History & Archaeology | Biography | Smithsonian.com

Mr. Lincoln Goes to Hollywood

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 07:37:00 GMT

In Lincoln, the Steven Spielberg movie opening this month, President Abraham Lincoln has a talk with U.S. Representative Thaddeus Stevens that should be studied in civics classes today. The scene goes down easy, thanks to the moviemakers’ art, but the point Lincoln makes is tough. Stevens, as Tommy Lee Jones plays him, is the meanest man in Congress, but also that body’s fiercest opponent of slavery. Because Lincoln’s primary purpose has been to hold the Union together, and he has been approaching abolition in a roundabout, politic way, Stevens by 1865 has come to regard him as “the capitulating compromiser, the dawdler.” The congressman wore with aplomb, an

The Dark Side of Thomas Jefferson

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

With five simple words in the Declaration of Independence—“all men are created equal”—Thomas Jefferson undid Aristotle’s ancient formula, which had governed human affairs until 1776: “From the hour of their birth, some men are marked out for subjection, others for rule.” In his original draft of the Declaration, in soaring, damning, fiery prose, Jefferson denounced the slave trade as an “execrable commerce ...this assemblage of horrors,” a “cruel war against human nature itself, violating its most sacred rights of life & liberties.” As historian John Chester Miller put it, “The inclusion of Jefferson’s strict

The Adventures of the Real Tom Sawyer

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

On a rainy afternoon in June 1863, Mark Twain was nursing a bad hangover inside Ed Stahle’s fashionable Montgomery Street steam rooms, halfway through a two-month visit to San Francisco that would ultimately stretch to three years. At the baths he played penny ante with Stahle, the proprietor, and Tom Sawyer, the recently appointed customs inspector, volunteer fireman, special policeman and bona fide local hero. In contrast to the lanky Twain, Sawyer, three years older, was stocky and round-faced. Just returned from firefighting duties, he was covered in soot. Twain slumped as he played poker, studying his cards, hefting a bottle of dark beer and chain-smoking cigars, to which he ha

Why Are Jim Thorpe’s Olympic Records Still Not Recognized?

Thu, 21 Jun 2012 05:03:42 GMT

It’s been 100 years since Jim Thorpe dashed through the 1912 Summer Olympics in Stockholm, and we’re still chasing him. Greatest-evers are always hard to quantify, but Thorpe is especially so, a laconic, evasive passerby who defies Olympic idealizing. A breakfast of champions for Thorpe was no bowl of cereal. It was fried squirrel with creamed gravy after running all night in the woods at the heels of his dogs. Try catching up with that. He was a reticent Sac and Fox Indian from the Oklahoma frontier, orphaned as a teenager and raised as a ward of government schools, uncomfortable in the public eye. When King Gustaf V of Sweden placed two gold medals around Thorpe’s neck

Julia Child's Recipe for a Thoroughly Modern Marriage

Fri, 11 May 2012 04:05:20 GMT

By the time I met Julia Child, her husband, Paul, was little more than a ghost of a man, so diminished by old age and its attendant diseases that it was impossible to discern the remarkable artist, photographer and poet he once had been. It broke my heart, because the more I knew Julia, the more I wished I had known Paul. “He’s responsible for everything I did,” she once told me. When I look at Julia’s kitchen, it is Paul who comes to mind. “For us the kitchen is the soul of our house,” she told the Smithsonian curators who traveled to her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as her kitchen was being packed up for the National Museum of American History in

Should LBJ Be Ranked Alongside Lincoln?

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 01:30:19 GMT

It has become one of the great suspense stories in American letters, the nonfiction equivalent of Ahab and the white whale: Robert Caro and his leviathan, Lyndon Baines Johnson. Caro, perhaps the pre-eminent historian of 20th-century America, and Johnson, one of the most transformative 20th-century presidents—in ways triumphant and tragic—and one of the great divided souls in American history or literature. When Caro set out to write his history, The Years of Lyndon Johnson, he thought it would take two volumes. His new Volume 4, The Passage of Power, traces LBJ from his heights as Senate leader and devotes most of its nearly 600 pages to the first seven weeks of LBJ’s

