that little bit of extra advantage over the house of representatives. plus, they're a smaller body of men with only two senators per state. you represent an entire state, which means if you're from a large state you represent a lot

of people. finally, the other thing about the senate that makes it a bit unique is you get that longer term, the longest elected term in the united states with six-year term, but early on, senators were not even elected. senators are appointed on the basis of the constitution originally. senators are appointed by their state legislatures. so senators do not have to run for office. so as a result, senators here in philadelphia met in private. they did not meet in public. the house of repts alwaresentat always did. the senate gets into their own controversial bills like the j trayty. one of the early senators that is sent by pennsylvania is a man most famous for being a long-time secretary of treasury and he is of the democratic/republican side and so the federal aside of the

early senate and basically locking at the strict rules would say that albert galton has not lived in the united states for the requisite number of years to be in the senate. so the senate voted him out. he's later elected to the house of representatives but he's rejected from the senate. so they want to know why their senator has been kicked out of the senate. so you start getting this growing public feeling that we want to see what's going on when the senate meets here in philadelphia and add to that the press, obviously wants to know what's going on because they've got guys sitting in the balcony watching the house, they want to have guys sitting up here watching the senate because that's news. finally, i am sure of it, that the house of representatives is sitting in public saying why do those guys get to meet in private when we have to sit in front of all these people? so finally after about five

years of meeting behind closed doors, the senate relents and they start to as well meet in public here in philadelphia. and that's one of those long standing traditions. but this is where you're seeing that they don't have everything set in stone. they have a constitution that's only four pages long. these men have to figure out what their job is all about based on a few paragraphs that say duties and powers that they have. george washington essentially invents the job of president here in philadelphia. again, just going on some, you know, paragraphs in the constitution and figuring out, okay, what does that mean i do every day? so when he wants to negotiate a treaty with various indian tribes, what he'll do, the first time he's going to do something with this is he'll come into the senate and sit down and say, well, i'm supposed to do treaties with your advice and consent so i want your advice and consent on these issues i want to discuss and the senate

goes wait a minute, yeah, weir not interested in talking about that with you in the room. why don't you give us some stuff and we'll talk and get back to you later. and so that's when the president comes and goes from the senate. it's that more strict separation that we're used to. now, for washington, he's not a guy who likes tons of, you know, public accolade and he doesn't like to give a lot of speeches if he can avoid it. he will do an address to congress every year. they don't call it the state of the union yet, but his address to congress which he writes with his cabinet. he will come to the senate for his inauguration for his second term as president. he kind of keeps it low key. he doesn't do the bigger event that we saw downstairs in the house of representatives with john adams which was a much bigger deal. washington just going to a second term basically comes in and takes his oath of office and more or less goes back to work because he didn't really want the big public ceremony to take

place, but that's something that would change with adams' inauguration and of course when you move down to washington you start having inaugurations at the new capitol building so that would be a change. so we're growing into what the united states is today. as you look around this room, a lot of the guys that sat here in the senate were the architects of our constitution because senators being chosen by their states, a lot of the guys that had a big impact on writing that constitution would be then sent by their states to philadelphia. one of the ones that's not as is james madison and he runs into the problem in virginia that patrick henry is one of the great powers in virginia. henry's not a big fan of madison and his big role in the constitution so essentially madison is sort of -- we call him the father of the constitution, the obvious plumb of getting a seat in the constitution doesn't happen. he has to suffer through getting elected and becoming a member of

the house. but as for election of senators that's a recent phenomenon in our history. so 1913 when he'd start electing our senators. so all the men prior to that just have to court their state legislature, so you think of the lincoln/douglas debates over senate, they're not debating for people to vote for them, they're debating for people to vote for the people of the state government to vote for them. so it's a very complicated system. and people are saying you know what? we want to be able to vote for our own senators. we vote for everyone else in government, why not the senate, so that's one of the things that changes, but we have to grow into how some of these things work. but the remarkable thing when you go back to these years if philadelphia, other than that, most everything does operate pretty well the same way. we're using the system designed in independence hall that they take into this building and use

and continue on when they move to washington in 1800. now, as you look at this room, unlike downstairs in the house of representatives, the second floor of the building with the senate is a lot more original as far as the things in the building go. we have -- we have the setting for 32 senators. we start with just of course 26 representing 13 states, and as each new state, vermont, kentucky, tennessee, up to the 32, now, when they leave for washington, 32 senators would go, the room would turn into a courtroom, eventually actually it was the united states federal district courtroom in the 19th century. they don't necessarily need the stuff that's here. so desks kind of go away. we don't know what happened to them. these are sort of our best guess, but chairs you always need. so when the mid-1800s when

people start thinking about american history like we do so much of today, they started saying, well, we need to collect things for independence hall and somebody says well, we've got a bunch of these chairs, a couple dozen chairs and at some point somebody thinks maybe they were the chairs for the continental congress so they stuck them in the room but of course they were for the federal congress but these were displayed in independence hall for a long time and when we are restoring congress hall, the old u.s. capitol to look as it would have we had 29 original chairs. some of them were in the house based on simple proportion, but a couple of them were marked senate, a couple of them had bits of different colored upholstery. some of these are probably in the house. we said, well, let's just put them all in the senate chamber. so we'll fill it with 29 of the

32 chairs being original. the eagle on the ceiling is -- we're not 100% sure of the date on that. the one thing i can tell you is there's 15 stars above it so it's sometime after the 15th state enters the union. we don't know exactly when and may no never know when that was painted, but the seal was another thing created here in philadelphia actually by the continental congress and independence hall in 1782. something they'd worked on throughout the war, the different committees and kept changing a little bit here and there until they worked out the final version of the seal. we have a carpet on the floor that is a reproduction of the original carpet. the original carpet more than likely went to washington when they moved, but whatever happened to it, it's long gone. we don't know what happened to the senate carpet but it was made specifically for the room here and there was actually enough written description of exactly what it was that enabled

us to sort of recreate the carpet and it would have also featured the seal of the united states, but it would have been encircled by the original state seals. it's set up as a chain which was a common motif of the time. chaining the states together. so a lot of those interesting symbols whether for the states themselves or the united states have their roots here in philadelphia. the one original desk we still have is the secretary's desk and the vice president would sit in the back of the room and that's another interesting part of our story. the vice president which we'll start with john adams and he'll be succeeded by doms jefferson, they would be here a good bit of the time. probably a lot more than the vice president today. today the vice president can sit in the senate any day they want, but early on they made it clear to john adams they didn't want him talking so he can sit there and run the meetings, which left him very disappointed.

he's the first, but certainly not the last vice president to complain about the limitations of that job. he is allowed to vote only to break ties, which again, that carries through the years, so if there's a tie vote the vice president is always the tie breaker. so any big day, any big vote, the vice president will be there and other than that, the vice president, you know, john adams would find he was kind of stuck here in philadelphia running a bunch of meetings with a bunch of guys who wouldn't let him talk and found it dissatisfying and for thomas jefferson, when he's vice president his opponent is the president so he doesn't necessarily agree with a lot of the policies that he has to be part of the executive over so it was a very difficult situation which is what leads to creating the system where we're going to elect president and vice president a little bit more carefully because rather than the electoral college voting for two men, the guy who gets the most votes being president and the guy who gets the second most being vice president we would

create a system where it's a candidate for president and a candidate for vice president and the real impo tus to that is the jefferson election in 1800 which is when they're packing up and moving to washington, d.c. so there's no one election day in those days but they will start meeting in the new capitol december of 1800. they're leaving philadelphia that summer and in the midst of this we're electing adams versus jefferson, but they've learned their lesson. they say we'll run two guys but you can't specify which is which. so when jefferson wins the election he ties his own vice president candidate and of course burr and jefferson being tied means by the constitution the election goes to the house of representatives so the first thing we do in our new capitol is basically the house of representatives has to elect the new president and they have to vote more than 30 times before the tie can be broken so now you're saying okay.

we've learned our lesson, let's fix it. so the 12th amendment comes along to straighten out the way of electing a president. but you look back to these early days and they're managing to find out what doesn't work which isn't much and find out that most of that constitution does, and so we're able to today look at that room that's much smaller than the senate today but the senators who sat here, pretty much do the same things as the senators in washington today. american artifacts continues with a tour of the whitney plantation avery museum in indiana.

