Smithsonian Magazine July/August 2023

“I hope this inspires a new generation to embrace the dedication to learn.” A Poignant Friendship How lucky we are to have Anne Frank’s story and now the story of her life with her friend Hannah Pick-Goslar before the war (“Hannah & Anne,” June 2023). It struck me that the United States was deliberate in its bureaucracy, not allowing Jewish refugees to enter the country. I hope that the world has learned many lessons, not the least of which is that refugees are fleeing for a reason—not to become spies, but to save lives. How many lives could have been saved if the U.S. had just allowed all refugees to enter? Patricia Kastenholz | Tipton, Indiana No matter how many books, stories and films about the Holocaust I have read…

SOME OF MY EARLIEST work as a historian happened in California, where I curated exhibitions about the creation, disruption and resilience of Black communities in Los Angeles. The current exhibition “Many Wests: Artists Shape an American Idea,” at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, tackles some of the questions that once consumed much of my time: What draws communities to settle in the West? How do new and Native American populations shape the region, and why are aboriginal contributions so frequently omitted from popular history? Why are the mythologized narratives of Manifest Destiny and cowboys and Indians so resistant to change? Under the stewardship of the Art Bridges Cohort Program, which fosters partnerships among museums to create collaborative exhibitions, the Smith-sonian American Art Museum co-curated an expansive, multimedia experience with four…

TOP OF THE PAGE: “A MIGHTY WOM AN WITH A TORCH” How Alexander Hamilton’s descendant put the Statue of Liberty on the map Dedicated in 1886, the Statue of Liberty was described by some in the 1890s as “disgraceful” and “of no importance”—far from the proud symbol of America’s diversity it is today. Thank Georgina Schuyler, a great-granddaughter of Alexander Hamilton, for turning the neglected gift from the French into an enduring monument to freedom. It was Schuyler who led the effort to add a plaque with the text of “The New Colossus,” Emma Lazarus’ 1883 sonnet about the sculpture, then being built. Schuyler was a friend of the poet, who died in 1887, and the two shared a desire to establish the United States as a welcoming place for…

HEY SAY IT BEGAN in the Bronx. It was August 11, 1973, and 18-year-old DJ Kool Herc, short for Hercules, hosted a party in the rec room of his apartment building. Herc was a pioneer in a new form of free entertainment. In early 1970s New York, if you were a teenager and didn’t have much money, you could find entertainment in the streets. There, DJs were dropping ad-libbed commentary while spinning records in a fresh way, combining old and new music on their turntables and elongating percussion-heavy instrumental breaks by looping them. Folks would match these funky beat-breaks with a new style of whirling dance; the break dancing and the music in those years were inseparable. All of this had been going on before that particular party, and spoken-word…

THE DISEASE WAS FIRST NOTED on the Midwestern frontier in the early 1800s as settlers expanded into new territory with their herds. Known initially as “the slows,” “the staggers,” “the trembles” and eventually “milk sickness,” the disease had a terrifying progression. Within days, a formerly healthy person could be bedridden with vomiting, often followed by coma and eventually death. Daniel Drake, a doctor in Cincinnati, described the symptoms as sly and baffling, beginning only with “a general weakness and lassitude, which increase in the most gradual manner.” It tended to strike in the summer after periods of little rain. It wasn’t present on the East Coast. There was no record of similar illness anywhere else in the world. Settlers were flummoxed—and terrified. Some blamed spooks and witches. Others, poisonous vapors…

PAULA REGO FOUND inspiration just about everywhere. In Bible stories told by her Catholic grandmother, in Walt Disney and Jane Eyre, in the cobalt tiles that decorated her childhood bedroom: Tidbits she tucked away turned up decades later in her paintings and pastels. But the year that the Portuguese-born artist spent in residence at London’s National Gallery in the early 1990s offered a true gold mine. “I could creep upstairs and snatch at things, and bring them down with me to the basement,” she recalled. Among the treasures Rego, who died in 2022 at age 87, discovered in the vast museum’s galleries was the Venetian painter Carlo Crivelli’s paneled altarpiece La Madonna della Rondine, created for an Italian chapel in the 1490s. It would inspire Rego’s monumental Crivelli’s Garden, a…