Roberto Clemente: The King of Béisbol

Wed, 21 Mar 2012 03:33:27 GMT

After Roberto Clemente disappeared in a plane crash off the coast of San Juan, Puerto Rico, on New Year’s Eve 1972, his body was never found. U.S. Coast Guard rescue and recovery teams probed the Atlantic waters for several weeks, but the ocean offered them a lone remnant of the brilliant baseball player—a single sock. Inanimate objects take on meaning only in the context of the story they evoke. That sock, banal yet gruesome, symbolized a sense of profound loss and mystery at Clemente’s tragic end. But here we are looking at another object in his story, an artifact from an earlier time that, considered on its own, seems utterly ordinary, yet also carries a deeper meaning

Books: Teddy Roosevelt: Top Cop, Jonah Lehrer and Other Must-Read Books

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Doomed Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York Richard Zacks When he left a comfortable job in the U.S. Civil Service in 1895 to become the chief commissioner of New York’s police department, 35-year-old Theodore Roosevelt was ill prepared for the bureaucratic tangles and urban pathologies that faced him. The city was a violent, crooked, crime-ridden place. One notorious police captain collected illicit $500 “initiation” fees from the 50 brothels in his ward—a tidy $25,000 bonus. Thirty thousand prostitutes roamed the streets. Twenty thousand people—on any given night—had no home. TR was formidable in his attac

John M. Barry on Roger Williams and the Indians

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

John M. Barry is the author of New York Times bestsellers The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History and Rising Tide: The Great Mississippi Flood 1927 and How It Changed America. His most recent book, Roger Williams and the Creation of the American Soul explores the relation between church and state and between the individual and the state through the story of Roger Williams’ search for religious freedom and how it informed the society he founded in Rhode Island. Barry spoke to the magazine on Williams’ respectful relationship with American Indians. Roger Williams said the Indians helped him survive in the wilderness after his banishment from the Ma

Unflinching Portraits of Pearl Harbor Survivors

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 11:00:52 GMT

Seventy years after the day that lives on in infamy, the soldiers stationed at Pearl Harbor recall their experiences

Madame Curie's Passion

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:00:00 GMT

When Marie Curie came to the United States for the first time, in May 1921, she had already discovered the elements radium and polonium, coined the term “radio-active” and won the Nobel Prize—twice. But the Polish-born scientist, almost pathologically shy and accustomed to spending most of her time in her Paris laboratory, was stunned by the fanfare that greeted her. She attended a luncheon on her first day at the house of Mrs. Andrew Carnegie before receptions at the Waldorf Astoria and Carnegie Hall. She would later appear at the American Museum of Natural History, where an exhibit commemorated her discovery of radium. The American Chemical Society, the New York Minera

Charles Conlon: The Unheralded Baseball Photographer

Thu, 01 Sep 2011 08:26:18 GMT

In 1839, around the time that Louis Daguerre announced that he had perfected the photographic process that would bear his name, the game of “base ball” was spreading up and down the Eastern Seaboard of the United States. By the turn of the 20th century, with the advent of the hand-held camera and the proliferation of newspapers and magazines featuring black-and-white photography, the sport was becoming the national pastime. Born in 1868, Charles M. Conlon was a proofreader at the New York Telegram when he began shooting pictures as a hobby. He started to frequent baseball stadiums in the first decade of the 1900s at the prompting of an editor. Using a Graflex camera, he soon

Samuel Morse's Reversal of Fortune

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

In November 1829, a 38-year-old American artist, Samuel F. B. Morse, set sail on a 3,000-mile, 26-day voyage from New York, bound for Paris. He intended to realize the ambition recorded on his passport: his occupation, Morse stated, was “historical painter.” Already esteemed as a portraitist, Morse, who had honed his artistic skills since his college years at Yale, had demonstrated an ability to take on large, challenging subjects in 1822, when he completed a 7- by 11-foot canvas depicting the House of Representatives in session, a subject never before attempted. An interlude in Paris, Morse insisted, was crucial: “My education as a painter,” he wrote, “is in

Gerda Weissmann Klein on American Citizenship

Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:16:35 GMT

Gerda Weissman Klein has an incredible story. After being torn from her family and home in Bielsko, Poland, in 1942, she survived three years in concentration camps and a 350-mile death march before American forces rescued her in 1945, from an abandoned bicycle factory in the Czech Republic. As chance would have it, she married the officer who liberated her. Then, she immigrated to the United States and became a U.S. citizen. Her memoir, All But My Life, has been a mainstay on high school reading lists since it was first published in 1957. HBO, in partnership with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, adapted it in 1995, into the Academy- and Emmy award-winning documentary “O