each week we take you to museums andph[z historic place today we visit whitney plantation to learn about the history of slavery in america. >> my name is ashley rogers. i'm the director of museum operations at the whitney plantation and we are beginning our tour today in a historic friedmann's church which was build 1870 by people who lived on the opposite side of the river in pallina, louisiana. this was donated by the descendants of the original founders of that congregation. they bought the land in 1870, two parcells of land for the express purpose of building a house of worship. in the sale document they named

their structure the anti -- they named their an gre gacongregati antiyolk congregation. this was a significant church for newly freed slaves on the east bank of the river and so it's really important in talking about the lives of people who saw freedom at the end of the war. so we like to start here in this building so we can see what happened to people, some of the things that they cared about after freedom came. >> the whitney plantation is the only plantation in the state of louisiana that is exclusively dedicated to telling the stories of enslaved people and so this land that we're on right now is -- was historically known as habitation hi dell and our owner purchased the property about 15

years ago and began restoring it, restoring the original structures that were here and also moving in buildings like this one. and so we had to kind of build in -- build some things here, restore existing buildings and bring in historic structures, all of these things help us tell the story of slavery. so when this -- when john comings bought the property in 1999 we did not have any original slave cabins. they had all been torn down for some 20 years and so we had to move in those from elsewhere in louisiana. this structure, like i said, just kind of helps us round out that story of enslavement till after the civil war and we have some other buildings that were here at one time and we have rebuilt. >> we have a collection of statues created by an ohio artist and he built these -- put together these statues for us to represent people who were enslaved at the end of slavery and then later gave their

testimony to works progress administration? 1930s. we use the narratives of slaves taken in the 1930s throughout our interpretation on this site. and so these give life to who they were. taking the narratives of formerly enslaved people, they were talking to people in their 80s, 90s or 100s who when they were slaves had just been childr children. at the highest end maybe 15 when freedom came but most of them were under the age of 10. and this is to remind us who those voices are coming from. those people were talking about their experiences in slavery as children and often times recalling the things that happened to their parents or their grandparents. this plantation was initially founded in 1752. it was founded by a german immigrant. he came in the company of john

law with his family -- they sailed from france and came here. when he founded this plantation finance much smaller and he grew rice and indigoprincipally as the main cash crops and indigowas the significant cash crop here in the 18th century. he and his children continued until the late 18th century, beginning of the 19 century. in 1795 the first crop of sugar in louisiana. we're in a strange climate zone so it couldn't really -- nobody had been really to take it the full way before that. so in 1795 with the help of somebody from haiti who had come over after the revolution, he granulated a crop and all of the

planters followed suit after that. sugar could make a whole lot more money than indigo could. and so right around the same time that that first sugar crop was being granulated, indigo was not really a viable crop anymore. so this plantation transitioned at some point after that by about 1805. it was planted in sugar and it remains planted in sugar till today. sugar is still a huge industry in south louisiana and all around us our historic cane fields still planted in cane that is still sent off to the domino sugar refineries. so three generations in this plantation. over the course of the 100 plus years that they owned this land,

there were many successful generations of people who were enslaved here and so the population would have shifted over time with market forces. the highest number that we ever have recorded at one single time of enslaved people in this land is 101, but we believe that that's a little low. we think there were perhaps as many as 200 people enslaved at the highest point. we have record of people that we've found, 357 over the course of that 100 plus years, but there are going to be a lot of people missing from that. so where we will really start introducing that population is on our first memorial where we're going to begin in some memorials where we've built to people enslaved in louisiana and enslaved on this land. >> this is a wall of honor and on this memorial we have recorded the names and some basic information about 354

individuals that we have been able to find who were enslaved on this land. this memorial is -- it moves through time roughly chronologically so in the earlier -- on this side we have people who were born in the 18th century, but we're missing the entire first generation of enslaved people here. we don't know anyone -- we don't know anyone's name who was enslaved here from the very beginning in 1752. all of these people were born after the founding of this plantation. so there's some example of people that we're already missing. this information comes mostly from sale documents. people's names were not always recorded when they were enslaved. so if you look at things like the census records, it will just include a tally of how many men and how many women but i won't tell you any names so we have to look for those names in sale documents, in the city of new orleans, there was a notary involved and so we go to the notary archives to find sales

and purchases. and all of the information that we have here, this biographic cal information is related to selling. so where someone came from, how old they were, whether they came with children, the jobs that they knew how to do, these were all things that would affect their price at sale. louisiana had different laws than other states and territories in the united states. so in -- in louisiana for a very long time it was illegal to sell children away from parents under the code that was beforeóírwñ py and later it was actually before the age of ten and so you see things like this. here's agatha and these are people being sold together in a lot. so we have basic information here and there's really not a

lot that this information can tell us, but we're able to tease out just a little bit. so one thing that we notice here is that all of these people, we can see that most of them are born in africa and that's listed here. their places of origin and yet their names are european names. in this case they're french. we also see in the early years a few spanish names as well. and so we know that these people who have these european derived names were not born in africa with those names so that tells us something about that cultural annihilati annihilation. slave traders often renamed people and it's something that continued to happen throughout the course of slavery in the united states over the course of the 19th century when people were sold from one plantation to another, their new owner could choose to rename them and here in louisiana, we use the example

of solomon northup. he was sold as a slave for years and then the movie that was recently made about it. the reason he was lost for that time is he was never sold under the name of solomon. the first slave trader called him plat and so he was living for 12 years under the name of plat which was not his given name and that's an experience that a lot of people had and you can see that written in various narratives. but even though there is this problem of people's names being taken away from them, there are a few people who remain here who have african names. so here is a person named mingo which is an african name. we also have someone named samba and we have coacou. it means a male born on a wednesday. these are names that tell us something about the circumstances of those people's birth. and also interesting enough, here is someone named moussa.

this is an islamic name so this person was a mus muslim. people who came from north africa were likely to be exposed to islam. there were long standing trade networks so this is something that tells us a little bit about the religion and culture of people who came to the new world as slaves. people came from widely different groups, so people who came to the americas enslaved were in some cases muslim and in some cases catholic. the kingdom of congo was oinitially catholic. and of course there was especially in louisiana a connection with the caribbean, a lot of the ships made stops off in the caribbean before coming into the mainland of the united states, and so there was there again, another chance for that kind of blending and synchrotism

with west african and caribbean religions there coming into louisiana. and it's also important to note that these people were selected by slave traders for specific skills and traits that they had. so most of the people enslaved in louisiana, about 60% were people that came to the different parts of the u.s. as slaves for different reasons. a lot of that had to do with the crops that they were familiar with growing. so the first two slave ships that came to louisiana in 1719, the captains of those ships were under orders to go find skilled indigo growers. because they were trying to establish an indigo economy here in louisiana and the european planters did not have the skills in planting indigo. it wasn't grown in europe. so they had to go find people who already knew how to grow it,

who already knew how to process it which is a complicated process and who knew how to build those fields. same thing with rice. skilled rice growers brought into louisiana and south carolina. so you find these very directed, you know, trading going along the western coast of africa, going into specific markets in the united states to fill the plantations there and build that crop wealth. so most of the people here were coming as we said, from west and central africa. a few people born in the caribbean who had already been, you know, coming from long trading there. but most people are coming internationally. and so something that's important to note about the movement across the atlantic during the time of the atlantic slave trade is that the vast majority of settlement of the new world was african compulsory

settlement. so of all of the people who crossed from the old world to the new world until 1807, four out of five came from africa. so the vast majority of movement was enslaved africans being forced on ships across the atlantic and they're not really good estimates about the actual number. the figure that's kind of come at is about 12.5 million people. and that's not including people who didn't make it to the coast. people who are being driven from the interior and died enroute and then were not even able to get on the boat and come across. so about 12.5 million people involved in the middle passage. of that 12.5 million people less than 12% came to the territory that became the united states. the vast majority of movement

into slave societies was into the caribbean and into brazil. in the united states we outlawed the international slave trade in 1807 which did not fully cut it off, but it significantly lowered that movement, because people were still being pirated. they were being smul smuggled into the united states. the last slave ship it's estimated arrived 1859 or 1860 and that's right up until the end of the civil war. but it did cut off the majority of that trade and this is an interesting time around 1807 that at the exact same time the lands down here in the mississippi river valley were just beginning to be developed. so the louisiana purchase happens in 1803. 1807 you can't get any more slaves into the united states and so at the same time that people are buying up large tracts of land and really increasing their need and

reliance upon compulsory labor, slave labor, they didn't have a supply of enslaved people coming from africa. and so what we -- this changes the culture here and what happened is that a very robust domestic slave trade developed in the wake of that. and we can see this happening on our wall here where you can already see them sort of str trickling in. there's a few people born on what's called the east coast instead of in the old world or in the caribbean and on the reverse side of the wall you'll see a large collection of them. so here all of a sudden, all of these people are listed east coast. east coast is probably virginia. and you can see that they came from an english owned plantation by their names. ed win, jack, tom, sam, these are all english names.

