The American 250 Weekly Recap: #147 - 151

All the old legendary guitar players—Jimi Hendrix, Chuck Berry, Jimmy Page, Jeff Beck—played factory-built guitars. Eddie Van Halen was the only one who built his own.

On the page, it looked harmless, a simple machine. Eli Whitney was trying to solve the bottleneck of separating cotton lint from seeds, which was slow, painstaking work. It took a person a day to manually separate seeds from a pound of cotton. Whitney’s gin, or engine, spun cotton around a drum, stripping the seeds away with wire teeth. Now two or three…

It looks like wet clay waiting to be shaped, like it would yield to a thumb pressed against it. The church of Saint Francis of Assisi in Ranchos de Taos dates back to the 1770s. 20th-century photographers Paul Strand and Ansel Adams made it fa…

Dear readers, we’ve only got 100 objects to go in the American 250! The rubber now begins to hit the road in earnest to make sure all the “must haves” I’ve been hoarding get included (the Edison bulb; Gee’s Bend quilts; the Hollywood sign, etc.). Now’s your chance: comment or message me if there’s something I’ve missed. Thanks, Rainey

It’s an intimate public space, one of the few where we touch a stranger. Someone holds our hands and massages our feet in a commonplace, affordable transaction. And what made it affordable was the Vietnam War.