This artifact came from Arnold “Pappy” Noel (1922-2009), a longtime news photographer who at that time was in the Public Affairs Office of the Secretary of Defense. Noel earned his nickname in World War II as a B-29 tail gunner. After the war and his retirement, he joined United Press International as a newsreel and still photographer, filming presidential and White House events, marches on Washington and Selma, fires and riots in Washington and Detroit, and early NASA events. At the 1968 Democratic Convention, he became part of the story when he was injured and arrested for refusing to hand over his film of “excessive abuse of law enforcement agents towards demonstrators.” He was president of the White House Press Photographers Association for two years, leaving the press corps to work as a public affairs assistant to President Ford.

“the only thing we have to fear is fear itself....”

President Franklin D. Roosevelt delivered his landmark first Inaugural Address at the U.S. Capitol, on March 4, 1933. Many consider the speech to be one of the greatest in American history. On the day of the inauguration, the country was at the lowest point of the worst depression in American history. The banks had closed in thirty-two of the forty-eight states (plus the District of Columbia), unemployment was above 25 percent, farms were failing, and two million people were homeless. The New York Federal Reserve Bank would not be able to open the very next day, as panicky customers had withdrawn huge sums in the previous days. In this context, Roosevelt set forth a positive message addressing the country’s greatest needs: relief, recovery, and reform. His confidence, optimism, and the massive amount of “New Deal” legislation he sent to Congress in the first one hundred days of his administration did much to reassure the American people that better times were on the way.

“Yes, we’ll rally round the flag boys! we’ll rally once again, Shouting the Battle-cry of Freedom!… The Union forever! Hurrah boys, Hurrah! Down with the traitor, up with the star! While we Rally round the flag boys, rally once again, Shouting the Battle-cry of Freedom!”

This declaration indicates that Thomas Jefferson imported a clock, which arrived in Philadelphia on the ship Minerva under the command of Captain Wood from Le Havre, France, on October 17, 1791. On May 12, 1792, Jefferson paid an import duty of $7.52 on the clock according to the provisions of the Tariff of 1790.

Consisting of a pair of black marble obelisks between which a brass clock was suspended, Jefferson commissioned this piece in the Spring of 1790 to replace a similar one stolen from his Paris residence. An unusual feature of the clock is the use of a complex pinwheel escapement, often used in regulators of the finest quality in that period but rarely used in mantel clocks. He later had it mounted on a shelf above the foot of his bed. Susan Stein, the Richard Gilder Senior Curator at Monticello, described the obelisk clock as “arguably one of the most important and interesting objects at Monticello.” After Jefferson’s death, his daughter Martha called it the object “I should have prized beyond anything on earth.”[1] The original clock was passed down through the Jefferson family until it was donated to Monticello in 2016.

This is a rare record of payment of the tariffs that funded the nascent federal government, in effect bringing together Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, in the temporary capital of Philadelphia.

Due to a shortage of paper,The Pennsylvania Magazine: or American Monthly Museum, edited by Thomas Paine, held the June issue past its normal publication date (which would have been July 3^rd), allowing time for the last-minute insertion of the actual resolution of Congress declaring independence. The Pennsylvania Evening Post is the only other contemporary publication of the resolution we have found, in their July 2 issue.

“10th March 1794 rec^d of B^w Dandridge one hundred & forty six dollars and thirty two cents to purchase sundries for the President’s Household.  146 ³²/₁₀₀      Sam^l Fraunces”

Documents signed by Samuel Fraunces, the famous tavern keeper and steward of George Washington’s presidential households in New York and Philadelphia, are exceptionally rare. During the British occupation of New York, Fraunces had been captured and impressed into the service of British officers. While doing so, he was able to help feed American captives, and was credited with providing information to American troops and preventing an assassination plot against Washington. 

“Just at the moment I am so angry with that infernal little Cuban republic that I would like to wipe its people off the face of the earth. All we have wanted from them was that they would behave themselves and be prosperous and happy … they have started an utterly unjustifiable and pointless revolution and may get things into such a snarl that we have no alternative save to intervene - which will at once convince the suspicious idiots in South America that we do wish to interfere after all, and perhaps have some land-hunger!...”

This “Confidential” letter brims with significant content, as Roosevelt comments on hunting, disarmament, the Cuban Revolution, and the American voter. He expressed particular frustration at the inability of the new Cuban Republic to maintain a legitimate democracy. In September 1905, candidate Tomás Estrada Palma and his party rigged the Cuban presidential election to ensure his victory over liberal candidate José Miguel Gómez. The liberals revolted in August 1906, leading to the collapse of Estrada Palma’s government the following month, and to U.S. military and political intervention.

In this brief letter, General A. C. McAuliffe agrees to inscribe a copy of a unit history of the 103^rd Infantry Division for the New York attorney and autograph collector Ashley T. Cole after he returns to Washington from atomic tests in the Pacific Ocean. This letter was written between the test denotations of the fourth and fifth atomic bombs ever exploded.

Unit historians Ralph Mueller and Jerry Turk wrote Report after Action: The Story of the 103^rd Infantry Division with illustrations by artist Bill Barker, and it was published in 1945. Because McAuliffe led the 103^rd through the end of the war in Europe, Cole wanted to get his autograph on the brief volume.

“The prospect of national prosperity now before us is truly animating, and ought to excite the exertions of all good men to establish and secure the happiness of their country, in the permanent duration of its freedom and independence. America, under the smiles of a Divine Providence—the protection of a good government, and the cultivation of manners, morals and piety, cannot fail of attaining an uncommon degree of eminence, in literature, commerce, agriculture, improvements at home, and respectability abroad.

As mankind become more liberal, they will be more apt to allow, that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community, are equally entitled to the protection of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality.”

Lovely condition, drum-mounted on board, original full hand-coloring. Framed. Line engraving derived from the portrait done by “Alexander Campbell” with facial elements after the  Nuremberg version of the print. This enjoys the independent addition of battle flags placed within the image to flank the portrait.

Canadian photographer George Barker was one of the first professional photographers to visit Florida. In the late 1880s, he documented the landscapes and people of northern and central Florida. Barker took this large-format photograph of an African American cartman at the city gate of St. Augustine.

“Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude,...shall exist within the United States....”

President Calvin Coolidge reappoints Amy Louise Veerhoff as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Training School for Girls. Originally appointed by President Warren G. Harding, Veerhoff served as president of the Board of Trustees for several years.

“a discussion upon a section of a Malitia bill freeing the wife & children of the slave that enlist will occupy most if not all the day.”

“Please accept sincerest thanks for your telegram of September twenty-seventh. It is heartening and I appreciate much your sending it.”

FDR thanks Republican New York City attorney Frederick R. Coudert Jr. for a telegram received a day earlier, September 27, 1938. On that date, in response to Hitler’s threat to annex the western third of Czechoslovakia, known as the Sudetenland, Roosevelt sent a message urging German Chancellor Adolf Hitler to avoid the “incalculable disaster which would result to the entire world from the outbreak of European war” and “the mutilation and death of millions of citizens.”

“We hope you will be able to be ‘one with us’ in the bazar.”

In this personal letter written months before her death, Lucy Stone thanks Almira Pitman for a donation of $5, congratulates her on the birth of another child, reminisces about Pitman’s mother, and speaks of her own child.