so they no longer have french or spanish names. not as many african names. so the domestic slave trade was an enormous movement of people across this country. so in total, from after the conclusion of the international slave trade in 1807, 1 million people were moved from the upper south and the upper south is virginia, maryland, tennessee, north carolina, south carolina a little bit, but mostly centered in virginia and north carolina and 1 million people were moved down the river to louisiana, alabama, mississippi, where there was large -- large scale plantations. so to give you an idea of this -- the difference in labor there, i come from north carolina. a lot of our plantations that we had in north carolina tobacco plantations, tobacco is really awful for the soil. and the fields have to lay fallow for a very long time to recover after growing tobacco

and so it really cuts down on the amount of land that they could work. and also they needed smaller scale labor. a lot of the plantations had 55, 60 slaves and here in louisiana, they had over 100. and just on another plantation they had 750 slave people. so there was a greater need for large scale labor and in the upper south, they had a larger population of women. they were encouraging family units and family growth. part of the value of an enslaved woman was her reproductive potential. and enslaifvers talked about th by using the word increase. so if a woman were given to another family member in a will, they would give sally and her increase, sally and all of the

potential children that she could have forever and her children's children, all of that sombre reproductive potential belonged to that woman. so there was a great value in encouraging the growth of families because they could make more money on selling off those children. so the majority of people who came down from the upper south were in their late teens to early 20s in the prime of their working life that would be born and raised on plantations in the upper south and most of them marched over land. most of that movement was over land. some of it was on a river boat coming down the mississippi. some of it was on boats coming down the atlantic seaboard and into the gulf of mexico from there. but new orleans was the heart of that trade. so new orleans was tied to virginia and to alexandria and virginia and there was this constant flow of people coming down to new orleans to be spread out to the territories from there. so this is where you can see all

of that happening. on this plantation we have an oral history given to us by the descendants of one of the people enslaved here that describes this process of being taken from the upper south and sold in the lower south. anna is a girl who was born on the east coast, probably virginia, and the story was she was bought to be a gift to the woman of this house. anna as the family has related to us lived inside of the big house and so would have had a -- an interesting kind of relationship with the family. people who lived in the big house who were slaves often had a strange kind of relationship that we can't really understand today. she was a slave and would have been treated as such, but also would have been very close to the family as well.

and the reason for that significance is because of her son victor hidell. so anna's mistress had a brother who impregnated anna and we don't know -- this was so long ago we don't know if anna was raped by him or if they had some kind of relationship although for enslaved women there was no such thing as consent because they did not own their bodies. and so victor was born of a family member and an enslaved woman who was as listed on her documents, american, mixed race woman and so victor would have been considered here what they call a quadroon. one quarter african descendant and enslaved by his own family. this is one instance that we

know of for certain of all of these 354 people over 100 years of ownership of the family, we know that there were many, many, many more people born here of enslaved mothers and white hidell fathers and this can kind of thing was common throughout the south and those children born of those enslaved women belonged to their own family and would not necessarily be treated any better and in many cases you can read in narratives of where those children would be treated just a little bit worse because usually there was a white wife somewhere in there who understood where those children were coming from. so the accept rations between enslaved people and the enslavers were not really there. there was a lot of mixing in terms of sexual assault, in terms of actual relationships. certainly here in louisiana a lot of free people of color existed here because of

consensual relationships where enslaved women would then be freed and given their own property. so in louisiana it's a very different class that's kind of created here. free people of color and people enslaved by their own families as well. >> this is a memorial where we have trabs scribnscribed of 107 people enslaved. this is based on the information that hall has put together and that database ends in 1820. there's talk now of about extending it to 1865. we have just their first names and again, these are mostly coming from sale documents and then what we've also done here is recorded little snippets from

the works progress slaves narratives so we allow people to walk through on their own and take a few minutes to reflect and read those names and those testimonials. >> this is the last memorial that we visit before we move into the historic grounds of the plantation. we put this for children who died in the parish that we are in here at the whitney plantation. it's centered by a sculpture by rod moore head. he's from mississippi and this is called coming home. so we have along the walls here the names, date of death, ages and names of the mother of all of these children who died and these are recorded in the church records. so our historian did the research in pulling those records out of the church and

recording them here. so here's a large collection of people that are not listed with any name whatsoever. these are all people that are just listed as little slave, negro slave girl, negro slave boy. these perhaps died too young to be named but sometimes we see this notation when people were two or three years old, people who had names but even at death were just, you know, when they were born they were born into a lower class of course as enslaved people and it was not seen as important enough to record the names that they had or to look into it to find out what their name was in life. >> so the whitney plantation for the longest amount of time was a sugar plantation.

today our sugar fields come right up to the edge of where we interpret, and historically the land had a sugar mill on its site as well. so the people who were enslaved on this land worked in the fields, and probably the majority of them would have been occupied in sugar. so they worked in the fields. they also worked as domestics, as herdsmen. this is kind of like a little village. all of the jobs that needed to sustain this group of 100 plus people were done here, you know, they made all of the food here, they grew the food here, and also worked on, you know, text tiles and things like that. carpenters and the like. shaug g sugar processing happens at the end of the year. sugar is very much growing and it's going to continue to grow until late october or early november. the goal with sugar is to have everything processed and done by

christmas time. so christmas day, they want the entire field done and granulated. these kettles were used in the granulation of sugar. we brought these kettles in from other places, but historically at our sugar mill there would have been eight kettles like this and they would go from large down to small. you can see that this has a lip on it so these would be sitting in a brick structure, and then open on the bottom where there would be a fire underneath. so the goal with these kettles is to take ground down sugar stalks, they would grind all of the cane using animal power and then using a steam engine later on. they would take the juice that comes out of that sugar cane and boil it in these giant kettles. these would have to be tended. this is a 24-hour a day process for about one month and the

people who worked in making sugar would be standing next to kettles like this using long handled ladles and physically scooping the juice from one kettle to the next to the next to the next and putting it in cooling pans where it would granulate. this would be as you can imagine a very hot and dangerous process. it's sticky, so not only would it get crusty and attached to the bottom there and burn, which made an inferior product but it could also burn the people who were making the sugar so it was dangerous in that way. and they worked in shifts, 24 hours a day. the thing that makes sugar difficult and kind of unique in the cash crops grown in the new world is that it had to be processed as soon as it was cut. so they couldn't, in other words, just cut it and sit on it for a little while and then process it later. as soon as it's cut it starts to die and it's not going to make good sugar. so that's why that harvesting

season or grinding season was extremely grueling and all of the physical labor done outside was also done in a very, very cold time of the year. south louisiana does get bitterly cold, humid cold in november and december and enslaved workers would be working outside constantly in that. all of the original slave cabins were torn down by the 70s and they looked about like this. this is pretty typical and it's essentially a duplex. it's -- it would be a family on each side or if not a real family, a fictive family. the slave cabins that were on this site were arranged the way that we've brought these in, so

we have -- there would be two rows facing each other with a central courtyard in the center and so you can imagine that that would have created a kind of community there. and these were also set back from the plantation big house by about a half a mile and so there was some physical distance where the family lived and where the enslaved workers lived and that distance is important in creating a sense of autonomy although their movements were not controlled. overseer would be monitoring them at all stages of the day to ensure that they got up at the right time, they were at work at the right time and they were back at the cabins at the right time. that said, especially because there's that distance and there is so much space here, there are a lot of plantations out here on the river road, something that was very common in particular in this region, but other reasgion