Everything You Didn’t Know About Clarence Darrow

Sat, 11 Jun 2011 06:27:50 GMT

Clarence Darrow exists foremost in the public memory as Spencer Tracy, who played a lawyer based on Darrow in the 1960 movie Inherit the Wind. That film, in turn, was based on Darrow’s 1925 defense of a Tennessee educator accused of breaking a state law banning the teaching of evolution in public schools. (Darrow lost The State of Tennessee v. Scopes, or the “monkey trial,” as it was known; the law was later repealed.) But as John A. Farrell makes clear in his new biography, Clarence Darrow: Attorney for the Damned, Darrow’s life was even more tumultuous than that sensational trial would suggest. Before Darrow became the champion of labor, proponent of the poor and

Ask an Expert: What Did Abraham Lincoln’s Voice Sound Like?

Tue, 07 Jun 2011 05:04:32 GMT

I suspect that when people imagine Abraham Lincoln and the way he sounded, many imagine him as a bass, or at least a deep baritone. Perhaps this is because of his large stature and the resounding nature of his words. Certainly, the tradition of oratory in the 1850s would support the assumption. “Usually people with centurion, basso profundo voices dominated American politics,” says Harold Holzer, a leading Lincoln scholar. Then, of course, there are the casting choices of film and TV directors over the years. “It can’t get any deeper than Gregory Peck,” says Holzer. Peck played Lincoln in the 1980s TV miniseries The Blue and the Gray. But, unfortunately, no r

Odd McIntyre: The Man Who Taught America About New York

Mon, 25 Apr 2011 09:04:24 GMT

On a steamy July day 100 years ago, a 27-year-old newspaperman stepped off the train from Cincinnati at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan. He wore a checkered suit, carried a bamboo cane and would have put on his loudest red necktie had his wife not talked him out of it. Years later he’d cringe at his youthful fashion sense but remember his first glimpse of Manhattan with awe. He called it “life’s most thrilling moment.” So began one of the great romances of the 20th century. “I came to New York with no special qualifications, no brilliant achievements and certainly nothing to recommend me to metropolitan editors,” he said. “Yet New York accepted

Fred Birchmore’s Amazing Bicycle Trip Around the World

Wed, 13 Apr 2011 06:31:22 GMT

Fred Birchmore of Athens, Georgia, belongs to an exclusive club: he’s a round-the-world cyclist. The club’s charter member, Thomas Stevens, pedaled his high-wheeler some 15,000 miles across North America, Europe and Asia between 1884 and 1887. Mark Beaumont of Scotland set the current world record in 2007-08, covering almost 18,300 miles in 194 days and 17 hours. Birchmore finished his epic two-year, 25,000-mile crossing of Eurasia 75 years ago this October. (North America came later.) And unlike the American Frank Lenz, who became famous after he disappeared in Turkey while trying to top Stevens’ feat in 1894, Birchmore lived to tell of his journey. He will turn 100 on

Bettany Hughes on Socrates

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Sure, Socrates was one of the founders of Western philosophy, but what was he really like? The 42-year-old British historian Bettany Hughes, whose previous biography dealt with Helen of Troy, brings him to life 25 centuries after his death in The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens and the Search for the Good Life. She spoke with the magazine’s Megan Gambino. Why Socrates? We think the way we do partly because Socrates thought the way he did. His basic idea—that the unexamined life is not worth living—is what it means to live in the modern world, to develop ideas and ask questions. Yet people imagine Socrates as this rather lofty graybeard dressed in a toga. He lived a very vi

George Washington: The Reluctant President

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Editor’s note: Even as the Constitution was being ratified, Americans looked toward a figure of singular probity to fill the new office of the presidency. On February 4, 1789, the 69 members of the Electoral College made George Washington the only chief executive to be unanimously elected. Congress was supposed to make the choice official that March but could not muster a quorum until April. The reason—bad roads—suggests the condition of the country Washington would lead. In a new biography, Washington: A Life, Ron Chernow has created a portrait of the man as his contemporaries saw him. The excerpt below sheds light on the president’s state of mind as the first Inau

