Smithsonian Magazine June 2024

Taste of Nostalgia I never pass by a child’s lemonade stand without stopping to buy some and then offer a generous tip (“Sweet Dreams,” April/May 2024). It’s not the beverage that I seek—that is usually over-or under-sweetened and sometimes served under less than sanitary conditions. I enjoy seeing the smiles on the faces of the children as they become flush with cash and conspire to determine what happiness that cash will buy after the stand is closed. The aftertaste of these cool drinks is always a déjà vu of the memories of my own childhood lemonade stand. That’s why I usually buy two glasses. John M. Nonnemacher | Hazleton, Pennsylvania Young Revolutionaries I graduated college 43 years ago with a bachelor’s in history. This is the first time I’ve ever…

IN SEPTEMBER OF 2004, I flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C. for the grand opening of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). I fought my way through the crowds and stood near the Smithsonian Castle, where I watched a procession of thousands of Native people from across the Americas, many dressed in full traditional regalia, as they marched on the National Mall. The six-day event remains the largest gathering of Indigenous people that has ever occurred in Washington, D.C. This year, our annual Folklife Festival—a decadeslong Smithsonian summer tradition on the National Mall that celebrates the depth and diversity of culture—will honor the 20th anniversary of the museum’s opening, along with other milestones. This year marks a century since the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted…

IN THE LATE 1920s, an ambitious young Stanford grad named Wally Byam found himself in booming Los Angeles, far from the rural Oregon of his youth, where he and his family had been happy, and frequent, campers. Byam, a magazine publisher, couldn’t wait to ditch his suit and tie to go camping on days off, but his wife proved less enthusiastic about sleeping on the dewy ground. He devised a compromise, elevating their tent on a wooden platform that sat atop the chassis from an old Ford Model T; the Byams’ own car then towed the tent-laden contraption. “I guess we looked like an itinerant patent-medicine show,” he’d later tell a reporter. “But it worked.” So Byam kept tinkering, building a teardrop-shaped trailer out of plywood as a sturdier substitute…

BORN TO A FORMERLY ENSLAVED mother in Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) moved to Paris as a teen with his plantation-owner father and launched his artistic career during the tumultuous years before the French Revolution. Lethière’s talent as a painter of portraits of the rich and famous, landscapes, and scenes from history won him plum academic posts and a place at the center of Creole society. But in the two centuries after his death, the neo-Classicist has faded into relative obscurity. That’s set to change in June with the world’s first-ever Lethière retrospective, at Massachusetts’ Clark Art Institute. The show aims not just to rehabilitate Lethière as an artist but also to tell the story of a remarkable life. He lived in an age of “drastic shifts in politics and painterly…

FUTURE TITAN OF INDUSTRY Henry Clay Folger Jr. lived the first part of his life in Dickensian poverty. Born in Brooklyn in 1857, he used essay contests to pay for his education at Amherst College, where he hand-washed his own laundry to save money and still could not afford coal for heat. And he was a deep admirer of William Shakespeare: He recalled delight in reading the Bard’s plays and poems “far into the night” while still at Amherst. A guest lecture by 75-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson inspired Folger to search out the author’s 1864 “Remarks at the Celebration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Shakespeare,” further enflaming his passion. Still, little about his early life indicated Folger would amass the largest collection of Shakespeareana in the…

PERICLES, PRINCE OF TYRE Pericles is one of the least-performed plays in Shakespeare’s canon. Some scholars believe Shakespeare co-wrote the play with fellow playwright George Wilkins, though Wilkins was never credited. The play’s title character spends the first two acts trying to win the hands of princesses through competitions devised by their kingly fathers, and even saves a community from famine. Once married, Pericles comes to believe his new wife has died in childbirth at sea and casts her coffin overboard—even though she’s still alive! How will they reunite? THE TWO NOBLE KINSMEN This collaboration between Shakespeare and playwright John Fletcher borrows plotlines from Chaucer’s “The Knight’s Tale” and follows cousins Palamon and Arcite of Thebes. Imprisoned by the Duke of Athens, the cousins espy the beautiful Emilia from their…