History & Archaeology | U.S. History | Smithsonian.com

How Harlem Put Itself Back on the Map

Wed, 22 May 2013 03:42:46 GMT

Despite a recent slump from the economic crisis, Harlem brownstones prices are on the rise again. Photo by Ilan Costica, courtesy of Wikimedia Just a block from Harlem’s great thoroughfare, 125th Street, is a brownstone listed for a cool $2.3 million, courtesy of the Corcoran Group Real Estate. Advertising its proximity to the subway and trendy restaurants like Red Rooster, the listing provides a snapshot of the dramatic changes underway in the Manhattan neighborhood. Projects like the expansion of the Harlem Hospital Center and the plans for Columbia University and rezoning efforts have brought a wave of development interest to Harlem, which suffered along with the rest of New Y

The Design Future of New York as Seen by Urbanist Michael Sorkin

Mon, 20 May 2013 06:59:13 GMT

Detail from the cover of All Over the Map: Writings on Buildings and Cities, 2011. Published by Verso. Copyright Michael Sorkin Studio. Only Michael Sorkin, urban theorist and architect, could write an entire book about his 20-minute walk to work and turn it into an engaging meditation on city life and citizenship. Principal of Michael Sorkin Studio in New York as well as a professor at City College, Sorkin’s unique examination of what makes cities work has earned him the Cooper-Hewitt’s 2013 “Design Mind” Award. Sorkin says he’s honored to have won and has big plans for the celebratory lunch in October. “I have so much to discuss with the president

How Edwin Hubble Became the 20th Century’s Greatest Astronomer

Mon, 20 May 2013 01:28:00 GMT

Galaxy M106 as captured by the Hubble Space Telescope. Credit: NASA/ESA Edwin Hubble. Photo: Wikipedia When the great minds of science gathered at the U.S. National Museum (now known as the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History) on April 26, 1920, the universe was at stake. Or at least the size of it, anyway. In scientific circles, it was known as the Great Debate, and although they didn’t know it at the time, the astronomy giants Harlow Shapley and Heber Curtis—the two men who came to Washington, D.C., to present their theories—were about to have their life’s work eclipsed by Edwin Hubble, a young man who would soon become known as the grea

Landscape Designer Margie Ruddick Brings a New Meaning to Green Design

Fri, 17 May 2013 02:38:24 GMT

Landscape designer Margie Ruddick’s “Urban Green Room,” the first permanent living indoor installation, helped her win a National Design Award last week. Photo by Sam Oberlander “Nature” is probably the last word that comes to mind when most people think about urban design. That’s not the case for landscape designer Margie Ruddick, though. For the past 25 years, she has created parks, gardens and waterfronts that blend ecology with city planning. In New York City, home to many of her works, Ruddick has transformed Queens Plaza by merging plants, water, wind and sun with the city’s infrastructure, and designed a 2.5-acre park along the Hudson R

The Best of Design, Cooper-Hewitt Announces 2013 Award Winners

Thu, 09 May 2013 01:43:57 GMT

Part of the portfolio for this year’s Lifetime Achievement award winner: Ross’s Landing Park and Plaza entrance bridge, Chattanooga, TN, 1992. Architecture: SITE (James Wines, Alison Sky, Michelle Stone, Joshua Weinstein). Engineers: Hensley-Schmidt. Construction: Soloff Construction Company. Photo: SITE Recognizing everything from landscape architecture to fashion, the 2013 Cooper-Hewitt Design Awards recognize the best in design. Some names, like this year’s winner for Corporate and Institutional Achievement, TED, are familiar, while others may be new to most. Within academic circles, for example, Michael Sorkin is a well-known architecture and planning critic and

8 Famous People Who Missed the Lusitania

Fri, 03 May 2013 01:00:00 GMT

When the First World War began, in the summer of 1914, the Lusitania was among the most glamorous and celebrated ships in the world—at one time both the largest and fastest afloat. But the British passenger liner would earn a far more tragic place in history on May 7, 1915, when it was torpedoed by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland, with the loss of nearly 1,200 lives. The Lusitania was not the first British ship to be torpedoed, and the German Navy had publicly vowed to destroy “every enemy merchant ship” it found in the waters surrounding Great Britain and Ireland. On the day the Lusitania set sail from New York, the German Embassy ran ads in U.S. newspapers,

Starving Settlers in Jamestown Colony Resorted to Cannibalism

Wed, 01 May 2013 02:40:24 GMT

The harsh winter of 1609 in Virginia’s Jamestown Colony forced residents to do the unthinkable. A recent excavation at the historic site discovered the carcasses of dogs, cats and horses consumed during the season commonly called the “Starving Time.” But a few other newly discovered bones in particular, though, tell a far more gruesome story: the dismemberment and cannibalization of a 14-year-old English girl. “The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. “Then, the body was turned ove

How the Ford Motor Company Won a Battle and Lost Ground

Tue, 30 Apr 2013 05:55:33 GMT

Before the blows began to rain: Walter Reuther (hand in pocket) and Richard Frankensteen (to Reuther’s left). Photo: James Kilpatrick of the Detroit News, Wikimedia Commons In 1937, Walter Reuther and his United Autoworkers Union had brought General Motors and Chrysler to their knees by staging massive sit-down strikes in pursuit of higher pay, shorter hours and other improvements in workers’ lives. But when Reuther and the UAW set their sights on the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge complex in Dearborn, Michigan, Henry Ford made it clear that he’d never give in to the union. On the morning of May 26, 1937, Detroit News photographer James “Scotty” Kilpatrick wa

We Had No Idea What Alexander Graham Bell Sounded Like. Until Now

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Smithsonian researchers used optical technology to play back the unplayable records

The True Story of the Battle of Bunker Hill

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

The last stop on Boston’s Freedom Trail is a shrine to the fog of war. “Breed’s Hill,” a plaque reads. “Site of the Battle of Bunker Hill.” Another plaque bears the famous order given American troops as the British charged up not-Bunker Hill. “Don’t fire ’til you see the whites of their eyes.” Except, park rangers will quickly tell you, these words weren’t spoken here. The patriotic obelisk atop the hill also confuses visitors. Most don’t realize it’s the rare American monument to an American defeat. In short, the nation’s memory of Bunker Hill is mostly bunk. Which makes the 1775 battle a natural topic f

The History of the Short-Lived Independent Republic of Florida

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 06:00:00 GMT

In the predawn fog of September 23, 1810, about 50 men, led by Revolutionary War veteran Philemon Thomas, walked in the open gate of Fort San Carlos in Baton Rouge. An additional 25 men on horseback rode through a gap in the fort’s wall. Spanish soldiers discharged a handful of muskets before Thomas’ men let go a single volley that killed or wounded five Spaniards. The remaining soldados surrendered or fled. Revolutions come in all shapes and sizes, but the West Florida Rebellion holds the record as the shortest. In less than one minute it was over, setting in motion a chain of events that would transform the United States into a continental and, eventually, world power. The

Sequestration to Cause Closures, Secretary Clough Testifies

Wed, 17 Apr 2013 11:24:18 GMT

Secretary G. Wayne Clough testified before Congress today about the effects of sequestration on the institution. Photo by Ken Rahalm, courtesy of the Smithsonian On April 16, Smithsonian Institution Secretary G. Wayne Clough testified before the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform about the impending effects of sequestration. Though the Obama administration had sought a $59 million budget increase for the Institution in fiscal 2014, this year Clough has to contend with a $41 million budget reduction due to sequestration. Gallery closings, fewer exhibitions, reduced educational offerings, loss of funding for research and cuts to the planning process of the under-construction Na

The Business of American Business Is Education

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

If you ask American leaders about the overall goal of the nation’s education system, you’d likely get a broad set of answers: to prepare young people for the workforce; to close racial and socioeconomic achievement gaps; to create informed citizens ready to participate in popular democracy. Other western nations, including the United Kingdom, France and Germany, provide their public schools with a national curriculum, roughly equalized budgets and government-produced exams. In contrast, the defining feature of American education is its localism; we have no shared curriculum, large funding disparities and little national agreement about what the purposes of schooling should be.

Document Deep Dive: What Was on the First SAT?

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 05:00:00 GMT

Explore the exam that has been stressing out college-bound high school students since 1926

Document Deep Dive: The Heartfelt Friendship Between Jackie Robinson and Branch Rickey

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 06:38:29 GMT

Baseball brought the two men together, but even when Rickey left the Brooklyn Dodgers, their relationship off the field would last for years

Agony and Ecstasy at the Masters Tournament

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 02:37:47 GMT

Grantland Rice, Gene Sarazen and Craig Wood at the 1935 Augusta National Invitational Tournament. Photo: © Bettmann/CORBIS There were already whispers that Craig Wood was a bad-luck golfer when, in late March of 1935, he accepted an offer from Bobby Jones to play in his second Augusta National Invitational Tournament in Augusta, Georgia. Known as the “Blond Bomber,” Wood had literally made a splash at the 1933 British Open at St. Andrews—he had tied Denny Shute for the lead after 72 holes, but lost in a playoff when his booming drive found the famous Swilcan Burn, a thin channel of water that cuts across the first fairway. At the inaugural “Masters” (as it would later bec

When New York City Tamed the Feared Gunslinger Bat Masterson

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 03:06:57 GMT

Bat Masterson, toward the end of his life, in New York City. Photo: Wikipedia Bat Masterson spent the last half of his life in New York, hobnobbing with Gilded Age celebrities and working a desk job that saw him churning out sports reports and “Timely Topics” columns for the New York Morning Telegraph. His lifestyle had widened his waistline, belying the reputation he had earned in the first half of his life as one of the most feared gunfighters in the West. But that reputation was built largely on lore; Masterson knew just how to keep the myths alive, as well as how to evade or deny his past, depending on whichever stories served him best at the time. Despite his dapper appearance an

The Worst Parade to Ever Hit the Streets of Boston

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 05:15:29 GMT

This tale is excerpted from Nathaniel Philbrick's upcoming book Bunker Hill: A City, A Siege, A Revolution, available for pre-order now and in stores on April 30, 2013. Boston had always been a town on tiptoe. Just a square mile in area, with a mere sliver of land connecting it to the mainland to the south, this tadpole-shaped island was dominated by three towering, lightly settled hills and a virtual forest of steeples. From Boston’s highest perch, the 138-foot Beacon Hill, it was possible to see that the town was just one in a huge amphitheatre of humped and jagged islands that extended more than eight and a half miles to Point Allerton to the southeast. Whether it was from a hill

Has Gettysburg Kicked Its Kitsch Factor?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

Climbing over a snake-rail fence, Peter Carmichael leads me across a field of grass stubble and gray boulders. On this wintry day in 2013, the field is frozen and silent. But 150 years ago it was filled with the shriek and smoke of the bloodiest battle in American history. “The Confederates who charged here were mowed down in minutes,” says Carmichael, director of the Civil War Institute at Gettysburg College. As evidence, he shows me photographs taken just after the battle of bullet-riddled corpses. Then he walks a few paces and lays the 1863 images on the ground. The field in the photographs aligns perfectly with the one we’re looking at in 2013, right down to clefts i

America’s Got a Case of Souvenir Mania

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

For days on end William Bird locked himself in a brightly lit storage room with hair clippings, a wood chip and two 80-year-old pieces of cake. There was also a punch bowl and the cuff of a woman’s blouse stained with Abraham Lincoln’s blood. Bird, known to friends as Larry (no Celtics jersey, but almost as tall), was digging through the American History Museum’s political history collection for overlooked gems to put in his new book, Souvenir Nation, out this month from Princeton Architectural Press, and the subject of an exhibit by the same title opening August 9 at the Smithsonian Castle. The things he exhumed didn’t usually look like treasure at all: b

Where Was the Birthplace of the American Vacation?

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

One of the little-known turning points in the history of American travel occurred in the spring of 1869, when a handsome young preacher from Boston named William H.H. Murray published one of the first guidebooks to a wilderness area. In describing the Adirondack Mountains—a 9,000-square-mile expanse of lakes, forests and rivers in upstate New York—Murray broached the then-outrageous idea that an excursion into raw nature could actually be pleasurable. Before that date, most Americans considered the country’s primeval landscapes only as obstacles to be conquered. But Murray’s self-help opus, Adventures in the Wilderness; or, Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, suggested th

How the DC-3 Revolutionized Air Travel

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 06:00:00 GMT

On an early evening in late 1938, a gleaming American Airlines DC-3 departed Newark Airport, bound for Glendale, California. The takeoff, wrote a Fortune magazine reporter aboard to record the still-novel experience of cross-country air travel, was effortless. “Halfway along the runway,” he recounted, “she left the ground so smoothly that none of the first fliers in the cabin realized what had happened until they saw the whole field rushing away behind them and the factory lights winking through the Jersey murk ahead.” By the time the flight crossed over Virginia, passengers had already polished off a dinner of soup, lamb chops, vegetables, salad, ice cream and cof

Who Really Invented the Smiley Face?

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 03:37:00 GMT

An original Harvey Ball smiley face (image: The World Smiley Foundation) In the 1994 Robert Zemeckis film, Forrest Gump stumbles into the history books as he runs across the country. At one point, he meets a poor T-shirt salesman who, Gump recalls, “wanted to put my face on a T-shirt but he couldn’t draw that well and he didn’t have a camera.” As luck would have it, a truck drives by and splashes Gump’s face with mud. He wipes his face on a yellow T-shirt and hands it back to the down-on-his-luck entrepreneur, telling him to “have a nice day.” The imprint of Gump’s face left a perfect, abstract smiling face on the bright yellow t-shirt.

The Most Audacious Australian Prison Break of 1876

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 06:04:00 GMT

The Irish Fenian prisoners known as the Fremantle Six. Photos: Wikipedia The plot they hatched was as audacious as it was impossible—a 19th-century raid as elaborate and preposterous as any Ocean’s Eleven script. It was driven by two men—a guilt-ridden Irish Catholic nationalist, who’d been convicted and jailed for treason in England before being exiled to America, and a Yankee whaling captain—a Protestant from New Bedford, Massachusetts—with no attachment to the former’s cause, but a firm belief that it was “the right thing to do.” Along with a third man—an Irish secret agent posing as an American millionaire—they devised a plan to sail halfway around the world to Fremantle, Australi

The True-Life Horror that Inspired Moby-Dick

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 03:50:59 GMT

Herman Melville, circa 1860. Photo: Wikipedia In July of 1852, a 32-year-old novelist named Herman Melville had high hopes for his new novel, Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, despite the book’s mixed reviews and tepid sales. That month he took a steamer to Nantucket for his first visit to the Massachusetts island, home port of his novel’s mythic protagonist, Captain Ahab, and his ship, the Pequod. Like a tourist, Melville met local dignitaries, dined out and took in the sights of the village he had previously only imagined. And on his last day on Nantucket he met the broken-down 60-year-old man who had captained the Essex, the ship that had been attacked and sunk by a sperm whale

Photo Interactive: The Civil War, Now in Living Color

Fri, 22 Feb 2013 07:29:15 GMT

How one author adds actual blues and grays to historic photographs

Eleanor Roosevelt and the Soviet Sniper

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 01:26:56 GMT

Lyudmila Pavlichenko arrived in Washington, D.C., in late 1942 as little more than a curiosity to the press, standing awkwardly beside her translator in her Soviet Army uniform. She spoke no English, but her mission was obvious. As a battle-tested and highly decorated lieutenant in the Red Army’s 25th Rifle Division, Pavlichenko had come on behalf of the Soviet High Command to drum up American support for a “second front” in Europe. Joseph Stalin desperately wanted the Western Allies to invade the continent, forcing the Germans to divide their forces and relieve some of the pressure on Soviet troops. She visited with President Franklin Roosevelt, becoming the first Soviet citizen to

The Shocking Savagery of America’s Early History

Thu, 21 Feb 2013 07:00:00 GMT

It’s all a bit of a blur, isn’t it? That little-remembered century—1600 to 1700—that began with the founding (and foundering) of the first permanent English settlement in America, the one called Jamestown, whose endemic perils portended failure for the dream of a New World. The century that saw all the disease-ridden, barely civilized successors to Jamestown slaughtering and getting slaughtered by the Original Inhabitants, hanging on by their fingernails to some fetid coastal swampland until Pocahontas saved Thanksgiving. No, that’s not right, is it? I said it was a blur. Enter Bernard Bailyn, the greatest historian of early America alive today. Now over 90 a

The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla and his Tower

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 07:20:28 GMT

Nikola Tesla. Image courtesy of LIbrary of Congress By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. His inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination. Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn’t above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison, who once hired him. “If E

Everything Was Fake but Her Wealth

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 01:48:09 GMT

Ida Mayfield Wood in the 1860s. From The Recluse of Herald Square. Ida Wood never had any intention of renewing contact with the outside world, but on March 5, 1931, death made it necessary. At four o’clock that afternoon, the 93-year-old did something she hadn’t done in 24 years of living at the Herald Square Hotel: she voluntarily opened the door, craned her neck down the corridor, and called for help. “Maid, come here!” she shouted. “My sister is sick. Get a doctor. I think she’s going to die.” Over the next 24 hours various people filtered in and out of room 552: the hotel manager, the house physician of the nearby Hotel McAlpin and an undertaker, who summoned two lawyers from th

Lost and Found Again: Photos of African-Americans on the Plains

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 07:00:00 GMT

Douglas Keister has spent the past four decades traveling the country to photograph subjects as varied as architecture, folk art and cemeteries. Over the years, as he moved from his hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, to several different cities in California, he carted around a heavy box of 280 antique glass-plate negatives that he’d bought when he was 17 from a friend who’d found them at a garage sale. “I thought, ‘Why the heck am I keeping these things?’” he says. Then, in 1999, Keister’s mother sent him an article she’d seen in the Lincoln Journal Star saying historians in Lincoln had unearthed a few dozen glass negatives that featured portra

What Django Unchained Got Wrong: A Review From National Museum of African American History and Culture Director Lonnie Bunch

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 08:53:00 GMT

Jamie Foxx as Django. Courtesy of Columbia Pictures/Sony Pictures Digital Inc. For more than two centuries slavery dominated American life, the shadow of slavery shaped everything from politics to the economy, from Westward expansion to foreign policy, from culture to commerce and from religion to America’s sense of self. And yet, contemporary America has little understanding or tolerance for discussions about the enslavement of millions. In many ways, slavery is the last great unmentionable in American public discourse. So I was hopeful and interested when I learned that Quentin Tarantino was to tackle the subject of slavery in his movie Django Unchained. At nearly three hours

That Time a Chicken Crashed Nixon’s Inaugural Ball and Other Crazy Inaugural Tales

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 01:35:00 GMT

Not officially on the guest list for Richard Nixon’s 1973 inaugural ball, this chicken decided to check out the scene anyway. Courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives With Richard Nixon’s first inauguration, the president threw a party not to be beat. “Nixon girls” from the campaign served as hostesses for six inaugural balls. One ball at the Smithsonian was so popular, the cloakrooms were overrun, according to the Boston Globe, forcing guests to carry their minks and umbrellas with them during the celebrations. But the party animals had competition from real animals for the spotlight. Remembering Nixon’s first inauguration, Bob Schieffer of CBS

PHOTOS: Who Were the Six Indian Chiefs in Teddy Roosevelt’s Inaugural Parade?