as well. especially since families tended to be separated and that wasn't a long distance, necessarily. if a husband and wife were on neighboring plantations they might be away from each other for two or three miles and so running away for that two miles to go see a loved one and come back before dawn is something that was extremely common but that was all done with a certain degree of risk. if they left and even if they intended to come back they would be considered a runaway and could be punished for that. enslaved people would be in the cabins mostly at night. their work days stretched from what they said was can't see to can't see, so in other words, from dawn until dusk they would be out at their jobs and then come back to the cabins at nighttime. nighttime back at the cabins would be a time for communion with people who are there, their families or like we said, the

fictive families and also food preparation. enslaved people were given rations by the plantation owner and typically the most common thing that you can read about in slave narratives are corn meal and bacon. bacon would be essentially fat backed. lots of fat. not a nutritious cut and not considered really the high cut, the good cut that the family would be eating. they would also receive things like intestines, like pig feet, these are all things that of course have been sustained for a very long time in southern cooking, but have their roots in those kind of lower cuts that were given to enslaved people during slavery times. also very common in terms of food of enslaved people are things that orange nate in africa. black eyed peas, watermelon, these are things that came to the new world with enslaved people, okra and people brought

with them their african food ways and supplemented it the best they could. people cooked in their cabins. there were usually fireplaces in the cabins where they could prepare meals but in a place like south louisiana where it's very, very hot, a lot of the time we imagine they would be preparing almost like a campfire outside so they didn't have that smoke and heat in their cabins. all of these things are going to be different in the different plantations. the way people were treated was different and what we have represented here are a few things that you can read about in slave narratives when people talk about the types of furnishings that hthey had. a rope bed like this is something that is common.

and we have this rough kind of fabric with hay in the middle so you can see how that's constructed. in louisiana it was also common to use moss, spanish moss for stuffing for a bed. a lot of people experienced at different plantations. in fact, solomon northup, he never described sleeping in a bed for that full 12 years. he also described sleeping on a pallet on a floor. beds like this about the size of a full bed today, this would be a bed for an entire family. children, mom and dad, they'd all be sharing space and you can see there's not a lot of space in these cabins so there wouldn't be much of a sense of privacy, what we would think of being appropriate in a family and being private. all of that living was done in

just a couple of rooms, everybody together. this is an 1868 jail that we brought in. this is not a slave jail. it's from a few years after the conclusion of slavery. but we brought it in as a learning tool so that we can see the types of typical spaces where enslaved people were confined, especially leading up to sales. this is a very typical design of that era and you can see there are a few photographs of pens in the backs of auction houses that are similar in design to this. so typically at an auction houssay like you would find in the city of new orleans there would be a front room where the auction would take place an d auction would take place and then in the back a small courtyard with a row of cells enclosed in a courtyard so people could come out during the day and sleep in the cells at night. in addition to pens that were

used in the marketing of enslaved people, there were also slave jails. in the city of new orleans, in the central business district there were two dozen slave jails at one time. additional enslaved people were locked up at the state penitentiary as well. so all of the same rules applied to enslaved people if they were convicted of murder or theft or any of those other infractions, they could be locked up just the way that a free person could. but of course, a lot of the punishment of enslaved people was done in an extra legal fashion on the plantations. plantations did also have jail like structures sometimes where people could be confined as punishment. but typically they were not iron structures like this. they might be made of wood or brick or people might just be confined in a barn or an extra room somewhere. but those -- that kind of confinement was very typical. a lot of people who were enslaved in the state of

louisiana would at one time or another experience being sold at an auction. especially since so many people who were enslaved in the lower south had come from the upper south. so they had been sold off of a plantation and then purchased by a slave trader, and brought down to new orleans to be sold at auction. this whole transaction of moving people from one part of the country to another to sell them is something that kind of i elucidates the markets. of course the raw goods that we were producing in the south supplied the northern and foreign factories, but also that slave trade itself involved people like insurance agents, like mortgage brokers and bankers. there was a lot of industry, northern and southern involved in that. so to give you an example there. if a slave trader working out of

virginia and new orleans and that would be the biggest one would be isaac franklin. if he purchased an enslaved person off of a plantation, the upper south, he would sometimes pay full cash value for them up there, but it would be a wholesale rate so this is, you know, you can see how people were sold. they were paid for a wholesale rate. if he didn't have the cash amount he could put a mortgage on that person and they would be ensured for the time in transit and then brought, he would cover all of the expenses of moving them down and then sell them here at a retail rate. about 100% more than what he bought them for in the upper south. if he had a note, a mortgage on that person, he would pay off that mortgage and pocket the profit. and so the same way that we comodify houses and cars and livestock, these are the exact same market forces that were in the comodification of human

beings during the time of enslavement and all of that is being transacted in this calculated way, but on the ground floor, on the human side of it, what that story is is of course separation from loved ones, when people were being locked up in pens similar to this, they might be with their family and about to be sold away from their family or they've just traveled long distance away from everything they've ever known and all of that is being done with a price tag. people who were locked up in slave pens also sometimes had to wait for long periods of time for the market to be at an appropriate value to sell them at the highest return. so if people made it to an auction house in new orleans and the price for slaves was low, sometimes they would wait and keep them locked up in a jail or keep them locked up in the boat that they had come on and wait for those markets to improve so they could make a higher return on their investment. as far as the actual dollar amount, what people were being sold for here in louisiana, a good rate that you see pretty

commonly is about 900 to $1,000. for somebody who was skilled that might go up to $1,500. and there's a -- another sort of seedy underbelly of the slave trade which was called the fancy trade. girls who might be used as sex slaves could be sold at a higher rate. that 1,500 or $2,000 and we're talking about 19th century money, so when you translate it to today it's an enormous amount of money that people were spending on those individuals. >> this area that we're standing in right now is the whitney plantation historic district and this is where we have the highest concentration of original structures. all centered around the 1790 big house. over here we have the original site of the kitchen, and there was a kitchen here from as far

as we can tell, the earliest time the construction of this big house. this structure is a little bit later -- it was here by about 1830. and it was in very poor condition when our owner john comings bought the land in 1999. it was just about falling over so he had to right the building and rebuild the hearth entirely. but a lot of these structures were really just falling apart into the ground. so hidell, his son built this big house and then later it was occupied by his sons. they operated it in a partnership until 17 -- or excuse me, until 1839 at which point the widow took over and she ran the plantation from 1840 to 1860. so really the longest period of

ownership was a woman. and this was also during the most profitable years and also during the time of the greatest -- the largest slave population was under the ownership of a woman. the kitchen where we are right now is where the enslaved cook would prepare meals for the family. and we have record of a couple of cooks that were listed on different inventories. marie and marie joseph. cooks would be assisted by domestics, people who lived either inside the big house or close to the big house and assisted the family and they would do things, you know, ranging from cleaning inside the big house to helping out the cook and moving food, serving it in the big house for meals. the cook's day in a kitchen like this would start very early in the morning, because all of the preparing of food, all of the cooking was done on the hearth. this is called hearth cooking. so she would build a fire in the

center here, and most of her cooking is again, not done on those flames, but done on the embers that are built up by that fire. so the reason that she would have to start so early is that she would have to get a large supply of coals by burning lots and lots of wood and then raking those coals out on to the hearth to prepare food. so we have a couple of examples of ways that people prepared food on those coals. this works almost like an eye and we also have something called a spider pot. so the coals go underneath and then there would be a top here to retain that heat and the coals would go on top of the pot as well. you can see a good example of this right here where this is constructed with almost like fingers coming up so those can retain all of the coals on the top. so a lot of the cook's day in preparing all of the various food that the family wanted to

eat would be spent bent over pots like this. or crouching down trying to get close to what she was preparing. anything that we prepare today, say in a slow cooker or in an oven could be prepared in pots like this over a hearth. basically it creates a dutch oven. and so we -- we know that the food that they eating here would be kind of a cultural mix. the family was jer monodescended but this was french louisiana. we had native american ingredients and if you think about the food ways of south louisiana, this is kind of an african center there. they would also be preparing any types of foods that the family had requested and we have remains, archaeological remains

here of cow, apparently an extraordinary amount of beef, and there were cow teeth found on this site so that tells us the cook was doing everything from butchering all the way to preparing the food. it was complete to this configurati configuration. in the 1830s they added dormers. but it remains prethety much unchanged. the house was lived in by two generations of hidels and then after slavery, a number of different families lived here

when it was operated as a wage labor farm, free labor farm. so we're going to enter into the ground floor. any domestic slaves that worked on this plantation would come into this house through the back. so we've made a choice to enter the house through the back as enslaved people would enter it. the front of the house is really where you get the kind of grand vista. but the back is really more of the labor center. so there would be a path that cut all the way from the kitchen to the back. and enslaved people would go into a pantry over here to prepare the food for plating and service and then take it into the dining room. so we are in the dining room of the whitney plantation big house. the dining room is on the ground floor. and the floor has spanish tile, which we had recreated.

