Time Capsule - Button Box Part One

My better half is interested in buttons, so of course people regularly give her batches of them.  Usually they come out of some obscure drawer, or are the collection of a recently departed family member.  Most are not of value, but that's not to say there are not interesting things mixed in at times.  A recent batch had several oddities.  Starting with these:

I've given them a bit of a clean, but in their original form they were dark grey, encrusted with stuff, and tied together with a bit of thread.  So, what do we have here?

The larger buttons show a cannon and flag.  The material is pewter, that odd conglomeration of tin and other metals, often with a fair percentage of lead.  They are rather heavy.

Notice that this is not a traditional American flag.  Below is the smaller size, it has an odd monogram.

Naturally one turns first to a scholarly work that actually is called "The Big Book of Buttons".  It has a lot of info but does not rival the internet.  Just a couple of clicks showed me several similar buttons including a grouping just like mine that was being offered for sale as "possibly Revolutionary War" era.  Hmmm.  I had my doubts.  The two styles were very different.  And what are the odds that identical sets would survive?  Also on the back there were numbers stamped.  6 on the small ones and 4 on the larger ones.  It looked like such a clean, deep strike that I doubted it was done 200 plus years ago.

Just a little more sleuthing uncovered this:

Looks pretty familiar, no?  This is a set of reproduction buttons, based on actual specimens excavated at Revolutionary war battle field sites.  They are not even from the same uniform, the larger ones being a style worn by Continental Army artillery officers, the smaller ones are from a New York militia unit. The odd monogram is a version of NY. 

They were given away on July 4th 1969 by Time Magazine as a commemorative item.  

So I'm 99.9% sure I don't have actual Revolutionary War pewter buttons here.  But still, its history after a fashion.  It is after all about a half century since they came out, and in a very momentous year.  Moon Landing, Woodstock, assassinations, etc.