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 06:57:00 GMT

Marching in the parade. Courtesy of the National Museum of American Indian/LOC Among the 35,000 people who participated in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade on March 4, 1905, were six men on horseback wearing elaborate headdresses. Each was an Indian chief and each had at one time or another been at odds with the American government. They were Quanah Parker of the Comanche, Buckskin Charlie from the Ute, Hollow Horn Bear and American Horse of the Sioux, Little Plume from the Blackfeet and the Apache warrior Geronimo. As they rode through the streets of Washington on horseback, despite criticism, Roosevelt applauded and waved his hat in appreciation. They are the subject of t

The Unsuccessful Plot to Kill Abraham Lincoln

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 06:33:30 GMT

As he awaited the outcome of the voting on election night, November 6, 1860, Abraham Lincoln sat expectantly in the Springfield, Illinois, telegraph office. The results came in around 2 a.m.: Lincoln had won. Even as jubilation erupted around him, he calmly kept watch until the results came in from Springfield, confirming that he had carried the town he had called home for a quarter century. Only then did he return home to wake Mary Todd Lincoln, exclaiming to his wife: “Mary, Mary, we are elected!” At the new year, 1861, he was already beleaguered by the sheer volume of correspondence reaching his desk in Springfield. On one occasion he was spotted at the post office filling

War and Peace of Mind for Ulysses S. Grant

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 03:41:00 GMT

Ulysses S. Grant working on his memoirs just weeks before his death in 1885. Photo: Library of Congress After serving two terms as president, Ulysses S. Grant settled in New York, where the most famous man in America was determined to make a fortune in investment banking. Wealthy admirers like J. P. Morgan raised money to help Grant and his wife, Julia, make a home on East 66th Street in Manhattan, and after two decades at war and in politics, the Ohio-born son of a tanner approached his 60s aspiring to join the circles of the elite industrialists and financiers of America’s Gilded Age. But the Union’s preeminent Civil War hero had never been good at financial matters. Be

Garrison Keillor’s 1996 Predictions for the Future of Media

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 03:39:00 GMT

“Nostalgia Man” by Amy Crehore 1996, oil painting (9 1/2″ x 10 1/2″) www.amycrehore.com There are many different ways to talk about the future, but few are more self-centered than guessing how the generations of tomorrow may judge you and yours. Garrison Keillor did just that with his article, “The Future of Nostalgia,” which appeared in the September 29, 1996, issue of The New York Times Magazine. Some of Keillor’s observations ring true for those of us here in the year 2013: he predicts that the future of air travel will only become more and more cumbersome and he imagines that Americans’ growing dissatisfaction with stagnant wages m

The Jetsons and the Future of the Middle Class

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 06:32:00 GMT

This is the 15th in a 24-part series looking at every episode of “The Jetsons” TV show from the original 1962-63 season. The world of “The Jetsons” is fundamentally a conservative vision of the future. Whenever I mention this people tend to give me a strange look. But what I mean by “conservative” is not some political “red versus blue” or “Democrat versus Republican” idea, but rather conservative in the advocacy of the status quo — aside from technology, that is. The show projects into the future what was seen by some in 1963 as the ideal American family. They may have flying cars and vacations to the

Document Deep Dive: The Menu From President Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Ball

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 03:17:32 GMT

What delicacies and confectionaries were found on the 250-foot-long buffet table?

From Washington to Obama, Inaugural History

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 09:08:05 GMT

Everything you've wanted to know about the upcoming Presidential Inauguration

Where Did Pabst Win that Blue Ribbon?

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:56:00 GMT

A vintage Pabst Blue Ribbon advertisement from the mid 1950s. “Go get me a blue ribbon.” I must’ve heard my grandpa utter those words hundreds of times as we sat together fishing off our small dock. Even before I could read I knew which beer to grab for him – the one with the first prize ribbon on the can. I didn’t realize it as a child of course, but that ease of recognition was a testament to the power of branding. Pabst Blue Ribbon beer –PBR to its friends– may today be best known as the preferred beer of old Midwestern fisherman and mustachioed hipsters, but that instantly recognizable ribbon is more than just a symbol or marketing ploy.

That Time 150 Years Ago When Thousands of People Watched Baseball on Christmas Day

Fri, 21 Dec 2012 04:10:00 GMT

On a Christmas morning in South Carolina 150 years ago, two teams took the field for a game of what was not yet the national pastime. The epic Christmas Day faceoff between two teams representing New York regiments stationed on Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, may be one of the most significant contests in baseball’s early decades, even though it retains a whiff of mystery. Details are scarce. We don’t even know the final score. But it was played before an enormous audience: various sources say 40,000 people watched the game on Hilton Head—also known then as Port Royal—on that Christmas morning. We do know one of the players: A.G. Mills. Then a young p

Document Deep Dive: Emancipation Proclamation

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

When freeing the slaves 150 years ago, Abraham Lincoln traded in his famous lyricism for a dry, legal tone. Harold Holzer explains why

The Vegas Hotspot That Broke All the Rules

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The newest casino in Vegas was a 40-foot trailer in a vacant lot. Inside, gamblers in shorts, T-shirts and baseball caps fed quarters into video-poker machines. Outside, weeds sprouted through the sun-scorched pavement of a forlorn stretch of Bonanza Road near Three Star Auto Body and Didn’tDoIt Bail Bonds. A banner strapped to the trailer announced that this was the “Site of the Famous Moulin Rouge Casino!” That was the point: Due to one of myriad quirks of Nevada law, some form of gambling must occur here every two years or the owners lose their gaming license. This desolate city block had practically no value except as the site of a hotel-casino that closed more than

How the Emancipation Proclamation Came to Be Signed

Wed, 19 Dec 2012 07:00:00 GMT

On July 20, 1862, John Hay, Lincoln’s private secretary, predicted in a letter that the president “will not conserve slavery much longer.” Two days later, Lincoln, wearing his familiar dark frock coat and speaking in measured tones, convened his cabinet in his cramped White House office, upstairs in the East Wing. He had, he said, “dwelt much and long on the subject” of slavery. Lincoln then read aloud a 325-word first draft of the Emancipation Proclamation, intended to free slaves in Confederate areas not under United States authority. Salmon P. Chase, secretary of the treasury, stated that he would give the measure his “cordial support.” Secreta

The Kennedy Assassin Who Failed

Thu, 06 Dec 2012 05:58:08 GMT

Posted from Dan Lewis' fantastic Now I Know newsletter. Subscribe here or follow him on Twitter. In November of 1960, John Fitzgerald Kennedy was elected President of the United States. Three years later, he was assassinated by Lee Harvey Oswald while in a motorcade going through Dallas, Texas. Had Richard Paul Pavlick gotten his way, Oswald would have never gotten to pull the trigger. Because Pavlick wanted to kill JFK first. On December 11, 1960, JFK was the president-elect and Richard Paul Pavlick was a 73-year-old retired postal worker. Both were in Palm Beach, Florida. JFK was there on a vacation of sorts, taking a trip to warmer climates as he prepared to assume the office of the

Document Deep Dive: Rosa Parks’ Arrest Records

Thu, 29 Nov 2012 04:45:53 GMT

Read between the lines of the police report drawn up when the seamstress refused to give up her seat 57 years ago

Looking at the Battle of Gettysburg Through Robert E. Lee’s Eyes

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Anne Kelly Knowles loves places where history happened. She traces this passion to family trips she took as a girl in the 1960s, when her father would pile his wife and four children into a rented RV for odysseys from their home in Kalamazoo, Michigan, to iconic sites from America’s past. “We’d study the road atlas and plot trips around places like the Little Bighorn and Mount Rushmore,” Knowles recalls. “Historical landmarks were our pins in the map.” Between scheduled stops, she and her father would leap out of the RV to take pictures of historical markers. “I was the only one of the kids who was really jazzed about history. It was my strongest

The Tucker Was the 1940s Car of the Future

Tue, 20 Nov 2012 07:00:00 GMT

Francis Ford Coppola’s car connection began at birth, or even before. He was delivered at Detroit’s Henry Ford Hospital, and Henry Ford himself sometimes attended rehearsals of the Detroit Symphony, where Coppola’s father played first flute. “In a family tradition of giving the middle name to an important family acquaintance, they gave me ‘Ford,’” the Godfather director explains. But Coppola would soon come to admire a more obscure automotive icon: Preston Tucker, father of the unlucky Tucker ’48, a cutting-edge car that was never mass-produced because of the inventor’s legal and financial woes. “As a child, my father told me ab

Henry Wiencek Responds to His Critics

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 03:10:00 GMT

The cover story of Smithsonian’s October 2012 issue, “Master of Monticello” by Henry Wiencek, presented a new and controversial portrait of Thomas Jefferson. Wiencek writes that the founding father was far from a reticent slaveholder but instead was heavily involved and invested in maximizing profits at his slave-dependent estate. Since the release of Wiencek’s book of the same name (and which provided the excerpt for the magazine), a new controversy has arisen, this time about the accuracy and diligence of Wiencek’s scholarship. Writing for Slate, Jefferson historian Annette Gordon-Reed writes, “Suffice it to say that the problems with Master of the Mo

PHOTOS: The History of Abraham Lincoln on Film

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 07:34:59 GMT

The 16th president has been a Hollywood star and box office attraction since the earliest days of Hollywood

When Republicans Were Blue and Democrats Were Red

Thu, 01 Nov 2012 04:00:20 GMT

Television’s first dynamic, color-coded presidential map, standing two stories high in the studio best known as the home to “Saturday Night Live,” was melting. It was early October, 1976, the month before the map was to debut—live—on election night. At the urging of anchor John Chancellor, NBC had constructed the behemoth map to illustrate, in vivid blue and red, which states supported Republican incumbent Gerald Ford and which backed Democratic challenger Jimmy Carter. The test run didn’t go well. Although the map was buttressed by a sturdy wood frame, the front of each state was plastic. “There were thousands of bulbs,” recalled Roy Wetz

Before Salem, There Was the Not-So-Wicked Witch of the Hamptons

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 06:05:20 GMT

Thirty-five years before the infamous events of Salem, allegations of witchcraft and a subsequent trial rocked a small colonial village. The place was Easthampton, New York. Now a summer resort for the rich and famous—and spelled as two words, East Hampton—at the time it was an English settlement on the remote, eastern tip of Long Island. There, in February, 1658, 16-year old Elizabeth Gardiner Howell, who had recently given birth to a child, fell ill. As friends ministered to her, she terrified them by suddenly shrieking: "A witch! A witch! Now you are come to torture me because I spoke two or three words against you!” Her father, Lion Gardiner, a former military offic

The Speech That Saved Teddy Roosevelt’s Life

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:30:00 GMT

On October 14, 1912, just after eight o’clock in the evening, Theodore Roosevelt stepped out of the Hotel Gilpatrick in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and into an open car waiting to take him to an auditorium where he would deliver a campaign speech. Although he was worn out and his voice nearly gone, he was still pushing hard to win an unprecedented third term in the White House. He had left politics in 1909, when his presidency ended. But his disappointment in the performance of William Howard Taft, his chosen successor, was so great that in 1912 he formed the National Progressive Party (better known as the Bull Moose Party). He was running against Taft and the Republicans, the Democrats&r

"Confederates Try to Burn New York"

Wed, 24 Oct 2012 06:30:00 GMT

People had paid five bucks a seat that night to catch all three Booth brothers in their togas. Edwin, the brightest star, with Junius, who'd recently become his Broadway rival, and dastardly John Wilkes, the pale assassin, who rode up on the train from Baltimore. The Winter Garden Playhouse was so jammed they had to put up benches in the aisles, and, when a bottle of Greek fire flew in from the street, a wild commotion spread throughout the house. Edwin, alone on stage, would calm the crowd while still in character, exhorting them, sententiously, as Brutus, to sit back down and disregard the hubbub. Out strode John Wilkes, who glared and crossed his arms, aping the “Coriolanus&rdqu

A Brief History of the Teleprompter

Tue, 23 Oct 2012 04:14:28 GMT

As President Barack Obama and former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney enter the home stretch of their campaigns, they've now been touring the country and delivering the same stump speech three times per day for the past ten months straight. Both of the candidates read their words while looking out at the crowds, instead of down at a piece of paper, conveying the idea that they’ve memorized their speeches and are connecting with their audiences. And while conservatives take great pleasure in mocking President Obama’s reliance on a machine to help him deliver his speeches, the truth is that both candidates—along with politicians for more than a generation—read off o

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

Document Deep Dive: What Did Analysts Find in the Recon Photographs From the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 02:48:47 GMT

Dino Brugioni explains how he and other CIA photo analysts located Soviet missiles just 90 miles away from the United States

Document Deep Dive: What Did Analysts Find in the Recon Photographs From the Cuban Missile Crisis?

Wed, 10 Oct 2012 02:48:47 GMT

Dino Brugioni explains how he and other CIA photo analysts located Soviet missiles just 90 miles away from the United States

Lunch Atop a Skyscraper Photograph: The Story Behind the Famous Shot

Thu, 20 Sep 2012 03:39:03 GMT

On September 20, 1932, high above 41st Street in Manhattan, 11 ironworkers took part in a daring publicity stunt. The men were accustomed to walking along the girders of the RCA building (now called the GE building) they were constructing in Rockefeller Center. On this particular day, though, they humored a photographer, who was drumming up excitement about the project’s near completion. Some of the tradesmen tossed a football; a few pretended to nap. But, most famously, all 11 ate lunch on a steel beam, their feet dangling 850 feet above the city’s streets.st You’ve seen the photograph before—and probably some of the playful parodies it has spawned too. My brother

Play the Great American History Puzzle

Fri, 21 Sep 2012 01:16:00 GMT

Jeopardy! Champion Ken Jennings takes you on a challenging adventure through the secrets of American history. Will you be our grand prize winner?

