How Smithsonian curators scavenge political conventions to explain the present to the future and save everything from hats to buttons to umbrellas to soap

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Naomi Schalit, The Conversation

(THE CONVERSATION) Thousands of Republicans, from a presidential candidate to grassroots party members, began assembling in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024, for that quadrennial political ritual, the party convention. Political history curators from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History were there, too. They’re self-described “scavengers” of the physical objects that make up political campaign history, from candidate buttons to signs, banners and anything else that can enter the Smithsonian’s campaign collection – which dates back to George Washington – in order to “make sense of our moment to people wondering what we were all thinking,” as curator Jon Grinspan put it. Grinspan was joined by curators Claire Jerry and Lisa Kathleen Graddy in an interview with The Conversation’s politics editor, Naomi Schalit. They will report back to Conversation readers during the convention about their progress.

Schalit: What do political history curators do?

Lisa Kathleen Graddy: We try to document, through material culture, Americans’ relationship with their democracy, with their government, how they are affected by it, how they affect it, and how they interact with it. Material culture is all of the ephemera and the products that people make and use to express their opinions about politics.

Claire Jerry: We go into the field so we can watch people in real time working and...