Detail from front cover.

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BULLETIN 254

WASHINGTON, D.C.

1968

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THE SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION PRESS

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The Invention
Of the Sewing Machine

Grace Rogers Cooper

CURATOR OF TEXTILES

Museum of History and Technology

SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION · WASHINGTON, · D.C. 1968

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Publications of the United States National Museum

The scholarly and scientific publications of the United States NationalMuseum include two series, Proceedings of the United States NationalMuseum and United States National Museum Bulletin.

In these series, the Museum publishes original articles and monographsdealing with the collections and work of its constituent museums—TheMuseum of Natural History and the Museum of History andTechnology—setting forth newly acquired facts in the fields ofanthropology, biology, history, geology, and technology. Copies of eachpublication are distributed to libraries, to cultural and scientificorganizations, and to specialists and others interested in the differentsubjects.

The Proceedings, begun in 1878, are intended for the publication, inseparate form, of shorter papers from the Museum of Natural History.These are gathered in volumes, octavo in size, with the publication dateof each paper recorded in the table of contents of the volume.

In the Bulletin series, the first of which was issued in 1875, appearlonger, separate publications consisting of monographs (occasionally inseveral parts) and volumes in which are collected works on relatedsubjects. Bulletins are either octavo or quarto in size, depending onthe needs of the presentation. Since 1902 papers relating to thebotanical collections of the Museum of Natural History have beenpublished in the Bullet