Meet the Real-Life Vampires of New England and Abroad

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

A little more than a century ago, vampires stalked Rhode Island. Or rather, New England farm families were digging up dead relatives suspected of being vampires and desecrating the bodies in a misguided effort to protect the living. Often these latter-day vampire hunters removed and burned their loved ones’ hearts. Though the corpses were typically re-buried, modern scholars continue to unearth the stories of real-life “vampires,” whose historic tragedies underlie classics like Dracula as well as Hollywood’s latest guilty pleasures. The practice of disinterring accused vampires likely began in Eastern Europe, spreading to western countries including France and Eng

Kennedy After Dark: A Dinner Party About Politics and Power

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 08:00:00 GMT

On January 5, 1960, just three days after announcing that he would run for president, Senator John F. Kennedy and his wife, Jacqueline, held a small dinner party in Washington, D.C. Their guests included Ben Bradlee, then Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief, and his then-wife, Tony, and Newsweek correspondent James M. Cannon. Cannon taped the conversation for research on a book he was writing. After he died, in September 2011, the tapes became part of the collection of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in Boston; a transcript is published for the first time in the new book Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy, edited by Ted Widmer. In this exclusi

From the Editor

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The most beautiful secret I know sits a block from my office, near the corner of Independence and Seventh avenues in Washington, tucked neatly into one of the sexy curves outside the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. It’s a message written on two sinuous waves of copper joined by a piece of petrified wood—a graceful sculpture called Antipodes crafted by Jim Sanborn 15 years ago. The copper scrolls unfurl in a maddening Babel of Cyrillic letters on one side and Roman on the other. The Cyrillic code was broken in 2003: It includes a passage from a classified KGB memo about dissident Andrei Sakharov, and matches the text on another Sanborn sculpture installed in Charlotte, No

The Photographs That Prevented World War III

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

On October 23, 1962, a U.S. Navy commander named William B. Ecker took off from Key West at midday in an RF-8 Crusader jet equipped with five reconnaissance cameras. Accompanied by a wingman, Lt. Bruce Wilhelmy, he headed toward a mountainous region of western Cuba where Soviet troops were building a facility for medium-range missiles aimed directly at the United States. A U-2 spy plane, flying as high as 70,000 feet, had already taken grainy photographs that enabled experts to find the telltale presence of Soviet missiles on the island. But if President John F. Kennedy was going to make the case that the weapons were a menace to the entire world, he would need better pictures. Swooping o

The CIA Burglar Who Went Rogue

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The six CIA officers were sweating. It was almost noon on a June day in the Middle Eastern capital, already in the 90s outside and even hotter inside the black sedan where the five men and one woman sat jammed in together. Sat and waited. They had flown in two days earlier for this mission: to break into the embassy of a South Asian country, steal that country’s secret codes and get out without leaving a trace. During months of planning, they had been assured by the local CIA station that the building would be empty at this hour except for one person—a member of the embassy’s diplomatic staff working secretly for the agency. But suddenly the driver’s hand-held rad

The World’s Most Famous Filing Cabinet

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Recently, I met with Daniel Ellsberg, now 81, at his house in the hills above Berkeley, California, to get the ultimate insider’s inside account of exposing deception by successive administrations about Vietnam, from the man who is arguably the nation’s most important whistleblower. In particular, I was inquiring about a battered but otherwise seemingly ordinary four-drawer file cabinet, which sits today at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History (NMAH). The cabinet once stood in the Los Angeles office of Lewis Fielding, Ellsberg’s psychoanalyst. On September 3, 1971, three men led by former CIA agent E. Howard Hunt broke into the office and crowbarred op

The Great New England Vampire Panic

Wed, 19 Sep 2012 06:00:00 GMT

Children playing near a hillside gravel mine found the first graves. One ran home to tell his mother, who was skeptical at first—until the boy produced a skull. Because this was Griswold, Connecticut, in 1990, police initially thought the burials might be the work of a local serial killer named Michael Ross, and they taped off the area as a crime scene. But the brown, decaying bones turned out to be more than a century old. The Connecticut state archaeologist, Nick Bellantoni, soon determined that the hillside contained a colonial-era farm cemetery. New England is full of such unmarked family plots, and the 29 burials were typical of the 1700s and early 1800s: The dead, many of them

The Top 10 Political Conventions That Mattered the Most

Mon, 27 Aug 2012 03:00:52 GMT

As the two main party conventions approach—the Republicans kick off today, August 27, in Tampa, Florida, followed by the Democrats in Charlotte, North Carolina, next week—pardon the nation’s collective yawn. National conventions, once riveting political theater that held America in suspense for days, have been reduced to a made-for-television, political promo for the two parties. Since primary elections now routinely determine the candidates, this quadrennial dog-and-pony show offers a ho-hum pageant, in which windy speeches are delivered, party platforms hammered out and often ignored, and delegates don silly hats and hold up handmade signs extolling the virtues of cand

Document Deep Dive: What Did the Zimmermann Telegram Say?

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:07:01 GMT

See how British cryptologists cracked the coded message that propelled the United States into World War I

How a New Yorker Article Launched the First Shot in the War Against Poverty

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

On January 19, 1963, the New Yorker published a 13,000-word essay, “Our Invisible Poor,” the longest book review the magazine had ever run. No piece of prose did more to make plain the atrocity of poverty in an age of affluence. Ostensibly a review of Michael Harrington’s book The Other America, which had all but disappeared since its publication in 1962, “Our Invisible Poor” took in a slew of other titles, along with a series of dreary economic reports, to demonstrate these facts: The poor are sicker than everyone else, but they have less health insurance; they have less money, but they pay more taxes; and they live where people with money seldom go. What D

From the Editor

Wed, 22 Aug 2012 06:00:00 GMT

I was fortunate to grow up surrounded by beautiful designs, many created by my father, the designer of Sub-Zero refrigerators and chairs made by Herman Miller and Knoll. He worked in a studio at one end of my childhood home, a wildly creative piece of architecture that he also designed. At a time when people were still traveling to Europe to shop for state-of-the-art furniture and products, I had them in my living room and kitchen. My father taught me a great many of the lessons Steve Jobs would later make famous: the elegance of simplicity, form fused with function, a laserlike attention to detail. I thought it was important to create this special issue to highlight the Smithsonian&rsquo

How Would You Rank the Greatest Presidents?

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 01:18:32 GMT

In an interview in January 2010, President Obama told Diane Sawyer of ABC News, “I’d rather be a really good one-term president than a mediocre two-term president.” The comment didn’t really jibe well with Robert W. Merry, an acclaimed biographer of James Polk, who served as president from 1845 to 1849. Polk is ranked as a “near great” president in polls by scholars, but he is an exception. “History has not smiled upon one-term presidents,” wrote Merry in an editorial in the New York Times. “The typical one-term president generally falls into the ‘average’ category, occasionally the ‘above average.’ ” In

The Shark Attacks That Were the Inspiration for Jaws

Wed, 08 Aug 2012 11:15:00 GMT

In the summer of 1916, panic struck the Jersey Shore. A shark sunk its teeth into Charles Vansant, the 25-year-old son of a Philadelphia businessman, out for an evening swim in the resort town of Beach Haven on July 1. A lifeguard pulled him ashore, but he quickly bled to death. Five days later, and 45 miles to the north, in Spring Lake, New Jersey, Charles Bruder, a young bellhop at a local hotel, met a similar fate. Then, something even stranger happened. The rogue great white traveled 30 miles north of Spring Lake and into Matawan Creek. On July 12, Lester Stillwell, 11, was playing in the creek 16 miles inland when the shark attacked. A young man named Watson Stanley Fisher attempted

How Advertisers Convinced Americans They Smelled Bad

Fri, 03 Aug 2012 05:23:42 GMT

Lucky for Edna Murphey, people attending an exposition in Atlantic City during the summer of 1912 got hot and sweaty. For two years, the high school student from Cincinnati had been trying unsuccessfully to promote an antiperspirant that her father, a surgeon, had invented to keep his hands sweat-free in the operating room. Murphey had tried her dad’s liquid antiperspirant in her armpits, discovered that it thwarted wetness and smell, named the antiperspirant Odorono (Odor? Oh No!) and decided to start a company. But business didn’t go well—initially—for this young entrepreneur. Borrowing $150 from her grandfather, she rented an office workshop but then had to mo

Document Deep Dive: A Peek at the Last Time London Hosted the Olympics

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 04:27:51 GMT

Records at the National Archives in London show how organizers cobbled together the 1948 "Austerity" Games

Document Deep Dive: A Holocaust Survivor Finds Hope in America

Tue, 03 Jul 2012 04:59:54 GMT

Michael Pupa's story, from orphan of Nazi Europe to American citizen, is a testament to the freedoms America offers

The Men Behind the First Olympic Team

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 08:39:51 GMT

Years later, it was said that the whole idea started as a joke. It was January 1896, and at the Boston Athletic Association’s annual indoor track meet at Mechanic’s Hall, Arthur Blake—a 23-year-old distance-running star for the BAA—had just won the hotly contested 1,000-yard race. Afterward, stockbroker Arthur Burnham, a prominent member of the well-heeled association, was congratulating him on his performance. Blake laughed and said in jest, “Oh, I’m too good for Boston. I ought to go over and run the Marathon, at Athens, in the Olympic Games.” Burnham looked at him for a moment, and then spoke in earnest. “Would you really go if you had t

Torch Song

Thu, 28 Jun 2012 06:00:00 GMT

It is the best of us and the worst of us: pomp and circumstance, thrill and agony, transience and transcendence. The Olympic Games, with roots that reach back more than 2,800 years to Homer’s Iliad, are a microcosm of world culture and history, a global showcase of preening nationalism, rampant commercialism and human evolution measured in hundredths of a second. Every two years, the planet seems to spin a little slower while we put aside our regularly scheduled programming and tune in to the world’s greatest reality show, a modern echo of ancient times when soldiers laid down their spears for seven days before and after the Games and soldier-athletes were granted safe passage

Frank Deford on Bloggers, the Olympics and 51 years of Sportswriting

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 03:48:25 GMT

In 1961, Frank Deford graduated from Princeton and started writing for Sports Illustrated, a job he thought would be a brief entryway into the world of magazine journalism. More than 50 years later, he’s still at SI and still going strong. His remarkable stories—covering everything from outsized athletic figures to oddball coaches—have led to his being recognized as one of America’s finest sportswriters. Last month, he published his memoir Over Time: My Life as a Sportswriter. He spoke with Smithsonian’s Joseph Stromberg about the luck involved in being a journalist, his thoughts on bloggers and his predictions for this summer’s Olympic Games in London.

The Vice Presidents That History Forgot

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 05:59:28 GMT

In 1966, I stood outside my elementary school in Maryland, waving a sign for Spiro Agnew. He was running for governor against a segregationist who campaigned on the slogan, “Your Home Is Your Castle—Protect It.” My parents, like many Democrats, crossed party lines that year to help elect Agnew. Two years later, he became Richard Nixon’s surprise choice as running mate, prompting pundits to wonder, “Spiro who?” At 10, I was proud to know the answer. Agnew isn’t otherwise a source of much pride. He became “Nixon’s Nixon,” an acid-tongued hatchet man who resigned a year before his boss, for taking bribes. But “Spiro who?&rdquo

How Well Do You Know Your Vice Presidents?

Wed, 27 Jun 2012 05:58:55 GMT

Test yourself on our quiz of the famous, infamous and not-so-famous least powerful men in the country

The Legend of Dolley Madison’s Red Velvet Dress

Fri, 15 Jun 2012 06:01:00 GMT

As Major General Robert Ross and his 4,000 British troops closed in on Washington, with orders to set fire to the city’s public buildings, Dolley Madison stood her ground at the White House. One of the most powerful first ladies in history, she maintained enough composure to gather some of the nation’s treasures before making her escape. That fateful day, August 24, 1814, Dolley famously arranged for servants to bust the frame of Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington hanging in the state dining room and cart it off to safety. She also saved some silver, china and, of all things, red velvet draperies from the Oval Drawing Room. At the National Portrait Gallery,

How Trees Defined America

Thu, 14 Jun 2012 04:41:14 GMT

According to historian Eric Rutkow, the United States would not be the country we know today without the vast forests that provided the growing nation with timber, paper and other resources—and eventually inspired our environmental consciousness. In his recently published book American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation, Rutkow traces the history of the United States through our trees, from the mighty elm in the heart of Boston that would become the Liberty Tree, to California’s giant conifers, which inspired an early generation of conservationists. How has Americans’ relationship with trees shaped our character? We have such a material abundance of tree

Document Deep Dive: The Musical History of "The Star-Spangled Banner"

Wed, 13 Jun 2012 06:48:15 GMT

Was the national anthem really set to the melody of a drinking tune? Take a closer look at the original manuscript of Francis Scott Key's song

The War of 1812: 200 Years Later

Fri, 01 Jun 2012 08:25:53 GMT

What is there to remember about the battles long relegated to footnote status? More than you might think!

The 10 Things You Didn’t Know About the War of 1812

Tue, 22 May 2012 07:14:38 GMT

1. The War Needs Re-Branding “The War of 1812” is an easy handle for students who struggle with dates. But the name is a misnomer that makes the conflict sound like a mere wisp of a war that began and ended the same year. In reality, it lasted 32 months following the U.S. declaration of war on Britain in June 1812. That’s longer than the Mexican-American War, Spanish-American War, and U.S. involvement in World War I. Also confusing is the Battle of New Orleans, the largest of the war and a resounding U.S. victory. The battle occurred in January, 1815—two weeks after U.S. and British envoys signed a peace treaty in Ghent, Belgium. News traveled slowly then. Even s

The War of 1812: Remember the Raisin!

Mon, 21 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

It’s 19 degrees with a brisk wind blowing off Lake Erie as the men of Lacroix Company march across a snow-crusted field in Michigan. “Prepare to load!” shouts Ralph Naveaux, the unit’s commander. Fumbling with frozen hands, the men shove ramrods down the muzzles of their flintlocks. “Aim!” Naveaux yells, and the soldiers point their muskets at an industrial park on the far side of the field. “Fire!” Six triggers click in unison. “Bang,” one of the men says. After a second mock volley, the re-enactors retire to the parking lot of one of the bloodiest battlefields of the War of 1812. On this ground, hundreds of U.S. soldiers di

Eat Here

Mon, 21 May 2012 06:00:00 GMT

I’m almost as addicted to food writing as I am to food itself. I’ve recently savored Gabrielle Hamilton’s wonderful Blood, Bones & Butter, Marjane Satrapi’s exotic Chicken with Plums and Mark Kurlansky’s fascinating new Birdseye, a biography of the man who went all the way to Labrador to bring us flash-frozen peas. So I looked forward to planning our first annual food issue with Jonathan Gold, our Food + Culture columnist and one of America’s savviest gourmands. Why are we doing a food issue? Our longtime readers know that Smithsonian has published a smorgasbord of stories about food—more than 70 stretching back over 40 years. Though we aren&r

Document Deep Dive: A Firsthand Account of the Hindenburg Disaster

Wed, 02 May 2012 05:38:54 GMT

Frank Ward was a 17-year-old crewman when he saw the infamous disaster, but his memories of that day are still strong, 75 years later

What Are America’s Most Iconic Homes?

Fri, 27 Apr 2012 04:32:04 GMT

According to the National Building Museum, these houses, more than most, have impacted the way we live

A By-The-Numbers Look at American Real Estate

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 03:20:46 GMT

1,000: Approximate age, in years, of the oldest continuously inhabited sites in the United States: pueblos in Acoma and Taos, New Mexico, and the village of Oraibi, Arizona 375: Approximate age, in years, of Fairbanks House, in Dedham, Mass., believed to be the nation’s oldest timber-frame house 1,297: Square footage of Fairbanks House when new 1,740: Square footage of average new house in the U.S., 1980 2,392: Square footage of average new house, 2010 175,000: Square footage of Biltmore, in Asheville, North Carolina, the largest privately owned U.S. residence 3: Number of people in the immediate family of original Biltmore owner George Washington Vanderbilt III 1.1 mill

Found: Letters from the Hindenburg

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 03:11:21 GMT

Every ounce counted onboard the Hindenburg, the 804-foot airship designed to fly across the Atlantic. The metal girders were perforated, and the piano was made of aluminum. Each passenger was assigned a single napkin to reuse in the luxurious dining hall. And yet the hydrogen-filled zeppelin was hauling hundreds of pounds of mail when, for reasons that are still unknown, it burst into flames on May 6, 1937, above a New Jersey field, killing 35 of 97 riders. Transcontinental mail was indispensable cargo; despite the year-old vessel’s glamorous image (tickets cost a whopping $450), the airship covered much of its operating costs by providing the first regular trans-Atlantic airmail ser

Document Deep Dive: How the Homestead Act Transformed America

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 01:30:00 GMT

Compare documents filed by the first and last homesteaders in the United States

Document Deep Dive: What Does the Magna Carta Really Say?

