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#YourCuriousObjects
56 Plays7 years ago
This time it's your turn. For the last two months, we’ve been asking listeners to post their curious objects on Instagram, tagging #mycuriousobject and @antiquesmag.
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Transcript
Exploring Mummy Linen and Ancient Egyptian Culture
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Mummy linen is not what most visitors expect when visiting the American Antiquarian Society....to believe that it was produced in Hala.
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Many of these portraits did not survive Jim Crow era America, as they were a million objects from the Five Points, an African burial ground....made from a coconut in the shape of an owl....it had sort of an unusual form....awfully scared.
00:00:24
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Frisco and Hale went into partnership and Hale came out winner.
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These goggles really protected his eyes from the sandstorms, from the colds.
Introduction to 'Curious Objects' Podcast and Instagram Campaign
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Hello, and welcome back to Curious Objects and the Stories Behind Them, brought to you by the magazine Antiques.
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I'm your host, Ben Miller.
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Today's episode is a little different.
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If you've been listening to the show, you've heard me log rolling for the My Curious Object Instagram campaign.
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I've been asking you, dear listeners, to post images of your own objects that are fascinating or beautiful or rare or that have great stories behind them.
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And you've delivered.
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Thank you so much to everyone who participated.
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If you use Instagram, I hope you'll take a few minutes to browse through the objects.
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There's a wealth of educational and eye-opening and just plain quirky pictures.
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And if you don't use Instagram, this might actually be a good reason to start.
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Anyway, I had wanted to feature one or two of these objects on the podcast, but given how many fantastic posts you wonderful people have made, it became clear that I really needed a whole episode if I were even going to begin to do justice to them.
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So today's episode is the hashtag MyCuriousObject episode.
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You'll hear about just a handful of the objects that have been posted.
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And there are so many great ones that we just don't have time for.
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But I'm truly impressed by all of the objects you've shared and by the research and knowledge you've added to them.
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And I'm thrilled to be able to include some of you in the podcast.
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As always, images of all the objects are available at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast, and I also post more curious object images on my Instagram at Objective Interest.
Sponsor Highlight: Freeman's Auction House
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Even some behind-the-scenes stuff if you're into that.
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Today's episode is sponsored by Freeman's, America's oldest auction house, located in Center City, Philadelphia.
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And we have another sponsor, Rinalda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Cultural Significance of Antebellum Louisiana Portraits
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Hello, my name is Jeremy Simeon.
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I'm 33 years old.
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I live in Baton Ridge, Louisiana, and I'm a collector of antiques.
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We're going to hop around today to a lot of different times and places, but I want to start with an object from Antebellum, Louisiana.
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This was posted by Jeremy Simeon.
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It's a miniature portrait.
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If you've been listening to Curious Objects for long enough, you might remember my conversation with Wade Leger about his Greek revival home originally on the banks of the Mississippi River in Louisiana.
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Wade's house tells an important story about the wealth and taste of the slave-holding elite,
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But while Jeremy's curious object comes from the same era and region, it sheds a very different light on this culture.
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I'll let Jeremy give you the story.
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This portrait is small but significant.
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Miniature portraits are, as the name suggests, quite small scale.
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This piece measures only about 2.5 inches tall and 2 inches wide.
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This watercolor on ivory is circa 1840 and depicts a man of African descent who is medium to dark complexion with a mustache.
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The gentleman appears to be about 30 years of age and is finely dressed with a black jacket, white shirt, and a thinly tied cravat.
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I acquired this piece from auction two years ago, and since then I have loaned it to two Louisiana museums for viewing.
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While the portrait has New Orleans provenance, sadly the sitter is unidentified.
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However, when considering the time period, manner of dress, and the appearance of the sitter in the portrait, one can make the assertion that the gentleman is a member of Le Jeune de Couleur L'Epre.
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as they were known, or the free people of color, as they are known today.
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During the antebellum period, New Orleans, Louisiana had the largest population of free people of color.
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This group consisted of people of variant degrees of African descent who were either born free, had become free through manumission,
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through self-purchase, and even through military servitude.
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The free people of color accounted for one-fifth of the population in New Orleans and owned a third of the properties in the French Quarter.
