Innholdsfortegnelse for January/February 2023 i Smithsonian Magazine

ON THE EVENING OF July 12, 1893, in the hall of a massive new Beaux-Arts building that would soon house the Art Institute of Chicago, a young professor named Frederick Jackson Turner rose to present what would become the most influential essay in the study of U.S. history. It was getting late. The lecture hall was stifling from a day of blazing sun, which had tormented the throngs visiting the nearby Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition, a carnival of never-before-seen wonders, like a fully illuminated electric city and George Ferris’ 264-foot-tall rotating observation wheel. Many of the hundred or so historians attending the conference, a meeting of the American Historical Association (AHA), were dazed and dusty from an afternoon spent watching Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show at a stadium near the fairground’s…

A DOGGED U.S. SCHOLAR has upended the conventional wisdom about enslaved Africans in the New World by demonstrating that the first successful slave uprising in the Americas occurred in Panama, not in Haiti, as many have long believed. Robert Schwaller, a University of Kansas historian, discovered new details about the Panama uprising at the General Archive of the Indies, a repository in Seville, Spain, devoted to the Spanish Empire in the Americas and Asia. The papers, including letters, royal edicts and court documents, shed new light on several groups of enslaved Africans in and around what is now the Panamanian province of Colón. The Spanish explorer Vasco Núñez de Balboa first transported captured Africans to Panama in 1513. Around a decade later, the enslaved population began to flee captivity, first individually…

The Austrian Alps rise like a giant patchwork curtain being pulled from the ground—green pine groves, mountain stone, jagged peaks topped with snow. The sun’s early light reveals the bright colors of summer all around us: the tall grass, verdant brush, and polka-dot pinks and whites of wildflowers. Behind rolling clouds, the wide morning sky shows its truest blue. In the Krimmler Achental Valley, every view is a postcard come to life. I voice my admiration to Aster Karbaum, a former bookseller from Hamburg, Germany, who has traveled to this valley half a dozen times. She smiles and points to a distant peak. “That,” she says, “is where you’ll be crossing.” For a moment, I assume she’s joking. From where we’re standing, that mountaintop looks to be about halfway to…

IN 1960 MARIA COLE, the wife of Nat King Cole, asked Marian Anderson about adding her signature to a statement by prominent Black Democrats endorsing John F. Kennedy for president. Anderson replied that she considered it “not possible” to have her name “identified in any particular party.” That revealing exchange is just one glimpse into the artist’s private life offered by the Marian Anderson Collection at the University of Pennsylvania, which holds the most comprehensive cache of Anderson materials in the world: photographs, diaries, contracts, interviews, sheet music and more, much of which has been digitized since 2017 and is available online. The archive is packed with clues to Anderson’s life and artistry. What was she reading in 1941 as a 44-year-old? Her books list that year included W.E.B. Du…

FOR ALMOST 20 YEARS, Steve Galchutt, a retired graphic designer, has trekked up Colorado mountains accompanied by his pack of goats to contact strangers around the world using a language that is almost two centuries old, and that many people have given up for dead. On his climbs, Galchutt and his herd have scared away a bear grazing on raspberries, escaped from fast-moving forest fires, camped in subfreezing temperatures and teetered across a rickety cable bridge over a swift-moving river where one of his goats, Peanut, fell into the drink and then swam ashore and shook himself dry like a dog. “I know it sounds crazy, risking my life and my goats’ lives, but it gets in your blood,” he tells me by phone from his home in the town…

“I HAD A STRONG, DEEPLY EMBEDDED HATRED OF BULLIES.” AT A PRESS CONFERENCE in July 1954, Ethel Payne, one of just three Black correspondents credentialed to cover the White House, asked President Dwight D. Eisenhower about his stance on banning segregation in interstate travel. In a response that made front-page news, Eisenhower dismissed Payne’s question, saying he wasn’t interested in supporting “special groups.” Thereafter, the president snubbed her, calling on her only twice for the remainder of his time in office, and though Payne continued to cover the White House, she began spending less time there, deciding her journalism would have greater impact if she reported from abroad, and later on the front lines of segregation in America. Her reporting in the South came to redefine her work; as Payne later…