Thu, 29 Mar 2012 01:15:00 GMT

A curator from the National Archives takes us through what the governing charter means

This Baseball Fan Digs the Small Ball

Thu, 05 Apr 2012 07:06:48 GMT

Baseball is about homecoming,” A. Bartlett Giamatti once wrote. “It is a journey by theft and strength, guile and speed, out around first to the far island of second, where foes lurk in the reefs and the green sea suddenly grows deeper, then to turn sharply, skimming the shallows, making for a shore that will show a friendly face, a color, a familiar language and, at third, to proceed, no longer by paths indirect but straight, to home.” The eloquence of the late scholar and baseball commissioner stands in delightful contrast to the description of home plate in the game’s rule book—“a five-sided slab of whitened rubber” in the form of a “17-i

Richard Clarke on Who Was Behind the Stuxnet Attack

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

The story Richard Clarke spins has all the suspense of a postmodern geopolitical thriller. The tale involves a ghostly cyberworm created to attack the nuclear centrifuges of a rogue nation—which then escapes from the target country, replicating itself in thousands of computers throughout the world. It may be lurking in yours right now. Harmlessly inactive...or awaiting further orders. A great story, right? In fact, the world-changing “weaponized malware” computer worm called Stuxnet is very real. It seems to have been launched in mid-2009, done terrific damage to Iran’s nuclear program in 2010 and then spread to computers all over the world. Stuxnet may have averte

Foreseen Consequences

Thu, 22 Mar 2012 06:00:00 GMT

They don’t make the future like they used to. At the turn of the 20th century, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, a feisty newspaper once edited by Walt Whitman, published a special section peering into the next 100 years. The future then was a bright, hopeful world of possibility. Just think of it: mighty airships crisscrossing the skies, electric lights solving the problem of crime, the elimination of houseflies due to the disappearance of horse-drawn carriages, and the “union of the telephone and phonograph” bringing theater and opera right “into the salon of one’s own home.” Lately, our future seems to have grown more dystopian, worst-case scenarios waiting

Seven Famous People Who Missed the Titanic

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

The notables who planned to sail on the fateful voyage included a world-famous novelist, a radio pioneer and America’s biggest tycoons

From the Editor: Fateful Encounters

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:00 GMT

“We don’t see things as they are, but as we are.” Anaïs Nin One hundred years after an innocent iceberg was struck by the world’s most famous ocean liner, we find ourselves riding the latest wave of Titanic obsession. James Cameron’s blockbuster movie is being re-released in theaters, this time in 3-D. Fans have paid as much as $60,000 for a seat in a submarine to view the wreckage on the ocean floor. More than 5,000 items recovered from the sunken vessel—demitasse cups, gold jewelry, eyeglasses, binoculars—are being auctioned off in New York, at an estimated valuation of $189 million. On the centennial of the Titanic’s launch, the cru

When the Country's Founding Father is Your Founding Father

Fri, 17 Feb 2012 07:42:16 GMT

The descendants of American presidents are the athletic trainers, lawyers, salesmen and executives of everyday life

Objects Of Desire

Wed, 18 Jan 2012 07:00:00 GMT

We think of this as our obsession issue. Our cover story, by Joshua Hammer, delves into the life and work of the amazingly imaginative, hyper-ambitious Victorian novelist Charles Dickens and his devoted following then and now, 200 years after his birth. We chronicle one impact of the age-old obsession for gold, which is today causing miners in Peru’s Amazon basin to destroy rainforest at a frightening clip, all to satisfy the world’s—that includes yours and mine, by the way—seemingly bottomless craving for the metal. And we shine an uncommon light on another, perhaps more obscure, object of desire, orchids. It’s a safe bet you’ve never seen anything l

The Civil War in Black and White

Tue, 10 Jan 2012 08:51:40 GMT

A collection of historic front pages shows how civilians experienced and read about the war

God, Government and Roger Williams' Big Idea

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Even the most bitter opponents of Roger Williams recognized in him that combination of charm, confidence and intensity a later age would call charisma. They did not regard such traits as assets, however, for those traits only made the preacher more dangerous in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. With someone like him, they could not compromise. For his part, Williams was not about to compromise, either, despite his benevolent intelligence and Christian charity. The error, he believed, was not his, and when convinced he was right he backed away from no one. So the conflict between Williams and his accusers nearly 400 years ago was inevitable. It was also thick with history, for it concerned bo

Going Places

Mon, 19 Dec 2011 07:00:00 GMT

To the list of good reasons to get out of the house, you may now add another: evotourism. This new concept in travel is the brainchild of senior editor Mark Strauss, who worked with senior editor Laura Helmuth on the evotourism special issue you hold in your hands. We present ten places, including three in the United States, where you can see the powerful evidence of evolution in action or contemplate how a great mind added to our understanding of the process. You’ll find more evotourist destinations, plus travel tips, videos and photographs, at Smithsonian.com/evotourism. Evotourism is not as bizarre as it might sound. Evolution and travel are closely related, after all. Charles D

The Midday Ride of Paul Revere

Mon, 12 Dec 2011 09:54:30 GMT

Colonial Boston’s secret patriot network crackled with the news. Regiments of British troops were on the move, bound for points north to secure military supplies from the rebels. Paul Revere mounted his horse and began a feverish gallop to warn the colonists that the British were coming. Except this ride preceded Revere’s famous “midnight ride” by more than four months. On December 13, 1774, the Boston silversmith made a midday gallop north to Portsmouth in the province of New Hampshire, and some people—especially Granite Staters—consider that, and not his trip west to Lexington on April 18, 1775, as the true starting point of the war for independence.

The Sentimental Ballad of the Civil War

Wed, 30 Nov 2011 09:45:57 GMT

When folk musician Tom Jolin performs Civil War songs in concert, it’s not “When Johnny Comes Marching Home,” “The Battle Cry of Freedom” or any of the other standards of that time that really tugs his heartstrings. Rather, it is a piece written in 1822 by a talented American who was already nine years in his grave by the time the first shots were fired at Fort Sumter. The song is “Home, Sweet Home!” by John Howard Payne. “It gets me every time,” admits Jolin, who plays banjo, harmonica and dulcimer. “I’m such a sucker for sentimentality.” Indeed, Payne’s plaintive refrain “there’s no place like ho

The Monuments That Were Never Built

Wed, 23 Nov 2011 08:48:30 GMT

In a new exhibit at the National Building Museum, imagine Washington D.C. as it could have been

What Was on the Menu at the First Thanksgiving?

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 07:23:03 GMT

Today, the traditional Thanksgiving dinner includes any number of dishes: turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, candied yams, cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie. But if one were to create a historically accurate feast, consisting of only those foods that historians are certain were served at the so-called “first Thanksgiving,” there would be slimmer pickings. “Wildfowl was there. Corn, in grain form for bread or for porridge, was there. Venison was there,” says Kathleen Wall. “These are absolutes.” Two primary sources—the only surviving documents that reference the meal—confirm that these staples were part of the harvest celebration shared by the

Clarence Darrow: Jury Tamperer?

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

On a rainy night in Los Angeles in December 1911, Clarence Darrow arrived at the apartment of his mistress, Mary Field. They sat at the kitchen table, beneath a bare overhead light, and she watched with dismay as he pulled a bottle of whiskey from one pocket of his overcoat and a handgun from the other. “I’m going to kill myself,” he told her. “They’re going to indict me for bribing the McNamara jury. I can’t stand the disgrace.” The great attorney had come to Los Angeles from Chicago to defend James and John McNamara, brothers and unionists accused of conspiring to bomb the Los Angeles Times, the city’s anti-union newspaper, killing 20 pri

Frozen in Place: December 1861

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

”A disloyal portion of the American people have, during the whole year been engaged in an attempt to divide and destroy the Union,” Abraham Lincoln told Congress on December 3, 1861, in his first State of the Union message. After discussing the war’s effect on foreign commerce, Lincoln floated the idea that freed slaves might be encouraged to emigrate from the United States to territory to be acquired for them. Secretary of War Simon Cameron had recently advocated freeing and arming slaves, but Lincoln dismissed the proposal—for now. The president ended the speech, which would be telegraphed to newspapers for publication, by remarking on the eightfold growth in popu

Most Interesting

Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Carey Winfrey left this past fall after ten years as editor, and perhaps the most telling distinction of his tenure was the finding by an independent research firm that Smithsonian was the nation’s “most interesting” magazine. Not the most interesting magazine never to publish a profile of Lady Gaga, nor the most interesting one read by people who love Maya archaeology. The most interesting magazine in America. The same survey, done last year by Affinity, found that readers also ranked Smithsonian among the Top Five “most believable” and “most trusted” magazines. Carey was too self-deprecating to trumpet those results, but as he recently reflected

The Essentials: Five Books on Thomas Jefferson

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:12:29 GMT

Historian Marc Leepson is the author of seven books, including Saving Monticello (2001), a comprehensive history of the house built by Thomas Jefferson and the hands it passed through since his death in 1826. Here, Leepson provides a list of five must-reads for a better understanding of the author of the Declaration of Independence and the third president of the United States. Jefferson and His Time, by Dumas Malone This classic biography of Thomas Jefferson, written by one of the most renowned Jefferson scholars, was published in six volumes over 33 years. It consists of Jefferson the Virginian (1948), covering his childhood through his drafting of the Declaration of Independence; Jeff

Thomas Jefferson, Aaron Burr and the Election of 1800

Tue, 08 Nov 2011 11:28:11 GMT

On the afternoon of September 23, 1800, Vice President Thomas Jefferson, from his Monticello home, wrote a letter to Benjamin Rush, the noted Philadelphia physician. One matter dominated Jefferson’s thoughts: that year’s presidential contest. Indeed, December 3, Election Day—the date on which the Electoral College would meet to vote—was only 71 days away. Jefferson was one of four presidential candidates. As he composed his letter to Rush, Jefferson paused from time to time to gather his thoughts, all the while gazing absently through an adjacent window at the shimmering heat and the foliage, now a lusterless pale green after a long, dry summer. Though he hated lea

The Making of Mount Rushmore

Mon, 31 Oct 2011 04:56:50 GMT

The 70th anniversary of the completion of the South Dakota monument prompts a look back at what it took to create it

November 1861: Flare Ups in the Chain of Command

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:00:00 GMT

On November 1, George B. McClellan assumed the role of general in chief of the Union armies, a post voluntarily vacated by the ailing 75-year-old Lt. Gen. Winfield Scott, who had been a target of McClellan’s barbs in the press. The promotion inflated McClellan’s already significant ego, and he would spar with Lincoln throughout the war. When the president visited McClellan at his home later in the month, McClellan simply went to bed, as Lincoln cooled his heels. By early November, the president relieved another general, John C. Frémont, of command in the West. Frémont was replaced mid-month by Maj. Gen. Henry Halleck, of whom Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles

Civil War Veterans Come Alive in Audio and Video Recordings

Thu, 27 Oct 2011 08:23:23 GMT

It is only a scrap of 86-year-old silent newsreel footage: an elderly black man named William Smallwood stands in threadbare clothes against a brick wall in Boston, performing the manual of arms with a wooden crutch. “Still ready if he’s needed,” declares a title card, presumably reflecting the old man’s sentiments. The clip is just one minute long. Smallwood provides no details of his life. Yet this bit of film is one of the rarest in existence. Not only does it capture one of the few moving images of an African-American Civil War veteran, but it may be the only one ever made of a soldier who fought with the famed 54th Massachusetts

Comings and Goings

Wed, 19 Oct 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Ralph Frammolino spent nearly 25 years at the Los Angeles Times, most of them as an investigative reporter. His series for the paper about how the J. Paul Getty Museum built its antiquities collection, written with Jason Felch, was a finalist for the 2006 Pulitzer Prize. And it led to the publication earlier this year of Chasing Aphrodite: The Hunt for Looted Antiquities at the World’s Richest Museum, which “A Goddess Goes Home” updates and complements. “The reason I wanted to write this piece for Smithsonian,” Frammolino says, “was to bring this story to a final conclusion. The Aphrodite had basically been haunting me, but it wasn’t until the

Scattered Actions: October 1861

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:00:00 GMT

As the nation was remaking itself politically, it was doing so technologically as well. The new Union Army Balloon Corps began building a fleet and hiring aeronauts to survey enemy movements from the air. Reconnaissance balloons would enable Union regiments to fire artillery accurately, even while unable to see the enemy from the ground. Western Union completed its transcontinental telegraph system that October 150 years ago, allowing telegrams to be sent coast to coast for the first time. Within days, the 18-month-old Pony Express, which had sped messages from Missouri to California and back (it delivered Lincoln’s first inaugural address in just under eight days), was officially s

The Power of Imagery in Advancing Civil Rights

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:00:00 GMT

“One of the most extraordinary and least understood aspects of Dr. Martin Luther King’s leadership was his incisive understanding of the power of visual images to alter public opinion,” says Maurice Berger, standing in front of an oversize silk-screen portrait of the slain civil rights leader. Berger, who is a professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County’s Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture, is the man behind a moving and expansive new exhibition documenting the effect of imagery on the civil rights movement for the National Museum of African American History and Culture. (The traveling exhibition, “For All the World to See,” is on vi

Baseball’s Glove Man

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 05:23:56 GMT

At spring training about two decades ago, a young shortstop named Omar Vizquel mentioned to Bob Clevenhagen that he needed a new glove as soon as possible. Clevenhagen, the glove designer for Rawlings Sporting Goods, said he had one ready, but it would take a few days to imprint the ”Heart of the Hide” logos and other markings. Without them, Clevenhagen said, he could have a new glove shipped by the next day. Vizquel opted for unadorned and it’s proved to be a wise choice. Over a career spanning 23 seasons, he has won 11 Gold Gloves for fielding excellence. Still robbing hitters at age 44 for the Chicago White Sox, the venerable infielder has remained true to his Pro SXS

Great Cats

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Freelance journalist Sharon Guynup has been traipsing around Central and South America’s jungles for two decades, but she had never even glimpsed a jaguar in the wild until reporting our cover story, “The Jaguar Freeway” (p. 48), in Brazil, where she petted a tranquilized cat on her second day in the country. “It was amazing to see the animal that close,” she says. “Its paws are extraordinarily large, it has a very big head and a very powerful chest and trunk. It has the squat, powerful physique of a prizefighter. I was just stunned by the animal’s beauty.” Guynup’s article is about a bold plan to create a corridor that would link a nu

The Essentials: Five Books on Football History

Wed, 07 Sep 2011 05:51:30 GMT

As football seasons—in leagues from Pop Warner to the pros—get underway, Washington Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins provides a list of five must-reads for better understanding the history of the game. Jenkins, who was named a top sports columnist by the Associated Press Sports Editors in 2010, is the author of nine books, including The Real All Americans (2007), about how, in 1912, a Native American football team at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School changed the sport forever. Saturday's America (1970), by Dan Jenkins This collection of Sports Illustrated articles on college football, by the writer who launched football coverage at the magazine (and h

Building the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial

Fri, 19 Aug 2011 06:16:45 GMT

In early August, as the finishing touches are being made to the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial in Washington, D.C., Deryl McKissack waits in a trailer on the premises. “You could not pick a better site,” says the engineer, of the four-acre plot alongside the capital’s Tidal Basin. “He is sitting on a direct axis between the Lincoln and Jefferson memorials—so between two presidents. That is a spot for a king, right?” Surprised by the pun that rolls off of her tongue, McKissack splits into laughter. “I never thought of what it would be like the day of dedication. I always thought about just being a part of something great,” says McK

What 9/11 Wrought

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The military had a name for it—“asymmetric warfare.” But until 9/11 hardly anyone imagined how surreal and coldblooded, how devastating, it could actually be: that 19 would-be suicides from distant parts, armed only with box-cutters, their leaders trained to fly but not land airliners, could bring the greatest military power the world had seen momentarily to its knees, with a loss of lives on that perfect late-summer morning surpassing that inflicted by the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. With video clips edited to remove scores of bodies flying through the air, what was shoved in our faces on our TV screens hundreds of times in the days that followed was still close enough to

September 1861: Settling in for a Long War

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Five months into the Civil War—on September 9—Richmond, Virginia’s Daily Dispatch editorialized that the time for debate had passed. “Words are now of no avail: blood is more potent than rhetoric, more profound than logic.” Six days earlier, Confederate forces had invaded Kentucky, drawing that state into the war on the Union side and firming up the border between North and South. But who to trust in the border states? “We have had no success lately, and never can have success, while the enemy know all our plans and dispositions,” wrote Confederate war clerk John Beauchamp Jones on September 24 from Richmond. “Their spies and emissaries here

Burr, Ogden and Dayton: The Original Jersey Boys

Mon, 15 Aug 2011 04:07:22 GMT

In recent years Northern New Jersey has spawned famous groups of friends—the Four Seasons, Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band, Tony Soprano’s gang—but at the nation’s founding, another posse of boys from North Jersey captured both the bright promise and the grimy underside of the new American republic. Aaron Burr, Jonathan Dayton and the brothers Aaron and Matthias Ogden grew up together in Elizabethtown (now Elizabeth), then stormed across the nation, hell-bent on winning power and wealth. They found plenty of both, along with their share of troubles. Their high-water mark came in 1803, when Vice President Burr presided over a U.S. Senate in which Dayton and

Coming to Terms

Wed, 17 Aug 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Joseph Lelyveld spent nearly 40 years at the New York Times, including stints as a correspondent in London, New Delhi, Hong Kong and Johannesburg (twice). He retired as executive editor, the newspaper’s top editorial job, five days before 9/11. His essay about that awful day and its aftermath, “What 9/11 Wrought” (p. 58), is as provocative as it is insightful. “Nobody can forecast the future,” he says. “But I am surprised that nothing remotely on the scale of 9/11 has occurred again for a decade in the United States. Now that could be proved wrong any day, but I think most of us had the feeling that this was the beginning of something huge and ongoing.