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Many were skilled artisans, developers, and builders.
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Others were doctors, lawyers.
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even inventors.
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They did not only survive but thrive and in effect they contributed greatly to the culture and economy of Louisiana and in fact their influence can still be found today.
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While there are many depictions of 19th century African Americans and other people of African descent in the Americas, very few were commissioned and painted for the express benefit of this group.
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So while all images of free people of color are rare,
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Especially rare are these images of free men of color.
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Many of these portraits did not survive Jim Crow-era America, as they were seen as a threat and challenged a once widely held belief of white supremacy.
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This is why this object is exceptional.
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One of my favorites and truly curious.
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A huge thank you to Jeremy, who is on Instagram as at jeremy.k.simeon for that story.
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It's not hard to argue that the loss and destruction of African-American material culture is the greatest tragedy in American antiques.
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So it's a privilege to hear about an antebellum memento like this.
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Let's stick around in the 1840s for a little
Unveiling the Father Matthew Cup and NYC's Five Points
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longer.
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But now we're heading north from the bayou and the delta over the Mason-Dixon line to New York City.
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The Museum of the City of New York, they're at museumofcityny on Instagram,
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posted a curious object that I just have to tell you about.
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Their curator, Stephen H. Jaffe, sent me some extra information.
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I just want to share a few excerpts with you.
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The object is a teacup called the Father Matthew Cup, and it was found at number 472 Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan in 1990 or 91.
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Here's what Stephen wrote, as read by this podcast's editor, Sammy Delati.
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This is a small earthenware cup decorated with brown transfer printed images made by the Staffordshire pottery firm of William Adams and Sons.
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The principal image on the cup depicts the Irish priest Father Theobald Matthew, pioneer of the total abstinence movement, which exhorted men and women to quote, sign the pledge, unquote, promising to abandon all alcoholic beverages.
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Matthew toured the United States in 1849 to 1851, and the purchase of the cup by a tenant of 472 Pearl Street may well date from the period of this tour.
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In the mid-19th century, when this cup was owned and later thrown into a privy, this block of Pearl Street was part of the Five Points neighborhood, infamous among journalists and reformers of the day as a crowded and boisterous district of working-class shanties, early tenement houses, taverns, and brothels.
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When unearthed, the cup, along with other artifacts, helped archaeologists re-envision the neighborhood's historic meaning and identity.
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The moralistic pro-temperance message of the cup's imagery flew in the face of inherited stereotypes of the Five Points as a den of vice.
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This cup, along with 17 other artifacts from the excavation, were the only surviving relics of nearly a million objects from the Five Points and African burial ground archaeological sites
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They were stored in a basement in the World Trade Center and lost on September 11, 2001.
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The cup and its accompanying pieces were on loan to the South Street Seaport Museum at the time, thus escaping destruction.
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Donated by the U.S. General Services Administration to the Museum of the City of New York in 2007, the cup is currently on display in our long-term exhibition, New York at its Core.
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Many thanks to the museum for this object and story.
Freeman's Auction House's Legacy and Upcoming Auctions
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A remarkable thing about studying antiques is how often you find pieces like this whose drama continues long past their original use, even to the present day, and which take on layer upon layer of additional meaning as their lives go on.
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We'll be back with more Curious Objects after this.
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Our first sponsor for this episode is Freeman's Auction House in Central City, Philadelphia.
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Whether you're collecting or consigning, you want to deal with an auction house with a sterling reputation.
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Try Freeman's.
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Freeman's is the oldest auction house in America, dating to 1805.
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In my day job, I deal in silver and jewelry, and we've bought dozens of pieces at Freeman's, ranging in price from a few hundred to tens of thousands of dollars.
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But it's not just silver and jewelry.
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Their specialists offer one-on-one service and expertise across all areas.
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Freeman specialists have worked with generations of private collectors, institutions, advisors, estates, and museums.
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Their spring sale season this year offered 14 successful auctions, including eight significant private collections and four auction world records.
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Upcoming fall and winter auctions include an impressive list of subjects.
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Asian arts, fine jewelry, books, maps and manuscripts, Americana, British and European furniture and decorative arts, as well as 20th century design and American art and Pennsylvania Impressionists.
