Smithsonian Magazine September/October 2023

Also Overlooked It’s supremely ironic that Will McCarthy’s article “The Frontier Midwife” (July/August 2023) bemoaning the lack of recognition accorded Anna Pierce for her research on “milk sickness” almost skips past the Native American woman who flat-out told her, “It’s caused by that plant over there.” Seems like the unnamed Native American woman deserves at least as much recognition. Bill MacLeod | Whitehall, Michigan Treasures of Fiber Art Bisa Butler’s gorgeous quilts (“Dreaming in Color,” July/August 2023) and the symbolism within them are the next step in the evolution of the quilt as art—which it always has been, even though the “art” world denied that for centuries. Kerry Corthell | Dayton, Ohio Having grown up surrounded by quilts, there was always a story behind the piece. Bisa Butler’s work combines…

WHEN I WAS BUILDING the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), I was determined to collect the remnants of one of the many ships that carried enslaved Africans across the Atlantic. To do so, we partnered with George Washington University, the Iziko Museums of South Africa and several other institutions to create the Slave Wrecks Project, which helped recover the São José, a Portuguese slave ship that sank off the coast of South Africa in 1794. Several artifacts from the shipwreck now reside in NMAAHC’s permanent collections. Many more ships—and the human remains of the nearly two million people who died during the Middle Passage—have never been recovered. A new exhibition at the National Museum of African Art, which celebrates its 60th anniversary next year, imagines an…

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THE FIRST AND longest-ruling mascot of the United States made her debut before the country was even a country, appearing in 17th-century poems and sermons under the name “Columbina.” Samuel Sewall, a chief justice of the Province of Massachusetts Bay, captured her early ethos in a 1697 essay: She was, Sewall wrote, an emblem of the “New Heaven” of the American colonies. By the early 18th century, she was known by the less diminutive “Columbia,” and she became ubiquitous in political cartoons, posters and newspapers. She was portrayed as a goddess, draped in a neoclassical gown and holding a sword, an olive branch and a laurel wreath as metaphors for justice, peace and victory. As Lady Columbia’s image spread across the country, particularly after the Revolution, she came to embody…

PLAGUE ON YOU,” cries Brother Jonathan in an 1813 political cartoon. He wears a colonial hat and a mischievous smile as he assaults a Redcoat with a mug of fermented pear juice. It was a typical appearance for this young and brash character, who first entered political cartoons during the Revolutionary War, inspired by Jonathan Trumbull, governor of Connecticut and a close wartime adviser to George Washington. Brother Jonathan became a wartime mascot, embodying the upstart energy of the early United States. Over the next few decades, as the country outgrew this rambunctious youngster, he was slowly edged out by the figure we now know as Uncle Sam, originally named after a meat magnate from New York State. (In the Civil War, Sam grew a beard modeled on Lincoln’s.) Uncle…

JAGGED PEAKS and desolate terrain were the muses of Charlotte Butler Skinner. The under-celebrated 20th-century painter spent a lifetime chronicling the Sierra Nevada and the high desert of the Owens Valley along the eastern edge of California. She painted the majestic alpine ridges of Mount Whitney and the Alabama Hills, as well as rocky tableaux near her home in Lone Pine, California, where she spent almost three decades painting, printmaking and teaching classes. During her life, Skinner exhibited at galleries throughout the American West. This month, a survey of her work opens at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, including pieces given to her by influential friends such as photographer Dorothea Lange and sculptor-muralist Ralph Stackpole. “All of the artists would have visited Charlotte looking for new inspiration, solitude…