Public History & Philly

  As a former track athlete and having seen my fair share of athletic award ceremonies, I have a general idea of where athletic medals are placed on the human body and its usual meaning in American society. In an average athletic competition, medals in the U.S. are usually placed around a competitor’s neck to signify that that competitor has earned/won recognition for a particular athletic event. In the case of commemorative U.S. military medals, I wanted to find a very specific example to draw parallels with this week’s course readings. After having read Sun-Young Park’s Ideals of the Body: Architecture, Urbanism, and Hygiene in Postrevolutionary Paris , I was very pleased with her inclusion of diagrams which laid out the social spaces of French boarding schools and the location of gymnasiums [1] . These diagrams are educational as they show the placement of architecture like schools, living spaces, and gardens in Postrevolutionary France which highly conveyed the social expectations

  My goal for this week’s workshop was to find an American advertisement of the early 20 th century (preferably between 1900-1940) concerning commemorative and/or war medals. However, I was unsuccessful in finding an advertisement with these specific traits. My speculation for this is that because the U.S. did not enter the Great War until 1917, the year before its end, there may be a lesser amount of distinctively American advertisements concerning these items. For this reason, finding advertisements for my item proved challenging. However, I did manage to find an advertisement of a company called “John Pinches Medallist LTD.” which was founded by two 19 th century British citizens by the name of John Pinches and William Wyon. Though Pinches and Wyon established the Business in Britain, it would soon be bought by the American company “Franklin Mint” located in Pennsylvania [1] . To wrap up this backstory, the company is known for their production of Great War medals, one of them bei

    [1] After receiving my medal back in 2019 as a collegiate track runner, I did not place much thought into what its components are. I was, however, very pleased to have won it, and now that I am in Dr. Bruggeman’s Material Culture course, I am on the hunt to discover what my medal consists of. To gain potentially fruitful results of a CAA medal’s structure, I should reach out to the organizers of the CAA activities to gain an idea of what the process to form a CAA medal is and what elements would be found in the medal. For the time being, for this week’s analysis on my CAA medal, I chose to analyze medals in broad terms of object biography. I concentrated on the decades of the 20 th century before the Great War as well as the postwar decades to research the precious metal, gold: a metal which is often found in commemorative medals like mine. While researching the value of gold in decades surrounding the Great War, one of my strategies was to find the current monetary value of

  Place of Origin? My object could have been made in variety of countries. Since I have no knowledge as to where CAA organizers purchase their medals to bestow to athletes, I will choose the U.S. as its imagined place of origin. From my knowledge, the elements comprised in a medal often turn from liquidated states to hardened structures. For example: When a blacksmith makes weaponry, tools, and other items which require smelting, they must use an element of choice to place within a fiery furnace, which will then be withdrawn to craft a specific shape. The process is repeated until the desired shape of an object is created. Though I do not think that my medal would require the same exact process to craft as that of a sword or a hardware tool, I do believe that steps to craft either a sword or a medal might be quite similar. I will also add in the fact that today, humans are assisted by technology to craft objects like my medal, so its production might be a lot less taxing on the human