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Freemans is inviting new consignments right now.
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Want to find out more?
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Go to freemansauction.com.
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As usual, I want to take a minute to say thank you for listening.
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As grateful as I am to everyone who posted their curious objects, the whole reason behind this project is you listening right now.
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If you enjoy the podcast and want to help us reach more people, the easiest thing to do is to leave a rating and review on the app that you're using to listen right now.
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The second easiest thing is to suggest curious objects to a friend.
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Maybe this is obvious, but it's true that the more people we can reach, the more interesting and ambitious subjects I can tackle.
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I'm also grateful for your feedback, and I've been receiving some really great helpful comments lately.
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As always, you can email me at podcast at themagazineantiques.com, and you can find me on Instagram with the handle at objectiveinterest.
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And again, photos of all the objects you're hearing about are posted at themagazineantiques.com slash podcast.
Artistic and Historical Insights from Watercolor Drawings
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Now, we are going to hear from someone I've wanted to have on Curious Objects for a long time.
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Michael Diaz-Griffith is the Associate Executive Director of The Winter Show.
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His Instagram handle is at Michael Diaz-Griffith.
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He is a friend of mine and one of the most passionate evangelists for antiques that I know.
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Like the teacup from before the break, Michael's object has layers of meaning.
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Its aesthetic context, its unique features and creativity, but also its history as part of a very curious collection.
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Here's Michael with the full story.
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My curious object isn't quite an object, or at least many might not see it as such.
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It's a watercolor drawing.
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of an interior from mid-18th century Germany.
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I have reason to believe that it was produced in Halle in the early 1750s by an artist named E.F.
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Seidler, but I'll return to that later.
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What I find compelling about the drawing is that it depicts a high-style interior with grisaille murals and a rococo settee
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But it does so in a rather flat, folky manner that I find totally convincing and utterly charming.
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Watercolor interiors or interior portraits.
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typically depict the contents of a room, their material culture, and I love them for that reason.
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But this one sort of ups the ante by also depicting a woman dressed in a high style gown, engaged in romantic contemplation or fantasy, sort of whiling away the day wistfully on that settee with her faithful pup nearby.
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And the human dimension that she adds to the room gives it something special that made it
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rather irresistible to me as an object to acquire.
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So both curious and, how shall I say, tempting.
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And I'm also fascinated by the fact that another object stands behind this one.
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So there's reason to believe that beyond being produced in the early 1750s in Halle by Seidler, that this drawing was taken from the album
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a young medical student named Christian G. Gross who attended the University of Halle in the same period and while not much is known about Christian Gross, we do know that he was a medical student who collected drawings and paintings and kept them in the
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album.
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I find that fascinating, partly because it speaks to a culture of collecting that's different from our own.
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And it's fun to imagine the interests of this young student who had this work in his possession, but also because the object that hangs on my wall is connected to this family of objects.
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that are spread all across the world.
Historical Collecting Trends: From Spice Containers to Aviator Goggles
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I know of others who've encountered works from Gross' album,
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And while it's rather tragic that they're separated and that the example of material culture that they were collected in is no longer intact, it's a kind of fun puzzle to speak to others who have pages or works from that album and to sort of think about the culture of collecting.
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that dimmed from that album.
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Everything about this work makes me feel curious.
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And that's really the reason that I collect to be stoked on to further questioning and thinking about objects.
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It's odd to think about today, but antiques collecting isn't all that old of a hobby.
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Of course, there have always been treasured and valued objects and art enthusiasts like this Christian Gross that Michael just told us about.
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But the idea of scholarly study and accumulation of compelling pieces was not exactly mainstream until the Rockefellers and Morgans and others started assembling their great collections in the 19th and 20th centuries.
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Not coincidentally, around this time there was also a proliferation of reproductions and pastiches, which makes this next object very interesting.
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This was posted by the Jewish Museum here in New York.
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That's at the Jewish Museum.
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It's a spice container from the early 1900s, but made in a 16th century style.
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Now, if the Renaissance period makes you think of dismal paintings of tortured martyrs, don't worry, this spice container takes on a downright adorable form.
