Smithsonian Magazine June 2022

“I am glad to see that ‘The Tree’ is being treasured as a last and lost wonder.” It Takes a Village “Italian Renaissance” (April/May 2022) intrigued me. With the millions of homeless, displaced families around the world desperately longing for a place to call home, why not lease these residences to qualified displaced people who would bring their cultures and home life to these empty places, not only providing them with a home, but enriching the area? Ellen Kollmar | via email It makes sense to repopulate small towns in the United States, too. Many people can now work from anywhere, people are interested in getting off the grid—at least for a while—and small towns give people such as artists the quiet and reflective atmosphere needed for innovative expression. Cynthia…

A MUSEUM IS COMMONLY defined by its artifacts, artworks and scientific specimens. These wonders capture the public’s imagination and make research, exhibitions and scholarship possible. But today we must consider not only what museum collections are and what they can do, but also where they come from. For more than a century, collections were amassed in ways that are no longer acceptable. Objects were often removed using practices now considered unethical. Sometimes they were outright looted, taken as spoils of conquest. Although artifacts of questionable provenance may legally belong to a museum, how they were first acquired matters, even decades or centuries later. For years, the National Museum of Natural History and the National Museum of the American Indian, governed by the National Museum of the American Indian Act, have…

T WAS A HOT AND DISMAL DAY in Charlottesville, Virginia, in June 1815 as Thomas Jefferson watched the last of ten wagons carry away his entire personal library. His beloved 1744 edition of Cicero was headed north along with nearly 6,500 other volumes, and the Sage of Monticello was bereft. “I cannot live without books,” he wrote to John Adams shortly thereafter. Liquidating his library had been a painful choice, but Jefferson had compelling inducements. For one, the former president was facing some $20,000 in debts, and the library would net him nearly $24,000. But Jefferson had a second motive: His books were bound for Washington, D.C., where they would become the cornerstone of the rebuilt Library of Congress, which the British Army had torched the previous year, along with…

IN MAY OF 1889, in the depths of a mental health crisis, Vincent van Gogh retreated to an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in southern France. Here, the artist, who would die by suicide the next year, sought solace in painting. He captured the view through his bedroom window, studied irises in the hospital garden and—when allowed outside the asylum gates—set up his easel in the ancient olive groves that surrounded the village. “There are very beautiful fields of olive trees here, which are grey and silvery in leaf,” he wrote to his mother. Van Gogh made the trees the subject of 15 paintings, several of which are on view this month at the Minneapolis Institute of Art. “He was still experimenting—these were important compositions for him,” says Katie Luber, the museum’s…

IN JUNE 1972, Shirley Temple Black took on one of the biggest roles of her life: United States delegate to the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment. The tap-dancing child actress with her golden ringlets and magnetic appeal was 44 years old and an unmistakable presence at the first international meeting to address the crisis of global pollution, held in Stockholm. “You could usually locate her by following the clicking of shutters and the popping of flash bulbs,” the San Francisco Examiner reported. But Black’s value was more than mere fame. She had come to deliver an all-inclusive message, which even now, 50 years later, seems ahead of its time. People must unite with empathy and humility, she said, to restore the world for future generations: “We are trustees…

IS RED A FLAVOR? The question can lead to spirited debate in soul food restaurants, at cookouts and in Black homes. For well over a century in African American communities, “red drink” has referred to a variety of highly sweetened, ruby-colored drinks with a berry-citrus flavor profile. The origin of this fixture has long been a mystery. But historians are tracing its roots to West Africa, where people first made red-colored teas from hibiscus flowers and the cola nut some four centuries ago. Among the best known is bissap, which hails from Senegal and has often been used for medicinal and ceremonial purposes. Judith Carney, a professor of geography at the University of California at Los Angeles, has found that enslaved people taken from West Africa carried hibiscus seeds to…