Smithsonian Magazine March 2022

Street Veterinarian I was awed by the unselfishness and pure love of animals demonstrated by veterinarian Kwane Stewart (“A Healing Presence,” January/February 2022), who is to be admired for ensuring that pets belonging to homeless people will remain healthy and loved. How fortunate those less fortunate are to have someone to tend to their pets. The world needs more Kwane Stewarts. Judith Ann Yannarelli | Longs, South Carolina Lincoln’s Open Door “Changing Lincoln’s Mind” (January/February 2022) brought the reader behind the scenes of Lincoln’s time in office. It highlighted the endless efforts of African Americans as well as a president’s change of heart and how it came about. I had no idea Lincoln’s presidency had such an open-door policy. Thank you for focusing attention in naming individuals and the roles…

ONE OF MY FAVORITE items in the Smithsonian collections is a small childhood telescope that belonged to Sally Ride. Those early years spent gazing up at the stars inspired Ride to become a physicist, an astronaut and, in 1983 aboard the space shuttle Challenger, the first American woman in space. “I never went into the astronaut corps to become a role model,” said Ride, who died in 2012. “But after my first flight, I began to understand the importance. You can’t be what you can’t see.” Lucky for us, we are all about to see more of Sally Ride. This March, the United States Mint will circulate quarters stamped with Ride’s face as part of the 2022 American Women Quarters Program, alongside four other remarkable women: writer Maya Angelou, Cherokee…

ONE STORMY NIGHT in the spring of 1777, two years into the Revolutionary War, a 16-year-old girl mounted her horse (it may or may not have been named Star) and rode hell-for-leather (bareback? sidesaddle? accounts vary) through 40 miles of Hudson Valley countryside, rallying her father’s troops to battle. Perhaps Sybil Ludington even emitted “a high-pitched feminine halloo,” as a 1940 poem says: “Up, Up there, soldier. You’re needed, come! The British are marching!” and then the drum Of her horse’s feet as she rode apace To bring more men to the meeting place. Some modern scholars, though, suspect that Ludington, the “female Paul Revere,” uttered nothing of the sort, and that she even may have stayed snug in bed on that historic night like any sensible farm girl. There…

NATIVE ALLY NANYEHI The Cherokee leader, known also as Nancy Ward, warned North Carolina colonists of imminent raids by her cousin, the war chief Dragging Canoe, who sided with the Loyalists. (WO)MAN OF ACTION DEBORAH SAMPSON At 21, she joined the 4th Massachusetts Regiment disguised as a man and served for 17 months. When she fell sick, an army doctor discovered her sex. Sampson was honorably discharged. SECRET AGENT ANNA SMITH STRONG She worked with Abraham Woodhull, a member of George Washington’s Culper Spy Ring. Some historians say Strong, of Setauket, New York, was the famous spy “355,” who Woodhull said would help “outwit them all.” PARLOR GAME LYDIA DARRAGH The Irish-born Quaker was nearly 50 when redcoats requisitioned her Philadelphia parlor as a meeting room in 1777. Overhearing their…

JOAN MITCHELL (1925-1992) was a star of the Abstract Expressionist movement, a peer of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. But she was also an athlete—a champion figure skater—and that athleticism translated to her art. “She meant for her paintings to be physical and emotional, rather than intellectual, and because of that they’re more accessible than much abstraction,” says Katy Siegel, co-curator of a Mitchell retrospective opening this month at the Baltimore Museum of Art. The show, which brings together about 75 paintings and drawings by the Chicago-born artist, includes wall-size canvases that required Mitchell to climb up ladders. “She made these paintings with the entire span and reach of her body, and some of them are quite enormous,” Siegel says. “You feel like you’re inside the painting.” That sensation was…

IN THE SPRING OF 1963, Constance Baker Motley watched the protests in Birmingham, Alabama, with hope—and concern. The nation’s most segregated city, Birmingham had become the center of the struggle for Black equality. Previous demonstrations there led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom she consider ed “an American hero,” had produced “no results,” Motley wrote in her memoir. Consequently, King and other leaders began planning more dramatic action, including the Children’s Crusade. “Civil disobedience was not working; massive resistance was,” she wrote. Indeed, the zeal of the protesters in April and May of that year led to a climactic legal battle. Motley’s heroic role in it would help lay the groundwork for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as public outrage over the violent white response to…