Cultures & Communities

Furniture, cooking wares, clothing, works of art, and many other kinds of artifacts are part of what knit people into communities and cultures. The Museum’s collections feature artifacts from European Americans, Latinos, Arab Americans, Asian Pacific Americans, African Americans, Gypsies, Jews, and Christians, both Catholics and Protestants. The objects range from ceramic face jugs made by enslaved African Americans in South Carolina to graduation robes and wedding gowns. The holdings also include artifacts associated with education, such as teaching equipment, textbooks, and two complete schoolrooms. Uniforms, insignia, and other objects represent a wide variety of civic and voluntary organizations, including youth and fraternal groups, scouting, police forces, and firefighters.

Color print of a large number of horse-drawn carriages on the road in front of a two-story brick road house (Turner"s Hotel).
Description (Brief)
Color print of a large number of horse-drawn carriages on the road in front of a two-story brick road house (Turner"s Hotel). Eighteen of the horses are numbered and indentified in a key below the image.
Description
A color print of a crowded road in front of a large roadhouse (Turner Hotel, Rape Ferry Rd.) filled with carriages and spirited horses. All of the carriages are occupied by fashionably dressed men. The buggies are without tops – they have flat floors and straight footboards. The roadhouse is in the colonial style. A two story structure stands with a large ring in the rear, three dormer windows above, and a veranda across the front. Here guests stand and watch. Stable boys wait outside the barn in the background. The grounds are well-kept with trees, shrubbery, and picket fences.
Point Breeze Park in Philadelphia was founded in 1855 and raced thoroughbreds for the first time in 1860. It was eventually converted into an automobile race course in the 1900s after trotting faded as a popular sport.
Pharazyn was a Philadelphia lithographer and colorist. He was born 1822 and died in 1902. He had offices at 103 South Street in 1856 and at 1725 Lombard Street in 1870. Made prints for different magazines, as well as fine prints for patrons. Created a large colored folio “Trotting Cracks of Philadelphia Returning from the Race at Point Breeze Park” in 1870. The horses are all named as usual in the subtitle, but the artists name isn’t given; this was normal as the horses were more important than the actual artists.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1870
maker
Pharazyn, H.
ID Number
DL.60.3557
catalog number
60.3557
The process of manufacturing such baskets is called "sewing," but it is actually a process of binding and coiling long strands of grass.
Description
The process of manufacturing such baskets is called "sewing," but it is actually a process of binding and coiling long strands of grass. In the wetlands, two kinds of grasses are used; "sweetgrass," and more recently, black rush, also known as "bullrush." Strips of oak wood, or palmetto fronds are used to bind together long bundles of grass, which are then coiled into a particular shape. Makeshift tools, such as broken-off spoons, flattened nails, or cow ribs are used for the coiling and binding process. Sometimes, colored grasses or pine needles are used in the show baskets, although the use of sweetgrass, bulrush, and palmetto is standard.
Today, the role of the men and boys is to gather the materials, the women do the weaving and market the baskets. Until recently, baskets were sold from family-operated roadside stands, but increasingly, they are sold at county fairs and cultural festivals. Many of the older women regarded basketmaking as a carefully guarded community secret, but many of the younger women give basketmaking seminars to people from outside of the communities. The women of an earlier generation were not always comfortable with the term "gullah", younger women tend to recognize its historical and cultural value.
Today, the baskets are for domestic and decorative purposes, rather than agricultural use, and there is a much wider variety of shapes than when baskets were used on the plantations. Some coil weaving produces wall decorations, ladies' hats, and men's caps. Although there are no fixed rules for terminology, certain shapes are often given specific names. Some of the named shapes are for placing utensils inside the baskets.
Location
Currently not on view
Date made
1970
ID Number
CL.298252.18
collector/donor number
C.26.1
accession number
298252
catalog number
298252.18
The tradition of shaping human likenesses on ceramic vessels is thousands of years old. Face vessels held different meanings in different cultures around the world.
Description
The tradition of shaping human likenesses on ceramic vessels is thousands of years old. Face vessels held different meanings in different cultures around the world. Some were probably used in burial rituals, others satirized the person whose features were captured in clay, and still others were made just for fun.
Potters rarely signed their face vessels before the the 1920s, making attribution difficult. The maker of this face vessel, on the right, is not known. It features rough white clay to represent the teeth and eyes, much as the slave-made pieces used kaolin pieces.