Childhood Memories of Charles Lindbergh

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Reeve Lindbergh, the youngest daughter of Charles and Anne Morrow, is the author of several novels and children’s books. Her critically-acclaimed 1998 memoir, Under A Wing, tells the story of growing up under the watchful eye of her famous father, who kept checklists for each of his children, just as he made detailed lists to check and double-check before any of his flights. Some people believe that the most important thing Charles Lindbergh contributed to the field of aviation was not the flight in the Spirit of St. Louis, but the safety checklist. I have mixed feelings about this theory, though I think it may be correct, As a pilot my father habitually kept comprehensive lists on

J. P. Morgan as Cutthroat Capitalist

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:00:00 GMT

“No price is too great,” John Pierpont Morgan once declared, “for a work of unquestioned beauty and known authenticity.” Indeed, the financier spent half his fortune on art: Chinese porcelains, Byzantine reliquaries, Renaissance bronzes. His London house was so decked out a critic said it resembled “a pawnbrokers’ shop for Croesuses.” Morgan also commissioned a number of portraits of himself—but he was too restless and busy making money to sit still while they were painted. Which was why, in 1903, the painter Fedor Encke hired a young photographer named Edward Steichen to take Morgan’s picture as a kind of cheat sheet for a portrait En

Rehabilitating Cleopatra

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Cleopatra VII ruled Egypt for 21 years a generation before the birth of Christ. She lost her kingdom once; regained it; nearly lost it again; amassed an empire; lost it all. A goddess as a child, a queen at 18, at the height of her power she controlled virtually the entire eastern Mediterranean coast, the last great kingdom of any Egyptian ruler. For a fleeting moment she held the fate of the Western world in her hands. She had a child with a married man, three more with another. She died at 39. Catastrophe reliably cements a reputation, and Cleopatra's end was sudden and sensational. In one of the busiest afterlives in history, she has become an asteroid, a video game, a cigarette, a slot

Remembering PT-109

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:00:00 GMT

John F. Kennedy—elected 50 years ago this month—may not have been the most photographed of America’s presidents, but, like Abraham Lincoln, the camera loved him. His enviable thatch of hair and wide smile, plus his chic wife and two adorable children, turned serious photojournalists into dazzled paparazzi. One of the most compelling Kennedy portraits shows him as a young naval officer, leaning on a cane, his smile giving no indication that he was recovering from serious injuries incurred during a near-fatal ordeal at sea. The fellow officer who took that picture, Ted Robinson, recently donated a rare original print of the image—as well as the ironwood cane he lent

When Ben Franklin Met the Battlefield

Fri, 08 Oct 2010 06:39:40 GMT

Weapons ready, slogging into the deserted village, the men and their commander were appalled at what they saw: dead soldiers and civilians and evidence of a hasty retreat. The commander ordered quick fortifications against further attack, then burial parties. The orders came from an unlikely figure: Benjamin Franklin, 50 years old, already rich, retired from his printing business and notably famous for his inventions. He had received the Copley Medal from the Royal Society of London in 1753 for his “curious Experiments and Observations on Electricity” and founded a college in Philadelphia, as well as a lending library and other civic institutions. Now the otherwise unathletic

A Seminole Warrior Cloaked in Defiance

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:00:00 GMT

“Infinity of nations,” a new permanent exhibition encompassing nearly 700 works of indigenous art from North, Central and South America, opens October 23 at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York City, part of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). The objects include a pair of woven, beaded garters worn by Billy Powell of the Florida Seminole tribe. Billy Powell is hardly a household name. But his Seminole designation—Osceola—resonates in the annals of Native American history and the nation’s folklore. Celebrated by writers, studied by scholars, he was a charismatic war leader who staunchly resisted the uprooting of the Sem

Harriet Tubman's Amazing Grace

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:00:00 GMT

An 8- by 5-inch 19th-century hymnal, bound in faded paperboard and cloth, bears its owner’s name handwritten on the inside cover. The well-worn book of hymns belonged to one of American history’s most legendary heroines: Harriet Tubman. Historian Charles Blockson recently donated the hymnal—along with other Tubman memorabilia—to the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture. It represents, says NMAAHC director Lonnie Bunch, an opportunity “to renew our awareness of Harriet Tubman as a human—to make her less of a myth and more of a girl and a woman with astonishing determination.” Historians continue to investigate the in

