The Curtiss JN "Jenny" was originally produced as a training aircraft for the US Army. The common nickname derived from "JN", continued after World War I as a civilian aircraft, as it became the "backbone of American postwar aviation". Thousands of surplus Jennys were sold at bargain prices to private owners in the years after the war, and became central to the barnstorming era that helped awaken the US to civil aviation through much of the 1920s.