101 Objects that Made America: America in the World
Pulled from the Smithsonian collections, these items range millennia, from pre-historic dinosaurs to the very first supercomputer

Wild America

As a young man John James Audubon was obsessed with birds, and he had a vision for a completely different kind of book. He would paint birds as he saw them in the wild "alive and moving," and paint every species actual size. He travelled the U.S Frontier on foot and horseback seeking birds of every species known to science. He wrote of his time in Kentucky, around 1810, "I shot, I drew, I looked on nature only; my days were happy beyond human conception, and beyond this I really cared not." As Jonathan Rosen points out in The Life of the Skies, these paintings promoted a romantic vision of the wilderness of the New World, to be viewed by people who would never see these birds in real life. Perhaps that is one reason Audubon found more success in England than in the young United States, and why his work still holds its appeal today, as the wilderness he knew and loved recedes further into the past.Read more of Sibley's essay. Mark Laita
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The great Mari Sandoz, historian and novelist of the Plains, called the buffalo the Indians’ “chief commissary.” We Americans today are captivated by the still living survival of that primeval nomad life. Or say, better, perhaps, by our fantasy of such.Read more of Mamet's essay. Mark Laita
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Some have said I wasn’t there. When a one-armed Civil War veteran named John Wesley Powell made the first known descent through the Grand Canyon in 1869, from the Green River Station in Wyoming nearly 1,000 miles down to the Virgin River, it was described as the last heroic feat of exploration in the United States, the one that, as Wallace Stegner says, filled in the “great blank spaces” on the map. Powell gathered a party of nine men, mostly former soldiers, and had four stout wooden boats shipped out from Chicago by rail.Read more of Cahill's essay. Mark Laita
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Discovery

The Apollo suits were blends of cutting-edge technology and Old World craftsmanship. Each suit was hand-built by seamstresses who had to be extraordinarily precise; a stitching error as small as 1/32 inch could mean the difference between a space-worthy suit and a reject. While most of the suit’s materials existed long before the Moon program, one was invented specifically for the job. After a spacecraft fire killed three Apollo astronauts during a ground test in 1967, NASA dictated the suits had to withstand temperatures of over 1,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The solution was a state-of-the-art fabric called Beta cloth, made of Teflon-coated glass microfibers, used for the suit’s outermost layer.Read more of Chalkin's essay. Dan Winters
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Voice

When we look at photographs of authors, especially famous authors, we scan their faces, hoping to find some connection between the way they look and their work. We never find it, or at least I never have, because we don’t know if such a connection actually exists or whether we would recognize it if it did. A penetrating gaze, a goofy grin, even wild hair, could belong to an average person as well as to a genius. Even if we have numerous photographs of a single author, as we do of Whitman, it would be impossible to find that revealing feature or gesture that would establish the connection we seek.Read more of Strand's essay. Cade Martin
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Five decades ago, a 35-year-old Mexican-American applied for unemployment in Bakersfield, California, and argued with the caseworker about how to characterize his previous job. He rejected each option: clerk, playground supervisor, intermediate social worker with a second language. None, he said, described what he did. Community organizer was not part of the American lexicon in April 1962. Neither was the name Cesar Chavez. Only seven years later, he would be on the cover of Time magazine.Read more of Pawel's essay. Cade Martin
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The simple black judicial robe has been a part of my life for nearly four decades. I first wore one in 1975 when I became a trial judge in Arizona. When I was appointed to the Supreme Court of the United States, in 1981, I brought that same robe with me to Washington and wore it on my first day on the bench. Although I retired in 2006, I still wear a robe in my role as a “circuit-rider,” sitting frequently, as many retired justices do, on various federal Courts of Appeals across the country.Read more of Justice O'Connor's essay. Cade Martin
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Power