we did find restoration. enslaved people built the levies along the mississippi. it was set back from the mississippi river not terribly far. and so all of the people who were enslaved on the particular plantations along the river road were responsible for building the levy, maintaining the le vi right in front of that place. so some of these big houses, and this may have been one of them, but some of them were originally open air on the ground floor to allow for kind of flooding. s this the dining area where enslaved people, we have furnished this big house using not any original pieces from this family because they stopped living here in 1867. but we have inventories taken at

two points in the 19th century. and we used those as our guide. basically like an insurance adjuster, they would just walk room to room and record everything down to each individual fork. over to the side here, we also have another pantry that would be used for service. and around the corner on the floor, there's an interesting feature which is an olive jar sunk into the floor for refrigeration and this is original. so the slave domestics who worked here could use this to cool down food or wine. if they were serving a chilled dessert, that would be a good place to let it chill before service. the oaks in the front of the house are actually not that old. they're only about 50 years old, added much later. and the best thing we know is that in a photograph in the 1920s, there was a fence coming

up kind of close to the house and there were gardens coming right up against the front of the house, which is really kind of an old fashioned configuration for landscape design. so that would be sometimes flowers and just a real militshh of things grown right up to the house. so the way this house is constructed is typical of french design, french and caribbean. something that's a little bit unusual for people who live in areas settled by the english. it does not have interior hallways or staircases. however, the porch would act almost like a hallway. you could walk from one room on the end to one room on the other just on the porch. it's also important to note they are african in origin. and the people who built these houses were african and african

descended slaves, building things that were familiar to them. something that is really significant about the whitney big house is the original murals which are here. this is the only part that we have had reconstructed, our conservator had to redo this pattern because it was so deteriorated. however, we do have the original on the posts here. and these are from the 1840s. this is from a time of great sugar wealth and so that's why this is really significant. some people in the 1840s, 1850s, built enormous mangss. and most of our visitors here are expecting to see something like tara, you know, something they've read about or seen in movies. and by comparison, these are really pretty modest houses. but they were able to make enough money using the forced labor of african descended slaves to pay someone to come out and hand paint faux marble

on their base boards, on their fireplaces, on the outside walls, on these posts. and all of this attention to detail, all of that cost a lot of money. and that money came from that forced labor in the fields. so we're walking into one of the large bedrooms and this has typical furnishing of the era. mid 1th century. and also again, has more of this decorative mural work on the fireplace. you can see the marbling on the fireplace as well. this was the family's home, but enslaved people were in every room of this house. performing labor. in a bedroom like this, the family members might have

personal servants, people who sometimes even in some houses, we don't know here, but in some houses they slept on pallets on the floor, next to the bed of their owners. they would perform labor in this room, like cleaning, of course, dusting, getting autoof the clothing ready for people to wear, lighting the fire. and we have a bed warmer on the bed as well. so in the wintertime, enslaved domestics would fill a bed warmer like that with coals and then run it underneath the sheets to get the bed warm before the family got in. of course, also enslaved people would be tending to the personal hygiene of their owners as well. there were chamber pots in here that enslaied domestics had to empty out. so everything from start to finish was done by enslaved workers. including, of course, raising children. so any children who were raised in this house, any heidel children would be physically nursed and cared for by enslaved

wet nurses. so enslaved nurses usually slept in the same room as the children and formed a real bond with those children. and this again is a really interesting kind of relationship where one person is enslaved and one person is the enslaifr, yet there is an intimate bond there that has this division right in the middle. the center salon also retains a lot of that original yurl work. and the most elaborate is on the ceiling. we believe that this work was commissioned. she was the owner from 1840 to 1860. her husband had died in 1839. we believe this may have been a commemorative piece. this room, it's really difficult when we come in here, not to just sort of gawk at how beautiful it is. there's a lot of really remarkable furniture. the decor is really quite lovely. and most visitors imagine

themselves as the people who would be relaxing. they think wouldn't it be nice to relax in a room like this. but it's important to think about the different ways this room would be used. it would be a site of relaxation, but it would again be a site of labor for the enslaied people. one thing we draw from the era that was common, if there were slave enslaved people who were skilled musicians or in any form of entertainment, they might be called upon after their work in the field concluded to entertain the family. solomon northup was a skilled fiddle player. he all he wanted to do was rest in his cabin. he had to come into the house and perform fiddle for dances and balls all night long. you can understand that being forced or compelled to entertain

when all you want to do is relax and be by yourself would be another form of psychological torment for enslaved people. in the last big bedroom here, these people lived inside the big house as well. we'll go from here out on to the back porch. here you can see the end of those historic murals. these patterns, by the way, come from a standard pattern book, a french pattern book. this was a motif done from a pattern book. or conservator game out here and uncovered all of this painting. you can see the condition it was

in right here. there's a couple of spots that were dark, so you can see how deteriorated it had been. something that's expressive a little bit of life after the civil war. you can see all of these scribbles. these are children who lived in this house after slavery ended. some of these are dated. these are heights. so hooer we have, says 14th of july, 1894. lillian at 10 years old right here. the family lived here for many years after slavery ended. and these are written in krinch as well. that's also interesting in learning about the cull choor here. so after slavery ended, this plantation continued operating as a cain and rice plantation for many, many years. in the front of house, close to the river road, we have the

original plantation you can see it as a method of oppression in these types of labor forms. these plantations will build stores. it's kind of like a company store. you hear that in the north, too, a company store. the workers would have to shop there for all of their goods. they would deduct that from the money that they would make working in the fields. sharecropping is actually not common in sugar because you can't really sharecrop sugar. you need the whole crop to make anything. you can't just grow this amount and get anything from it. so they had wage laborers. and the wage laborers on this plantation would live in the same slave cabins. many of them would be the former slave themselves or their desen daents. people were living in these slave cabins until the 1960s and working the same fields. we have a lot of records from

the plantation store and worked currently beginning on a project processing those. they had a whole different experience, but some things stayed very much the same as they had been during slavery times. >> you're watching american history tv. for information on our upcoming programs and to keep up on the latest history news. and there's more on american history tv's facebook page, including video of recent programs and viewer comments. that's at facebook.com/cspan history. >> the supreme court cases that shaped our history come to life with the c-span series "landmark cases." our 12-part series explores real

life experiences. >> john marshall said in marbury versus madison says the constitution is a political document. it setups the political structures, but it's also a law. and if it's a law, we have the courts to tell what it means and that's binding on the other branches. >> what sets dread scott apart is the fact that it is the ultimate anti-press dential case. it's exactly what you don't want to do. >> who should make the decisions about those debates. >> each week, american history tv's american artifacts visits museums and historic places. up next, a visit to the national museum of the american jewish history in philadelphia.

to learn about their poor exhibition, tracing the history of the jewish people in america from 1654 to the present day. this is part one of a two-part program. >> welcome to the national museum of jewish american history in philadelphia, pennsylvania. i name is claire pingle. i'm the associate curator her s at the museum. i'm happy to give you a tour today. the museum was started in 1976 by one of the five original jewish congregations that date back to the colonial period. it's half a block north from us. we shared a building with them for 35 years and opened in this location in november 2010. we are right in the middle of independence mall here in philadelphia. we are halfway between independence hall where the nation really got its start even the national constitution center which explores the founding

dopts of this nation. we like to think that we are an example of what happens when a people are allowed to live in liberty. our museum is organized so that we have a big atrium right in the middle of the building. on this side of the atrium, we have some orientation spaces, and on the other side of the atrium is where the bulk of our exhibition is, where all the artifacts and stories unfold. in the orientation areas of the museum, we want to give visitors a little bit of breathing space and set them in the mood of what they're about to see on the other side of our atrium. so in this area, we talk a little bit about who jews are, where they came from. we knew that we would have a lot of jewish visitors coming in, but we've also been pleased that we've had a lot of people coming in who aren't jewish, who might need a little bit more explanation of who these people are, who they're about to learn about in our exhibition on the other side of our atrium.

