Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2024 i Smithsonian Magazine

A MONSTROUS MARRIAGE In legends of Persia—the region now known as Iran—dragon-like serpents are known as azi. A particularly ruthless, three-headed azi called Azi Dahaka once stole a shepherd’s two lovely daughters and made them his wives. A hero, Thraetaona, rose to the now-familiar challenge: He slayed Dahaka and brought the girls home. SCALING BACK According to the Rig Veda, an Indian text more than 3,000 years old, a dragon once presented a challenge for a Hindu god. The draconic demon was withholding water, to the dismay of a people suffering through drought. When Indra, the deity of war and storms, battled and killed the serpent, he freed the rain, enabled sunlight and created a new order. ELEPHANT HUNTER Roman scholar Pliny the Elder wrote a good deal about dragons,…

TEN MONTHS INTO the Civil War, the Union was short on a crucial supply, the absence of which threatened to sap the fighting strength of the Northern army: coffee. This critical source of energy and morale was considered almost as vital as gunpowder; Union General Benjamin Butler ordered his soldiers to carry coffee with them always, saying it guaranteed success: “If your men get their coffee early in the morning, you can hold” your position. But by 1862, imports of coffee were down by 40 percent since the start of the war. Though coffee was cultivated around the world from Java to Ethiopia to Haiti, Brazil had been the main supplier to the United States. The Union blockade of Southern ports, including New Orleans, had slowed coffee imports from Brazil…

WHEN ELIZABETH “LIBBA” COTTEN was around 8 years old, she would slip into her older brother’s room when he was at work, take his banjo off the wall and toy around with it. Immediately, though, little Libba ran into a problem: She was left-handed, while the instrument was right-handed. No matter. The determined young girl simply turned the banjo upside down and taught herself to play that way. For the treble, or higher notes, she used her thumb; for the bass, her fingers. In time, this distinct finger-plucking approach—characterized by its rhythmic, percolating sound and its lively, emotive melodies—would become known as “Cotten Style,” and these early years of musical exploration served as a prelude to a life and career in which Cotten did everything on her own, wholly original terms.…

Southeast Texas’ coast is flat and twiggy, bordered mostly by the sea and emblems of the region’s biggest economies—high-rise hotels and oil and smoke-puffing gas refineries. The coastal resort city of Galveston, about an hour’s drive southeast of downtown Houston, transports more tons of cargo than any other port in the United States. It’s a peaceful, watery place. Two long, thin bodies of land stretch toward each other along the Gulf Coast—Galveston Island and Bolivar Peninsula, separated by less than three miles of water at the entrance to Galveston Bay. Each is about 27 miles long and 3 miles wide at its widest point. In between the two is the mouth of the Houston Ship Channel, which provides an estimated $906 billion in economic value to the U.S. each year. Much…

On October 27, 1815, Prospect Robbins arrived by boat at the point in the alluvial swamps where the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers meet. He planted a post in the ground to mark his arrival, and then, along with his team, he began to trek into the muck. On the same day, a second man, Joseph Brown, embarked with a separate team at another confluence: the mouth of the St. Francis River. Both surveyors were veterans—Brown a captain, Robbins a lieutenant—of an army that a few months earlier had been fending off a British invasion. Now, they were official emissaries of the United States government: here not just to scout the landscape but also to lay upon it a perfect rectilinear grid. Decades earlier, Thomas Jefferson had formed a vision for…

WHEN THE INTERNATIONAL Olympic Committee announced the 2024 Paris Games would include breaking for the first time, not all athletes danced with joy. Indeed, some considered these street stylings to be an expression of anarchy: Michelle Martin, an Australian who dominated international squash in the 1990s, said the move would make “a mockery” of these noble competitions. The flap brings to mind another curious Parisian panic around a new, upstart dance competition—one that, more than a century ago, agitated everyone from nobility to church elders. The rebellious dance was called the tango, and it originated in the brothels and streets of Buenos Aires in the late 1800s. Though the Argentine upper classes associated the tango with violence and illicit sex, their more rakish sons encountered it in downtown cafés and…

