The Vault

Game of the Visit of Santa Claus. McLoughlin Brothers, 1901. The Strong National Museum of Play, Online Collections, Object ID 107.3860.

In the nineteenth century, Americans fell in love with Santa Claus. Clement Moore first published his poem “An Account of a Visit from Saint Nicholas,” which he originally wrote for his daughters, Margaret, Charity, and Mary, in 1823. Copious reprints of the poem in magazines and newspapers introduced the nation to the concept of Santa. By the late nineteenth century, when the games below were sold, Santa was as integral a part of an American Christmas as he is today.

Photo by Laine Nooney.

Each program in the 1984 Women's Ware software product line came folded on a miniature wire hanger like a pair of slacks, with package photography displaying a red-manicured Caucasian hand gently caressing a keyboard. Women's Ware was a software suite offering seven programs for managing home accounting, home productivity, and personal schedules: Budget, Calendar, Checkbook, Directory, Filebox, Freefile, and Recipe.

Squander Bug air rifle target, held at the Imperial War Museum. © IWM (EPH 4611)

The Imperial War Museum in London holds this World War II-era air rifle target. Although the item looks like a piece of outsider art, with its homemade fur and swastikas on its belly, it’s a representation of a cartoon character well-known in the U.K. during the war years: the Squander Bug.

It was 1899, and a dashing young Winston Churchill was roaming South Africa as a war correspondent, covering the Boer War. British forces were fighting the Boers (descendants of Dutch settlers) for control over two large territories.

The Strong National Museum of Play. Online Collections. 78.3460: Teddy's Adventures in Africa | Teddy's First Encounter with the Wild Animals | figure set

After Teddy Roosevelt left office in 1909, he was only 50 years old, and had by no means come to terms with the idea of a comfortable retirement. Vladimir Putin’s chest-baring antics seem amusing to us now, but the “Rough Rider” who made physical daring a part of his political image could probably have matched him feat for public feat.

The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress. Series 1. General Correspondence. 1833-1916. Abraham Lincoln, 1850-1860 (Notes for lecture on law).

Abraham Lincoln didn’t leave much written reflection on the profession that he pursued for almost twenty-five years, so these three pages of thoughts on the practice of law are particularly significant. The provenance of this document is not entirely clear; historians speculate that these are notes Lincoln made in preparation for an 1850s-era lecture to a group of law students. The document is now held at the Library of Congress (you can read a transcript on their website).

Letter from Charity Snider, with accompanying mole skin, from her Civil War Widow's Pension Application File. Discoloration on the paper is from the mole skin. (WC843258, Record Group 15), National Archives.

In order to receive a pension, Civil War widows had to prove that they had actually been married to a soldier. Marriage records were far less consistent in the past than they are today, which explains why Charity Snider ended up sending the pressed skin of a dead mole to the federal government.

Society in Dedham for Apprehending Horse Thieves membership certificate, December 6, 1961. President's Office Files, Box 131, Folder: Memberships: 1962. [JFKPOF-131-003-p0017]. John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum.

This document was found in a collection of membership certificates in John F. Kennedy’s papers. Amusing as it may be to picture the dapper President riding the woods at night rounding up evildoers, this particular membership was a strictly honorary one.

GLC09051 John Barstow, [Patriotic Verse in schoolboy exercise book], 1777. (Courtesy of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History.)

Young John Barstow must have found it difficult to concentrate on sums with the American Revolution underway.

His math exercise book, held at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History in New York, contains math problems, conversion tables, and other study aids. Sandwiched between these pages is a blank leaf filled with Barstow’s transcription of what must have been a popular patriotic song. (We know Barstow didn’t make it up, because a slightly different transcription of the same song, dated 1775, also exists.) The leaf is dated January 2, 1777.

Nineteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway served as a volunteer Red Cross ambulance driver during World War I. He was gravely wounded only a few months after his arrival in Europe; his recovery in a Milanese hospital and his relationship with his nurse, Agnes von Kurowsky, inspired his 1929 novel A Farewell to Arms.

While Hemingway recuperated under von Kurowsky’s care, three fellow ambulance drivers sent him this three-page pictogram. Archivists at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum recently deciphered the letter with the aid of many volunteer Hemingway buffs.