The Smithsonian Associates and the International Spy museum cohosted this 80 minute event. Good to see all of you here. I am a historian and curator. Some of you i know, some of you i am meeting for the first time. I would like to welcome all of you to the spy museum and spy seminar, where we focus on the spies of the American Revolution. The first two weeks centered on wellknown personalities. You have the , which has an entire tv show dedicated to it now, and ben franklin is of course ben franklin. Next week, we will look at the most infamous spy in u. S. History, Benedict Arnold. The relative obscurity of James Lafayette is what will make this morning so interesting. He is someone we should know more about. His impact on World History is well known. Historians are just now beginning to piece it together to find out new information and understand his impact on the revolution and figure out how he sits among the great heroes and villains of american intelligence history. Katherine egn
National consumers league. We will add a layer count talk about changes in how americans sold products, market goods. These are just as important as the changes on the business side, infrastructure, in American History. One of the things we will do is talk about advertising. Maybe it is strange to talk about ads in a history class. Ads are a great historical tool. They tell us about the past. This is an editorial from harper weekly, a popular magazine that circulated around the country at the end of the 19th century, still published today as monthly. The story of today would not go quite that far. They are not a perfect picture of the past, but advertising is a great way to think about the way society is valued. We dont take ads seriously today because we can see through them, either because they are part of the background. We dont see them as useful or that we literally see through them, we see the tricks. We are not deceived or manipulated, but advertising is a huge business, and the