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Here's some of what the researchers at the museum told me about the piece, as read by Catherine Lanza.
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Out of hundreds of objects on display in the Taxonomies Gallery within the Jewish Museum's exhibition, scenes from the collection, one of the most curious might be the ceremonial spice container made from a coconut in the shape of an owl.
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The head, wings, feet, and base are made of silver, while the body is the coconut shell.
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This work, created in Hinau, Germany in the early 20th century during a craze for older historical objects, imitates 16th century cups with bodies made of a nautilus shell or ostrich egg.
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Such objects were a staple of the collections of curiosities belonging to Renaissance nobility.
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The spice container is used in a ritual conducted at the end of the Jewish Sabbath.
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The container holds aromatic spices like cloves or cinnamon and all present smelted fragrance meant to bring the sweetness of the Sabbath into the rest of the week.
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The head of the owl can be removed in order to put the spices in the coconut shell and in order to smell the spices during the ritual.
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Our next curious object comes from an organization that I know you're familiar with.
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It's one of our beloved advertisers, Rinalda House.
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They're on Instagram as at curate Rinalda.
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Now, you'll have to take my word for it that there was no nepotism involved here.
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Actually, when you hear the story, I think you'll understand why I had to include this one.
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Take it away.
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I'm Barry Helms, the Director of Archives and Library at Rinalda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
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In our archives here, we have a pair of Aviator's Goggles that belong to Zachary Smith Reynolds.
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Smith Reynolds was the youngest child of RJ and Catherine Reynolds, RJ being the founder of RJ Reynolds Tobacco Company.
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These goggles are an early style of aviation goggles that have a metal frame with clear glass lenses.
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They have separate rubber eye cushion around the lenses that would help protect the pilot's face from the frame and would have been worn with an elastic headband.
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They come in an aluminum case that identifies them as aviator goggles made by the American Optical Company.
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Smith Reynolds made a mark on early aviation.
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Aviation really captured the imaginations of the Reynolds children.
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Three of the four learned to fly, including the older sister Mary.
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But it was Smith's older brother Dick Reynolds that first took a business interest in aviation.
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He founded Reynolds Aviation and in the summer of 1927, Smith was hanging out with his brother, working on the airfields in Long Island.
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He rubbed elbows with Charles Lindbergh and by November of that year,
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Kind of like a teenager asking for his first car, a 16-year-old Smith was riding his guardian and uncle, Will Reynolds, to use some of his funds to purchase his own plane.
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He earned his private pilot license signed by Orville Wright at the age of 16.
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And then by age 17, he actually became the youngest licensed transport pilot in the country.
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When he was 20, he married Broadway star Libby Holman, who was 28 at the time.
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So Smith had a lot going on before he even turned 21, and by far his greatest achievement in the air was his 17,000 mile solo journey from London to Hong Kong.
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In the spring of 1931, he purchased an amphibian biplane, a Savoia Marchetti S.
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56C.
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It was customized for him to have a single seat with extra fuel capacity.
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After several false starts, Smith finally began his flight in London in December 1931, landing outside of Paris.
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He then flew south over Italy and the Mediterranean until he reached North Africa.
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From there, he followed airline routes already established by British flyers, traveling across the Syrian desert from Gaza to Baghdad and on to India.
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Smith wore this particular pair of aviator's goggles during this flight.
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It would have been an open cockpit plane, so these goggles really protected his eyes from the sandstorms, from the cold, and they helped protect him from the sunlight.
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Smith's accomplishments in the air were really overshadowed by his death that happened a few months later.
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On July 5th, they hosted a birthday party for a friend on Rinalda's grounds, and reportedly Smith and Libby argued that night.
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Shortly after midnight, a shot was heard from the sleeping porch off the master bedroom.
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Smith died at the hospital in the early hours of July 6th.
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The death was actually initially ruled as a suicide, but a coroner's inquisition held a few days later at the house resulted in Libby and Ab Walker being indicted for murder.
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The sensational nature of the news coverage, it really captured the attention of
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the media and the public happening so close to the Charles Lindbergh baby kidnapping that the Reynolds family did not like the media pressure and the attention and they requested that all charges be dropped and their request was granted and so the case whether murder, suicide or accidental death still remains unsolved.
