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 expectati...

  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...

    [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...

  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 h...

        Step 1: I examined the medal to see where I should target my repair efforts.   Step 2: I attempted to scrub the medal with some "Method" hand soap and my damp cloth.    Step 3: I realized that the removal of the marks on my medal would not happen this evening.       Step 4: I placed the medal back into the case I previously withdrew it from. Unfortunately, I could not for the life of me track down a care/maintenance guide dating from the early 20 th century to clean medallions. I was quite surprised by this because I found plenty of Great War forums and blog posts which dealt with cleaning a war medal, but I could not find a pamphlet from a specific publisher or company that produced a guide to the cleaning of medallions. On an interesting note: my search did lead me to coinage cleaning and then to the term numismatics: the study or collection of coins, tokens, and paper money and sometimes related objects (such as medals). [1] ...

                              It honestly took me three attempts to craft a plane like the plane within the directions. To craft my paper airplane, or should I say paper airplanes, I used blank sheets of printer paper. The first step that I took was to fold the paper in half (I folded it so that the plane’s width would have a horizontal length over 9 inches). The next step that I took was to flip the paper over and to take a corner of my folded rectangle and to fold this corner over, making a small triangle over top of the original rectangle fold. Next, I took the corner opposite of the triangular fold and made the same triangle shape as I folded this corner over the rectangle base. To follow these steps, I started to structure the wings of my paper aircraft. My first step to make the wings was to fold the paper again in half so that I could only see one side of the plane. Then, I proceeded to take...

        This CAA Outdoor Track & Field medal (CAA standing for Colonial Athletic Association) is a medal gifted to collegiate athletes who compete in sports within universities on the East Coast of America. This specific medal, a medal given to the winner within CAA competitions, is of a gold tone with a reflective backside; one could see, with a very blurry reflection, the image of their own face or surroundings while looking at the backside of the medal. The frontside of the medal has the design of two circles: one circle is gold and a bit smaller than the surrounding circle, a navy-blue circle, which lies on the outside of the medal. Written overtop of the middle circle are the letters “CAA” which slightly move into the outer navy-blue circle. Near the top of the middle “A” are a few blemishes of a grayish color. The same grayish marks are apparent towards the bottom of the middle circle as well. On the top of the outer navy-blue circle, the words “Outdoo...