The Spirited History of the American Bar

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 07:37:29 GMT

Is happy hour a cornerstone of democracy? Yes, because chatting over a beer has often led to dramatic change, says Christine Sismondo, humanities lecturer at Toronto’s York University. Her new book, America Walks into a Bar, contends that local dives deserve more credit in history than they receive; they are where conversations get started. Smithsonian.com contributor Rebecca Dalzell spoke with Sismondo about her book. How did you get interested in bars? I used to travel around America a lot, and wherever I went it seemed that bars were important historic markers. On the Freedom Trail in Boston they talk about the Green Dragon Tavern, and in New York, George Washington said farewell

America’s First Great Global Warming Debate

Fri, 15 Jul 2011 09:18:45 GMT

As the tumultuous century was drawing to a close, the conservative Yale grad challenged the sitting vice president’s ideas about global warming. The vice president, a cerebral Southerner, was planning his own run for the presidency, and the fiery Connecticut native was eager to denounce the opposition party. The date was 1799, not 1999—and the opposing voices in America’s first great debate about the link between human activity and rising temperature readings were not Al Gore and George W. Bush, but Thomas Jefferson and Noah Webster. As a gentleman farmer in Virginia, Jefferson had long been obsessed with the weather; in fact, on July 1, 1776, just as he was finishing h

Fort Monroe’s Lasting Place in History

Wed, 06 Jul 2011 03:28:34 GMT

As a white child in southern Virginia, I thought his first name was “Beast” because everyone called him that. Gen. Benjamin Franklin Butler was our nemesis—the Union commander of Fort Monroe, at the entrance to southeastern Virginia’s vast natural harbor; the churl who ordered the women of New Orleans to yield the sidewalk whenever Yankee soldiers approached; the officer who returned to oversee the occupation of Norfolk. But I was never told how Butler and Fort Monroe figured in one of the pivotal moments of the Civil War. When he arrived on May 22, 1861, Virginians—that is, those white men who qualified—were voting to secede from the Union. That night,

The History of Soap Box Derby

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 05:34:43 GMT

Ava Pell, 12, of Bristow, Virginia, climbs into her sleek soapbox derby car. She lies back as her father helps to tuck her long brown ponytail over one shoulder. He locks her white helmet into a nook in the back of the fiberglass car—painted a shiny eggplant and adorned with blue and pink flames—and closes the top hatch. Between the brim of her helmet and the top of her car is a quarter-inch slit. “It’s like looking through a crack in a fence,” says John Luense, one of the event’s officials. Ava’s father holds up two fingers near the nose of the car to test her visibility. “Ready in Lane 1?” the starter asks Ava’s competitor, enc

The Battle of Bull Run: The End of Illusions

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Cannon boomed, brass bands serenaded and ladies tossed bouquets as Jefferson Davis arrived in Richmond on May 29, 1861, to make it the capital of the Confederate States of America. He had set out from the original capital at Montgomery, Alabama, soon after Virginia seceded from the Union six days earlier. Along the way, jubilant well-wishers slowed his train and he crossed the James River into Richmond far behind schedule. It was a scene wholly unlike President-elect Abraham Lincoln’s arrival in Washington the previous February, when he sneaked into the city at dawn in a curtained sleeping car because of threats of assassination as he passed through Baltimore. Richmond welcomed Davis

Founding Fathers, Great Gardeners

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:00:00 GMT

George Washington, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison aren’t American heroes because they were farmers. But in her new book, Founding Gardeners (Alfred A. Knopf), the London-based historian Andrea Wulf, 43, argues that the founders’ love of gardening and farming shaped their vision of America. She spoke with assistant editor Erin Wayman. Why was gardening so important to the founding fathers? The most obvious answer is that good crops were incredibly important to the economy and to America’s self-sufficiency. On an ideological level, the founders believed America should be an agrarian republic of virtuous citizens who were connected to the country because th

Battlefields

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Although Ernest B. Furgurson grew up on a street named after Robert E. Lee in Danville, Virginia—the last capital of the Confederacy—in a home filled with reminders of great-grandfathers who fought in the Civil War, it was not until he studied tactics as a young Marine officer that his interest ignited. “I remember we did Chancellorsville, and I said, ‘God, this is interesting, I am going to write about this some day.’” Prophetic words. After retiring as a columnist for the Baltimore Sun in 1992, he wrote Chancellorsville 1863, the first of his four books about the Civil War. (Freedom Rising, about Washington, D.C. during the war, is his most recent.) B

Juneteenth: Our Other Independence Day

Thu, 16 Jun 2011 10:16:24 GMT

America’s birthday is fast approaching. But let’s not wait for July 4th to light the fireworks. There is another Independence Day on the horizon. Juneteenth falls on June 19 each year. It is a holiday whose history was hidden for much of the last century. But as the nation now observes the 150th anniversary of the Civil War’s onset, it is a holiday worth recognizing. In essence, Juneteenth marks what is arguably the most significant event in American history after independence itself—the eradication of American slavery. For centuries, slavery was the dark stain on America’s soul, the deep contradiction to the nation’s founding ideals of “Life, li

Leaks and the Law: The Story of Thomas Drake

Fri, 10 Jun 2011 06:11:01 GMT

Editor's Note: This article was updated from the version in the July/August 2011 issue of the printed magazine to reflect Thomas Drake's June 9 plea agreement and his July 15 sentencing. Thomas A. Drake was a senior executive at the National Security Agency for seven years. When his efforts to alert his superiors and Congress to what he saw as illegal activities, waste and mismanagement at the NSA led nowhere, he decided to take his allegations to the press. Although he was cautious—using encrypted e-mail to communicate with a reporter—his leak was discovered. Last year the government indicted Drake under the Espionage Act. If convicted, he would have faced up to 35 years in

One Hundred Years of the Indy 500

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The men of the early 20th-century motor press sometimes referred to the 13th circuit of an automobile racecourse as “the hoodoo lap,” not because more bad stuff happened then, but because they fervently wished it would. Coming at that point, a wreck would play nicely into the tabloid trope that superstitions are not to be flouted, and it would give a long car race some much-needed narrative cord. And so it was on May 30, 1911, as several dozen reporters leaned forward anxiously to watch the 40-car field for the first-ever Indianapolis 500-mile race power past the starting line for the 12th time and roar yet again into turn one. They weren’t a bad lot, the newspapermen wh

Civil Discourse

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

The threat of a Confederate attack on Washington was on the minds of many in the capital city 150 years ago this summer, including Mary Anna Henry, daughter of the Smithsonian’s first Secretary, Joseph Henry, who was provided with 12 muskets to defend the Smithsonian Castle. The Castle’s tower was a good vantage for looking beyond the Potomac into Virginia, so Mary was anxious after climbing up on July 16, 1861, and spotting Union soldiers crossing the river to confront nearby Confederate troops. President Lincoln himself ascended the tower to participate in military signaling experiments and, encouraged by Secretary Henry, he met T.S.C. Lowe, an aeronaut who sent the world&r

June 1861: Anticipating the Onslaught of the Civil War

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Though the confederates had bombarded Fort Sumter two months earlier, signaling the start of the Civil War, there had been few additional clashes. On June 3, in Philippi, Virginia, Union forces mounted a two-pronged attack on a small group of Confederates. Taken by surprise, the Rebels ran off in retreat, some reportedly still in their pajamas, causing the papers to call the event the “Races at Philippi.” Even so, shots were fired, and 30 men were wounded, making it arguably the first major land action of the war. Elsewhere all was anticipation. On a Cincinnati street, a conscription-aged young man stirred the emotions of Lucy Webb Hayes. “I felt that he was not a poor b

Risky Businesses

Tue, 17 May 2011 06:00:00 GMT

Charles Leerhsen was a writer at Newsweek and an editor at Sports Illustrated, People and Us Weekly before he started writing books about what he calls “the little offshoots and back alleys of history.” His first, Crazy Good, was about the once hugely famous—now almost forgotten—harness horse Dan Patch. His second, Blood and Smoke, from which he adapted “500 Miles of Mayhem,” is about the first Indianapolis 500 race, in 1911, a race so chaotic that, to this day, no one knows for sure who actually won. “They didn’t have the technology to keep track of the running order of the race,” Leerhsen explains, “and within about ten minutes,

Women Spies of the Civil War

Mon, 09 May 2011 05:01:03 GMT

Hundreds of women served as spies during the Civil War. Here’s a look at six who risked their lives in daring and unexpected ways

Documenting the Death of an Assassin

Fri, 06 May 2011 06:43:26 GMT

When President Barack Obama announced this week that he would not release postmortem pictures of Osama bin Laden, people around the world immediately questioned his decision. The debate today echoes a similar controversy involving John Wilkes Booth, the man who assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. On April 26, 1865—12 days after he shot Lincoln at Ford’s Theater in Washington, D.C.—Booth himself was cornered and shot in a Virginia barn. He died from his wound that day. His body was taken back to Washington and then aboard the USS Montauk for an autopsy. The administration, led by Secretary of War Edwin Stanton, ordered that a single photograph be taken of Booth&rsqu

Elizabeth Van Lew: An Unlikely Union Spy

Mon, 09 May 2011 02:32:51 GMT

When the Civil War erupted in 1861, Union and Confederate officers could never have predicted the role women would play in gathering information about the enemy. But as Northern and Southern women began providing critical intelligence on everything from the enemy’s movements to its military strategy, both sides began to actively recruit them as operatives. Over the course of the war, hundreds of women acted as undercover agents, willing to risk their lives to help their cause. One of the most effective was Union spy Elizabeth Van Lew—a prominent member of Richmond, Virginia, society. The 43-year-old lived with her widowed mother in a three-story mansion in the Confederate capi

Photos: The Best Facial Hair in the Civil War

Fri, 29 Apr 2011 08:21:41 GMT

Browse through these portraits of officers with great facial hair and then vote for your favorite

The Essentials: Six Books on the Civil War

Wed, 20 Apr 2011 03:04:07 GMT

The literature on the war is so vast you could spend a lifetime reading really good books about it. Here are six excellent ones: Battle Cry of Freedom (1988), by James McPherson: Widely regarded as the most authoritative one-volume history of the war. The Fiery Trial (2010), by Eric Foner: A new Pulitzer-Prize-winning and authoritative account of President Abraham Lincoln's navigation through the politics of abolition; it won the Pulitzer Prize for History. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (2008), by Drew Gilpin Faust: A moving examination of the ways in which the slaughter changed Americans' ideas on mortality and influenced the way they chose to remember th

At Suffolk Downs, an Unintended Spectator

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 06:00:00 GMT

On July 4, 1966, more than 24,000 horse-racing fans crowded into the stands at Suffolk Downs in East Boston. The 32nd running of the Mayflower Stakes, New England’s premier race for 2-year-olds, was one of 11 races on the card that day. The press box was packed, which didn’t stop an uncredentialed punter from wandering in after the seventh race and asking where he could find the track announcer. Sam McCracken, the Boston Globe’s turf writer, directed him to the upper level of the stands. Nobody gave it much thought when the man went down to the track instead and sat on a bench about 30 feet past the finish line. The horses that would run in the six-furlong Mayflower Stak

Extraordinary Discoveries

Mon, 18 Apr 2011 06:00:00 GMT

It took Chip Brown a couple of days to come to grips with El Mirador, the overgrown Maya city in the Guatemalan jungle that dwarfs the better-known Tikal. “Much is still buried,” he explains. “You have to stare at the topography awhile before you can quite let go of the idea that the contours and the hills and the little dales are not natural but reflect the buried remnants of a ruined city. You just have to overcome this blind spot about how utterly this has all been obliterated.” Although El Mirador was discovered some 85 years ago, most of the 15-square-mile site, abandoned nearly 2,000 years ago, has yet to be excavated. “Once you tune into the geography a

How We’ve Commemorated the Civil War

Mon, 11 Apr 2011 08:47:42 GMT

A little over ten years after the start of the Civil War, in July 1871, Gen. George Meade spoke to a reunion of Union Army veterans in Boston. “Comrades of the Army of the Potomac,” he began, “The first thing I shall do, which we ought to do…is to return our thanks to the Great Being who, in His infinite mercy, has allowed us to be here, to enjoy the pleasures of this meeting, who has blessed us and spared us through all the dangers of the war.” Reconciliation; unification; a re-examination of the whys and wherefores of the greatest conflict in American history: All of these would be themes of later Civil War reunions and observances, leading up to the curr

The Women Who Fought in the Civil War

Fri, 08 Apr 2011 07:38:51 GMT

Even though women weren’t legally allowed to fight in the Civil War, it is estimated that somewhere around 400 women disguised themselves as men and went to war, sometimes without anyone ever discovering their true identities. Bonnie Tsui is the author of She Went to the Field: Women Soldiers in the Civil War, which tells the stories of some of these women. I spoke with the San Francisco-based writer about her research into the seldom-acknowledged participation of women in the Civil War. Why weren’t women allowed to fight in the Civil War? At the time, women weren’t perceived as equals by any stretch of the imagination. It was the Victorian era and women were mostly co

How Col. Ellsworth’s Death Shocked the Union

Fri, 01 Apr 2011 05:43:31 GMT

On May 23, 1861, Virginia seceded from the Union. President Abraham Lincoln ordered troops to occupy the port city of Alexandria. The next day, an enraged innkeeper there fired a shotgun point-blank into the chest of Col. Elmer Ellsworth of the 11th New York Volunteers. The innkeeper was immediately gunned down by one of Ellsworth’s men; the colonel became the first Union officer to die in the Civil War. In his new book, 1861: The Civil War Awakening, Adam Goodheart explains that Ellsworth was not merely a surrogate little brother to Lincoln, but also an exemplar of the romantic idealism that characterized the generation of Americans that came of age in the 1850s. Here is how Goodhea

The Destruction of Charleston in the Civil War

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 07:47:01 GMT

Photographs from the 1860s reveal how Union bombardment and a blazing fire devastated much of the South Carolina city

Fort Sumter: The Civil War Begins

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

On the afternoon of April 11, 1861, a small open boat flying a white flag pushed off from the tip of the narrow peninsula surrounding the city of Charleston. The vessel carried three envoys representing the Confederate States government, established in Montgomery, Alabama, two months before. Slaves rowed the passengers the nearly three and a half miles across the harbor to the looming hulk of Fort Sumter, where Lt. Jefferson C. Davis of the U.S. Army—no relation to the newly installed president of the Confederacy—met the arriving delegation. Davis led the envoys to the fort’s commander, Maj. Robert Anderson, who had been holed up there since just after Christmas with a ti

The Death of Colonel Ellsworth

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

One of the quieter commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the Civil War—but one of the most intriguing—can soon be found in an alcove at the end of a main hallway at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery (NPG) in Washington, D.C. Between two rooms housing highlights of the museum’s Civil War collection, a new exhibition, “The Death of Ellsworth,” revisits a once-famous but now largely forgotten incident. The exhibition opens April 29. The focal object is a 3 3/8- by 2 3/16-inch photograph of Union Army Col. Elmer E. Ellsworth, a dashing figure, his left hand resting on the hilt of his saber. James Barber, the NPG historian who curated the exhi

Top 10 Unforgettable Editorials

Wed, 16 Mar 2011 06:43:32 GMT

1. “Yes, Virginia.…” “Is there a Santa Claus?,” 8-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon asked The Sun of New York in a letter to the editor. Francis P. Church’s answer, printed on September 21, 1897, was a masterpiece of decisiveness (“Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus”) and evasion (“He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy.”) Church’s judgment that “a thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood” could also stand for his p

Civil War Artifacts in the Smithsonian

Fri, 04 Mar 2011 08:48:12 GMT

The museum collections house many items from the Civil War, including photographs, uniforms and personal diaries

Ronald Reagan and Moammar Qadhafi

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 09:41:40 GMT

Between 1969, when Col. Moammar Qadhafi took over Libya in a coup, and 2004, when he terminated his country’s nuclear weapons program, U.S.-Libya relations were almost unremittingly hostile. A notable flash point occurred 25 years ago, after a bomb went off on April 5, 1986, in a West Berlin discotheque frequented by U.S. service personnel. Two people, including a U.S. serviceman, were killed, and 204 others were injured. The Reagan administration’s response, both on the ground and at the podium, suggests the tenor of the relationship: April 9, 1986: news conference Q: Mr. President, do you have any solid evidence that Qadhafi is responsible for the recent acts of terrorism?

