Ulysses S. Grant and His Family, 1868 old_California_map The Gentlemans Vice Patent 1193593

The Gentlemans Vice Patent 1193593 belongs to the smokehouse era of design — when the act of lighting a cigar carried enough cultural weight to justify a patent application and a draftsman's afternoon

The Gull Beer Bottling Apparatus Patent Print captures one of those workhorse innovations that quietly defined how a glass of beer got from cellar to tap — a piece of equipment whose elegance was invisible to the drinker

retouched for a Gilded Age audience

or as a thoughtful gift for cocktail lovers

The Union Soldier's Discharge Certificate 1865 — printed in the closing months of the war

Ulysses S. Grant and His Family, 1868 old_California_map The Gentlemans Vice Patent 1193593Ulysses S. Grant and His Family, 1868 a domestic lithograph staged in the year the general traded epaulets for the presidency, his wife Julia and their children arranged in the careful symmetry of a household being introduced to the republic it would soon occupy. About the Source Bella Frye sources artifacts from the great American historical archive the Library of Congress, the National Archives, regional historical societies, and the lithographic