Innholdsfortegnelse for December 2022 i Smithsonian Magazine

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…

IN 1692, A PANIC swept through Salem, Massachusetts. More than 200 people—mostly women—were accused of witchcraft; 20 were executed, and five more died in prison. What led a quiet New England town to turn against itself, and why, three centuries later, do these trials continue to captivate Americans? A new exhibit at the New-York Historical Society (N-YHS), “The Salem Witch Trials: Reckoning and Reclaiming,” which opened October 7, transports viewers to that bleak New England winter—and invites us to consider how we might have reacted to such events. “It’s a call to re-examine our own behavior in moments of crisis,” says Anna Danziger Halperin, associate director of the N-YHS Center for Women’s History and the exhibit’s coordinating curator. “Everyone wants to think they would respond on the side of justice,…

MORE THAN 4,500 YEARS after an enterprising Mesopotamian stretched a few cords of catgut over a hollow wooden vessel to create the first lute, the craft of building string instruments reached a state of near-perfection in a humble workshop in Cremona, Italy. The craftsman’s name is still known around the world more than 300 years later, though his life story remains something of a mystery: Antonio Stradivari, maker of incomparable violins, cellos and more. Among the violin virtuosos who play a Stradivarius today are Itzhak Perlman, Akiko Suwanai and Joshua Bell. “I can’t think of anything else that has been frozen in time and stands as the holy grail for modern use,” says Gary Sturm, curator emeritus at the National Museum of American History’s Division of Musical History. It’s generally…

Welcome to the stickiest topic in history ne rainy morning in May, a Romanian archivist named Tudor Arhire retrieved a brown envelope from a wooden filing cabinet, slid out a small, yellowed page and placed it carefully on the table. Arhire is the custodian of a government archive in Sibiu, Romania, a medieval city in the region of Transylvania. Inside the grand, historic building, elegant windows and parquet floors contrasted with yellowed lace curtains and battered upholstery; on a desk in the corner, a pile of books and parchments spanned hundreds of years. The document he produced was a letter, more than 500 years old. Despite the ancient creases and stains, its nine lines of flowing Latin script, translated long ago, were clearly legible. But nobody here was intending to read it.…

WHEN, IF EVER, does an act of rescue become an act of pillage? It’s a question many museums are asking themselves as they re-examine storerooms filled with artifacts obtained before cultural theft was a concept, or at least one that people acknowledged. Private collectors can’t avoid it either. Even if the law doesn’t ask them the question, sometimes their consciences do. A decade of pondering a personal repatriation scenario ended for me on a recent spring day in front of a dilapidated house in Mississippi. There I gave away my prized possession—a torn piece of wallpaper with a campaign poster from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s last presidential run glued to it. The item had, improbably, once belonged to Mississippi John Hurt, one of the great blues guitarists and singers of 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…

AROUND 150 YEARS AGO, a father and daughter held hands in the fierce glare of a Pennsylvania steel mill: a grizzled older man and his dark-eyed daughter, their faces lit by smoldering ore. Few knew what the pair were doing there, but 12-year-old Florence Kelley understood. Her papa, Congressman William Darrah “Pig Iron” Kelley, was instructing her in the family business. Together, they would fight for working people, including the laborers doing this dangerous job. It would be a long-term project, he explained: His generation would “build up great industries in America,” and hers would fight to “see that their product is distributed justly.” American history has plenty of political father-son duos—the Adamses and Bushes come to mind—but the Kelleys are something rarer. From the 1830s to the 1930s, Will…

Across 1 Words spoken with a sigh 5 Easy-to-place puzzle piece 9 Only a dozen Stradivari originals of this instrument still exist today 11 Toyota hybrid 12 Area of land with dead trees 14 One with “Jr.” in his name, e.g. 15 Car or train alternative 16 Word typically ignored when alphabetizing 17 Circus animal trainer 19 Settle, as debts 22 Fruits such as the Saudi sukkary and the Emirati khala 26 Kerfuffles 27 Abbr. for a grab bag 28 Tasunke ___ a.k.a. Crazy Horse 30 Target of 17th-century “hunts” in Catalonia 31 Greek letter H 32 Metric speed meas. 34 Something named after a chemist or physicist 35 Purchased 36 Progressive ___, backdrop for Florie Kelley’s activism 37 Clean Air Act org. 38 Miracle-___ (garden brand) 39 Labeled with…

ON JOHNS ISLAND IN SOUTH CAROLINA, tucked along Maybank Highway, not far from where the Stono River meets Pennys Creek, sits a long-obscured piece of history. The remains of a four-chambered brick structure are set among black gum trees, live oaks and scrub brush. At its base, partially covered by moss and bald cypress roots, the tint that enchanted the colonial world is still visible. The ridges of the mortar in between the bricks emit a blue hue, the color of the ocean: indigo, a name that refers to the shrub, the dye the plant produces and the color itself. “IN ORDER TO CONTINUE WITH MY INDIGO WORK, I HAD TO FACE THE TRUTH OF HISTORY.” This crumbling vat, with squares aligned back to back, was built to process the…

THE TEMPEST BEGAN AT 7 O’CLOCK ONE MORNING this past June. It hadn’t rained for days, and by late afternoon, the forest floor had been drenched with 70,000 gallons of precipitation. Floods of salt water from the nearby Rhode River soaked the roots of the maples, beeches and tulip poplars. In this part of Maryland, near the Chesapeake Bay, downpours of such magnitude happen just once every ten years. But this tempest was no natural disaster. Like the deluge in Shakespeare’s play, conjured by the duke-turned-magician Prospero, it was a human creation. In this case, TEMPEST stood for Terrestrial Ecosystem Manipulation to Probe the Effects of Storm Treatments, and the magician was Patrick Megonigal, a laidback 62-year-old wetland ecologist in a flannel shirt, baseball cap and hiking boots. That early…

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…

THE CRY OF THE FISHING CAT sounds like the quack of a duck, and the rest of this midsize feline also seems tailor-made for the life aquatic. Its narrow, streamlined head is ideal for dips in the mangrove swamps and wetlands of South and Southeast Asia, its habitat, and its pointy ears even fold down during a dive, serving as earplugs. The short, stout tail works like a rudder; the back feet are partially webbed. The unusual half-retractable claws sweep through the water like anglers’ hooks, snagging prey, and the extra-thick coat guards against the damp. “Fishing cats are habitat specialists, wetland specialists,” says Tiasa Adhya, an ecologist and co-founder of The Fishing Cat Project, a research and conservation group based in eastern India. Her research recently showed, via camera…

Near the medieval village of Barjac in the foothills of the Massif Central mountain range in southern France, Anselm Kiefer has been carving up the landscape in and around an abandoned silk mill on the edge of the Cévennes National Park, excavating new lakes, tunnels and chambers, and cutting roads through the trees. And after 30 years the work isn’t done. A vast new underground space nearing completion could be a pharaoh’s tomb with its many rough-textured pillars and the ruddy striations of its dusty stone walls. Kiefer’s team cleared out enough dirt to build a slope above it. “I always liked to move earth,” says the 77-year-old, among the most prominent German artists of the postwar period. “We took out a lot of earth and then I made a…