Smithsonian Magazine December 2022

“Samuel Adams remains one of the great enigmas of American history.” Natural Beauty “Glen Canyon Reveals Its Secrets” (October 2022) came alive with some of the most beautiful photographs it has ever been my privilege to view. I am mesmerized by the photo of cracked sediment layers. Thanks to Pete McBride for sharing his writing and photography talent with the world. Nina Soltwedel | Boulder, Colorado Independent Influence Samuel Adams remains one of the great enigmas of American history (“Founding Force,” October 2022). He excelled as a pot-stirrer, but deferred to others once the flames of liberty had been lit. Author Stacy Schiff reminds me what a uniquely flawed character changed the course of the nation. Eric Pollard | Pasadena, California I was interested in that enigmatic hero of our…

THE MUSIC OF THE GREAT Sam Cooke has been the soundtrack to my life for as long as I can remember. From “Cupid” to “You Send Me,” his silky-smooth voice still brings me joy. But it was his powerful protest of Jim Crow segregation, “A Change Is Gonna Come,” released in 1964, that reveals pop culture’s ability to transcend the ephemeral. Music especially can transport us back in time and incisively define who we are. When Patti LaBelle performed Cooke’s song at the opening of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2016, it was a poignant reminder of how much had changed since its release—but also how much work remains. The new permanent bilingual exhibition at the National Museum of American History, “Entertainment Nation/Nación del espectáculo,”…

CRAZY HORSE, OR TASUNKE WITKO, was born around 1840 in the midst of a war. The Lakota Nation had launched a concentrated expansion into the Trans-Mississippi West and was fighting several other Native nations over pasturelands, river valleys and trading privileges. A son of a wealthy, respected family, the young Crazy Horse was known as Curly Hair. His relatives described him as “full of fire.” Curly Hair received his military training from his father and counted his first coup in 1857 by striking a Pawnee enemy—by some accounts a woman—with a stick during battle. His reputation grew in subsequent conflicts, and in 1865 he earned membership in the elite Shirt Wearers’ Society, dedicated to protecting the welfare of the Oglala tribe. Most Americans know of Crazy Horse’s reputation as a…

THE POLISH-AMERICAN SCULPTOR Korczak Ziolkowski detonated the first blast of dynamite on Thunderhead Mountain in the Black Hills of South Dakota on June 3, 1948. His goal: create an enormous carving of Crazy Horse riding a horse triumphantly out of the mountain. It would, when finished, be the largest sculpture ever made, more than eight times the height of Egypt’s Great Sphinx of Giza. When Ziolkowski died in 1982 at 74, the Crazy Horse Memorial was still not even close to being completed. Ziolkowski’s widow and ten children picked up the task, finally completing Crazy Horse’s face in 1998. But even then, the achievement was controversial. For one thing, Crazy Horse himself had famously refused ever to be photographed or drawn. What’s more, the Black Hills are sacred to the…

THE PAINTINGS of Vittore Carpaccio were the graphic novels of the Italian Renaissance. The Venetian, who was born in the 1460s and died in 1525 or 1526, created polyptychs—large-scale oils divided over several panels—to tell stories from the Bible, the lives of the saints and Greco-Roman mythology. “They’re a bit like strip cartoons,” notes Peter Humfrey, curator of a new exhibition of more than 90 paintings and drawings on view through February at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. Largely because of the logistical complexity of transporting 500-year-old paintings, some of them more than 11 feet across, this is Carpaccio’s first retrospective ever held outside Italy. But while he may be less well-known today than contemporaries like Michelangelo and Raphael, Carpaccio stands out as a compelling storyteller with…

THE VILLAGE OF Sant Feliu Sasserra perches on a hilltop in a pine-forested region of Catalonia. Fifty-three miles north of Barcelona, the place retains a medieval atmosphere, with a tenth-century church in the plaza and cobblestone alleys lined by old sandstone-block houses. A plain, three-story edifice with a pair of Spanish flags draped from the top-floor windows serves as the ajuntament, or town hall. I’ve come to this quiet village of 600 people because of a major reckoning with history that has made headlines across Europe—a vote by the Catalan Parliament to apologize for the more than 700 “witches” condemned in the region over three centuries beginning in 1424, when Catalonia enacted Europe’s first law prohibiting witchcraft. Catalonia was a center of witchcraft trials in Europe for more than 300…