Earlier this year, on a cold Sunday in January, I walked into an antique store in a Washington D.C. suburb. When I go to a shop like this one, I'm not looking for chairs or lamps. My interests are a little more specialized: a collectible whiskey decanter shaped like the Superdome, for instance, or a 1976 tabloid spread about Watergate witnesses who died under strange circumstances.
Now I was on the lookout for other important historical artifacts. And this place, West Howard Antiques in Kensington, Maryland, had a ton of them: sports yearbooks, posters, and all kinds of political ephemera, stuff with slogans like "Youth for Kennedy" and "Jimmy Carter 76."