AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Sneak Peek: Medical Marvels and Historical Oddities from the Collections

From Florida’s infamous hanging chads and the magnifying glass used to inspect them to vanity eyeballs, American History curators brought the goods for 2013’s Tweet Up

Leah Binkovitz

These vanity eyeballs, donated by a Marine who lost his eye serving overseas, are just some of the treasures kept at the American History Museum.

For this year’s Tweetup, curators from the American History Museum showed off the best of their wares from old-fashioned glass contact lenses to trinkets once sold to raise funds for the Statue of Liberty’s base. We gathered some of the highlights here:

 

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Leah Binkovitz

Leah Binkovitz is a Stone & Holt Weeks Fellow at Washington Post and NPR. Previously, she was a contributing writer and editorial intern for the At the Smithsonian section of Smithsonian magazine.