The Cherokees vs. Andrew Jackson

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:00:00 GMT

John Ross made an unlikely looking Cherokee chief. Born in 1790 to a Scottish trader and a woman of Indian and European heritage, he was only one-eighth Cherokee by blood. Short, slight and reserved, he wore a suit and tie instead of deerskin leggings and a beaver-skin hat. His trading post made him more prosperous than most Indians—or white men. But his mother and grandmother raised him in a traditional household, teaching him the tribe’s customs and legends. When the Cherokees embraced formal education—they were adapting quickly to a world they knew was changing—he attended school with their children. After his mother died, in 1808, Ross worked at his grandfather&

The Newsroom Rush of Old

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:00:00 GMT

No image brings a tear to the eye of even the crustiest ink-on-paper romantic like a yellowing photograph of the city room of a deceased newspaper. The men in this photograph, circa 1950, are putting out the New York Journal-American, which was born in 1937. The Journal-American was once the city’s most widely read afternoon newspaper—yes, afternoon paper, a once-grand tradition of American journalism that has gone the way of the Linotype machine, the gluepot and the spike onto which editors would stick stories they deemed unworthy of publication. Its newsroom was typical of the time. The furnishings look as if they had been plucked from a garage sale—scarred wooden de

Less Traveled Roads

Wed, 23 Feb 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Ann Morrison says she always knew that Paul Gauguin was a commanding presence. But she didn’t fully appreciate how over-the-top he was until she reported “Gauguin’s Gambit.” “He was a larger-than-life character, even though physically he was quite short, about 5 feet 3 inches,” says Morrison, a Paris-based freelancer who was executive editor of Fortune, editor-in-chief of Asiaweek and co-editor of Time’s European edition. “He drew attention to himself any way he could think of, dressing bizarrely, acting outrageously, painting unconventionally. Coming to grips with his personality was fascinating.” Fascinating and disquieting. As she g

The Invisible Line Between Black and White

Fri, 18 Feb 2011 08:58:19 GMT

For much of their history, Americans dealt with racial differences by drawing a strict line between white people and black people. But Daniel J. Sharfstein, an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt University, notes that even while racial categories were rigidly defined, they were also flexibly understood—and the color line was more porous than it might seem. His new book, The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White, traces the experience of three families—the Gibsons, the Spencers and the Walls—beginning in the 17th century. Smithsonian magazine's T.A. Frail spoke with Sharfstein about his new book: People might assume that

Revisiting Samuel Eliot Morison's Landmark History

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:00:00 GMT

On March 23, 1942, the historian Samuel Eliot Morison wrote to his friend President Franklin D. Roosevelt to offer himself as a “sea-going historiographer” to chronicle the activities of the U.S. Navy in World War II. “In order to do it the right way,” he told Roosevelt, “I must have a living, intimate connection with the Navy flagrante bello. An armchair history job after peace is concluded won’t do.” Before April was out, Morison was meeting with Navy officials to accept a commission as a lieutenant commander and discuss the logistics of his globe-spanning assignment. That July, he boarded a destroyer and pressed into the cold swells of the Atla

Fresh Eyes

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:00:00 GMT

When two policemen riding a motorcycle in Cartagenita, Colombia, noticed Ivan Kashinsky photographing the barrio early one morning, they took him to the station for questioning. He was worried—had he done something illegal?—until the officers got out their cellphones and began photographing him. “I realized they were more curious about me than anything else,” Ivan recalls. Then the police said it was too dangerous to walk around the neighborhood alone toting expensive camera gear. Next thing he knew, he says, “I was stuffed between two cops on a motorcycle taking a tour of Cartagenita.” Ivan’s assignment, his first for us, was to document Colombia

The Legend of Lincoln's Fence Rail

Wed, 19 Jan 2011 07:00:00 GMT

Every modern president aspires to emulate Abraham Lincoln, but few have wanted to be measured against him—a leader whose stature grew with the enormousness of the challenges he overcame, and whose violent death added the resonance of Greek tragedy to a historic life. Remarkably, most of the stories that underlie Lincoln’s legacy seem grounded in fact (in contrast, for example, to the apocryphal tale of George Washington and his cherry tree, invented by biographer Parson Weems). Lincoln, arguably more than Washington, embodies the American dream: an up-from-poverty hero who became a giant not only to Americans but to much of the world. “Washington is very unapproachable,

The Early History of Football’s Forward Pass

Wed, 29 Dec 2010 08:25:08 GMT

By 1905, college football was all the rage, attracting tens of thousands of fans to games at a time when major-league baseball teams often attracted only 3,000—and pro football was still more than a decade away. But it was also an increasingly violent and deadly passion. There were 18 fatalities nationwide that year, including three college players (the rest were high-school athletes), and President Theodore Roosevelt, whose son was on the freshmen team at Harvard University, made it clear he wanted reforms amid calls by some to abolish the college game. In a commencement address at the school earlier in the year, Roosevelt alluded to the increasingly violent nature of football sayin

Powers That Be

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Presidential historian Robert Dallek is probably best known as the author of An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917-1963. It is to Kennedy, who was sworn into office 50 years ago this month, that Dallek traces a significant expansion of presidential power in this country (“Power and the Presidency” ). The turning point, he says, “was the Cuban missile crisis, when we came closer than any other time during the cold war to a hot war and to a nuclear exchange.” During those fateful 13 days, “Kennedy set up what was known as the ExComm, the executive committee. He did consult with some people in Congress, but they didn’t make policy. It was essentially do

Power and the Presidency, From Kennedy to Obama

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Fifty Januaries ago, under a pallid sun and amid bitter winds, John F. Kennedy swore the oath that every president had taken since 1789 and then delivered one of the most memorable inaugural addresses in the American canon. “We observe today not a victory of party but a celebration of freedom,” the 35th president began. After noting that “the world is very different now” from the world of the Framers because “man holds in his mortal hands the power to abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life,” he announced that “the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans” and made the pledge that has echoed ever since: &l

Robert Dallek on "Power and the Presidency"

Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Historian Robert Dallek has been studying the American presidency for decades. He is the author of Nixon and Kissinger, a Pulitzer Prize finalist; An Unfinished Life, about John F. Kennedy; and several other books, including his latest The Lost Peace, looking at leadership around the globe from 1945 to 1953. Now, fifty years after Kennedy’s inauguration, Dallek reflects on how presidential power has expanded. The president’s growing control of foreign policy goes back before Kennedy to Teddy Roosevelt. But what made the 1960s a real turning point? What made it a turning point was the fact that the Cold War was really at a crest. The question was whether we were going to be abl

When Elvis Met Nixon

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

The image looks like a computer-generated joke, or maybe a snapshot from some parallel universe where the dead icons of the 20th century hang out together—even Elvis Presley and Richard Nixon. But the picture is genuine, an official White House photograph of a bizarre encounter that occurred in this universe, in the Oval Office on December 21, 1970. The story began in Memphis a few days earlier, when Elvis' father, Vernon, and wife, Priscilla, complained that he'd spent too much on Christmas presents—more than $100,000 for 32 handguns and ten Mercedes-Benzes. Peeved, Elvis drove to the airport and caught the next available flight, which happened to be bound for Washington. He

George Washington and His Maps

Tue, 16 Nov 2010 10:30:23 GMT

In his journey from surveyor to soldier to leader, our first president used cartography to get a feel for the young nation

Editor's Note: Glorious Quests

Wed, 17 Nov 2010 07:00:00 GMT

This is the third consecutive issue in which Newsweek correspondent-turned-monumentally-productive-freelancer Joshua Hammer has contributed a feature article to Smithsonian. In the October issue he wrote about the Mafia in Sicily. Last month it was Russia's cult of the czar. In this issue he writes about one man's determined quest to find a giant reclining Buddha buried in Bamiyan, Afghanistan, where, to the world's horror, the Taliban in 2001 dynamited two giant 1,500-year-old standing statues of the Buddha (see "Searching for Buddha,"). Hammer says archaeologist Zemaryalai Tarzi "is a passionate, engaging guy with this dream that may be a pipe dream. And in the course of pursuing it, he

From Election to Sumter: How the Union Fell Apart

Mon, 15 Nov 2010 04:20:31 GMT

You seem to identify the Dred Scott decision [which declared that all black Americans –regardless of whether or not they were slaves-- were not protected by the constitution as citizens] as the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back on the road to disunion. What was it about Dred Scott that jolted the country out of a period of relative calm? The problem with the Dred Scott decision is that it really addressed the issue of slavery head-on in a way that it hadn’t been addressed before. The previous compromises had all attempted to paper over these big issues of racial equality or inequality and citizenship—what it meant to be American, what the future of slav

E. J. Wagner on "The Tell-Tale Murder"

Tue, 19 Oct 2010 03:37:47 GMT

E. J. Wagner is a crime historian, author of the Edgar Award-winning book The Science of Sherlock Holmes and the moderator of the forensic forum at the Museum of Long Island Natural Sciences at Stony Brook University. I recently caught up with her about her experience researching her November feature story “The Tell-Tale Murder,” about the death of a wealthy slave trader in Salem, Massachusetts, in 1830, that would inspire the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. How did you first become interested in forensic science? When I first got out of drama school, I got a job ghostwriting speeches. I got assigned to writing speeches for doctors a lot, and I was invited

How the Battle of Little Bighorn Was Won

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Editor’s note: In 1874, an Army expedition led by Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer found gold in the Black Hills, in present-day South Dakota. At the time, the United States recognized the hills as property of the Sioux Nation, under a treaty the two parties had signed six years before. The Grant administration tried to buy the hills, but the Sioux, considering them sacred ground, refused to sell; in 1876, federal troops were dispatched to force the Sioux onto reservations and pacify the Great Plains. That June, Custer attacked an encampment of Sioux, Cheyenne and Arapaho on the Little Bighorn River, in what is now Montana. The Battle of the Little Bighorn is one of the most studied

A Murder in Salem

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:00:00 GMT

On the evening of April 6, 1830, the light of a full moon stole through the windows of 128 Essex Street, one of the grandest houses in Salem, Massachusetts. Graced with a beautifully balanced red brick facade, a portico with white Corinthian columns and a roof balustrade carved of wood, the three-story edifice, built in 1804, was a symbol of prosperous and proper New England domesticity. It was owned by Capt. Joseph White, who had made his fortune as a shipmaster and trader. A childless widower, White, then 82, lived with his niece, Mary Beckford (“a fine looking woman of forty or forty-five,” according to a contemporary account), who served as his housekeeper; Lydia Kimball,

Top 10 Historic Midterm Elections

Thu, 14 Oct 2010 11:47:50 GMT

Congressional elections, held in the middle of a president’s term, are usually referenda on a president and his policies. Only twice has a president’s party gained seats in his first midterm election. But among all midterm elections, some have been more consequential than others. 1858: the House is divided. Facing a recession and a nation bitterly divided over slavery, President James Buchanan (D) lectures the people on the virtue of thrift and backs a dubious pro-slavery constitution for the nascent state of Kansas. As the Democrats fracture, the Republican Party, founded only four years before to prevent the expansion of slavery, takes a plurality in the House of Representat

Reconsiderations

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Caitlin O’Connell-Rodwell, a Stanford ecologist and author of The Elephant’s Secret Sense, has been studying elephant behavior since 1992, primarily in Namibia’s Etosha National Park. In “Male Bonding,” she describes a hair-raising confrontation between two bull elephants that overturned all her preconceptions—and the conventional wisdom—about challenges to pachyderm hierarchy. “I thought for sure I was going to see the dominant bull get displaced by the bull in musth,” she says. “When I didn’t, I realized that social structures are not all black and white; once you start focusing, you see there is a lot of gray. There are a

Baseball’s Bat Man

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 10:03:59 GMT

Chuck Schupp has delivered alchemy to major-league players for 27 years, listening to their wishes for the perfect bat and then getting his team at the Hillerich & Bradsby plant in Louisville, Kentucky to produce one that fits their fancy. When Texas Rangers outfielder Josh Hamilton put on a herculean display at the 2008 Home Run Derby, Schupp fielded calls from players, including slugger David Ortiz of the Boston Red Sox, who wanted to know what bat he was using—a C253 model originally made for Jeff Conine, a solid journeyman who played 17 seasons. “Everybody’s different,” says Schupp, the pro baseball division manager for the venerable bat company. “So

75 Years of the Blue Ridge Parkway

Sun, 19 Sep 2010 05:22:38 GMT

The sign marking the commencement of construction for the Blue Ridge Parkway is an unassuming gray roadside plaque, a few hundred yards from the North Carolina-Virginia border near Cumberland Knob. The low profile seems appropriate here. The parkway’s pleasures are subtle, harking back to a time when traveling was about the journey, not just the destination. Around every bend, it seems, awaits another enticing vista, whether it’s a hawk’s-eye view of a river valley, a peaceful pasture crowded with cows, or a tree-covered peak. About 16 million people visited last year, making it the National Park Service’s most popular attraction (by comparison, Yosemite and Yellow

America's True History of Religious Tolerance

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Wading into the controversy surrounding an Islamic center planned for a site near New York City’s Ground Zero memorial this past August, President Obama declared: “This is America. And our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakeable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country and that they will not be treated differently by their government is essential to who we are.” In doing so, he paid homage to a vision that politicians and preachers have extolled for more than two centuries—that America historically has been a place of religious tolerance. It was a sentiment George Washington voiced shortly after taking the oath of office just

Walks of Life

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Freelance writer Helen Fields says the stories she most likes to report are about how science actually gets done—“how it works and the people who do it. I think science often seems like these grand ideas are handed down from on high,” she says. “But they come from people with dogs and kids and interests.” Interests, that is, in things like trilobites and brass bands, both of which have fascinated mineralogist Bob Hazen, whose day job is trying to figure out how life itself began billions of years ago and about whom Fields writes in this issue (“Before There Was Life,”). One of the many things that intrigued her about Hazen’s chosen endeavor

Debating on Television: Then and Now

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:00:26 GMT

Half a century ago, American politics stumbled into a new era. In WBBM-TV studios in Chicago on September 26, 1960, presidential candidates Richard M. Nixon and John F. Kennedy stood before cameras and hot lights for the first-ever televised presidential debate. An extraordinary 60 percent of adults nationwide tuned in. This encounter—the first of four—boosted support for Kennedy, a little-known Massachusetts senator and political scion who would go on to win the White House. Elections in the United States would never be the same again. No single aspect of presidential campaigns attracts as much interest as televised debates, and they have provided some of the most memorable mo

The Unsolved Case of the "Lost Cyclist"

Fri, 27 Aug 2010 05:42:27 GMT

The sport of high wheel riding was introduced to the United States from England in the late 1870s. In its first decade, it was an elitist, fringe sport. American cyclists were predominately well-to-do young men daring enough to mount high wheelers—bikes with a large front wheel and tiny rear wheel. In 1892, Frank Lenz, an accountant turned long-distance cyclist from Pittsburgh, set off on a solo around-the-world tour to promote the “safety bicycle,” a successor to the high wheeler and precursor to today’s road bike that would ultimately spark the great, turn-of-the-century bicycle boom and transform cycling into a popular sport. In his new book, The Lost Cyclist, bi

Commemorating 100 Years of the RV

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 07:14:10 GMT

Every December 15, Kevin Ewert and Angie Kaphan celebrate a “nomadiversary,” the anniversary of wedding their lives to their wanderlust. They sit down at home, wherever they are, and decide whether to spend another year motoring in their 40-foot recreational vehicle. Their romance with the road began six years ago, when they bought an RV to go to Burning Man, the annual temporary community of alternative culture in the Nevada desert. They soon started taking weekend trips and, after trading up to a bigger RV, motored from San Jose to Denver and then up to Mount Rushmore, Deadwood, Sturgis, Devil’s Tower and through Yellowstone. They loved the adventure, and Ewert, who bu

The Shock of War

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:00:00 GMT

In September 1914, at the very outset of the great war, a dreadful rumor arose. It was said that at the Battle of the Marne, east of Paris, soldiers on the front line had been discovered standing at their posts in all the dutiful military postures—but not alive. “Every normal attitude of life was imitated by these dead men,” according to the patriotic serial The Times History of the War, published in 1916. “The illusion was so complete that often the living would speak to the dead before they realized the true state of affairs.” “Asphyxia,” caused by the powerful new high-explosive shells, was the cause for the phenomenon—or so it was claimed

Aftershocks

Wed, 18 Aug 2010 06:00:00 GMT

For Bill Brubaker, a former Washington Post staff writer, reporting on the effect of January’s catastrophic earthquake on Haiti’s artists (“The Art of Resilience,”) combined his passions for journalism, travel and Haitian art, which he has been collecting for 30 years. (His first Haitian painting cost $10.) “I know a lot of the key players, and I care about them,” he says. “I was really anxious to see firsthand how they were doing.” Saddened by the devastation and loss of life, he was also heartened by the survivors.“I knew that Haitians were a resilient people, who had overcome so much in their history—but I was surprised by the

The Curious London Legacy of Benedict Arnold

Fri, 09 Jul 2010 08:21:28 GMT

“You have five minutes,” the vicar said, as he led us through the foyer of St. Mary’s church in the Battersea section of London. “I’m sorry I can’t give you more time, but we have a meeting down there that’s about to start.” And with that, we descended a flight of stairs to see the tomb of America’s most infamous turncoat. I was on a London “Tory Tour” —an afternoon-long look at sites associated with the 7,000 American Loyalists who fled to England’s capital during the Revolution. Our tour guide, Tom Sebrell, a young historian from Virginia currently living and teaching in London, made the crypt of Benedict Arn

Nine Historical Archives That Will Spill New Secrets

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

The past looks quite promising. Over the next several decades, governments and universities will shed new light on historic figures and events by opening long-sealed archives. Take the Harvard University Archives, which, in 30 years, will unseal John F. Kennedy’s responses to questionnaires and psychological tests he was first given as an undergraduate. Robert Dallek, a historian and author of the JFK biography An Unfinished Life, speculates that the papers could reveal fresh insights into the 35th president’s character. “Did he have any focus on social issues as a young man?” Dallek wonders. “Or maybe there will be a picture of a very vacuous young man, preo

From the Editor: Curveballs at the Un-Magazine

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 06:00:00 GMT

I don’t believe in ghosts, but I do believe the spirit of Ed Thompson, who died in 1996, still stalks these corridors, his hair slicked back, his tie loosened, a fat cigar stuck in his mouth. He swears a lot. He mumbles. Sometimes I feel him looking over my shoulder, shaking his head at what the world in general—and this magazine in particular—has come to. “What a lotta foofaw,” he might say, employing a favorite expression. Edward K. Thompson had been the editor of Life, back when Life had clout, and after Life, in 1968, he signed on as an assistant to the secretary of state, a job that brought him to Washington. He then came to the attention of S. Dillon Ri

The Great Escape From Slavery of Ellen and William Craft

Thu, 17 Jun 2010 09:53:20 GMT

Most runaway slaves fled to freedom in the dead of night, often pursued by barking bloodhounds. A few fugitives, such as Henry “Box” Brown who mailed himself north in a wooden crate, devised clever ruses or stowed away on ships and wagons. One of the most ingenious escapes was that of a married couple from Georgia, Ellen and William Craft, who traveled in first-class trains, dined with a steamboat captain and stayed in the best hotels during their escape to Philadelphia and freedom in 1848. Ellen, a quadroon with very fair skin, disguised herself as a young white cotton planter traveling with his slave (William). It was William who came up with the scheme to hide in plain sigh