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Music Music
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Speaking of Rinalda, our second sponsor for this episode is Rinalda House Museum of American Art in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
Rinalda House Museum and Historical Resilience
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Rinalda House is more than just an elegant 1917 historic estate.
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It's also home to a compelling and surprisingly wide-ranging collection of fine and decorative arts.
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Now, if you listen to this podcast, you probably already like house museums.
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But, Reynolda House goes beyond the typical displays of period furniture and old portraits.
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When you visit, you'll find thought-provoking objects like American artist Martin Johnson Heade's most famous orchid and hummingbird painting, tobacco baron R.J.
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Reynolds' mink coat, and century-old farm buildings now serving crepes and rosé.
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For any other museums out there listening, let me just say that this is a great idea.
00:21:23
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They also have a brand new app you can download called Rinalda Revealed, which takes you on a virtual tour of the museum and grounds.
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I downloaded that myself and had a lot of fun with it.
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I highly recommend checking it out at rinalda.org.
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And of course, planning your visit to the house in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.
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That's R-E-Y-N-O-L-D-A dot org.
00:21:49
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I want to mention briefly one especially touching object that was posted by the California Historical Society, conveniently on Instagram as at California Historical Society.
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This is a letter, but just as interesting as what's written in it is what it's written on, specifically a shirt collar.
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This letter dates from April 21st, 1906, just three days after the terrible earthquake and subsequent fires wrecked the city of San Francisco.
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Now, many of us know the frustration and anxiety of trying to get a text or cell phone call to go through during a major event, but in the aftermath of this earthquake, the bottleneck was the paper supply.
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So when James Graves Jones needed to get in touch with his family in New York, he scrawled his message on a shirt collar instead.
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Here's the text of the letter, as read by Benjamin Richmond of PRI's Afropop Worldwide, and creator of the podcast New York Pacific.
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Dear Wayland and Gussie, all safe but awfully scared.
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Frisco and Hell went into partnership and Hell came out winner.
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Got away with the sack.
00:22:54
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Draw a line from Fort Mason along Van Ness Avenue to Market Street, Outmarket to Dolores to 20th, thence to Harrison, 16th and Pontero Avenue, R&R Avenue to Channel Street and Bay.
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Nearly everything east and north of this boundary line gone and several blocks west of it, especially in Hayes Valley as far as Octavia Street from Golden Gate Avenue east.
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Fire is still burning on the north side but is checked in the mission.
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I and a band of 40 or 50 volunteers formed a rope and bucket brigade, backfired Dolores from market to 19th, pulled down houses and blanketed Westside Dolores and won a great moral victory.
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More with paper and stamps.
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James G. Jones, April 21st, 1906.
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I love the economy of language in this letter.
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If you go online and look at a picture of the shirt collar, you'll see that the words are really crammed together.
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Necessity is the mother of invention.
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I'll also say that I'm not sure I would sound so matter-of-fact and nonchalant after living through one of the worst natural disasters in American history.
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Well done, James Graves Jones.
00:23:56
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Next up, we're going to travel back to the mid-19th century, but this story actually concerns an object far, far older than that.
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So join me in embracing your inner Egyptologist.
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This is Lauren Hughes, the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Graphic Arts at the American Antiquarian Society.
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When the magazine Antiques recently asked participating libraries and museums to share, quote, curious objects from our collections on Instagram, I immediately thought of this 1850 handbill in our collection.
00:24:27
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The seven inch by five inch piece was acquired in 2011 and is a reminder of the powerful stories that ephemera can tell us.
00:24:35
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Information about the wonders of ancient Egypt reached America in the early 19th century after European travelers and scientists began publishing narratives and exploration findings, including their work with the Rosetta Stone to crack the mysteries of hieroglyphics.
00:24:50
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Egyptian influences and motifs soon appeared in American architecture, furniture, and costume design.
00:24:56
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American writers like Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Louisa May Alcott all included mummies, pyramids, and sphinxes in their writings.
00:25:06
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In the middle of this Egyptomania in 1850, George Glidden, a former US Vice Council in Egypt, traveled around America with four mummies and a rolling panorama of the Nile.
