Innholdsfortegnelse for April/May 2024 i Smithsonian Magazine

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…

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…

DRAWING BOARD Some ideas were especially forward-thinking. A 1913 patent proposed an “amusement apparatus,” which showed a baseball diamond on a board that used stick figures, bells and flashing lights to allow fans in one city to follow a game from afar, using the telegraph for updates. Though the apparatus wasn’t widely available, this display represented a forerunner to real-time game updates on sports websites. BELLS AND WHISTLES How to determine exactly when a runner reaches a base? An 1875 patent suggests an elegant solution: A base should have a bell inside of it—or perhaps “a sounding whistle, electrical connection or any other suitable enunciating device”—to help the umpire decide if a runner was safe or not. In a similar e. ort at eliminating human error, an 1888 patent sought…

Q: Why aren’t there freshwater seals or dolphins in the Great Lakes? Kurt Petersen | Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin THE GREAT LAKES started to form about 10,000 years ago as glaciers began to retreat, and they reached their present state 3,000 years ago. This is very recent in the context of evolution. Niagara Falls kept cetaceans and seals from colonizing most of the Great Lakes; however, there is evidence from historical records that harbor seals did inhabit Lake Ontario and Lake Champlain up into the early 1800s but were hunted to extinction there. Marine mammals are known to occur in the tidal segments far up the St. Lawrence River. Currently the largest semiaquatic mammal in the Great Lakes is the North American river otter. Michael McGowen, curator of marine mammals, National Museum…

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)…

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…

EVEN BEFORE YOU walk into the prefabricated steel building set in the woods off a country road, you’ll hear a muffled clacking sound. Once you step through the door into the workroom of Thistle Hill Weavers outside of Cherry Valley, New York, the noise from the electric-powered mechanized looms grows almost deafening. A peek into the weaving room shows workers, wisely, wearing ear protectors. Labeled archival boxes crammed on floor-to-ceiling shelves almost fill the workroom, leaving just enough space for several wooden floor looms. A large wooden worktable fills the rest of the space—where a weaver might sit and attach trim or fringe to the edge of a piece of fabric, or closely examine something right off a loom, or where, at noon, you would find the weavers eating their…

LYDIA ABARCA’s ballet career was forewritten in her body and her posture from early childhood, when she seemed to hover above everyone else on an invisible string. Accepted into the elite Juilliard School in 1961 at age 10, she spent four years there, the lone Black girl surrounded by affluent white girls. At the time, many ballet companies rejected Black dancers altogether. By age 15, Abarca would recall, “I’d become convinced that for a Black girl, ballet was an impossible climb straight to a dead end.” Yet Abarca managed a breakthrough after she became a founding member of the Dance Theater of Harlem, a pioneering Black ballet company conceived in 1969 by the Harlem-born dancer Arthur Mitchell, who’d served as the first Black principal dancer in the New York City…

The first golden age of Athenian tourism occurred around 435 B.C., when culture-lovers from around the Greek world flocked to the city at the peak of its glory. It was an unforgettable travel experience: After arriving by sea at the port of Piraeus, wide-eyed ancient sightseers would walk the four miles along defensive walls to the central Agora, the market square where illustrious philosophers like Socrates debated, young athletes worked out beneath marble colonnades, mathematicians drew their geometric theorems in the sand, and splendid temples were crowded with ravishing artworks by the world’s most talented sculptors. Travelers rushed to the houses of historical celebrities, the grave of lawgiver Solon and the supposed resting place of the mythic hero Oedipus. The main attraction, however, was to ascend on foot the Panathenaic…

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…

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…

When he picks me up at the airport, Gary Cobb is wearing a nudibranch baseball cap, a gray T-shirt covered in illustrations of nudibranchs of various kinds, and wraparound sunglasses known colloquially in Australia as “speed dealers.” It is a bright, clear winter’s day in Mooloolaba, on Australia’s Sunshine Coast. “I own 15 of these shirts,” Cobb, 73, says later, as we walk to a restaurant in a small shopping center. “That’s all I wear. And I do that because it’s a talking point.” He stops in at a dive shop. A young woman behind the counter greets Cobb warmly: “He’s just a bloody legend,” she tells me. “You can quote me on that.” She draws tiny hearts on his tank and flippers. Cobb points out a hand-painted mural depicting…

LIKE ANY NEW MOM, Sharlie Brown was anticipating special moments with her baby. A technician at a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, immunogenetics lab, she decided a high-quality camera would be the best way to capture them. She had no idea where that maternal instinct would lead. Twelve years later, Brown now runs a successful photography business on the side. She’s also the grand prize winner of Smithsonian’s 21st Annual Photography Contest, which drew 30,728 submissions from 5,324 photographers in 128 countries around the globe. “I feel like I’m walking in my purpose,” Brown says. The young woman featured in her winning photograph, a model named Seriana Gamble, exudes a similar confidence. “She sits on the step with a poise that says, ‘I own this space,’” says Smithsonian magazine creative director Maria…