Famous Animal Gravesites Around the World

Wed, 28 Apr 2010 09:49:18 GMT

It's not just Kentucky Derby winners that are buried with great honor

A Civil Rights Watershed in Biloxi, Mississippi

Tue, 20 Apr 2010 02:48:24 GMT

The waters beside Biloxi, Mississippi, were tranquil on April 24, 1960. But Bishop James Black’s account of how the harrowing hours later dubbed “Bloody Sunday” unfolded for African-American residents sounds eerily like preparations taken for a menacing, fast-approaching storm. “I remember so well being told to shut our home lights off,” said Black, a teenager at the time. “Get down on the floor, get away from the windows.” It wasn’t a rainstorm that residents battened down for, but mob reprisals. Hours earlier Black and 125 other African-Americans had congregated at the beach, playing games and soaking sunrays near the circuit of advancing

Wayne B. Wheeler: The Man Who Turned Off the Taps

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:00:00 GMT

On the last day before the taps ran dry, the streets of San Francisco were jammed. A frenzy of cars, trucks, wagons and every other imaginable form of conveyance crisscrossed the town and battled its steepest hills. Porches, staircase landings and sidewalks were piled high with boxes and crates delivered just before transporting their contents would become illegal. Across the country in New York City, Gold’s Liquor Store placed wicker baskets filled with its remaining inventory on the sidewalk; a sign read, “Every bottle, $1.” On the first day of Prohibition, January 17, 1920, Bat Masterson, a 66-year-old relic of the Wild West now playing out the string as a sportswrite

Victorian Womanhood, in All Its Guises

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Frances Benjamin Johnston made her name as a photographer in the 1890s, taking portraits of the political elite in Washington, D.C.—society hostesses such as Phoebe Hearst, and the wives of President Grover Cleveland’s cabinet members. At the same time, she befriended artists and other outsiders, hosted costume balls in her studio and traveled the country unescorted. Among the 20,000-odd prints she donated to the Library of Congress in 1947—including not only her portraiture, but also a substantial body of photojournalism—are the two self-portraits on these pages. One shows her as a bohemian: holding a cigarette and a beer stein, crossing her legs like a man and re

The Story of Bartram's Garden

Tue, 13 Apr 2010 09:04:34 GMT

When George Washington visited the Bartram family’s prestigious garden near Philadelphia in 1787, he found it to be “not laid off with much taste.” To naturalists like the Bartrams, however, the flora took precedence over the layout. Their 102-acre spread sloping down to the Schuylkill River was a grand incubator of native plants and the first botanical garden in the United States. Here, John Bartram and his sons William and John Jr. planted specimens they gathered from a large swath of the New World to be sold in the Old World. They are credited with creating the country’s first plant catalog in 1783, a 22-by-17-inch sheet of paper with almost 220 “trees, sh

Lincoln's Missing Bodyguard

Thu, 08 Apr 2010 07:41:24 GMT

When a celebrity-seeking couple crashed a White House state dinner last November, the issue of presidential security dominated the news. The Secret Service responded by putting three of its officers on administrative leave and scrambled to reassure the public that it takes the job of guarding the president very seriously. “We put forth the maximum effort all the time,” said Secret Service spokesman Edwin Donovan. That kind of dedication to safeguarding the president didn’t always exist. It wasn’t until 1902 that the Secret Service, created in 1865 to eradicate counterfeit currency, assumed official full-time responsibility for protecting the president. Before tha

How Dolley Madison Saved the Day

Tue, 12 Jun 2012 04:24:20 GMT

In the years leading up to America’s second war with Britain, President James Madison had been unable to stop his penny-pinching secretary of the treasury, Albert Gallatin, from blocking Congressional resolutions to expand the country’s armed forces. The United States had begun the conflict on June 18, 1812, with no Army worth mentioning and a Navy consisting of a handful of frigates and a fleet of gunboats, most armed with a single cannon. In 1811, Congress had voted to abolish Alexander Hamilton’s Bank of the United States, making it nearly impossible for the government to raise money. Worst of all, the British and their European allies had engaged (and would ultimately

Going Places

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

“Every place I have ever visited changed my life in some way, either spiritually, emotionally or intellectually. Isn’t that the point of travel?” That was my favorite comment in response to our new Smithsonian.com poll about travel. Reading your replies was a trip in itself. To the question, “Have you ever visited a place that’s changed your life?” your globe-spinning answers ranged from Sydney to Kyoto to Katmandu to Mecca to Albania to Mali to “Paris! Paris! Paris!” to Boston to Savannah to the Grand Canyon to the Redwood Forest and Machu Picchu. We asked you time travelers the historical place and time you’d most like to visit. The N

Learning from the Missile Crisis

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 06:00:00 GMT

It was a lovely autumn day 40 years ago this month, a day not unlike September 11, 2001, when Americans realized that the oceans no longer protected us from enemy attack. Those old enough that October 22, 1962 to know the name John F. Kennedy will never forget the fear that swept through homes and cities when the president appeared on television, grave and gray, to proclaim a crisis. Reading a stern ultimatum to the Russians that called them nuclear cheats and liars for placing offensive missiles in Cuba, he also left the impression that his counteractions might any minute provoke a rain of Soviet missiles. The news terrified the public for six days and nights (though less for those of us

A Necessary Conflict

Wed, 23 Mar 2011 06:00:00 GMT

With our cover story in this issue about the bombardment of Fort Sumter by Confederate artillery, we begin our coverage of the Civil War’s sesquicentennial. Over the next four years, we plan to examine the major battles, pivotal moments and social currents that so divided our country—and shaped its future—a century and a half ago. In April 1861, the people of Charleston, South Carolina, were in a celebratory mood. The state had just seceded, which most residents felt was a victory in itself, and no one was anticipating four long years of bloodshed and 620,000 dead. “When you walk through Charleston or stand at Fort Sumter,” says Fergus M. Bordewich, author of

Against the Grain

Mon, 24 May 2010 05:45:50 GMT

Novelist Francine Prose (A Changed Man, Blue Angel) says she has loved the work of Baroque master Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio “for such a long time that I can’t remember ever not knowing about him. He’s very direct, and there’s nothing ironic about his work at all. I think that’s very appealing. When you stand in front of a Caravaggio—or when I do—something happens that doesn’t happen anywhere else. It has to do with the intensity of emotion and how beautifully it’s painted—the composition and the characters and his insistence on doing things his way.” Prose, who wrote “On the Trail of Caravaggio,”, is not

Homes Away

Thu, 20 May 2010 06:00:00 GMT

From 1996 to 2000 Stephen Kinzer was the first Istanbul bureau chief for the New York Times. He delves into Turkey’s complexity in his seventh book, Reset: Iran, Turkey, and America’s Future, due out this month. “Like everybody who lives in Turkey, I became fascinated with that country,” he says, explaining his desire to profile Turkey’s Kurds (“Heritage Reclaimed,”). But he didn’t want to focus on the political or military conflict. “What I wanted to do was look at the Kurds’ underlying culture in Turkey, how it has survived and how it is being reborn in a new generation.” In the process he discovere

Model Moralist

Mon, 19 Apr 2010 06:00:00 GMT

Since handing in his pencil five years ago as the New York Times’ first public editor, Daniel Okrent has turned to the past. His 2003 book on Rockefeller Center was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in history; his latest effort, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition, excerpted in this issue, will be published this month. His wife calls him “a serial obsessive,” says Okrent. “I find a subject that interests me and I say, ‘Gee, do you think I can get somebody to pay me to spend the next three to five years learning more about it?’” The chapters Okrent adapted for Smithsonian (“The Man Who Turned Off the Taps”) take up the question of how

The Little League World Series’ Only Perfect Game

Tue, 06 Apr 2010 09:43:05 GMT

They came to be known as “Los pequeños gigantes,” the little giants. In baseball, a game full of real and imagined fairy tales from Bobby Thomson’s “Shot Heard ’Round the World” to Bernard Malamud’s fable The Natural, no story may be more inspiring or surprising than the story of the 1957 Little League team from Monterrey, Mexico. The team was composed of mostly poor kids from an industrial city who’d started playing baseball only a few years earlier, clearing rocks and glass from a dirt field and playing barefoot with a homemade ball and gloves. They’d only imagined Major League games, gathering around a radio for Sunday rebro

Reorientations

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 06:00:00 GMT

For his article “Probing the Biggest Mystery in the Universe,” journalist Richard Panek went all the way to the South Pole, where he was surprised by its incredible flatness. “I’ve just never seen a landscape like it,” he says, “and I grew up in the Midwest. There was absolutely nothing on the horizon. It’s just barren and beautiful for that.” He was even more surprised by how little the astronomers he talked to at the pole actually understood the subject he went there to report: dark energy, which may be the most powerful force in the universe. “They are kind of saying there is something there, but we don’t know what it is. For m

Hollywood's Historic Buildings

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 08:56:21 GMT

Theaters and other architectural gems lined Hollywood's famous boulevards during its Golden Age and now hold restored star appeal

Big Digs

Thu, 18 Feb 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Ann Gibbons, who wrote our cover story (“Our Earliest Ancestors,”), has been covering human evolution since the early 1990s and is the author of The First Human: The Race to Discover Our Earliest Ancestors (2006). For that book, she visited several hominid field sites in Africa, but she was unable to wangle an invitation to the site in Ethiopia where the first pieces of a skeleton of “Ardi,” a pivotal hominid who lived 4.4 million years ago, were found in 1994. “That was my one big wish,” she says, to go to Ethiopia. Then, in November 2008, Tim White, the lead researcher on the ongoing Ardi project, invited her to do just that. “A couple of weeks l

An Ancestry of African-Native Americans

Wed, 17 Feb 2010 10:51:41 GMT

Angela Walton-Raji has been researching African-Native American genealogy for nearly 20 years and is the author of the book Black Indian Genealogy Research: African-American Ancestors Among the Five Civilized Tribes. She recently presented a series of genealogy workshops at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., in conjunction with the exhibit IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas. Walton-Raji’s ancestors are Freedmen, African-Americans who were slaves of the Five Civilized Tribes – the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek and Seminole Nations – in Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma in 1907. The Cherokee freed their slaves

Abraham Lincoln, True Crime Writer

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 02:50:46 GMT

Abraham Lincoln was a rail splitter, a riverboat hand, an inventor, a poet and importantly, a lawyer. Lincoln also knew how to tell a good story. In 1841, he defended William Trailor, one of three brothers on trial for murder, in a case that surprised everyone in the courtroom. A few years later, Lincoln published the following short story based on the strange case. Lincoln dramatized the facts a bit to abide by the conventions of the true crime genre, but the story as he told it here fits well with the facts of the case. "In the year 1841, there resided, at different points in the State of Illinois, three brothers by the name of Trailor. Their Christian names were William, Henry and

The Top Ten Important Moments in Snowboarding History

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 05:02:57 GMT

Though snowboarding’s roots go back several centuries, its modern development began in the 1960s. In chronological order, here are the top ten moments of snowboarding’s short, radical history … subject to debate of course. 1) Sherman Poppen Invents the Snurfer (1965) On Christmas morning 1965, Sherman Poppen went into his garage, cross-braced two Kmart skis together, stood atop his backyard hill and started surfing the snow. The Snurfer – think snow and surfer – was born and became an instant hit. “When I saw how much fun the kids had Christmas Day,” Poppen told Skiing Heritage, “I spent the next week in Goodwill and everywhere else buying

Radio Activity: The 100th Anniversary of Public Broadcasting

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 07:41:55 GMT

On January 13, 1910, tenor Enrico Caruso prepared to perform an entirely new activity: sing opera over the airwaves, broadcasting his voice from the Metropolitan Opera House to locations throughout New York City. Inventor Lee deForest had suspended microphones above the Opera House stage and in the wings and set up a transmitter and antenna. A flip of a switch magically sent forth sound. The evening would usher out an old era—one of dot-dash telegraphs, of evening newspapers, of silent films, and of soap box corner announcements. In its place, radio communications would provide instant, long-distance wireless communication. In 2009, America celebrated the 40th anniversary of the cre

Top 13 U.S. Winter Olympians

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:00:00 GMT

These athletes took home gold, but also stole our hearts. Choose your favorite winter Olympian in our poll

The Changing Definition of African-American

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:00:00 GMT

Some years ago, I was interviewed on public radio about the meaning of the Emancipation Proclamation. I addressed the familiar themes of the origins of that great document: the changing nature of the Civil War, the Union army’s growing dependence on black labor, the intensifying opposition to slavery in the North and the interplay of military necessity and abolitionist idealism. I recalled the longstanding debate over the role of Abraham Lincoln, the Radicals in Congress, abolitionists in the North, the Union army in the field and slaves on the plantations of the South in the destruction of slavery and in the authorship of legal freedom. And I stated my long-held position that slaves

Novelties

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 07:00:00 GMT

For our story about one of the world’s most beguiling plants, we turned to Lynda Richardson, a wildlife and environment photographer in Richmond, Virginia, who has worked for us in Cuba, Alabama and California’s Channel Islands. “They were amazingly hidden,” she says of the Venus flytraps she tracked down in their only native habitat, a shrinking slice of the Carolinas. “They’re hard to see unless you know where to look.” Fortunately Richardson had an expert guide, James Luken, a botanist. See what they found in “The Venus Flytrap’s Lethal Allure” and online at Smithsonian.com/flytrap, where even more of Richardson’s hard-

The American Football League's Foolish Club

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 09:04:06 GMT

Having risked his reputation by un-retiring from a 10-year career in the established National Football League for the upstart American Football League, George Blanda clearly wasn't afraid to gamble. In the final quarter of the AFL championship game on New Year’s Day 1961, the stakes were high. Backed up on their own 12-yard line, it looked like the Los Angeles Chargers might get the ball back with time to take the lead. But the Houston Oilers quarterback knew his opponents were going to blitz. He looped a swing pass to Heisman Trophy-winning running back Billy Cannon, who then broke a tackle and outraced everybody to pay dirt, giving the Oilers a 24-16 lead and the title. “That

George Washington's Christmas Crossing

Wed, 23 Dec 2009 09:04:23 GMT

Standing on the Pennsylvania bank of the Delaware River, General George Washington—Ronald Rinaldi in real life—prepares to address his troops. Though the park is gray and dreary, the towering trees bereft of greenery, the atmosphere is festive, tense with anticipation. Cameras are working overtime as the troops clad in a bright and motley array of uniforms and colonial dress move to their appointed formations. The weather is cold, but not as cold as it was on this day in 1776, when a raging blizzard tormented the tattered remnants of Washington’s volunteer army. Back then, there was no one to witness either the misery or the bravery of this heroic band. Today thousands o

Highlights From the Warren Anatomical Museum

Tue, 22 Dec 2009 06:13:14 GMT

The collections inside this museum hold intriguing objects that tell the story of 19th century American medicine

Meat and Potatoes

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:00:00 GMT

For her first encounter with lions in the wild, staff writer Abigail Tucker flew to Tanzania and hung out in the Serengeti with Craig Packer, the world’s foremost expert on Panthera leo. “I really couldn’t process how beautiful the animal was,” she says of the first lion she saw up close. “He was just much more huge and gorgeous than anything I had expected. There was something so scornful about him. He didn’t move a muscle when we came near him. He just fixed us with this look, and it was like confronting some kind of aristocrat. We were up in a big car looking down on him, but somehow he was in charge. I later found out his name was Viking, which was a

Myths of the American Revolution

Fri, 18 Dec 2009 07:00:00 GMT

We think we know the Revolutionary War. After all, the American Revolution and the war that accompanied it not only determined the nation we would become but also continue to define who we are. The Declaration of Independence, the Midnight Ride, Valley Forge—the whole glorious chronicle of the colonists’ rebellion against tyranny is in the American DNA. Often it is the Revolution that is a child’s first encounter with history. Yet much of what we know is not entirely true. Perhaps more than any defining moment in American history, the War of Independence is swathed in beliefs not borne out by the facts. Here, in order to form a more perfect understanding, the most sig

Making Tracks

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:00:00 GMT

"It's like an open secret," Charles Bergman says about the subject of our cover story ("Wildlife Trafficking,"). "Nobody talks about it very much. But it seems to be everywhere." Even so, tracking the traffickers was no day at an Ecuadorean beach. "There just wasn't anybody I could call up and say how should I go about finding people in the backcountry. I really had to do it myself, one step at a time, to get deeper into the jungle and see what's really going on." Bergman, who teaches literature and creative writing at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, first got interested in the problem as a Fulbright scholar in Ecuador in 2006-2007

Memoirs of a World War II Buffalo Soldier

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:04:59 GMT

On his dining room table James “Pat” Daugherty had arranged some old faded photographs from his Army days, his Bronze Star, a copy of his recently published World War II memoir, The Buffalo Saga, and his olive-drab steel helmet, marred near the visor by a chunk of now-rusted iron. “If you feel the inside of the helmet, you can see how close it was,” he says of the shrapnel from a German mortar that struck the young private in Italy in the fall of 1944. A few more millimeters, and he might never have lived to write his memoir, which is what I went to his home in Silver Spring, Maryland, to learn about. Daugherty, 85, served in the Army’s storied 92nd Infantry

Flying With America's Most Famous Female Aviators

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 09:04:14 GMT

Dozens of talented women preceded Amelia Earhart, and thousands have followed, and each has her own groundbreaking story to tell

Robert M. Poole on “The Battle of Arlington”

