Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2024 i Smithsonian Magazine

The Path to Independence I thoroughly enjoyed Alexis Coe’s excellent article (“Freedom’s First Draft,” September/October 2024) on the sometimes overlooked First Continental Congress. As we approach the 250th anniversary of our nation, this semiquincentennial provides the perfect opportunity to honor this bold 1774 meeting of the American colonies. Andrew A. Zellers-Frederick | Haddonfield, New Jersey English Roots From linguistics, I must question the concept of a gentle blending of the Germanic and Celtic peoples (“How England Became England,” September/October 2024). Only a few Celtic words have survived into English, as expected for the speech of a subjugated race. By contrast, the Norman conquerors infused the Saxons’ language with their version of French and transformed it to what we call English. As for the proven genetic mix, blending of that sort…

THE MACY’S THANKSGIVING DAY PARADE was a generation-old tradition when organizers decided to dial up the excitement by adding star performers to the event in the late 1950s. But it wasn’t easy to stage a genuine concert on a moving vehicle in cold weather during a live television broadcast. So starting in 1964, the performers would often lip-sync to a playback of music they’d recorded earlier. Here are some of the most memorable musical acts that have gotten America tapping our toes before turkey time. 1958 BENNY GOODMAN AND HIS SEXTET The King of Swing, who’d appeared in the 1934 and 1937 parades as a non-performing celebrity guest, finally got to cook this year on the standard “The World Is Waiting for the Sunrise.” 1973 GEORGE JONES AND TAMMY WYNETTE…

The 28 th question of the hardest exam I’d taken since college was a smudged footprint pressed lightly into damp sand. The track possessed four teardrop-shaped toes and a vaguely trapezoidal heel pad; one toe, third from the left, jutted above the others, like a human’s middle finger. I knelt closer, scanning for the telltale pinpricks of claws, and saw none. That suggested feline: Cats, unlike dogs, have retractable claws, and they tend to walk without their nails extended. In my notebook, I wrote, tentatively, BOBCAT. The hypothetical bobcat had been wandering a sandy floodplain in the California desert, where I found myself taking a wildlife tracking test one April afternoon. The evaluation was administered by Tracker Certification, the North American wing of CyberTracker Conservation, a South African non-profit that…

Q: Could a private citizen get hold of a genome and use it to bring an extinct animal back to life? Anjali Rawal | Encinitas, California THERE’S CURRENTLY no way to bring an animal back from extinction based on genomic sequences alone. However, some lab groups and individuals hope to “bring back” extinct animals—including mammals, birds and amphibians—by modifying the genome of an existing species so the animal resembles an extinct relative and plays a similar ecological role. For instance, scientists with the Revive & Restore project have proposed using gene manipulation to create elephants that have the heavy coats of woolly mammoths. The same types of methods can be applied to currently endangered species; for example, adding genes to help a species cope with rising heat or survive an…

I AM CONTINUALLY IMPRESSED with the Smithsonian’s ability to connect us to the world and each other while tackling our most important and urgent issues. I was reminded of that in May, during my first visit to Brazil, a vast and vibrant country profoundly shaped by slavery. It was the destination of approximately 40 percent of the more than 12 million enslaved Africans who were forcibly brought to the Americas. I grasped the enormity of this history when I visited Valongo Wharf, Rio de Janeiro’s largest disembarkation point for Africans transported to the Americas. The violent history there stands in contrast to the human stories of resistance and resilience I saw reflected in artifacts retrieved from the Valongo archaeological site, including shells, beads and pipes Africans had brought with them. This…

IN THE MID-19TH century, election ballots were created by political parties, not the government. Local Republican and Democratic operatives designed and printed their own ballots, also called tickets, which typically listed each party’s candidates for state, local and federal office. At the polls, voters procured ballots from party workers and, after walking through a crowd, dropped their votes into a ballot box, typically a glass bowl. With no secrecy in how one voted, violence and intimidation became common, particularly in urban precincts. To capture the attention of voters on Election Day, local party organizations often turned their ballots into miniature works of art, using patriotic and partisan symbols to appeal to voters. Such artwork also had practical uses: Illiterate or non-English-speaking voters might be drawn to a ballot that seemed…

When Isabella Dalla Ragione assesses a Renaissance painting, she doesn’t immediately notice the brushstrokes or the magnificence of the imagery. The first thing she notices is the fruit. On a spring day earlier this year, I stride with Dalla Ragione into the National Gallery of Umbria, in a 14th-century stone castle built atop the hillside city of Perugia. Umbria, a region in central Italy next to Tuscany, is known more for its lush green spaces, hillside cities and Etruscan and Roman ruins than for its art. But the painters of Renaissance Italy traveled between regions, and some of the works on display in Perugia are as awe-inspiring as those in Florence. We breeze through room after room, passing a blur of masterworks by the likes of Gentile da Fabriano and…

THAT FIRST PARADE, held on a relatively mild Thanksgiving Day in 1924, was extolled as “a marathon of mirth” in splashy newspaper ads. It was actually more akin to a modest church carnival on wheels. Comprising a few marching bands, some clowns, some Mother Goose-themed floats and a small menagerie of animals on loan from Manhattan’s Central Park Zoo that occasionally terrified onlooking children with their howls and growls, the procession managed to trudge a staggering six miles, from 145th Street all the way down to Herald Square, to its final destination: R.H. Macy & Company, America’s largest department store. Despite its modest offerings, the parade still drew a crowd: By the time Santa, pulling up the rear, descended from his sleigh and climbed a ladder to sit on an ornate…

TOWARD THE END of the 19th century, J. Pierpont Morgan—the Gilded Age’s wolf of Wall Street—used some of his wealth to amass a vast collection of books and art. He soon realized it needed a home, and a skilled caretaker. In 1905, Morgan’s bibliophilic nephew recommended one of his co-workers in the library at Princeton: Belle da Costa Greene. Summoned to an audience with the financier, she impressed Morgan and soon moved into an office in the newly constructed building known as “Mr. Morgan’s Library” in Midtown Manhattan. She would remain at its helm for nearly the rest of her life, and after Morgan’s death in 1913, she led the effort to make his vast private collection accessible to all. Now, with the Morgan Library celebrating its centenary as a public…