The New York State Military Museum has one of the most extensive collections of flags in the United States, going back two centuries to the War of 1812. Its collection of Civil War battle flags is the largest in the country, which should not be a surprise given the Empire State’s outsized role in bringing an end to the Late Unpleasantness. One of the crown jewels of the state’s collection is the Marshall Flag, the Confederate national banner which flew above the Marshall House hotel in Alexandria Virginia until taken down by Colonel Elmer Ellsworth in May 1861.

The Photographic History of the Civil War in Ten Volumes: Volume one, the Opening Battles

Virginia passed its Ordinance of Secession on May 23 and tensions were high in the capital and just across the Potomac in Virginia. The following day Ellsworth noted the flag flying atop the building and in a fit of bravado dashed to the roof and pulled down the stars and bars. When he got to the bottom of the stairs Ellsworth was shot by proprietor James Jackson. Jackson in turn was shot by one of Ellsworth’s men. Both died instantly.

Currier and Ives print from the collection of the Library of Congress

Ellsworth was a dashing figure and a favorite of President Lincoln. He had been the colonel of the 11th New York “Fire Zouaves,” whose men had spent much of 1861 parading with great fanfare to large, appreciative crowds across the North. Their showmanship had more in common with acrobatics and synchronization than military tactics, and their colorful uniforms only added to their popularity and mystique. Ellsworth’s death made him a martyr across the North. The gruesome and violent nature of his death, however, was also one of the first signals to Americans of what the war would entail. How could a man so handsome and young, so vibrant, so full of life and charisma be taken away in an instant? Such is the nature of war.

Envelope from the collection of the New-York Historical Society

The NYS Military Museum has spent the last several years conserving what is left of the Marshall House flag. Here is an overview.

Cape Coast Castle, Ghana

George Washington University anthropologist Stephen Lubkemann has received a grant from the school and the Smithsonian Institution to locate and hopefully study a slave ship that sank off the coast of South Africa in the late eighteenth century. Archaeologists have previously studied shipwrecks of vessels that had been used in the slave trade. What makes this unique, the researchers claim, is that this will be the first study of a ship that sank with slaves aboard. The Smithsonian hopes the project yields previously unknown details of how the trade was practiced and contribute to the museum’s educational programming.

(image/Hiyori13)

I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art today for the opening of the third and final phase in the renovation of the American Wing. Today the new Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture, and Decorative Arts were opened to the public for the first time. The project was ten years in the making and began with rededications of the museum’s collection of American classical arts (2007) and period rooms (2009). It is a new era for one of the world’s great museums and you owe it to yourself to go if you are able.

Holiday Mondays, especially in the winter, are a great time to visit the museum. I thought it was going to be extremely crowded today. New Yorkers often leave the museums to the out-of-towners during the holiday season. I figured that the reopening, coinciding with a day off and a cold but otherwise fine day would have New Yorkers lining up to see the Gilbert Stuarts and Rembrandt Peales in their new surroundings. Surprisingly, this was not the case. Attendance was brisk but not unmanageable.

I intend to write more about art and history over the course of the year and so today will give only a brief overview:

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze’s Washington Crossing the Delaware has again taken its proper place as the centerpiece of the American Wing. In the old gallery Washington was cramped in a small space unworthy of the masterpiece. Forced to compete with lesser works, the painting’s grandeur was diminished. This is no longer a problem. Entering the space one first sees a gallery of eighteenth century portraits. Turning down the hall to enter the next gallery one gets a partial, teasing glimpse of Washington several rooms down that just builds the excitement and expectation. Let’s just say there is a big wow factor when you finally get to it. I always tell people “Look at the frame. The frame is part of the story.” Here the Met has outdone itself. Washington is in a new frame based on a recently found Matthew Brady photograph of the painting taken during the 1864 Sanitary Fair that raised funds for the U.S. Sanitary Commission. A great touch.

The Met has always had an extensive collection of Augustus Saint-Gaudens and they have employed the sculptor’s works throughout the new galleries to great effect. Ones I noticed included a study for his David Farragut statue that sits in Madison Square Park, a Standing Lincoln like the one in Chicago’s Lincoln Park, a sculpture of Victory as also depicted atop the Sherman statue in Manhattan’s Grand Army Plaza, and the Lincoln that Saint-Gaudens created using the Volk life mask. A half hour later I saw the death mask of Lorenzo de’Medici from 1492 in an exhibit of Renaissance portraiture. It was one of those moments of serendipity and inspiration that can only happen in Met, the Louvre, and a handful of other institutions.

There are twenty-six rooms in the new space, each filled with little surprises that reward the close observer. When a person gets to the end he will have a good understanding of American history and society as depicted by its artists. The only thing missing today was the Hayfoot, who had to work. I am already counting down to President’s Day when we can go together.

