Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2022 i Smithsonian Magazine

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…

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…

1961 RIGHT TO COUNSEL Hamilton v. Alabama Accused of breaking and entering with plans to “ravish” a white woman, Charles Clarence Hamilton, a mentally disabled Black man, faced capital punishment. But Motley persuaded all nine justices that the Alabama courts had violated Hamilton’s 14th Amendment rights because he had first been arraigned without a lawyer present. The case was a landmark in preserving capital defendants’ right to counsel. 1962 HIGHER EDUCATION Meredith v. Fair In 1962, after Motley convinced the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to allow James Meredith to attend the University of Mississippi, the state appealed to the Supreme Court, which ruled in Motley and Meredith’s favor. Meredith went on to attend the university and pursue further civil rights work. 1963 DESEGREGATION Watson v. City…

DAVID BURKE GRASPS a rusty ladder fixed to the outside of an abandoned 60-foot concrete grain silo towering above a field in Tehama County, California. Using round holes in the concrete as footholds, he climbs ten or more feet, straight into a cluster of dense green foliage. Leaves explode out of gaps in the wall and peek over the lidless roof, rustling in a breeze that threatens to blow Burke off the ladder. Peering into the silo, Burke notes that the trunk is only about six inches in diameter, but it’s one of the tallest fig trees he’s ever seen—and he has seen a lot of them. “Figs are survivors,” Burke says. After plucking a small green fig and returning to earth, he slices it open with a pocket-knife and…

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…

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…

THE CENTENNIAL exhibition of 1876 was a massive celebration that sought to promote patriotic unity in the wake of the Civil War, drawing nearly ten million visitors to Philadelphia’s Fairmount Grounds. Among the 500-plus sculptors with work on view, only one was Black: Edmonia Lewis. Her Death of Cleopatra established Lewis as one of the country’s premier sculptors and, the scholar Naurice Frank Woods Jr. wrote in 2009, enabled Lewis “to lay a solid foundation for women of color to begin ascending in artistic relevance in a profession then largely dominated by skeptical, unsupportive, and inflexible white males.” Lewis gave varying accounts of the circumstances of her birth. Today, historians believe she was born in 1844 in upstate New York to a free Black man named Lewis and a Chippewa…

Q: Did European modernists recognize Georgia O’Keeffe as a great artist? Clarence-Shannon Mullen | Manchester, New Hampshire IN THE EARLY 20th century, American artists looked toward Europe for inspiration rather than the other way around. O’Keeffe had her first solo exhibition in 1917 at New York’s 291, a gallery that also showed prominent European painters of the day. By 1946, she had her own exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, directly following an exhibition of the European-born artist Marc Chagall. But despite the prominence she achieved in America, O’Keeffe was never featured in a major show on the European continent during her 98 years of life. Her first retrospective in France opened in September 2021—to rave reviews. Stephanie Stebich, director, Smithsonian American Art Museum Q: Was there any political significance…

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…