Remember the Maine?

In the recent episode of Pawn Stars entitled Whatcha talkin' 'Bout Sturgis, Rick and I took a look at a set of documents purporting to be the official engineering drawings of the USS Maine.  The ship was made famous for being sunk in Havana Harbor, and touching off the Spanish American War.  But what were these documents that walked into Gold and Silver Pawn?  Were they, as the seller claimed, valuable engineering drawings, or were they something else?

Rick and I decided that while they were cool pieces of art, they weren't worth the thousands of dollars the seller was asking.  Rick pointed out that they were lithographs, and I noticed the name of a German printer in the bottom right corner of each folded document.  Well, after the guy walked out of the shop (with his documents in hand), I did a little bit more research, and determined that our guess that the prints were either part of a propaganda or commercial endeavor was not far from the truth.

Turns out they were diagrams included in a Naval Academy textbook, printed many years after the Spanish American War.  Battleship technology was still studied by Midshipmen at the USNA, and these pictures were fold-out supplements from the book.

As I said to Rick, the notion that the US Government would send top-secret plans for their latest battle-ship off to a German printer in town, to be printed, was unfathomable.  I mean, has anybody seen Star Wars?  The rebels and the Empire fought an entire war over stolen battle plans!  I doubted the Government would have been THAT stupid or careless!