>> these settlers came from brazil, which had just been taken over by the portuguese. so the jewish colonists in brazil had to leave. most colonists had already left when these 23 boarded a ship and came to north america. this is the earliest known record of their arrival here. it refers to these 23 original jewish permanent settlers. there had been other jews here prior to these people, but they

were not people who stayed and built a community. these settlers arrived in new amsterdam where they quickly became part of the local fabric of the community, setting up organizations like a synagogue and other organizations that make them a community of people who stayed in new york and new amsterdam. one of these people was named asur levy. he became part of that original jewish community there. new amsterdam was not a very friendly place for jews in 1654. the governor of new amsterdam didn't really want the jews there, but they were allowed to stay and levy became a champion for jews in the new colony, fighting for their right to serve in the militia and be full citizens of the colony.

historians believe that levy kept a kosher home. we have here his estate inventory, and it lists two of many kitchen implements. which would indicate, could indicate that he used one for meat and one for dairy, keeping those separate. we explore the five original colonies. the jews who live here are people historians now refer to as port jews. many were involved in commerce and trade and in port cities all over the atlantic. we have some portraits of some of these people here. most notably to us is the portrait here in the top left corner.

he came from central europe and he chose to depict himself posed with the five books of moses. one is on the table here. there are four other volumes up here on the bookshelf of. this is unusual in colonial jewish portrait chur. jews generally didn't include any indication that they were jewish in their portraits. this is a model of the sin nothing in new port, rhode island. you'll notice the balcony up above where the women would have sat. everything is to scale. this was made by a model maker in illinois who was not jewish but was very interested in the synagogue and went to the library of congress and studied the floor plans for benjamin peter harrison's design for the synagogue, which ask a very new port building. there are no outward signs that

this is a jewish building. new port's jews were just building a colonial building. he was one of the finest architects in the colonies at the time. it's a pa laidian building. the next gallery of the exhibition explores the american jewish experience in the revolutionary war. not all jews were yankees, but it would have been very difficult for people to choose to follow the revolution. this was a very new idea to rebel against the crown. so we do talk about jews who were torys as well as those who were patriots. and one of the most famous patriots, of course, is haim solomon who helped finance the revolution by selling bonds for the revolutionary army to help raise money. so we have a little -- a few

arty fangts from his life, including his marriage certificate, an advertisement for his business, and a receipt, a ledger sheet right here in james madison's hand where madison is recording expenses and the receipt of funds from various people who were helping to raise money for the revolution including on the second line there, haim solomon. solomon was a congregation of the synagogue that started this museum. one of the big stars of our exhibition is right here. this is correspondent between george washington and the jewish congregation of newport, rhode island. these are on loan to us from the morguen zs stern foundation. we're very excited to have these on loan.

when he arrived, various groups addressed him, including the jewish community of new port. and this is the address that was read outloud to washington that day on august 17. a very quickly afterwards, probably within a day or a few days, washington would write back to the congregation a very eloquent letter confirming his belief that the new nation should -- and his commitment to religious tolerance in the new nation. it's really one of the founding document for american jewish history. it's a very important thing for us to have on display here. new port was not the only community to address washington

and receive a well considered letter confirming washington's belief in religious libtd in response. we have a couple more letters across the way here. the community of savannah also wrote to washington, as did many other religious groups. we have a list here of different groups that wrote to him. despite this confirmation of commit by the federal government of religious wlibt, jews haed to overcome obstacles to complete liberty. many states had religious tests that blocked jews from holding office at the state level. generally that would be -- you would have to take an oath on a christian bible in order to hold office. jews can't do that. so those laws were struck down

one by one in the states that help held them. the latest was in 1877. so it took a very long time for this. in this gallery, we look at the mid 19th century from the period of about 1820 to right around the civil war, the 1860s. in this gallery, especially over here in this gallery, you'll notice that we paid a lot of attention to our youngest visitors while we were organizing this exhibition. we didn't want kids to be bored when they were walking through this history museum. it's no not a dry history. we really nougt about ways to keep children engaged while they're here. throughout the building you'll find stations with kids books where parents or grandparents can sit down with children and read to them and different activities that can engage children.

i even see adult visitors trying on costumes in our pioneer gallery here. the pioneer gallery is a story around fannie brookser who was a young woman, a teenager in central europe who married a man who had already been to america and came back to europe and was planning to come back to america and join a wagon train. she set off on thissed a men chur with him and came to america and traveled all over the country with him in a wagon. she left very detailed memoirs for her daughter, for her children, with allowed us to recreate the wagon she traveled on on her journey. and gave us a lot of information about the types of supplies they brought with them on their journey. these are two basically 16-year-old kids off in america

by themselves. the children can try on costumes, think about what they would pack if they were going on a journey like this. they can pretend to cook dinner around a campfire and visit a trading post. the types of people coming here are expanding in variety and the nation itself is geographically expanding as the boundaries move west. and jews are traveling along with those boundaries, going out west for the gold rush and for different opportunities and to get, you know, to be out in the open and for adventure as well. for exploration. in this gallery, we talk about the civil war. we know that jews found themselves on both sides of the

conflict, like other americans. they divided mainly along geographic lines. if you lived in the north, you were likely to support the union. and if you lived in the south, you were likely to support secession. jews also were on both sides of the debate over slavery. this is a very vivid artifact. the original is in the mangun collection in california. it's a lithograph of a rabbi in neat. at some point in the war, he apologized for not speaking out against slairy saying right must be right whatever the consequences. and coming out on the side of abolition. one of his former supporters, a man named jacob cullen of new orleans dei faced his portrait and sent it back to him in protest. the family kept this and

eventually donated it to the magnus museum. there were about 10,000 jews who fought in the civil war. 7,000 for the union, and we think about 3,000 for the confederacy. that disparity of numbers might just have to do with where jews lived. there were more jews in the north. in 1852, up with of the more well known instances of the civil war for jews is grants order number 11. general grant was in charge of keeping track of the cotton industry during the war. it needed to continue because the north needed cotton. the south needed funds. so grant was charged with making sure there was no black market,

which there was. i believe it was during hanukka, grant issued orders that because jews as a class were trading in cotton on a black market they all needed to be expelled from several states, kentucky, tennessee, other states. and about 300 families were displaced because of these orders. the jews were incensed about lumping people in one group and protested directly to lincoln. this is a letter frto abraham lincoln in early january 1863. as soon as lincoln heard about this, it seems that he wrote to grant and told him that he needed to rescind these orders. grant later protested that he had not read the orders, that he just signed them, that they had been written by a subordinate. and a lot of people thought that

this might come back to haunt him when he ran for office a few years later. the thought was maybe jews wouldn't vote for grant, but we know that jews did vote for grant. they forgave him for this. >> we look at several aspects of the jewish experience in the civil war. the home front, fighting in the war, as well as serving in government. this woman is particularly interesting. she was from a prominent family in charleston. she had married a man from pennsylvania who was a general in the union army. she went to war with him, which many women did with their husbandss. she wrote a memoir and it includes photographs about the

war and her experience. in those memoirs she wrote that she had never really fully realized the fraternal side aspect of the conflict until she was nursing her brother one day and her northern husband the next. this really embodies that concept. one development we saw was the first jewish chaplains came into being during that time. up until the civil war, a chaplain in the army had to be a regularly ordained minister of some congregation. jews fought to have that law changed so that it was just a regularly ordained minister. of a congregation. so this is the first charter for a jewish chaplain signed by

abraham lincoln, just above those flags. this is on loan to us from a congregation here in philadelphia. the first jewish chaplain was rabbi jacob frankel. we explore the story of judah benjamin who was a high ranking official in the confederacy. we look at reform judaism, which was not an american movement originally. it was a european movement that was sort of imported over here to america. it has three main aspects. one is that prayers in english are introduced, or whatever country the reform is happening in. in america, that's english. not everyone could understand the he brew prayers anymore and

