Innholdsfortegnelse for September/October 2023 i Smithsonian Magazine

IT’S A UNIVERSALLY familiar phrase. Ask any English-speaking adult or child, and they will recognize the label “goody two-shoes” as derogatory shorthand for an insufferable prude—but few remember how it became a staple of popular culture. Before her name became synonymous with sickly-sweet virtue, Goody Two-Shoes was the protagonist of the first English children’s novel, The History of Little Goody Two-Shoes. First published in 1765, the book was a groundbreaking work. It tells the life story of an orphaned girl, Margery Meanwell, whose poverty reduces her to rags—and to wearing just one shoe. When her fortunes improve and she acquires some new footwear, her excitement earns her the nickname “Goody Two-Shoes.” For more than a century, this largely forgotten Cinderella story broke social and literary barriers while delighting readers. The…

It was well before dawn when I set off on foot through Granada’s oldest neighborhood, El Albaicín, an intricate brocade of cobbled streets overhung with fragrant jasmine trees. The first glow of sunlight revealed the titanic walls and turrets of the palace-fortress complex called the Alhambra looming above me on a spectacular crag. Poets have rhapsodized about the structure’s fairytale beauty since the finest craftsmen of the Arab world built it nearly 800 years ago. For over two centuries in the Middle Ages, it was the crown jewel of the Emirate of Granada, which stretched across Spain’s Mediterranean coast from modern-day Gibraltar past the snowcapped Sierra Nevada. After crossing a stone bridge over the River Darro, I took a little-known back route into the palace called Cuesta del Rey Chico,…

IT CARRIES ITSELF WITH CLASSIC ELEGANCE, a nine-foot-long torpedo with tapered fins. Like their oceangoing cousins, Caribbean reef sharks swim fast to force water through their mouths and over their gills so they can take in oxygen. But they can also ventilate their gills by using muscles in their mouth while lounging in the shallows, where they stalk reef-dwelling fish and the occasional unlucky lobster, says Brendan Talwar, a researcher with the Scripps Institution of Oceanography near San Diego, who has worked with Caribbean reef sharks off the island of Eleuthera in the Bahamas. In fact, their iconic streamlined form belies a homebody nature: They rarely stray more than a handful of miles from the reefs they frequent in the Caribbean and along the Atlantic coast of South America. In…

“I’VE ALWAYS BEEN enchanted by hummingbirds,” Stuart says. “Their tiny size and iridescent plumage make them seem as though they are born out of fairy tales.” As otherworldly as these creatures are, they’re not hard to find in western U.S. suburbs. Set out a sugar-water feeder in your garden, and you’re likely to spot them. You might need to pay close attention: They’re only about four inches long and, like other hummingbird species, they move quickly. But the males in particular stand out because of their magenta heads, which shimmer in the sunlight. During courtship dances, the male can rise up as high as 130 feet before diving sharply toward the female. When Stuart moved to the Oregon Coast, she was delighted to find that her landlord maintained feeders for…

WONDERLY WAS WALKING in downtown Santa Rosa when he saw a stark white bird with a five-foot wingspan flying overhead, carrying a stick. Another appeared, then another. “Following the birds and the sound of bird calls, I came to two large eucalyptus trees that are a rookery for egrets and herons,” Wonderly says. Construction in the late 1990s apparently disturbed their earlier breeding colony, so the birds established a new one—right in the middle of a boulevard. In the late 1800s, great egrets were hunted nearly to extinction because their plumes were prized for ladies’ hats. The National Audubon Society helped save them, using the great egret as its logo. “They’re incredibly graceful, spectacular birds,” Wonderly says. “The chicks, however, emerge with green skin and spiky white feathers. They look…

IN WESTERN OREGON where Vyn lives, the tooting of the northern pygmy-owl is the sound of spring. “Even when you don’t see them, while hiking through the forest or sitting in a lush patch of sword ferns on the forest floor and looking up into the canopy, just knowing they are somewhere up there, watching, deepens the experience and magic of place,” he says. Vyn spent ten days waiting near the nest cavity in this tree, hoping for owlets to emerge. Watching the mother owl and her mate deliver food to the chicks, he saw an astonishing range of prey species. “In the predawn hours, moths were commonly delivered, and as the day progressed there was a steady of stream of small mammals and birds.” Mice and voles were often…