The UH-1 “sprang from the cold, muddy battlefields of the Korean War, where the original M*A*S*H helicopter, the Bell 47, recovered thousands of wounded soldiers and delivered them straight to critical care units,” writes David Hanselman in the National Air and Space Museum's collection notes for this fabled aircraft. In 1954, when the U.S. Army launched a design competition for a new medical evacuation helicopter, Bell Helicopter Company was expected to compete for the contract since their -47 had performed so well in Korea.
According to the diaries of Bell engineer Bartram Kelley, who designed the Huey, the Army wanted a helicopter that could carry a payload of 800 pounds, with a top speed of 131 knots and a maximum endurance of 2.7 hours. The requirements called for a pilot and medical attendant to be able to take off from an unprepared area, day or night, and land at a pre-determined destination on an unprepared area. There they would pick up two litter patients and return to the point of departure.
The Army was impressed enough with Bell’s XH-40 prototype to sign a contract for 200 medevac helicopters, plus an additional 100 to use as trainers to teach pilots to fly at night and in bad weather. And so began the saga of the Huey, which became a familiar sight in the sky for an entire generation of soldiers.
See the gallery above to learn more about the Bell UH-1’s history. All photographs are part of the Lt. Col. S.F. Watson (U.S. Army) Collection at the National Air and Space Museum.
Above: Two Bell UH-1 Iroquois helicopters in flight over Vietnam, circa late 1960s/early 1970s. Lt. Col. S.F. Watson (U.S. Army) Collection/NASM.
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Though unmanned, remote-controlled drones had been used in times of war since World War II, they were revolutionized in 1995. The Gnat, developed by the San Diego defense contractor General Atomics, carried something new: video cameras. Soldiers had long coveted the ability to see over the next hill. Manned aircraft delivered that, from gas-filled balloons in the Civil War and from airplanes in the 20th century, but only until the pilot or his fuel was exhausted. Satellites provide an amazing panorama but they are expensive, few in number and not always overhead when needed. The Gnat gave commanders a 60-mile panorama from a platform that could stay airborne more or less permanently, with vehicles flown in 12-hour shifts. Later renamed the Predator, it quickly became the U.S. military's preferred surveillance tool.Read more of Bowden's essay. Cade Martin
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Nowadays, we have trouble envisioning Lincoln without his top hat, but how he began wearing it remains unclear. Early in his political career, historians tell us, Lincoln probably chose the hat as a gimmick. In those days he was rarely seen without his stovepipe, the traditional seven- or even eight-inch-high hat that gentlemen had been wearing since early in the century. True, Lincoln’s version was often battered a bit, as if hard worn, an affectation perhaps intended to suit his frontier image.Read more of Carter's essay. David Burnett
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Invention

Isaac Merritt Singer's sewing machine was a vast improvement upon earlier versions, capable of 900 stitches a minute -at a time when the most nimble seamstress could sew about 40. Though the machine was originally designed for manufacturing, Singer saw its domestic potential and created a lighter weight version, which he hauled to country fairs, circuses and social gatherings, dazzling the womenfolk.Read more of Martha Stewart's essay. Guy Billout
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Clovis points are wholly distinctive. Chipped from jasper, chert, obsidian and other fine, brittle stone, they have a lance-shaped tip and (sometimes) wickedly sharp edges. Extending from the base toward the tips are shallow, concave grooves called “flutes” that may have helped the points be inserted into spear shafts. Typically about four inches long and a third of an inch thick, they were sleek and often beautifully made.Read more of Mann's essay. Guy Billout
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What distinguished Eniac from the others was that a working machine performing thousands of calculations a second could be easily reprogrammed for different tasks. It was a breathtaking enterprise. The original cost estimate of $150,000 would rise to $400,000. Weighing in at 30 tons, the U-shaped construct filled a 1,500-square-foot room. Its 40 cabinets, each of them nine feet high, were packed with 18,000 vacuum tubes, 10,000 capacitors, 6,000 switches and 1,500 relays. Looking at the consoles, observers could see a tangle of patch cords that reminded them of a telephone exchange.Read more of Levy's essay. Guy Billout
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Community