it was important for people to understand what they were saying during services. as well as mixed seating was being introduced so that unlike the torha synagogue model we looked at earlier, there were women seated in a balcony with children and men would sit down on the level of the bema where the reader is positioned. at this time, family seating was being introduced. in this image of temple emanuel in new york, you can see that there are women down here with their husbands and families. and we have an orchestra in the balcony. music and choirs and instruments were introduced during services. reform judaism was not without controversy. there were a lot of people who did not think reform was good. some people thought that it was

a die lugs of jewish tradition and they should stay the same and follow from generation to generation very closely. people went as far to say that reform judaism was a way of making judaism more like protestant christianity. in 1883, the first rabbis were being ordained. before the 1880s, all rabbis had been ordained in europe. there were no american ordained rabbis. there were a couple in 1875, but generally rabbis came from europe and came over here and worked. people all over the country were invited to a banquet including a

lot of different rab lies in different areas. they sat down to a meal that included food that was not kosher. so this is a menu from that event. this is an oyster fork from the caterer that is onloan to us. this was a big controversy obviously. not all of the rabbis who came were reform minded. a lot of people kept kosher and were faced with all these nonkosher foods at this meal. and it was a big controversy. it became known as the trefa banquet, meaning nonkosher food. at the end of the century, we're here in about the 1870s, 1880s in this gallery. a lot of the central european jews who had emigrated from europe in the mid 19th century had kind of made their way in america and settled in and they have professions and jobs now.

they become interested in giving back to the community, back to the wider community as well as the jewish community. they start to get organized and old balls in support of different charitable causes. this is around the time when some of the first jewish federations of jewish charities get founded. a popular time for these balls is a holiday of purin which is focused on charity. we have a few ar fi tacts related to purim balls. the charities could include hospitals to orphanages to support for the immigrants who are starting to come over in greater numbers from eastern europe.

each floor in our building ends with a time line. we wanted to give people an idea of when things happened in relation to other things. so our time line has three levels. american history, american jewish history, and world history. some of these events are cover ed on the floor we just left, others are not, like the building of taj mahal. i was surprised to learn that the taj mahal was completed only 11 years before the first 23 jewish refugees came here to our shores. it's a nice way to orient people to review what we've just seen and see how it fits in with other things we know about. my title is jeff rerj star and associate curator my main focus is our artifact collection.

i oversee its preservation and see that it's getting processed correctly and that it's accessible to researchers. i also write text and do research for our exhibitions. artifacts help us tell stories about history in a way that we can't get out of books. when you're stanning in sfront of an artifact, it's a different experience than reading a book. it's a direct witness to the history you're learning about. and it's really a special experience. >> this was the first of a two-part look at jewish history. >> each week, american history tv's american artifacts visit museums and historic places. up next, a visit to

philadelphia's national museum of american jewish history for a tour of their exhibition, tracing the history of jewish people in america from 1654 to the present day. the second of a two-part visit, we pick up the story in the 1880s when the era of mass immigration brought thousands of jewish immigrants to eastern europe every year. our guide is curator claire pingel. >> in the 1880s we saw big waves of immigrants coming to america. they included jews, i rash, italians. all kinds of people were coming in to ellis islan people were all coming into boston as well as from places you wouldn't think.

everything from passports to visas. luggage tags, health inspection certificates. and these are things that people tended to save for a very long time afterwards. and each pass down to their children. jews left here for many different reasons. one of the most well known, of course, is anti-semitic violence that happened in europe. things called pagras whi. they were very traumatic experiences and they were remembered by the grandchildren. however, they're not the only reason people left. people left for geographic freedom, for economic

opportunity, and to avoid military conscription. one of my favorite stories in this area is that of albert hatchwell and his family. hatchwell was an algerian jew. he lived in algeria in the 1890s. of course we always think of these jews who came here in this time period as being from eastern europe, but hatchwell stands here to let us know that not everyone was coming from eastern europe. people were coming from all over the place. his descendants gave us his fez and we have on loan a pair of coffee pots that descended down through his family. when people arrived here in america, they both a welcoming harbor and not always a welcoming harbor.

some weren't happy about immigrants coming, but others were helping these immigrants become acclimated to their new surroundings. we have several books on display here that were written for these incoming immigrants to help them figure out what american life was like. so the books ranged from how to get your citizenship started, how to find employment, how to be socially accepted in some cases. we have a few examples of the types of things immigrants brought with them. it's always surprising to see the large objects people brought with them when they didn't have a lot of luggage space. you see pictures of immigrants traveling with a basket or a satchel or their back. but some people managed to drag over from europe entire cooking sets.

things they could much more easily got here when they got themselves established, but they just chose to bring them with them. a lot of times people stopped using these things when they got here and got new american things, but they kept the european things and passed them down to their families. which is nice for us because those families then donate them to museums and help us tell stories. eva bane was 17 years old when she came to america by herself, following a brother who had already come here. eva is the one standing in the middle in that photograph where she's appearing with her family back home in europe. she came to philadelphia, lived with an uncle for a while and she later told her daughter that she had em gritted because she had finished the educational opportunities had run out for her at home and she wanted to continue going to school. and she felt that she could only do that here in america.

whej you talk about the different reasons people come here, that's a compelling one for all of us. she brought a muffin tin. it belonged to her grandmother. she brought with her this table runner that she stitched while she was on the journey. before the museum opened, we had this table runner reviewed by a textile conservator to make sure that we knew that we were displaying it in a way that would best preserve it. one interest thing the conservator told me was that it was made from a kit that would have been purchased. so i like to think about ava thinking about this long ocean voyage ahead of her and thinking about what am i going to do i'm on the boat and going out and buying a kit so she could do some embroidery while she was sitting on the ship waiting to get to america. in this area, we call this our street scape.

it is a typical immigrant urban neighborhood. we have different smaller galleries that go off from this area where we talk about different subjects, including the way that people lived, their home life, a lot of people lived in tenements. many had borders living with them in a small two-room apartment. so this was a different experience. people were living very close to each other close to people of other nationalities and learning about them in this situation. one gallery that surprises a lot of our visitors is this one where we explore the farming experience.

not all immigrants ended up in urban experiences. some took up farming. this afghan and tools belonged to the kalof family. rachel kalof came to america and promptly moved to a homestead in north dakota where she lived with her husband. for seven year before the family moved to chicago. in this gallery we learn about the work the jews were doing at this time in urban communities. a lot of factory work, a lot of manufacturing and, of course, the garment industry was a major area that employed a lot of jews in factories. this was a time when the labor unions started getting more traction here in america.

people began fighting for rights like shorter working hours and basic safety in their factory settings. this is from a man who came to america and worked in a garment factory where he met his wife. they left the factory together and started a tailor shop. and he worked at this sewing machine for 30 years. we learn about the jewish experience in world war i. this uniform was worn by a doctor in the american expeditionary forces stationed in france did you know there were 300 female marines in 1851. these women mostly had clerical

positions. the marines were really looking to open up positions so that have more men could go overseas. she worked in washington, d.c. where she worked as a payroll person. in the 1920s, the fears of immigrants which had been boiling during the time of the great migration to america started to come to a head and eventually leading to the johnson reed act of 1984 which effectively ended immigration by ins instituting quotas. this would of course become a very difficult thing, an obstacle ten years later when a lot of european jews could have used another safe harbor during the rise of the nazis. the 1920s was a rise of anti-semiti

anti-semitism, largely due to the immigration surge that had happened up until the 1920s. so here we talk a little bit about that, about henry ford's anti-semitism and the protocols of zion, this was a fraudulent document purportedly outlining a jewish conspiracy to take over the world. it was published during the 1920s. in the 1930s, there was a sort of cultural flourishing in america despite the depression. a lot of really rich artistic activity and so in this area, we look at the rise of the movies in the 1930s, as well as yiddish theatre. we look at the wpa that supported artists in the 1930s. we also look at the political situation in america, a lot of people were espousing different

