Innholdsfortegnelse for March 2024 i Smithsonian Magazine

DICE HARD Roman Emperor Nero gambled extravagantly during his FIRST-CENTURY A.D. reign, often in games with four dice. Per Suetonius, Nero would wager 400,000 sesterces (roughly $1.6 million today) on each pip of a throw—risking a loss of up to 9.6 million sesterces. KING SWAP During one card game around the turn of the 16TH CENTURY, Henry VII challenged his courtier Juan de Lepe: If the Spaniard could beat his hand, he’d get to be king of England for a day. De Lepe prevailed and throughout the realm was lauded by his newfound, and very temporary, subjects. KIDDING AROUND While playing cards at an ENGLISH TAVERN IN 1735, Henry and John Trotter bet the child of James and Elizabeth Leesh against a four-shilling wager. When the bet was lost, the…

JUST BEFORE DAWN ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1944, the flight deck of the aircraft carrier USS Enterprise came to life, as ground crews readied a line of airplanes for battle. The day’s mission was critical: to hit Japanese positions and ships in advance of an amphibious invasion of Peleliu, an island in the archipelago of Palau some 50 miles to the west. At approximately 5:30 a.m., the first contingent of planes taxied and took flight. Then crews moved the next group into position on deck: 12 fighter planes known as Hellcats, five heavy bombers called Helldivers and seven even larger bombers known as Avengers. The Avenger, nicknamed the Pregnant Beast, was the heaviest single-engine air-craft produced by any nation during World War II. Its crew members grimly joked that it weighed so…

Drive high enough into western Montana’s Lolo National Forest, up a succession of dirt tracks that parallel glittering creeks and twist through stands of fir and spruce, and eventually you’ll come to a clearing. At first glance it’s unremarkable, a grassy, sunlit hillside scattered with bleached tree trunks, as though a windstorm had opened the canopy. IT WOULD BE A PLEASANT SPOT to sit with your back against a lodgepole pine and watch chickadees bounce from branch to branch. What makes this clearing extraordinary isn’t what’s there now, but what once was—a road. I visited the clearing one summer afternoon with an ecologist named Adam Switalski. Years ago, Switalski explained, large tracts of this land belonged to a private timber company, which had etched the forest with dirt roads to…

FEW IF ANY decorative objects of the early 1900s are as sought after as Tiffany lamps, with their signature patterned lampshades that resemble ornate stained-glass windows. Today, originals, often with dazzling insects and floral motifs, routinely fetch tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars at auction or on design websites—and one Dragonfly Tiffany light from Andrew Carnegie’s personal collection sold for more than $2.1 million at Sotheby’s in New York in 2015. Museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum feature the painted bronze and glass table lamps in their permanent collections. The handcrafted iridescent artworks have spawned many modern knockoffs, from infinitely less expensive copies to Tiffany-style Star Wars lampshades. But equally precious is the secret history contained…

On May 29, 1851, a woman asked to address the attendees of the Ohio Women’s Rights Convention in Akron. She cut a striking figure, close to six feet tall even without her crisp bonnet. She was more than likely the only Black person in the room. A procession of participants had already sounded off about the plight and potential of the “fairer sex” during the two-day gathering. “We are told that woman has never excelled in philosophy or any of the branches of mathematics,” said abolitionist Emily Rakestraw Robinson before noting that women were largely barred from higher education. Lura Maria Giddings lamented: “The degraded, vicious man, who scarcely knows his right hand from his left, is permitted to vote, while females of the most elevated intelligence are entirely excluded.”…

NORVAL MORRISSEAU WAS CERTAIN. “I did not paint the attached 23 acrylics on canvas,” he wrote in a typed letter in 2001 to his Toronto gallery representative, who had sent him color photocopies of works that had recently sold at an unrelated auction. Morrisseau, then in his late 60s and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, was the most important artist in the modern history of Canada’s Indigenous peoples—the “Picasso of the North.” He had single-handedly invented the Woodlands school of art, which fused European and Indigenous traditions to create striking, vibrant images featuring thick black lines and colorful interiors of humans, animals and plants, as though they had been X-rayed and their insides were visible and filled with unusual patterns and shapes. He was one of the first Indigenous painters to…

IN 1829, A GROUP of explorers led by Spanish merchant Antonio Armijo moved west toward Alta California through the arid Mojave Desert—the ancestral lands of the Southern Paiute people. A young scout named Rafael Rivera discovered a particularly verdant area full of grassland irrigated by a natural spring; this lushness soon inspired the place’s name: “The Meadows,” or “Las Vegas.” Though a couple dozen Mormon missionaries arrived here in 1855—largely failing to convert the Paiute population—the oasis remained something of a secret until four years later, when prospectors came to the valley. They found gold and silver, and the ensuing rush sparked a population boom, with miners arriving in droves to dig by day before chancing their new fortunes away in the saloons and bordellos at night. At the turn of…

WHEN AKITO KAWAHARA was 8 years old, his father took him on a members-only tour of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His father, the renowned conceptual artist On Kawara, had introduced him to butterfly collecting early, and Akito had already amassed about 500 of his own specimens. Seeing the enormous cabinets and extensive floor displays of butterflies and other insects on the museum’s fifth floor, Akito was thrilled, but what really captured his attention was an unassuming chart posted on the door of a curator’s office. It was a phylogeny of butterflies—an evolutionary family tree—and it contained many blank spaces. “I was so surprised that scientists didn’t know everything about this, and it became my childhood dream to figure out where butterflies…

TO SEE A DUGONG is to want to hug a dugong, with its round body, gently curved flippers and gigantic smiling face. Along with their manatee cousins, these marine mammals have earned the nickname “sea cows” thanks to their grazing habits, consuming up to 85 pounds of seagrass a day. Seagrass, in turn, depends on the sunlight that illuminates shallow coastal waters. In Australia, where a wide and well-lit continental shelf boasts plentiful seagrass, dugong populations can thrive. “Australia was probably always the dugong capital of the world,” says Helene Marsh, a leading dugong expert at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia. East Africa has a similarly wide continental shelf and may once have housed as many dugongs as Australia, but coastal development and pollution have destroyed seagrass beds. Mean-while,…

Across 1 “Yo te ___” (Spanish for “I love you”) 4 Do-it-yourself purchase 7 Open-mouthed feeling 10 ___ girls, turn-of-the-century group of designers 12 Genre for many Billboard hits nowadays 13 Early visitors to what is now the Las Vegas Strip 15 Old Russian rulers 16 There ___ Fakes, 2019 documentary centered around Morrisseau’s art 17 Musical key with five sharps: Abbr. 19 Chowder creature 20 Pencil’s point 22 Cutesy cat noise 26 Poppy or pansy, in Paraguay 29 Powerful product from poppies 31 “Hold on just a sec!” 34 Question of Truth? 36 Element of Akito Kawahara’s butterfly studies 37 Book keeper 38 Drill instructor’s rank: Abbr. 39 Like some climates and wines 40 Adult content letters Down 1 Periodic table no. 2 Searched-for figures on expeditions to Palau, for…