Smithsonian Magazine April/May 2024

MY FIRST MUSEUM job was at the National Air and Space Museum. It was 1978, and I had just earned my degree in American and African American history, which is to say that I knew nothing about aviation—but I worked at the Smithsonian, and that was all that mattered to me. I had so much to learn, and I will never forget the patience shown to me by museum volunteers. I had countless questions, and they shared a wealth of information on early aviation with inexperienced staff members and visitors alike. Now, as Secretary, I remain humbled by the work and knowledge of our volunteers; they are essential to our operations. More than 3,000 volunteers work on-site. Tens of thousands more contribute from their homes. An example close to my…

More Enlightenment Your article on the Tiff any lamps and the girls who assembled them (“Out of the Shadows,” March 2024) was very informative. However, not mentioning the collection at the New-York Historical Society is a major omission. The society has a permanent exhibit of about 100 Tiff any lamps. Ronald Winchester | New York City Fraud and Forgery I appreciated your well-researched article (“The Art of the Scam,” March 2024) on Norval Morrisseau’s fake paintings. I wish, however, that you had named more names. Thankfully, the article does reference Jamie Kastner’s 2019 documentary There Are No Fakes, a film that features some of the unscrupulous auctioneers and dealers who made the long-running scam possible. Ed Clark | Guildhall, Vermont Looking for the Lost “Up From the Depths” (March 2024)…

IN THE FALL of 1839, New York City’s Apollo saloon hosted a “Ladies Fair,” complete with live music, displays of artisan goods and, of course, refreshments. As the Daily Herald reported, “From the post office to the lemonade stand, bright eyes and smiling faces peered forth, as if heaven had at last been let loose and got a holiday.” This rhapsodic description of a sun-kissed fete is also the first recorded mention of that most American of fixtures, the pop-up vendor hawking lemonade. Though today’s kids might not know it, their operation is the result of 200 years of sweat and ingenuity. Since lemonade stands first began spreading across the country in the 19th century, they’ve served as grifters’ street hustles, legitimate cash cows and instruments of charity. They’ve also…

THE FIRST SQUEEZE Humanity’s earliest known lemony drink sprang up around the tenth century, in Egypt. Kashkab was a mix of barley, mint, black pepper and leaf of citron (a tarter predecessor to the modern lemon). When lemons arrived in North Africa, they became central to the drink, thereafter known as qatarmizat: a blend of lemon juice, water and sugar. PARIS, JE T’AIME By the mid-17th century, carbonated lemonade was popular in Europe. In France’s capital, vendors carried vats of it on their backs, from which they filled glasses for passing pedestrians. As lemonade’s popularity rose, these resourceful merchants became so numerous that in 1676, they unionized as the Compagnie de Limonadiers. AHEAD OF THE SCURVY With the advent of long-distance ocean voyages came scurvy, a deadly affliction caused by…

FRANZ MARC came of age in the early 20th century, a period of rapid change and impending global upheaval. “The climate they were living in was quite apocalyptic,” says Natalia Sidlina, curator of a new show at London’s Tate Modern of artists associated with the journal Der Blaue Reiter (“The Blue Rider”). “It was a time when empires were about to clash, a time of crises of faith, of class struggle.” Founded in Munich by Marc and his friend Wassily Kandinsky, the Blue Rider circle believed that art could not only reflect the turmoil of the times but also help point to a better future. Marc would dedicate most of his canvases to animals. “People with their lack of piety, especially men, never touched my true feelings,” he wrote his…

BASEBALL, MORE THAN any other sport, is grounded in history, built on legend, an enduring portal into the past. So it made a certain sense in 1999 when Major League Baseball’s ninth commissioner, Bud Selig, created an unusual position in pro sports, ensuring that this most classic of American games would have an official, in-house historian. Selig first tapped the encyclopedic knowledge of Jerome Holtzman, who had just retired as a longtime baseball writer and columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and Chicago Tribune. Holtzman, a Chicago native, held the post until his death in 2008. But it’s arguably MLB’s second (and current) official historian, John Thorn, who has truly defined the role, from developing new mathematical ways of understanding the sport to pushing our knowledge of baseball’s roots further and…