concepts like socialism or zionism. we also explore religion in the 1930s. congregation shari eli was a south philadelphia immigrant synagogue that opened its doors in 1918. by the 1980s, membership slacked off and the congregation would soon be closing its doors. people moved out of the neighborhood and they didn't need the big sin nothing anymore. someone from the congregation called our museum and asked if we would like to go in and see their torah arc, which our curators did in 1984. they entered the synagogue and saw a monumental hand carved, hand painted torah arc that had been maid by these immigrants in south philadelphia 70 years earlier. we salvaged the entire tora

torah arc. part is on display now, including these lions that were up near the ceiling. we think that a lot of the carving was done by people who were carving care zell animals. you can see that kind of in the face of the lion. in this era, we look at the american experience of world war ii and the holocaust. jewish leaders were faced with a dilemma. should they boycott germany and rally in the streets and make lots of noise? or should they quietly work behind the scenes to come to a diplomatic solution to this rising problem of the nazi rise in europe. there was domestic anti-semitism. we saw in an earlier gallery, henry ford's publications,

espousing virulent anti-semitic believes. you had people like father coughlin, who was a catholic priest who had a radio show and was a national figure who spoke up against jews, very ant anti-semitic. of course, during this time, there were very strict quotas for who could enter america and when. the visa system was very controlled. this is a steamer trunk from a family that attempted to immigrate in 1939 on a luxury ship that was carrying 937 passengers from germany to cuba. most of these people were jewish and most of them had visas to enter the united states a the a later date. they were going to wait out the time period before that in cuba. when they arrived in havana,

they realized that their landing permits were fraudulent. they had been sold to them by a corrupt government official. so only a few people were able to get off the boat in cuba. the jewish community in america scrambled to try to figure out how to give these 930 people refuge in america. and they were ultimately unable to do so because those quota system was so very strict. the ship had to turn back to europe. joseph josephs who was on the ship with his wife lily and daughter leisle, this is their trunk, was part of the passenger committee that the captain who was ship, who was not jewish organized in order to boost spirits of the passengers as they were on their trip back to europe. people were terrified of what would happen to them when they had to get off the ship again. this particular family made their way to america the

following year. they got off the ship in great britain and came to philadelphia the following year. in 1997, we got a call from an auction house the auctioneer is a friend of the museum. the steamer trunk was put on consignment and he was looking at it and he noticed a sticker that said st. louis on it and he knew about the journey of the st. louis, so he called us and asked us if we were interested in the trunk. and he very generously purchased it from the consigner and donated it to the museum and it's now one of our really special artifacts he. by 1944, it was widely known

that the holocaust was happening in europe. we were immersed in world war ii and the secretary general asked several of his aides to write a report on this subject, what the government was doing to help aid european jews. these aides, including josiah dubois wrote a long report to him after studying the subject. he titled it on the acquiesce sense of this government on the murder of the jews. very explicit statement of what was happening. morganthal condensed this report, presented it to roosevelt and several days later, the war refugee board was instituted to try to help get people out of europe and give them refuge in america. despite that, very few people were able to come here. more went to england or other places.

but one of the phenomena that we saw was that a lot of americas s jewish and nonjewish started organizing and trying to figure out ways, grassroots ways to get threatened people out of hostile territory to america. one of those stories was that of helga weiss and 49 other children who were saved by a couple and the jewish fraternal organization. this couple gilbert and eleanor krause were able to obtain 50 visas to help bring unaccompanied children from europe to america. they traveled to europe to interview the families of people who applied for these visas. and one of them was helga weiss.

her parents rosa and emil weiss applied for her to be in this transport. they had already sent their older daughter to palestine so she could be safe there and they were happy to find a spot for helga on this transport. helga brought with her this teddy bear, a set of pajamas that her mother had made for her. and her mother's hair brush. this is helga in her passport here. she strongly remembered the application process. she was only 8 years old at the time, but she later said she always remembered having to write everything forgetly and the amount of pressure that was on her to do efrl perfectly during this application because her parents were so frightened that fe she didn't -- if her handwriting wasn't perfect then she might not be chosen to go on this trip and be rescued. helg a's mother died in the holocaust. her father managed to come to

america and she had been living with a foster family during this time. about a year when they were separated and they moved to detroit where she grew up. a very sweet lady. she trained seeing eye dogs later in life. and used this teddy bear in school presentations that in he experience of jewish people during the holocaust. >> so in this gallery, we look at the experience of jewish soldiers fighting in the war, both men and women.

we look at culture during this time meperiod, cold war and establishment of the state of israel, as well as carrying on jewish traditions. both of the floors above us started with an immigration story. this floor starts really more with a migration story. a lot more of them went to israel, some stayed in europe, some came to america. the establishment of the state of israel was a roop really momentous story.

it carried a lot. a safe refuge, a jewish home. during the 1950s, we experienced the red scare. and this was a very frightening time for jewish for jewish people, many of whom had been involved in communism in the period before in the urban neighborhoods. a lot of ideas were percolating about how to improve america, how to make things work well for everybody. and communism was one of those ideas that people had. one of the big news stories at the time was the trial of julius and ethel rosenberg who were a jewish couple. we know now that julius was -- we're not sure of ethel's

involvement in the plot, but they were executed. at the time, people didn't necessarily believe they were spies, but they were anti-semitic and certainly there were anti-semitic aspects to the way that americans were reacted to their trial. you hear about the hundred black list, and it was a real thing. this is a book called red channels. it was written and published in 1950. if you open up the book, you'll see all kinds of famous names of very well known people, and it goes through and it lists everything that they did that was considered unamerican. this is the summons for screen writer alba bessie to come before the house on american activity committee.

she became what was known as part of the hollywood ten, which were a group of hollywood people who were imprisoned. bessie was in jail for a year in contempt of congress, who would never work in hollywood again. in this area, we look at the experience of jewish families who moved out of the urban areas into the suburbs that were opening up. at the end of world war ii, a lot of people had the opportunity to get an education, start a business, and buy a house. in a nicer place than the immigrant neighborhoods they had been in. so a lot of people were moving to the new suburbs outside of the city. here we talk about the catskill, very famous, and also the leisure activities in the post

war period, going to resorts for vacation, where the catskills were of course a mountain area in upstate new york that became popular with artists in the 19th century, and then with vacationers later on, people looking to get out of the city. that's the hotel book, they wouldn't accept jews to register at the hotel. so jews started to build their own hotels, including classics like the concord, kutcher's. a lot of the clientele was jewish. they would have kosher services and facilities in the fall. one of the results of people moving out to these suburbs was

that weren't in such tight-knit communities anymore. they wanted to help the children remain jewish, support jewish tradition in their children and meet other jews in their community where they have a lot of christian neighbors. so this is a time period when the first jewish community centers were established in america and people are making an effort to send their children to jewish schools or to supplemental jewish schools after school and on the weekends. here we look at jewish summer camp. along with sendingt 1200

>> she made hundreds and hundreds of them. and brought them to schools and taught kids about the bible. she eventually opened a commercial business, the american bible doll company, which sold bible dolls in department stores in the 1950s and '60s and eventually a large collection of these bible dolls came to the museum in the 1980s that came directly from diana foreman, that she had made.

so in this area, we start to look at the 1960s, 1970s, a time of great social fermenting of different ideas. we look at jews who were involved in the civil rights moment. we look at feminism, and the jewish relationship with israel in this time period as well. the last area of our exhibition, where we have artifacts is this area, where we look at the 1980s and jewish culture in this time period, as well as just identity, what is means to be a jew in the late 20th and early 21st century. this is a hanukkah mennora that was designed by a holocaust survivor from germany. he collected a lot of artifacts. he designed this in 2011 when

the statue of liberty turned 125 years old. he made a cast of a little statue of liberty souvenir statueett. and turned it into a mennora. we have it on display here, and we actually loaned it out to the white house a couple of years ago. president obama lit it for hanukkah. we wanted to give our visitors a chance to talk back to us and talk with each other after making their way through this exhibition and learning about the history of the jewish people in america. so in this gallery, we project four questions all the time. we change them according to current events. if something happens, we ask a new question, and visitors get a chance to fill out a post-it note with their opinion and put it on the wall and see how people are reacting to contemporary events, which have a lot to do with historical

events. >> this was the second of a two-part look at the national museum of american jewish history. you can watch this and all other american history >> each week american history tv's "reel america" provide archival films that bring perspective to today's public affairs issues. president kennedy traveled across the united states, making 11 stops between pennsylvania and california. he highlighted conservation of