Tue, 20 Oct 2009 02:56:11 GMT

Robert M. Poole was an editor and writer for National Geographic for 21 years. He retired from the magazine in 2004, the same year that his book Explorer's House, about the history of National Geographic's founding family, was published. Poole has written for National Geographic, Preservation, The New York Times, The Washington Post and Smithsonian, where he has been a contributing editor since 2005. His latest book, On Hallowed Ground, from which “The Battle of Arlington” is adapted, is due out in November. What drew you to this story—and book idea? I am keen on the biography of places—in other words, how a particular piece of geography evolves over time, taking

The Rescue of Henry Clay

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Six brawny movers gingerly made their way out of the LBJ Room in the Senate wing of the U.S. Capitol this past May 24. In their gloved hands, they carried a monumental canvas sheathed in plastic, maneuvering the 100-pound, 11- by 7-foot painting toward a staircase leading from the opulent Brumidi Corridor. Finally, the movers painstakingly removed the packing, revealing a pantheon of larger-than-life senators from the years preceding the Civil War. At the painting's center, towering over his colleagues, stands Kentucky's Henry Clay, careworn and majestic, apparently declaiming with the silver-tongued oratory for which he was famous. Completed nearly a century and a half ago by Phinea

How Arlington National Cemetery Came to Be

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:00:00 GMT

One afternoon in May 1861, a young Union Army officer went rushing into the mansion that commanded the hills across the Potomac River from Washington, D.C. "You must pack up all you value immediately and send it off in the morning," Lt. Orton Williams told Mary Custis Lee, wife of Robert E. Lee, who was away mobilizing Virginia's military forces as the country hurtled toward the bloodiest war in its history. Mary Lee dreaded the thought of abandoning Arlington, the 1,100-acre estate she had inherited from her father, George Washington Parke Custis, upon his death in 1857. Custis, the grandson of Martha Washington, had been adopted by George Washington when Custis' father died in 1781. Beg

A Photo-journalist's Remembrance of Vietnam

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:00:00 GMT

The end was at hand. Saigon swirled with panicked mobs desperate to escape. On the outskirts of the surrounded city, more than a dozen North Vietnamese divisions prepared for their final assault. A Dutch photographer, Hugh Van Es, slipped through the crowds that day, snapping pictures, then hurried down Tu Do Street to the United Press International office to develop his film. No sooner had he ensconced himself in the darkroom than a colleague, Bert Okuley, called out from an adjoining room, "Van Es, get out here! There's a chopper on that roof!" He pointed to an apartment building four blocks away, where an Air America Huey, operated by the CIA, was perched. Twenty-five or so p

Misperceptions

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Our title is our greatest asset. Affiliating us with our parent organization—one dedicated, in the words of founder James Smithson, to "the increase and diffusion of knowledge"—Smithsonian confers authority, integrity, responsibility and trust. In a time that has seen the deaths of too many fine magazines, our affiliation with the Smithsonian Institution underlies our continuing good health. Not a day goes by that I'm not grateful for it. But our title may create misperceptions. Some people—nonreaders, I like to think—assume we're a mouthpiece for the Institution. Not so. We are of the Institution, not about it. We choose our stories—and how we exec

Meriwether Lewis' Mysterious Death

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 05:06:03 GMT

Captain Meriwether Lewis—William Clark’s expedition partner on the Corps of Discovery’s historic trek to the Pacific, Thomas Jefferson’s confidante, governor of the Upper Louisiana Territory and all-around American hero—was only 35 when he died of gunshot wounds sustained along a perilous Tennessee trail called Natchez Trace. A broken column, symbol of a life cut short, marks his grave. But exactly what transpired at a remote inn 200 years ago this Saturday? Most historians agree that he committed suicide; others are convinced he was murdered. Now Lewis’s descendants and some scholars are campaigning to exhume his body, which is buried on national parkl

John Brown's Famous Photograph

Mon, 21 Sep 2009 03:17:59 GMT

Perhaps more than any other American historical figure, the militant abolitionist John Brown embodies the idea that one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. Brown’s zeal at the Pottawatomie Massacre, where five pro-slavery Kansans were taken from their homes and murdered, and his botched raid on the arsenal in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, beginning October 16, 1859, made him a pariah in the South and helped precipitate the secessionist movement that led to the Civil War. But in non-slave states, his execution on December 2, 1859, was marked by the tolling of church bells and martyrdom within the abolitionist movement. In a well-known painting completed circa 1884

Timothy Egan on “The Big Burn”

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In just two days in August 1910, the largest wildfire in U.S. history devoured 3 million acres in eastern Washington, Idaho and Montana, leveling five towns and numberless trees and leaving at least 85 people dead. Timothy Egan’s new book, The Big Burn, chronicles the doomed effort to fight the fire and the ensuing havoc, but it also tells a broader story, reflected in the book’s subtitle: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. Let’s start with the battle that was fought in Washington, D.C. How did Teddy Roosevelt, scion of a wealthy New York family, come to think of vast tracts of land in the West as belonging to the public, in perpetuity? Today, everybody ac

The Legacy of America’s Largest Forest Fire

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Excerpted from The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, by Timothy Egan, © 2009. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Reproduced with permission. Here now came the fire down from the Bitterroot Mountains and showered embers and forest shrapnel onto the town that was supposed to be protected by all those men with faraway accents and empty stomachs. For days, people had watched it from their gabled houses, from front porches and ash-covered streets, and there was some safety in the distance, some fascination even—See there, way up on the ridgeline, just candles flickering in the trees. But now it was on them, an element transformed from Out There to Here,

John Brown's Day of Reckoning

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Harpers Ferry, Virginia, lay sleeping on the night of October 16, 1859, as 19 heavily armed men stole down mist-shrouded bluffs along the Potomac River where it joins the Shenandoah. Their leader was a rail-thin 59-year-old man with a shock of graying hair and penetrating steel-gray eyes. His name was John Brown. Some of those who strode across a covered railway bridge from Maryland into Virginia were callow farm boys; others were seasoned veterans of the guerrilla war in disputed Kansas. Among them were Brown's youngest sons, Watson and Oliver; a fugitive slave from Charleston, South Carolina; an African-American student at Oberlin College; a pair of Quaker brothers from Iowa who had

Fevers

Fri, 18 Sep 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Fergus M. Bordewich, who writes frequently for Smithsonian about history, takes up the case of extremist abolitionist John Brown, whose fateful raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, 150 years ago this month exacerbated tensions leading up to the Civil War ("Day of Reckoning,"). The author of a history of the Underground Railroad, Bound for Canaan: The Underground Railroad and the War for the Soul of America, Bordewich says Brown is among the most notable American figures, one whose significance is still debatable: "He has been seen in a remarkable number of ways in different eras, as a saint, a hero, a demon, a traitor, an enlightened forerunner of modern civ

German POWs on the American Homefront

Wed, 16 Sep 2009 05:05:51 GMT

In the mid-1940s when Mel Luetchens was a boy on his family’s Murdock, Nebraska, farm where he still lives, he sometimes hung out with his father’s hired hands, “I looked forward to it,” he said. “They played games with us and brought us candy and gum.” The hearty young men who helped his father pick corn or put up hay or build livestock fences were German prisoners of war from a nearby camp. “They were the enemy, of course,” says Luetchens, now 70 and a retired Methodist minister. “But at that age, you don’t know enough to be afraid.” Since President Obama’s vow to close the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp erupted int

Top 10 Nation-Building Real Estate Deals

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 04:56:02 GMT

Despite the recent unpleasantness in the real estate market, many still hold (or once held, or will hold again) to the axiom of the late millionaire Louis Glickman: “The best investment on earth is earth.” This applies for nations, too. Below are ten deals in which the United States acquired territory, ranked in order of their consequences for the nation. Feel free to make bids of your own. (Just to be clear, these are deals, or agreements; annexations and extralegal encroachments don’t apply.) 1. The Treaty of Paris (1783): Before the United States could start acquiring real estate, it had to become the United States. With this deal, the former 13 colonies received Grea

On the Hunt for Jefferson's Lost Books

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 07:30:58 GMT

For more than a decade, Mark Dimunation has led a quest to rebuild an American treasure—knowing he will likely never see the complete results of his efforts. On an August day 195 years ago, the British burned the U.S. Capitol in the War of 1812 and by doing so, destroyed the first Library of Congress. When the war ended, former President Thomas Jefferson offered to sell his personal library, which at 6,487 books was the largest in America, to Congress for whatever price the legislators settled upon. After much partisan debate and rancor, it agreed to pay Jefferson $23,950. Then another fire in the Capitol on Christmas Eve of 1851 incinerated some 35,000 volumes, including two-third

Strongmen

Mon, 20 Jul 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Barbara Kreiger teaches English and creative writing at Dartmouth College. She has been fascinated by King Herod, ruler of Judea at the time of Jesus' birth, since she began researching a book about the Dead Sea more than 25 years ago. So when she read in 2007 about the probable discovery of Herod's tomb, her passport was at the ready. Kreiger flew to Tel Aviv and soon met up with archaeologist Ehud Netzer, who guided her through the site as well as through the thinking that led him to his sensational find; so began the reporting that would become this month's cover story, "Finding Herod's Tomb." "This is a classic needle-in-a-haystack scenario," Kreiger says of Netzer

Tales From the Appalachian Trail

Tue, 14 Jul 2009 05:58:50 GMT

At 2,178 miles, the Appalachian Trail is the nation’s longest marked footpath. Starting at Springer Mountain in Georgia, it crosses 14 states, six national parks and eight national forests on its way north to Maine’s Mount Katahdin. But despite the trail’s daunting length, more than 10,000 people—called “2,000-milers”—walked it in its entirety, in sections over time or as a whole. In light of “Earl Shaffer and the Appalachian Trail,” an exhibition honoring the first person to hike the trail in one continuous trip (at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History through October 11), we take a moment to reflect on the trail’s

Revisiting the First Ladies’ Homes

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:55:49 GMT

Preserving the memory of the nation's first female president is a task that Farron and William Smith take seriously. Last fall, the couple opened a museum in Wyethville, Virginia, dedicated to Edith Bolling Wilson, who some historians claim ran the U.S. government while her husband, Woodrow Wilson, recovered from a massive stroke during his second term. The Smiths own the two-story brick building in this small southwest Virginia city, where Mrs. Wilson was born more than 100 years ago. "We decided that once our kids were educated, we'd devote our time to making the museum," Farron Smith says. "We've spent a lot of money on it; we could have re-educated our children again. B

Moonwalk Launch Party

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

In the summer of 1969, all eyes turned to a spit of land on Florida's Atlantic coast—the site of the Kennedy Space Center, named for the president who had challenged the nation to put a man on the moon before the end of the decade. That July, the Apollo 11 mission would attempt just that. I was 22, a year out of Colorado College and working as a photographer at Time magazine's Miami bureau. In the days before the launch, thousands of people drove from all over the country to see it firsthand, converging on Titusville, across the Indian River from NASA Launch Complex 39-A. I asked my superiors if I could cover these witnesses to history. The previous year had been one of division over

Nikita Khrushchev Goes to Hollywood

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

Fifty summers ago President Dwight Eisenhower, hoping to resolve a mounting crisis over the fate of Berlin, invited Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev to a summit meeting at Camp David. Ike had no idea of what he was about to unleash on the land whose Constitution he had sworn to defend. It was the height of the cold war, a frightening age of fallout shelters and "duck-and-cover" drills. No Soviet premier had visited the United States before, and most Americans knew little about Khrushchev except that he had jousted with Vice President Richard Nixon in the famous "kitchen debate" in Moscow that July and had uttered, three years before, the ominous-sounding prediction, &q

Up in Arms Over a Co-Ed Plebe Summer

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:56:10 GMT

Don Holcomb was new to the United States Naval Academy, still in the grueling orientation period known as "plebe summer." Sandee Irwin was a midshipman first class—a senior. One day in July 1979, while Holcomb was still getting used to the academy's intense memorization drills, Irwin ordered him to recite the lunch menu. "Tater tots, ham, luncheon meats," he spouted, according to a contemporary report in the Washington Post. "Swiss cheese, sliced tomatoes, lettuce, mayonnaise, submarine rolls, macaroon cookies, iced tea with lemon wedges, milk...uh...ma'am." "Did I hear salami, Mr. Holcomb?" she demanded. She had not. She should have. Holcom

From the Editor: My Favorite Commie

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 06:00:00 GMT

"Imagine if President Obama invited Kim Jong-il to the United States and then Kim Jong-il said, 'Yeah, I'll come, but how about I travel around the country for two weeks before we meet at Camp David?' and then he went to Hollywood and interacted with Madonna and Beyoncé—that would be roughly comparable." Peter Carlson is talking about Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's extraordinary visit to the United States 50 years ago, which not incidentally is the subject of Carlson's book, K Blows Top: A Cold War Comic Interlude, Starring Nikita Khrushchev, America's Most Unlikely Tourist, excerpted herein by the author as "Nikita in Hollywood". Carlson got interested

Setting Sail on the Hudson River 400 Years Later

Mon, 08 Jun 2009 09:44:58 GMT

About midway through construction of the replica of Onrust, a 17th-century Dutch ship, volunteer Lance LaTant of Queensbury, New York, paused and peered through a thicket of curved, bent white oak ribs towering over him and fellow workers. "It looked like a beached whale with bleached bones," he recalled. It was clear that finishing and launching the 52-foot, 29-ton boat in a year would be a challenge for the volunteer builders. But hard work and a little luck paid off. On June 6 the Onrust (pronounced AHN-roost) reproduction joins a flotilla of some 15 historic vessels and untold numbers of private and commercial boats sailing from Manhattan 140 miles up the Hudson River to Alb

Alice Ramsey's Historic Cross-Country Drive

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:53:15 GMT

On June 9, 1909, in a rain drenched New York City, a crowd of wet photographers gathered at 1930 Broadway to snap pictures of an “automobile” and the four poncho-cloaked women within. The car itself was a dark-green, four-cylinder, 30-horsepower 1909 Maxwell DA, a touring car with two bench seats and a removable pantasote roof. But the cameras focused particular attention on the woman in the driver’s seat, 22-year-old Alice Ramsey. Just over five feet tall, with dark hair below her rubber helmet and visor, she posed until she could stand it no more; then she kissed her husband goodbye and cranked the motor to start the car’s engine. Off the Maxwell drove with a clan

Before Rosie the Riveter, Farmerettes Went to Work

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 07:53:56 GMT

From 1917 to 1919, the Woman's Land Army of America brought more than 20,000 city and town women to rural America to take over farm work after men were called to war. Most of these women had never before worked on a farm, but they were soon plowing fields, driving tractors, planting and harvesting. The Land Army's "farmerettes" were paid wages equal to male farm laborers and were protected by an eight-hour workday. For many, the farmerettes were shocking at first--wearing pants!--but farmers began to rely upon the women workers. Inspired by the women of Great Britain, organized as the Land Lassies, the Woman’s Land Army of America was established by a consortium of women’s

A Green Addition to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Meeting House

Thu, 21 May 2009 09:29:36 GMT

Back in 1946, members of the First Unitarian Society of Madison, Wisconsin, selected a visionary architect to design a new meeting space for their congregation. Did they also choose someone who was an early practitioner of “green” architecture? At a meeting of the First Unitarian Society, Frank Lloyd Wright, one of its members (though not a regular attendee), was selected to design the growing congregation’s new Meeting House. His impressive portfolio at the time—Prairie School and Usonian homes, Fallingwater, the S.C. Johnson Wax Administration Building—spoke for itself, and his credentials as the son and nephew of some of the congregation’s founders s

Weegee's Day at the Beach

Tue, 19 May 2009 06:00:00 GMT

At 70 years old and counting, the Parachute Jump still stands, a ghost of its former self. Built for the world's fair in 1939, the ride known affectionately as Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower has graduated to the status of official landmark. In Weegee's photograph Coney Island at noon Saturday, July 5, 1942—shot for the visually punchy, commercial-free, left-wing tabloid PM—the overgrown structure looms on the horizon in its glory: a memory within a memory. Visit the spot today and you will find, raked by the Jump's skeletal shadow, a hotly contested landscape of urban blight. Peering into a crystal ball, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's administration sees a 12-acre amusement

The Kentucky Derby’s Forgotten Jockeys

Tue, 28 Apr 2009 03:56:37 GMT

When tens of thousands of fans assemble in Louisville, Kentucky, May 2 for the 135th Kentucky Derby, they will witness a phenomenon somewhat unusual for today’s American sporting events: of some 20 riders, none are African American. Yet in the first Kentucky Derby in 1875, 13 out of 15 jockeys were black. Among the first 28 derby winners, 15 were black. African American jockeys excelled in the sport in the late 1800s. But by 1921, they had disappeared from the Kentucky track and would not return until Marlon St. Julien rode in the 2000 race. African American jockeys’ dominance in the world of racing is a history nearly forgotten today. Their participation dates back to colonia

George Washington Slept Here

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:31:46 GMT

"I not being so good a woodsman as the rest of my Company striped my self very orderly and went in to the Bed as they call'd it when to my Surprize I found it to be nothing but a Little Straw—Matted together [and] one Thread Bear blanket with double its Weight in Vermin such as Lice and Fleas etc.” Thus George Washington, at age 16, confided to his diary. The year was 1748. He was largely self-taught, far from home, trying to learn the surveyor's trade. Eventually the father of his country would sleep in a very great number of beds, so that one of them seems suitable enough as an object at hand. All through the 1750s he traveled the Western wilderness, first as a surveyo