How Annie Oakley, "Princess of the West," Preserved Her Ladylike Reputation

Thu, 12 Aug 2010 09:16:48 GMT

“Famous Woman Crack Shot. . . Steals to Secure Cocaine.” It would have seemed, on August 11, 1903, the day this headline first appeared in two of William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, that Annie Oakley would be the last woman behind such a despicable act. And yet it was she, the newspapers claimed, who was facing a 45-day sentence in a Chicago prison for literally stealing a man’s breeches to get her fix. This 28-year-old woman, the newspapers claimed, looked to be almost 40, her “striking beauty” entirely gone from her face. The headlines were laden with fallacies. Having retired from Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West Show two years earlier in 1901,

Michael Walsh on “Great Expectations”

Mon, 24 May 2010 09:31:25 GMT

Michael Walsh is a New York Times bestselling author. Early in his career, he served as music critic to the San Francisco Examiner and then Time magazine. Walsh wrote a biography of Andrew Lloyd Webber and has since added other nonfiction, novels and screenplays to his repertoire. I recently caught up with him to talk about his experience researching “Great Expectations,” his feature story about what life was like for African-American boxer Jack Johnson and musician Scott Joplin a century ago. What drew you to this story? I love sports, and I love music. When my editor and I started talking about possible anniversary stories, I thought, well, what happened in 1910 that would

A Year of Hope for Joplin and Johnson

Thu, 20 May 2010 06:00:00 GMT

On that fourth of July afternoon 100 years ago, the eyes of the world turned to a makeshift wooden arena that had been hastily assembled in Reno, Nevada. Special deputies confiscated firearms, and movie cameras rolled as a crowd estimated at 20,000 filled the stands surrounding a boxing ring. The celebrities at ringside included fight royalty—John L. Sullivan and James “Gentleman Jim” Corbett—and the novelist Jack London. For the first time in U.S. history, two champions—one reigning, the other retired but undefeated—were about to square off to determine the rightful heavyweight king of the world. But more than a title was at stak

Hypatia, Ancient Alexandria’s Great Female Scholar

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 08:11:34 GMT

One day on the streets of Alexandria, Egypt, in the year 415 or 416, a mob of Christian zealots led by Peter the Lector accosted a woman’s carriage and dragged her from it and into a church, where they stripped her and beat her to death with roofing tiles. They then tore her body apart and burned it. Who was this woman and what was her crime? Hypatia was one of the last great thinkers of ancient Alexandria and one of the first women to study and teach mathematics, astronomy and philosophy. Though she is remembered more for her violent death, her dramatic life is a fascinating lens through which we may view the plight of science in an era of religious and sectarian conflict. Founded

Gene Kranz's Apollo Vest

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Forty years ago, for several unbearably tense days—April 13 to April 17, 1970—the whole world watched as NASA Flight Director Gene Kranz led a team that worked around the clock to rescue Apollo 13 astronauts Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert and Fred Haise. After an explosion of an oxygen tank partially crippled the moon-bound spacecraft, NASA’s mission was to bring the trio safely back to Earth. Today, Kranz’s five-button, off-white vest (familiar to moviegoers who watched actor Ed Harris play Kranz in the film version of the crisis) holds pride of place at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. Kranz’s wife, Marta, created the garment that would establish a

Phineas Gage: Neuroscience's Most Famous Patient

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:00:00 GMT

Jack and Beverly Wilgus, collectors of vintage photographs, no longer recall how they came by the 19th-century daguerreotype of a disfigured yet still-handsome man. It was at least 30 years ago. The photograph offered no clues as to where or precisely when it had been taken, who the man was or why he was holding a tapered rod. But the Wilguses speculated that the rod might be a harpoon, and the man’s closed eye and scarred brow the result of an encounter with a whale. So over the years, as the picture rested in a display case in the couple’s Baltimore home, they thought of the man in the daguerreotype as the battered whaler. In December 2007, Beverly posted a scan of the imag

Charles Atlas: Muscle Man

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Like tens of thousands of young men and boys before him, Tom Manfre first caught sight of Charles Atlas in the back pages of the comic books he read so voraciously. With a sculpted chest, leopard briefs girdling his hips, a piercing look on his granite-jawed face, Atlas seemed to be jabbing his finger at Manfre as he commanded: "Let Me Prove in 7 Days That I Can Make You a New Man!" It was 1947, Manfre was 23 years old, and the man in the leopard-pattern briefs was the toast of New York City. He'd helped President Franklin Roosevelt celebrate his birthday at the Waldorf Astoria hotel. He cavorted on radio with Fred Allen and Eddie Cantor and on television with Bob Hope and Garry

