Smithsonian Magazine November 2023

BOTH OF MY PARENTS were public school teachers, and I grew up in a household that valued education immensely. We would discuss everything from literature to astronomy; they taught me that an effective teacher knows how to help each student find joy in learning. That sense of curiosity proved to be one of the most important aspects of my life, and I am so proud to have followed in their footsteps to become an educator, too. America’s public school system is charged with informing the next generation about the world so that they might grow up to improve it, and the Smithsonian Institution is determined to contribute to that effort. We are a place of scholarship, research and education, and I take great pride in our work to help strengthen…

“It brought to light the many delights of a region that is passed over by most tourists.” Humanitarian Effort “On Common Ground” (September/October 2023) was an educational awakening for me. New insights into the potato famine in Ireland were revealed, as well as the oppression of the Choctaw Nation. People in need helping and caring for each other across the globe and different cultures—what a wonderful thing. Gina Kirby | Cresson, Pennsylvania Music to Live For “Songs of Survival” (September/October 2023) is a beautiful, culturally important story about classical musician/researcher Mark Ludwig, whose curiosity led to an unearthed treasure trove of concentration camp masterworks that embody the courage, defiance and artistic hunger of doomed men and women. Thomas Giacoponello | Warwick, Pennsylvania Hope for Birds When I saw the photo…

ON A MILD October day in 1929, the architect William Van Alen watched from the corner of 42nd Street and 5th Avenue in Manhattan as a 185-foot steel needle rose from the guts of his unfinished masterpiece, the Chrysler Building. For months, New York media had breathlessly covered the battle between Van Alen and his former business partner, H. Craig Severance, to complete the city’s tallest building. Van Alen’s 27-ton spire, secretly assembled high up in the building’s skeleton, was his trump card. Hoisted into place in less than two hours, the spire brought the Chrysler’s height to 1,046 feet—handily beating Severance’s Manhattan Company Building. But there was scarcely time for celebration. Plans had already been announced for the Empire State Building, which would shatter the Chrysler’s record just over…

WHEN WILLIAM MATTHEW PRIOR (1806-1873) painted Nancy Lawson in 1843, the Maine artist relied on familiar signifiers to portray a woman of wealth and refinement. The wife of a successful Boston clothing merchant, Lawson wears a stylish dress and holds a book—a symbol of her education. Behind her, drapery is pulled back to reveal a bucolic landscape, a common trope in portraits at the time. But as conventional as Prior’s composition may have been, Lawson’s sitting for the portrait was a radical statement, says Emelie Gevalt, a curator at New York’s American Folk Art Museum, where an exhibition of art representing Black subjects from the 17th to 19th centuries opens this month. During that era, Black figures in art, if they appeared at all, were usually anonymous and often included…

THE ARCTIC WOOLLY MAMMOTH named Kik, one of the only Ice Age mammals whose life story is known in detail, was born approximately 17,100 years ago in the Alaskan interior, a region bounded by the Brooks Range to the north and the Alaska Range to the south. Back then, the area was a cold, dry grassland that extended across the Bering land bridge into Siberia, and all the way to western Europe. Paleontologists call this vast region the “mammoth steppe” after the largest animals that traversed it. Adult male woolly mammoths reached a height of 12 feet at the shoulder, with a thick hide, shaggy coat and tusks up to 12 feet long. No predator could bring down an adult, but young mammoths, likely standing about four feet tall, were prey…

THE TUSKS OF KIK the mammoth offer a remarkably complete biography of the creature. Following a painstaking study of isotopes in the tusk, Matthew Wooller’s team was able to identify the areas where Kik spent time during each stage of his life—traveling to some of the outer ranges of present-day Alaska before meeting his end just north of the Brooks Range. The Last Glacial Maximum refers to a period during the final phase of the Pleistocene, around 20,000 years ago, when glaciers covered 25 percent of the Earth’s land area and the sea level worldwide was roughly 400 feet lower than it is today. SOURCE: ADAPTED FROM MATTHEW J. WOOLLER ET AL., LIFETIME MOBILITY OF AN ARCTIC WOOLLY MAMMOTH, SCIENCE 373, 806-808, 2021…