Across 1 Alliterative, cheerful greetings 6 Bear whose porridge was too cold for Goldilocks 10 Young ___ (literary genre) 11 Beneficiaries of Choctaw generosity in the mid-19th century 13 “There’s certainly a possibility” 14 Vampire hunter’s weapon 15 Language spoken in Southeast Asia 16 Fighting sport, for short 17 Like Egypt’s Temple of Isis, as discovered centuries later 23 Luxury fashion house from Italy 24 On which Glenn Curtiss reached a speed of 136 miles per hour 29 Number typed with a letter key in Sholes and Glidden’s first keyboard prototype 30 “Errr … I mean …” 32 Creature that’s the focus of ecotourism in Caribbean waters 35 A victim to frosty pod rot 37 Bro 38 Where the Nasrid dynasty ruled 39 Bugs Bunny or Elmer Fudd 40 Big…

BEGINNING WITH its construction in the fourth century B.C. and continuing for more than 800 years, the Temple of Isis on the small island of Philae, set where the Nile flowed out of Nubia, was visited by a stream of pilgrims. Coming from all parts of the Egyptian empire, and even as far away as Cyprus and Rome, they passed between 60-foot towers to attend elaborate seasonal ceremonies that celebrated Isis’ miraculous resurrection of her husband, the god Osiris, and the birth of their son, Horus. They beseeched Isis, the queen of the Egyptian pantheon, for aid and thanked her for interceding in their affairs. Before heading home, many also etched their marks—a carving of their footprints on sacred ground, a picture of the deity, a name, a date or…

“WE ALL KNOW CURTISS. HE’S THE GRANDFATHER WHO STARTED THIS STUFF.” THE 1907 CURTISS V-8 looks like it went fast. It suggests a lifetime of high speed, as if the very wind had cocked the forks back, swept its handlebars out like streamers, even smoothed and elongated its frame. Other motorcycles of the age, like the early Harley-Davidsons and Triumphs, look more like bicycles, with jaunty upright handlebars, cheerful enamel paint jobs and compact motors offering single-digit horsepower. The Curtiss, by contrast, looks vicious: satin-black, ears back, with eight finned cylinders churning out 40 horsepower, a big dog ready to bite. The engineer and racer Glenn Curtiss wasn’t intimidated by the machine he’d designed when he threw a leg over it and throttled out across the hard-packed sand of Ormond…

OF ALL THE HEIRLOOM cacao pods laid before us on a rickety wooden table, on this quiet hillside outside the city of Manta in Ecuador, the ancient variety known as Nacional was misleadingly plain. It was hard to believe this shriveled yellow pod contained one of the world’s rarest and most coveted cacao beans. Then I tasted its fruit in its fresh, raw, pure form. The flesh is peachy and bright, with a fragrant and sugary bouquet. And the beans, once roasted and hand-ground into a thick paste, give off a rich scent of pure dark chocolate that becomes almost overpoweringly seductive. Servio Pachard, one of the world’s foremost cacao experts, combined that paste in a metal bowl with sugar and other ingredients, his jaunty straw hat dipping over dark…

IF IT LOOKS LIKE these two sharp-tailed grouses are taking part in an elaborate dance, they are. As females look on, the males point their tails upward, spread their wings, hold their heads low and stamp their feet in a stuttering pattern. These courtship demonstrations are so elaborately choreographed and perfectly synchronized that Native American groups have emulated them. To this day, the Northern Tutchone First Nations group of Yukon continues to perform a grouse dance. The Columbian sharp-tailed grouse can be found in the north-central and western U.S. and parts of Canada. To get this image, Paothong showed up on a frigidly cold Wyoming morning before the birds arrived—around 5 a.m. He set up a photo blind, or camouflaged tent, away from the mating ground and waited expectantly for…

WHEN A MALE roadrunner courts a female, he may bring a gift: a dead lizard, a centipede, a dragonfly or a small bird. After holding out his offering, he proceeds to mate with the female. It’s an effective seduction tactic: Roadrunners mate for life. The bird in this picture is a regular visitor to the South Texas ranch where Aigner teaches photography workshops. He’s known around the ranch as Sir Walter Camilo Meeplethorpe. For a while last year, he seemed forlorn. “Each day that summer, Sir Walter would hoo call,” she says—a sound not unlike the cooing of a dove. Sir Walter kept showing up at a half-built nest and calling out, a gift always in his mouth. Bird biologists suggested to Aigner that Sir Walter had lost his mate,…