This piece came to the Museum as part of the Van Alstyne Collection of American Folk Art. Eleanor and Mabel Van Alstyne collected more than 300 examples of American folk art over a period of about 40 years.
Location
Currently not on view (base)
Currently not on view
date made
late 1800s-early 1900s
Date made
c. 1850-1860
maker
unknown
ID Number
CE.65.1066
catalog number
65.1066
accession number
256396
The Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church sprang up in rural areas across the South following the Civil War, providing a place of rest and community for freed slaves.
Description
The Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church sprang up in rural areas across the South following the Civil War, providing a place of rest and community for freed slaves. Even if church services only occurred once or twice a month when a traveling minister visited, the house of worship provided not only a place to rekindle faith but as a school and meeting house for fraternal clubs. Homecomings came around harvest time, bringing visitors from across the country. Relatives and neighbors who had moved away came back to spend time with family, sharing stories of their lives in northern cities. The often-embellished picture of northern urban life painted at such reunions encouraged others to contemplate boarding trains north.
World War I brought a new era of industrial opportunity for African Americans, But as production demands grew, wartime recruitment took away traditionally white and immigrant factory workers. Northern labor recruiters, newspapers, and word-of-mouth spread news of higher wages and regular work being offered to African Americans willing to move. Desire for better treatment and better paying jobs brought hundreds of thousands of African Americans north.
Those left behind in the South found continued solace and fortitude in the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, leading the way in continuing the fight for basic civil rights for all. Freedom songs sung in marches and jails spread to whites traveling from northern colleges to join in the struggle, spreading lyrics and ideas back north that have now become familiar to those visiting the National Mall and public squares across the country participating in democratic demonstrations of a range of popular issues.
maker
Mt. Zion Mission Baptist Church
ID Number
1986.0812.01
accession number
1986.0812
catalog number
1986.0812.01
In 1857, Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives became business partners and set out to produce popular, affordable decorative prints for American consumers.
Description
In 1857, Nathaniel Currier and James Merritt Ives became business partners and set out to produce popular, affordable decorative prints for American consumers. In the 1880s, Currier & Ives produced the "Darktown Comics" series of color lithographs, which would become one of their best-selling lines. Each of these depicted African Americans as racist caricatures and ugly stereotypes, and presented scenes where the humor, such as it was, derived from their buffoonish antics and "putting on airs.” These color lithographs were primarily created by John Cameron (1828-1906) and Thomas Worth (1834-1917), two artists employed by Currier & Ives. They drew on a broad visual vocabulary of anti-black racist tropes that had developed over the 19th century, derogatory signifiers that would have been understood and shared by their popular audience, who created a demand for similar imagery in numerous other commercial and decorative objects of the time. Cameron and Worth often set hapless black figures in traditionally white roles, such as firefighting, and the ridiculous failures they depicted helped to reinforce entrenched racial and social hierarchies, as well as to perpetuate the notions of heroism and leadership as white male prerogatives in the period after Reconstruction. When Currier & Ives shut down operations in 1907, New York City printer Joseph Koehler purchased the lithographic stones of the "Darktown Comics" series from the firm and produced restrikes under his own name for several more years.
This color lithograph – “A Prize Squirt” – depicts a fire company (“Niagara”) engaged in a contest to throw water high enough to reach a liberty cap atop a pole. A group of spectators looks on and one man, dressed somewhat like Uncle Sam, holds a trophy, engraved “Prize Mug.” The fire pumper depicted is intentionally old-fashioned and shoddy, and the firefighters must stand on a board and sawhorses in order to operate it. It is paired with a second scene entitled “The Last Shake.” The print is a racist parody of the common practice of fire companies in American towns and cities to mark holidays with parades and contests, including pumping challenges. This version is a restrike produced by Joseph Koehler after 1907.
Location
Currently not on view
date made
ca 1907
publisher
Koehler, Joseph
copyright
Currier & Ives
ID Number
2005.0233.1092
accession number
2005.0233
catalog number
2005.0233.1092

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