00:25:19
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He displayed the panorama and unwrapped a mummy before his audiences, all while lecturing on ancient Egypt and discussing mummification.
00:25:29
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American audiences were fascinated by this spectacle and flocked to Glidden's presentations.
00:25:35
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On November 23rd, 1850, he was in Philadelphia where he unwrapped a female mummy and distributed the wrapping linen to his spectators.
00:25:44
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An anonymous audience member preserved a scrap of the linen from that mummy inside the handbill as a memento of the event.
00:25:51
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Mummy linen from around 800 BC is not what most visitors expect when visiting the American Antiquarian Society to do research on American history and culture.
00:26:00
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Combined with the handbill, however, this, quote, curious object neatly encapsulates the nation's 19th century fascination with ancient Egypt.
00:26:09
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Thanks so much to Lauren and to the American Antiquarian Society at AmericanAntiquarian on Instagram.
The Mystery of the Shakespeare Silver Inkstand
00:26:19
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I have one more segment for you, and this one, I'll admit, does involve some nepotism.
00:26:25
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This is a very curious and very academic object posted by Tim Martin, the owner of the shop where I work, SJ Shrubsel.
00:26:32
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We're on Instagram as at SJ Shrubsel.
00:26:36
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Tim is one of the world's top experts in antique silver, and he also happens to be an English major.
00:26:42
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So when, as a dealer in his early 20s, he found a piece of 18th century English silver with a connection to Shakespeare, it's no surprise that he had to buy it.
00:26:52
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This is a small cylindrical box with an engraved inscription in Latin on its base.
00:26:58
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To my eye, this is a quintessential curious object.
00:27:01
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It's a piece more rare than it is valuable, more perplexing than it is beautiful.
00:27:08
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It piques your curiosity and it speaks to a strange and distant time, place, and people.
00:27:14
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Here's Tim.
00:27:15
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So I bought this inkstand at Tepper Galleries, a now defunct auction house on 26th Street between Park and Lexington.
00:27:25
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that I used to go to every Saturday morning to check their sales.
00:27:29
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They rarely had anything, but occasionally some oddity would turn up and sometimes some lovely piece of commercial silver.
00:27:38
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This piece sort of mystified me at first because I had just started working at Shrub Soul and I didn't quite understand what it was.
00:27:46
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It had sort of an unusual form and didn't look like an ordinary inkstand to me.
00:27:52
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The thing that caught me
00:27:54
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What caught my interest, of course, was the connection to Shakespeare.
00:27:59
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It was owned by or passed from one to another of these two very important 18th century editors of Shakespeare, Edward Cappell and John Collins, two people who labored to restore Shakespeare's texts from various bastardized versions that had been
00:28:23
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where the plays had been altered to make them more appealing to modern audiences.
00:28:30
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My Latin is terrible.
00:28:33
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So I didn't know what the bottom inscription said, but I was sufficiently interested to buy it.
00:28:41
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And I had a friend who was a classicist who did translate it for me, but he had some trouble with it because I guess the Latin isn't entirely sort of standard classical Latin.
00:28:54
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But I don't remember what my friend told me and didn't record it in any way.
00:29:00
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It was sort of pre-internet.
00:29:01
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So I think I got it all like over the phone and wrote it down on a bit of paper that I subsequently misplaced.
00:29:09
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So, yeah, I mean, it's a curious object and it's still a curious object to me because, to be honest, I don't really know what the inscription says.
00:29:16
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Any Latin scholars out there looking for a little project?
00:29:19
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Maybe you can give Tim a hand.
Closing Remarks and Community Acknowledgments
00:29:30
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An enormous bottom of my heart thank you to everyone who joined in this celebration of Curious Objects, those who were featured today, and all the others who shared their fascinating objects and stories on Instagram.
00:29:42
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I'd like to thank our sponsors once more, Rinalda House Museum of American Art and Freeman's Auction.
00:29:48
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And of course, thanks to all of you listening right now who make this whole project worth doing.
00:29:53
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Don't forget to subscribe, rate, and review.
00:29:56
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Today's episode was produced and edited by Sammy Dilotti.
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Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:30:01
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And until next time, I'm Ben Miller.