Central Park from the Metropolitan Museum of Art

Museum of the Confederacy, Richmond, Virginia

Those who have been following the Civil War’s 150th anniversary know that the two major purposes of the Sesquicentennial are 1) to correct the mistakes made during the Centennial in the 1960s and, 2) to incorporate the historiographical shifts that have taken place since that time. Historians, park rangers, curators, and others have been working hard the last few years to make this a reality, and no one has faced a harder challenge in these endeavors than officials at museums dedicated to the history of the Confederacy. Some, such as the Museum of the Confederacy itself, have made great strides in recent years, doing much to abandon the Lost Cause narrative that was the original mission of these institutions. Others are working equally hard but finding it difficult to enact change. Budgets have shrunk due to the economic crisis; attendance, a chief source of revenue, has been down in recent decades as younger people have largely stayed away; corporate sponsorship, a staple of today’s museum experience, is next to impossible because sponsors do not want to associate their brand with the Confederate States of America. I have visited numerous such museums across the Deep South and can attest that many, even the smallest, contain valuable artifacts worth preserving. (The most poignant for me was the one in rural Arkansas that my father, who died three years ago, drove me sixty miles to visit.) I predict that those that refuse to change in any way–and there are many–will eventually become so anachronistic that they will disappear for good. Louisiana’s Civil War Museum at Confederate Memorial Hall is trying to make the transition.

(image/Voice of America)

Brooklyn Museum of Art

Hey everyone, I hope you are enjoying the remainder of your holidays. Today a friend and I ventured to the Brooklyn Museum to see the highly touted Youth and Beauty: Art of the American Twenties. Our expectations were high and I can only say that they were exceeded. It is not every day that one sees the works of Georgia O’Keeffe, Thomas Hart Benton, Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Hopper, Marsden Hartley, Aaron Douglas, and others all on display, and so intelligently. American is the key word in the exhibit’s title. While Europeans were exhausted and recovering from the slaughter of the Great War, artists on this side of the Atlantic were busy creating a uniquely American idiom. Incorporating photography, painting, sculpture, and mass media, it is the type of show that changes one’s ideas of what “modern” is. The exhibit was so overpowering that we took a break and went to Tom’s Restaurant for lunch before going back for more. I used to volunteer at the Brooklyn Museum and can tell you that it is one of our country’s leading cultural institutions. If you are hesitating to travel to the land of us bridge and tunnel folk, don’t. The museum is remarkably easy to get to from Manhattan. Any time is a good time to visit the Brooklyn Museum, but if you can see this show before it ends on January 29. And bring your appetite for Tom’s around the corner.

(image/Henrinator69)

Step into the sanctuary of the African Meeting House and you will walk on the same ancient floorboards where Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison and other prominent abolitionists railed against slavery in the 19th century, and where free black men gathered to shape the famed 54th Massachusetts Civil War regiment.

I can’t wait to visit here on my next trip to Boston, the city where both my parents grew up and where I still have family.  For decades visitors, myself included, have walked the Freedom Trail.  Our definition of that term is about to get a little wider.

Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

I have been to the Louvre, the Musee D’Orsay, and the Hermitage and ranking with them on my short list of favorite institutions is the Newark Museum, which lies just a half hour away from New York City via mass transit.  If it were in Manhattan it would be a world renowned institution on par with the Met; stuck across the Hudson as it is, the museum remains one of the hidden gems of American cultural institutions.  Why does Newark have such a vital museum?  It is the old maxim that art follows money.  Many once prosperous Gilded Age cities–Newark, Hartford, Rochester, and Toledo just to name a few–house some of the greatest collections ever assembled.  Walk from Newark Penn Station to the museum and you will pass buildings that, if you look closely enough, still show the grandeur that Newark once was. (Thankfully Newark is reviving.)  Most of the wealth generated in these Rust Belt cities is long gone, but the toys remain.  Today the money has moved to places like Bentonville, Arkansas, home of Wal-Mart and the new Crystal Bridges Museum of Art.

My father lived in Arkansas and I believe the museum may be a tipping point for the Natural State.  Arkansas is evolving into a Sun Belt destination, probably at the point where Florida was thirty and Arizona twenty years ago.  The Clinton Library in Little Rock has been bringing people to the state for years now. The Crystal Bridges museum is the project of Wal-Mart heiress Alice Walton.  Wal-Mart has a considerable (to put it mildly) presence in Bentonville and when one travels there one sees the changes taking place.  Bentonville is also the home of Pea Ridge National Military Park.  I am eager to get back and check out this new museum on our next visit to the region.

(Photo/Aker Imaging)