Innholdsfortegnelse for November 2023 i Smithsonian Magazine

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…

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…

IT’S A LUMBERING presence before it comes to life—but once it does, it’s the most beloved piece of maintenance equipment on earth. The Zamboni was the brainchild of Frank Joseph Zamboni, born in 1901 to Italian immigrant parents in Utah and raised in Idaho. At 15, Frank was pulled from school to help on the farm, kick-starting his career as a machinist: Frank kept the tractors and balers in tune and worked as a mechanic at a local garage. In 1922, he and his brother Lawrence opened an electrical component and servicing business in Southern California. Fatefully, they also got into ice, helping produce 300-pound slabs to refrigerate rail cars. Frank and Lawrence sold their ice-making plant in 1939 but stripped the refrigeration equipment from it so they could open…

Q:Can every living thing be traced to a single cell? Benjamin Schwartz | Oak Park, Michigan SCIENTISTS AGREE on the basics of how life began, perhaps four billion years ago. Inorganic materials in the depths of the sea—subjected to favorable chemical conditions—most likely came to form a primitive slime, over a long period of time. That slime eventually gave rise to bacteria, or perhaps blue-green algae. No one knows whether these early life-forms developed in several different regions or in one part of the ocean—or from a single cell, as you suggest. When it comes to that level of precision, we may never arrive at a universally acceptable answer. Dave Pawson, researcher of invertebrate zoology, National Museum of Natural History Q: Why is Saturn’s moon Titan the only moon in the…

“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…

ONA BRIGHT DAY EARLY in 1885, Zelia Nuttall was strolling around the ancient ruins of Teotihuacán, the enormous ceremonial site north of Mexico City. Not yet 30, Zelia had a deep interest in the history of Mexico, and now, with her marriage in ruins and her future uncertain, she was on a trip with her mother, Magdalena; her brother George; and her 3-year-old daughter, Nadine, to distract her from her worries. The site, which covered eight square miles, had once been home to the predecessors of the Aztecs. It included about 2,000 dwellings along with temples, plazas and pyramids where they charted the stars and made offerings to the sun and moon. As Zelia admired the impressive buildings, some shrouded in dirt and vegetation, she reached down and collected a few…

In a former boat repair workshop in Venice, down a narrow alley just off the Grand Canal dead-ending at the water’s edge, hides a space now used as a painting studio with Corinthian columns and skylights overhead. Towering canvases hang on every surface. Many more are stacked like dominoes in the corners. A bloody shade of red, the artist’s signature color, mixed from an oil paint base of alizarin crimson, is pervasive in the abstract work here. “I’ve used it again and again and again and again,” says Anish Kapoor, the 69-year-old British Indian artist behind this particular hue, chatting in his newly occupied Venice studio in August. Kapoor has spent decades exploring the possibilities of this corporeal color, in three-dimensional objects forged from silicone, wax and other malleable materials…

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…

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…

IN 1924, PARIS jeweler Cartier debuted a makeup vanity case inspired by the door of an ancient Egyptian tomb. Adorned with mother of pearl, coral and lapis lazuli, the case’s design hearkened back to the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb two years prior, when archaeologist Howard Carter peered through an unsealed door in the Valley of the Kings and discovered “wonderful” ancient artifacts, as he reported back to his companions, according to one popular account. Carter’s unprecedented find ignited the West’s interest in a civilization that dominated the world for some 3,000 years, ushering in a movement that touched every realm of Western culture, from architecture to film to the decorative arts. Now, an intimate exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art argues that Egyptomania’s most lasting influence was in the…

When Dorothy Thompson disembarked from the ocean liner Leviathan in New York on September 14, 1934, it was the first time the reporters waiting at the dock seemed more interested in her than in her Nobel Prize-winning husband, the novelist Sinclair Lewis. He, too, had come to meet her, and was waiting at the side of the pier, quietly irritated by all the attention she was getting. Thompson, a writer for the Saturday Evening Post and other publications, was in the spotlight as the first American correspondent to be expelled from Nazi Germany. A few weeks earlier, as she was having breakfast in her Berlin hotel room, a trench-coated Gestapo agent had appeared at the door with an order that she leave the country within 24 hours. Under police escort,…