WHEN STONE WAS a biologist with the National Audubon Society, he used to love watching a spoonbill chick push out of its shell. “It used the only tool it had: a blunt pink spoon,” he says. The distinctive bill would prove to be useful as the chick grew to scoop up crustaceans and fish. Naturalists have fun describing these birds. “The spoonbill exhibits paradoxical glamour and drollery,” wrote Robert Porter Allen in 1942. The Audubon Society’s website describes it in the words of contemporary field guide author Kenn Kaufman: “gorgeous at a distance and bizarre up close.” After being almost exterminated by plume hunters in the late 1800s, roseate spoonbills have made a remarkable (though incomplete) comeback. They’re usually found along the Gulf Coast and farther south, but with sea-level…

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…

HEW MORRISON specializes in bringing the dead back to life, in giving a face to the faceless. Born in Inverness, Scotland, and currently based in Thailand, Morrison is a freelance forensic artist. His canvas is a laptop, and he often works with the police and private investigators to reconstruct faces of unidentified corpses. He also works with archaeologists, among whom he has become the go-to guy for recreating likenesses of figures from centuries or even millennia ago. It’s painstaking work: For his history projects, Morrison refers to CT scans or photographs of skeletons and skulls as well as paintings, tapestries, busts, sculptures and historical accounts to fashion the most accurate and compelling portraits. When there’s ancient DNA analysis available, Morrison can even get a good idea of what hair and…

THE EVENING GROSBEAK tends to hover north of Groo’s home in Central New York State. So she was delighted when a flock of them recently appeared outside her house. “When they roam further south in winter in search of food, I’ve been blessed with their presence, sometimes over months,” she says. “This past winter and into very early spring, I had a flock of up to 15 visiting my platform bird feeder daily, hoovering up black oil sunflower seeds.” Seeds and berries are favorite food sources for these birds. In the summer, they also eat insects. While they breed in coniferous forests, their southern migrations don’t always take them to the same place, which makes their appearances somewhat unpredictable. Groo made the most of the grosbeaks’ visit. To get this shot,…

WALKING ALONG A BEACH in the eastern United States, you might spot one of these small, round birds in the midst of its signature foot-trembling maneuver. Piping plovers will dash along the shore and then suddenly stop and tap the sand with one foot. The leading theory holds that the goal of all this stomping is to startle insects and other prey, making them easier to detect and catch. The piping plover is an endangered species, almost gone from the Great Lakes region where it once thrived. If you’re lucky enough to spot one on the Atlantic Coast, you’ll have a good shot at getting a picture, since these birds frequent busy beaches and tend to be well-acclimated to humans. But to get a spectacular shot like this one, says…

FOR ANYONE WHO considers the California condor an unsightly bird, U.S. RANGE Asel suggests watching them at sunset. “Their heads and crops can reflect the entire range, from yellow to pink to crimson,” he says. “You can hear the wind flow past their massive wingtips, almost like the sound of dozens of swords simultaneously swinging through the air.” California condors are the largest bird species in North America. They are critically endangered, with just 275 free-flying in California, Utah, Arizona and Baja California. They serve the environment by cleaning up animal carcasses, a role they’ve played since the days of woolly mammoths and saber-toothed tigers. “If you’re lucky enough to have one of these flying giants soar right past you and look you right in the eyes, you can immediately…

In 1988, Mark Ludwig, a tenured violist with the Boston Symphony Orchestra, was between events at New York City’s Carnegie Hall when he wandered into his favorite used bookshop. He picked up a biography of Leo Baeck, the 20thcentury German rabbi and scholar. Baeck had been imprisoned during World War II at the Terezin concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. He’d survived, settled in London and become one of the foremost theologians of his day. Something in the book caught Ludwig’s attention—Baeck’s observation that despite the hardship and cruelty of the camp, inmates produced an impressive output of high-quality classical music. Ludwig had heard of Terezin: The Nazis had established it as a way station to the notorious extermination camps such as Auschwitz and Dachau. He knew that famous artists and musicians…