The National Museum of American History. It's not the prettiest thing on the Mall — pink marble, designed by committee. But this building has more strange, sacred, and accidentally priceless stuff per square foot than anywhere else in the country. Lincoln's top hat is in here. Jefferson's cut-up Bible. Kermit the Frog — made from his creator's mother's old coat and two ping pong balls. We could be here all day.
We're here for three things. A flag, a pair of shoes, and a kitchen.
The flag first. The Star-Spangled Banner — the actual one, the original — is inside this building right now. Lying at a ten-degree angle in a purpose-built chamber with filtered air, controlled humidity, and oxygen deliberately reduced below normal to prevent combustion. This flag has better living conditions than most Americans.
Here's how it got here. In eighteen thirteen, the commander of Fort McHenry — a man named George Armistead — wanted a flag so large the British couldn't miss it. He hired a widowed
flagmaker named Mary Pickersgill. She assembled her crew — her thirteen-year-old daughter Caroline, her teenage nieces Margaret and Eliza, and a girl named Grace Wisher. Grace was thirteen, free-born and Black, indentured in the Pickersgill household.
The flag was thirty feet by forty-two feet. Roughly the size of a basketball half-court. Far too big to sew indoors. So they spread it out on the m