The Triumph of Frank Lloyd Wright

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Frank Lloyd Wright's most iconic building was also one of his last. The reinforced-concrete spiral known as the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum opened in New York City 50 years ago, on October 21, 1959; six months before, Wright died at the age of 92. He had devoted 16 years to the project, facing down opposition from a budget-conscious client, building-code sticklers and, most significantly, artists who doubted that paintings could be displayed properly on a slanting spiral ramp. "No, it is not to subjugate the paintings to the building that I conceived this plan," Wright wrote to Harry Guggenheim, a Thoroughbred horse breeder and founder of Newsday who, as the benefactor's nephew,

For General Patton's Family, Recovered Ground

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In 1986, the year I turned 21, my father accidentally set fire to our basement. Until then he could often be found down there, in the office he'd carved out for himself in a far corner, smoking a cigar and working on his diaries. He'd been keeping them—dozens of identical volumes bound in red canvas—for most of his adult life. In the span of a few hours, the flames that rose from the smoldering butt he'd tossed in the wastebasket destroyed two rooms. My father suffered second-degree burns trying to rescue his journals, but nearly all of them were reduced to ash. A year later, a conservator handed us what was left of them, suggesting to Dad that he could review these scraps fo

George Koval: Atomic Spy Unmasked

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The old man had always been fiercely independent, and he entered his tenth decade with his mind clear, his memory keen and his fluent Russian still tinged with an American accent. His wife had died in 1999, and when his legs began to go he had trouble accepting help from his relatives in Moscow. He gradually withdrew from most human contact and died quietly on January 31, 2006, at age 92, taking his secrets to the grave. A singular confluence of developments forced Zhorzh Abramovich Koval out of obscurity. First, over the past decade Western intelligence analysts and cold war historians began to grasp the role of the GRU, the Soviet (now Russian) military intelligence agency, in the devel

Who Discovered the North Pole?

Thu, 19 Mar 2009 06:00:00 GMT

On September 7, 1909, readers of the New York Times awakened to a stunning front-page headline: "Peary Discovers the North Pole After Eight Trials in 23 Years." The North Pole was one of the last remaining laurels of earthly exploration, a prize for which countless explorers from many nations had suffered and died for 300 years. And here was the American explorer Robert E. Peary sending word from Indian Harbour, Labrador, that he had reached the pole in April 1909, one hundred years ago this month. The Times story alone would have been astounding. But it wasn't alone. A week earlier, the New York Herald had printed its own front-page headline: "The North Pole is Discovered by Dr. Frederic

Philip Kunhardt on “Lincoln’s Contested Legacy”

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 04:32:56 GMT

Philip Kunhardt has spent the last twenty years writing and producing documentaries on historical subjects—including Freedom: A History of US, Echoes from the White House and Lincoln—and has co-authored four companion books for these series. His work has ranged from a ten-part study of the American presidency, to a history of violence in America, to a multi-part series on the history of American freedom. However, he repeatedly returns to the subject of Abraham Lincoln. His newest book, Looking for Lincoln, was released this past November. What drew you to this story? Can you describe its genesis? In the early 1990s, I wrote and co-produced a three-hour long documentary film o

How Lincoln and Darwin Shaped the Modern World

Thu, 22 Jan 2009 07:00:00 GMT

We are all pebbles dropped in the sea of history, where the splash strikes one way and the big tides run another, and though what we feel is the splash, the splash takes place only within those tides. In almost every case, the incoming current drowns the splash; once in a while the drop of the pebble changes the way the ocean runs. On February 12, 1809, two boys were born within a few hours of each other on either side of the Atlantic. One entered life in a comfortable family home, nicely called the Mount, that still stands in the leafy English countryside of Shrewsbury, Shropshire; the other opened his eyes for the first time in a nameless, long-lost log cabin in the Kentucky woods. Charl

