BGuthrie Photos: DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Taking America to Lunch

DC -- Natl Museum of American History -- Exhibit: Taking America to Lunch:

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Description of Pictures: Taking America to Lunch
Ongoing
Lower Level, in Stars and Stripes Cafe
This display case celebrates the history and endurance of American lunch boxes. Reaching the height of their popularity at the dawn of the television era, lunch box sales became barometers for what was hip in popular culture at any point in time. Included in the display are more than 50 objects drawn from the Museum’s collection of children’s and workers illustrated metal lunch boxes and beverage containers dating from the 1890s through the 1980s. Which one is your favorite?

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[1] LUNCH_221210_001.JPG	[2] LUNCH_221210_005.JPG	[3] LUNCH_221210_008.JPG
[4] LUNCH_221210_012.JPG	[5] LUNCH_221210_015.JPG	[6] LUNCH_221210_017.JPG
[7] LUNCH_221210_019.JPG	[8] LUNCH_221210_021.JPG	[9] LUNCH_221210_026.JPG
[10] LUNCH_221210_029.JPG	[11] LUNCH_221210_032.JPG	[12] LUNCH_221210_036.JPG
[13] LUNCH_221210_038.JPG	[14] LUNCH_221210_043.JPG	[15] LUNCH_221210_045.JPG
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[19] LUNCH_221210_055.JPG	[20] LUNCH_221210_058.JPG	[21] LUNCH_221210_062.JPG
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[64] LUNCH_221210_164.JPG	[65] LUNCH_221210_169.JPG	[66] LUNCH_221210_173.JPG

Specific picture descriptions: Photos above with "i" icons next to the bracketed sequence numbers (e.g. "[1] ") are described as follows:
1. LUNCH_221210_005.JPG: The First Generation American industrial workers have often carried their lunch in plain metal buckets. From the mid-19th century, miners, factory workers, dockhands, and other laborers used sturdy dinner pails to hold boiled vegetables, meat, coffee, pie, and other hardy fare. In 1904, new Thermos vacuum bottles began keeping worker's drinks hot or cold until the noon whistle blew.
2. LUNCH_221210_017.JPG: School Days Parents one hundred years ago often gave their schoolchildren an empty tobacco or coffee tin to carry some fresh-picked fruit, bread, a wedge of cheese, and perhaps a handful of shelled nuts. Some children carried their food in a store-bought lunch pail or a paper sack. Other children brought no midday meal.
3. LUNCH_221210_036.JPG: Taking America to Lunch For generations, the lunch containers many of us hauled to school and work have reflected American culture. Of all the bags, boxes, trays, cans, and cartons we have carried over the past century, the most message-laden is the metal lunch box. This section of boxes and their drink containers from the collections of the National Museum of American History explores that colorful heritage.
4. LUNCH_221210_049.JPG: The Other Box Television transformed the lunch box from an ordinary food conveyance into a storyteller. Beginning in the 1950s, the screen-like sides of the lunch box offered children a new form of self-expression. Box makers paid for the right to use TV shows to promote box sales. The studios used boxes to gain market exposure. And children acquired a new statement of their power and influence in the emerging world of mass-marketed consumer goods.
5. LUNCH_221210_073.JPG: Cowboys and Astronauts Comic books, radio shows, and television introduced a cast of action characters to American schoolchildren. Fearless champions of a mythical Old West joined with explorers of outer space no the illustrated metal lunch box and its companion drink container. The steel box had reached its ideal form. Innovation shifted from the box to the action swirling around the outside. Manufacturers competed for rights to the latest horseback hero, fearless crime fighter, or Martian maiden.
6. LUNCH_221210_120.JPG: Cool Lunches and a Cold War As grade-school children became teenagers, box makers devised new themes to keep boxes selling. Music groups, hit movies, athletes, TV thrillers, and wild geometric patterns added zip to boxes of the 1970s. Cold War boxes displayed scenes of combat, heavy weaponry, and stealthy foreign intrigue. By the mid-1980s, box makers had replaced steel with less costly materials. The era of the metal lunch box was over for all but the collectors.
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