Negro baseball leagues allowed African-Americans the chance to play the national pastime for pay (if not for much). The heyday of the Negro Leagues was the '30s, the cynosure of most seasons the East-West All-Star Game, which was usually played in Chicago at Comiskey Park, home of the White Sox. Indeed, in 1941, just before America entered the war, that fabled season when Ted Williams batted .406 and Joe DiMaggio hit safely in 56 straight games, the Negro League All-Star Game drew a crowd of more than 50,000 fans.Read more of Deford's essay. Max Aguilera-Hellweg
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This ration ticket, this seeming inconsequential token of conquest and devastation, is the graphic expression of an 1883 act of Congress that furthered the appropriation of Indian lands west of the Missouri by moving tribal peoples onto assigned reservations, where, proclaims the act, “they may live after the manner of white men.” The reality was something else.Read more of Heat-Moon's essay. Max Aguilera-Hellweg
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I first saw the AIDS Memorial Quilt in 1989 in Washington, D.C. just as the epidemic was gathering pace. The overwhelming feeling was terror. I remember bumping into acquaintances on the patchworked landscape. “What’s going on?” I asked, lamely. “Oh, just looking for friends.” Like the Vietnam Veterans Memorial not so far away, it cataloged names—names we knew, names we heard recited like a metronome over the scene. But these names weren’t organized in a single aesthetic design, crafted in the same font; they were brought to life separately, each representing a distinct human being, with an actual life and an untimely death.Read more of Sullivan's essay. Max Aguilera-Hellweg
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This plow is one of the Smithsonian’s most prized objects, and the unpretentious way it is displayed can be ascribed to an unusually strong love of Democracy in the vicinity. The genius of blacksmith Deere’s innovation was to discard the cast-iron moldboard—the blade—from the traditional plow of the rocky farm fields of the East, and replace it with a dynamically curved moldboard of wrought iron or steel.Read more of Frazier's essay. Max Aguilera-Hellweg
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Happiness

But 20 years later, is Barbie really such a menace to society? Or is she an institution of plastic Americana, a blank slate on which we’ve superimposed half the population’s challenges? As an American woman (a child of the mid-’80s, I was weaned on Barbie and the Rockers), I have officially decided to cut Barbie a little slack. Terrible makeup and all.Read more of Crosley's essay. Mark Ulriksen / Barbie and associated trademarks and dress are owned by and used under license from Mattel, Inc. © 2013 Mattel, Inc. All rights reserved
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A presidential pardon inspired a million nurseries
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In America every car is a declaration of independence. The special genius of this car lies not in what it is, but in what it did. Richard Petty, “The King,” won the Firecracker 400 behind the wheel of this car on July 4, 1984, down in Daytona Beach, Florida. It was his 200th Nascar career victory, an achievement unmatched in stock-car racing history, and he did it on the nation’s birthday in front of Ronald Reagan, the first sitting U.S. president to visit Nascar’s most famous track. This car carried the sport’s greatest star to what may have been the sport’s greatest moment.Read more of MacGregor's essay. Mark Ulriksen
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America in the World

With recent advancements in radio, newsreels with sound, and transmission of photographs, the flight of the Spirit of St. Louis was the first event to be shared globally in real time. And the impossibly photogenic Lindbergh was the original modern-media superstar—as recognizable in India as in Indiana. Overnight, his plane became the most well-known conveyance since Noah’s Ark.Read more of Berg's essay. Susan Seubert
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Pocahontas is the most myth-encrusted figure in early America, a romantic “princess” who saves John Smith and the struggling Jamestown colony. But this fairy tale, familiar to millions today from storybook and film, bears little resemblance to the extraordinary young woman who crossed cultures and oceans in her brief and ultimately tragic life.Read more of Horwitz's essay. Susan Seubert
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So pandas have power over us, what University of Oxford scholars called “soft, cuddly power” in a recent journal article analyzing the political role of China’s ambassador bears. “What other countries see is this cute, cuddly creature, but there’s a lot going on behind the scenes,” says Kathleen Buckingham, lead author of the paper, which appears in the latest issue of Environmental Practice. She adds, “From a Chinese perspective, sharing the care of such a precious animal strengthens the bonds that China has with its ‘inner circle’ of countries.”Read more of Tucker's essay. Susan Seubert
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Freedom

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Word of the bombing reached Martin Luther King in Atlanta as he was about to step up to the Ebenezer Baptist Church pulpit. “Dear God, why?” he had silently asked. Then he appealed to secular powers, writing President John F. Kennedy that unless “immediate federal steps are taken,” the “worst racial holocaust this nation has ever seen” would come to pass in Alabama. His telegram to Gov. George Wallace charged, “The blood of our little children is on your hands.”Read more of McWhorter's essay. Albert Watson
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The drug’s impact was immediate and immense. By 1962, well over one million American women were taking oral contraceptives. By 1964, the pill had become the most popular form of reversible birth control, a position it retains today both here and abroad. Yet some historians dispute the common notion that the pill kick-started the sexual revolution.Read more of Angier's essay. Albert Watson
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