Lincoln as Commander in Chief

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:00:00 GMT

When the American Civil War began, president Abraham Lincoln was far less prepared for the task of commander in chief than his Southern adversary. Jefferson Davis had graduated from West Point (in the lowest third of his class, to be sure), commanded a regiment that fought intrepidly at Buena Vista in the Mexican War and served as secretary of war in the Franklin Pierce administration from 1853 to 1857. Lincoln's only military experience had come in 1832, when he was captain of a militia unit that saw no action in the Black Hawk War, which began when Sac and Fox Indians (led by the war chief Black Hawk) tried to return from Iowa to their ancestral homeland in Illinois in alleged violation

James M. McPherson on "Lincoln as Commander in Chief"

Thu, 18 Dec 2008 07:00:00 GMT

James M. McPherson, a professor emeritus of American history at Princeton University, has written prolifically about abolitionism, the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln and Reconstruction. Published in 1988, his Battle Cry of Freedom: The Civil War Era earned him a Pulitzer Prize, and his latest book Tried by War: Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief—like his story “Commander in Chief” in Smithsonian’s January issue—focuses on Lincoln as a military strategist. What drew you to this story? Can you describe its genesis a bit? I wrote the story of Lincoln as commander in chief because, in my research and reading about Lincoln and the Civil War, I became convinced that

The Swamp Fox

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:43:43 GMT

In early 1781, Revolutionary War militia leader Francis Marion and his men were camping on Snow's Island, South Carolina, when a British officer arrived to discuss a prisoner exchange. As one militiaman recalled years later, a breakfast of sweet potatoes was roasting in the fire, and after the negotiations Marion, known as the "Swamp Fox," invited the British soldier to share breakfast. According to a legend that grew out of the much-repeated anecdote, the British officer was so inspired by the Americans' resourcefulness and dedication to the cause—despite their lack of adequate provisions, supplies or proper uniforms—that he promptly switched sides and supported American indep

Marie Antoinette

Wed, 01 Nov 2006 05:00:00 GMT

Late September sunlight filters onto the blue velvet furnishings of the jewel-box theater built for Marie Antoinette at Versailles. The painted, original backdrop depicts a rustic farmhouse hearth, and I can just imagine the young queen reveling in her role as a shepherdess while her witty friends and dull husband, French king Louis XVI, applaud politely. At the time I was there, the theater was closed to most visitors (it is now open to the public from April 1 through October 31), and I wanted to take full advantage of my access. "Go ahead. Have a good, long look," said Christian Baulez, Versailles' chief conservator. On the way out, Baulez, who has worked at the former royal palace for

Who Was Cleopatra?

Sun, 01 Apr 2007 04:00:00 GMT

The struggle with her teenage brother over the throne of Egypt was not going as well as Cleopatra VII had hoped. In 49 B.C., Pharaoh Ptolemy XIII—also her husband and, by the terms of their father's will, her co-ruler—had driven his sister from the palace at Alexandria after Cleopatra attempted to make herself the sole sovereign. The queen, then in her early twenties, fled to Syria and returned with a mercenary army, setting up camp just outside the capital. Meanwhile, pursuing a military rival who had fled to Egypt, the Roman general Julius Caesar arrived at Alexandria in the summer of 48 B.C., and found himself drawn into the Egyptian family feud. For decades Egypt had been

France's Leading Lady

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:45:19 GMT

Nearly 600 years after she was burned at the stake, Joan of Arc is still making headlines. This past April, forensic scientists at Raymond Poincaré Hospital in Garches, France, announced in the journal Nature that relics supposedly found beneath her pyre are a forgery. The remains, which included a human rib, were never burned, and instead show evidence of embalming. Using carbon-14 analysis, the researchers dated the fragments to between the third and sixth centuries B.C. They concluded that the relics were taken from an Egyptian mummy, a component, in powdered form, of some medieval pharmaceuticals. Found in the attic of a Paris apothecary in 1867, the manufactured relics date to

The Gentleman Pirate

Mon, 12 Nov 2007 08:40:50 GMT

Stede Bonnet's career as the "Gentleman Pirate" may represent the worst midlife crisis on record. In 1717, Bonnet, a retired British army major with a large sugar plantation in Barbados, abandoned his wife, children, land and fortune; bought a ship; and turned to piracy on the high seas. Though his crew and fellow pirates judged him to be an inept captain, Bonnet's adventures earned him the nickname "the Gentleman Pirate," and today his legend lingers in the annals of pirate history. But why did a man who seemed to have everything give it all up for a life of crime? For a few years in the early 18th century, from about 1715 to 1720, piracy experienced a golden age. &qu