RAVENNA HAD EMERGED as the center of the Western world by the time Placidia arrived in 416. “Ravenna attracted the best artists and architects from around the empire,” noted Claudia Frassineti, a cultural heritage specialist and guide in the city. “It was the new capital city, the focus of wealth and power.” Emperor Honorius, Placidia’s half-brother, presided in a magnificent palace overlooking the Adriatic, surrounded by luxury villas for aristocrats, splendid churches and a stadium for horse races. The port turned into “an emporium,” Frassineti added, its warehouses bursting with goods from the Mediterranean and beyond. Today, charming and sleepy Ravenna is often overlooked by travelers entranced by Rome, Venice and Florence. Even its geography has changed over the last 1,500 years. Its once-busy port has silted up, and the…

THE WORLD’S TINIEST RABBIT is roughly the size of a softball—a very, very soft softball. An adult weighs less than a pound. These little bunnies abound in the scrublands of the American West, but one population, known as the Columbia Basin pygmy rabbit, long ago colonized what is now central Washington, happily munching away at a smallish patch of fragrant sagebrush steppe for thousands of years. Every last inch of a pygmy rabbit is built for sagebrush. The enzymes in its gut evolved to neutralize the plant’s toxins and maximize digestion, and it tunnels elaborately beneath the sagebrush’s roots. It even forfeited its archetypal cotton tail, and thus blends in with the gray-green bushes. But in the last century or so, about 80 percent of the wild “sagebrush sea” of the…

The lion charges the electric fence, and I leap backward. “These lions are not accustomed to humans,” Casper van der Merwe says in his distinctive Afrikaner accent. I am standing less than five feet from five very large, healthy, well-fed lions, nothing but strands of wire separating us. The wire is supposed to be electrified, but I catch a lion licking it to no ill effect. Another young female charges me but is stopped by an older lioness, who bats her on the nose with a huge paw. “We only feed them twice a week, and we throw the meat over the fence,” van der Merwe says. He’s a fit, handsome cowboy in his 30s. Along with his wife, Anneke, he runs Jenobli Safaris in North West province, South Africa,…

IN EVERY DROP OF WATER I S A HIDDEN WORLD. Scuba divers can’t see it through their masks; neither can snorkelers swimming among the coral reefs. To really enter this world, you need to look through a magnifying lens. There you’ll see a vast array of vanishingly small plankton, including crustaceans known as copepods. They come in some 13,000 known species, from glimmering-blue sea sapphires to noodle-shaped cod worms. Some roam freely, while others cling to plants or animals. One copepod species can swim into the womb of a gestating shark and attach itself to her calf. “Copepods are the most numerous animal on the planet,” says Chad Walter, an emeritus researcher at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History who has been studying them for 40 years. “People think…

Sometime in the spring of 1893, Cassie Kirby Smith contacted Alexander Darnes, one of Florida’s first formally trained Black doctors. She shared news of a memorial honoring her recently deceased husband, Edmund Kirby Smith, a former Confederate general and professor at the University of the South. Though Cassie’s original communication has not survived, Darnes’ reply has, and it suggests that someone made a special request: Might he be so kind to share a few words, destined for a Confederate veterans’ publication, about Cassie’s dear spouse? Darnes agreed, and in a self-described “humble attempt” that ran almost 20 handwritten pages, Darnes extolled the virtues of the man, who was among the last Southern generals to surrender—more than a month after Robert E. Lee negotiated the end of the Civil War. “He was…

Across 1 Locale of the first successful slave uprising in the Americas 7 Radio operator with a unique “fist” 10 Birthplace of Ethel Payne and home of the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition 12 Union org. that merged with the CIO 13 Diminished to a point 14 Savings plan, for short 15 Air leak sound 16 Rang, like a funeral bell 18 Where Marian Anderson broke a color barrier in 1955, with “the” 19 ___-bitsy 20 Barrel of laughs 22 Bear with a jar of “hunny” 23 Japanese buckwheat noodle 24 “___ appetit!” 25 It’s solid blue in a game of pool 27 Slack-jawed emotion 30 ___ alai (ball game) 31 Like some city elections 33 Spots for surgery, in brief 34 Rome’s Galla Placidia Augusta, for one 35 Summer hrs. in D.C. 36 What “bricha” means…