Enos Mafokate was 16 when a punch in the face changed the course of his life. It was 1960, and he was delivering milk for a dairy farm north of Johannesburg. It was the height of apartheid, and he knew the rules: He was to call his white employer baas—or boss—and the man’s teenage daughter kleinmiesies—the small madam. But sometimes, when the boss wasn’t around, he called the girl by her first name. One day, he accidentally did it within earshot of her father. Before Mafokate even saw it coming, his boss’s meaty fist collided with his face. “His one hand was as big as two of mine,” Mafokate remembers. One of Mafokate’s bright blue eyes swelled shut. While the girl sobbed, her father guiltily loaded him into his pickup…

Across 1 Cause damage to  4 ___ pollination, technique used by bumblebees  8 How Peter F. Mack flew around the world for his goodwill tour 9 Maker of the G-Shock watch 10 Website with tutorials 11 Large animal on Pablo Escobar’s estate 12 Historic travelers on the Mississippi 14 Boxer with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame 15 Lead-in to mantle 16 Early games co. behind D&D 17 “It’s Raining ___” 18 Internet connection inits. 21 Spanish for “sun” 22 Hurricane prompting the construction of flood barriers around Galveston 23 Pharaoh who supposedly founded Berenike 26 Some natural hairstyles 28 Zap in the microwave 29 Destination to harvest wild blueberries 30 Big name in elevators 31 Group impacted during Civil War-era coffee shortages 32 Collection Down 1 Sweater material from…

IN MAY 1951, REPRESENTATIVE Peter F. Mack was in his southern Illinois district on what promised to be an unremarkable listening tour among his constituents. Amid the usual glad-handing and baby-kissing, Mack received a surprising challenge from his friend John W. Hobbs, an automobile parts manufacturer. Hobbs noted how scary things looked world-wide: Europe was still a mess after World War II, the Soviet Union had recently gotten the bomb, conflicts were raging in Korea and French Indochina, and anti-Western protests had begun in Iran. Conventional diplomacy had failed at the mighty task of bringing peace, Hobbs argued, in large part because U.S. diplomats rarely tried to communicate with ordinary citizens in other countries. “Our top brass just talks to the top brass of other countries,” Hobbs told Mack. “They never…

THE NEW SKIPPER bowling shirt of 1940 offered a sports-friendly fit and boasted that it was “pre-tested by actual bowlers.” Readers today would be surprised by ads for the Skipper, in which a model wears the shirt with a necktie and appears to be buttoning the cuffs of his long sleeves. At the time, this decorous attire was standard at bowling alleys, where women often wore dresses or skirts. But over the next decade, sprawling suburban developments and innovative automatic pin-setting machines inspired a boom in family-friendly bowling centers: Between 1945 and 1957, at least 20,000 new lanes cropped up across the country, some in new establishments sporting flashy chrome, bright upholstery, swanky lounges and other hallmarks of midcentury design. By 1958, the American Planning Association declared that the bowling…

On a sunny morning this past January, Ingo Strauch, an expert in ancient Indian history, crouches in the courtyard of what was once an Egyptian temple. The floor is littere with fallen stones and columns. Nearby, carved hieroglyphs are visible on the salt-corroded walls, which in some places still stand nearly eight feet high. Located just a few hundred steps from the glittering water of the Red Sea, in Egypt’s eastern desert, this remote shrine was dedicated to the mother goddess Isis some 2,000 years ago. Today, the ruins form the most prominent feature of a barren, windswept landscape, inside a restricted military zone a few hours from the modern border with Sudan. But Strauch, scrutinizing a recently unearthed slab, is immersed in a different world. Just beneath the sand…

BUMBLEBEES’ ROUND, HAIRY BODIES are magnets for pollen. Inside flowers, they often “slip, almost fall and somersault,” says conservation biologist Leif Richardson of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation, an international nonprofit. “They make a huge mess and get pollen all over themselves, which makes them effective pollinators for plants,” Richardson says. Being relatively big and covered in black-and-yellow fuzz allows the world’s roughly 250 bumblebee species to withstand more frigid temperatures than honeybees, which are generally daintier and less hairy, and are not native to North America. This makes bumblebees key pollinators in colder, higher-elevation regions such as the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades and the Rocky Mountains of North America. Bumblebees also best honeybees as pollinators for the 6 percent of flowering plants, including blueberries, bell peppers, eggplants and tomatoes,…

IN THE STEAMY HEAT OF AFTERNOON, YAMIT DIAZ ROMERO steered our motorized longboat around overhanging bamboo branches and islets in the Claro Cocorná Sur River, in western Colombia. Red howler monkeys swung from the cables of a footbridge and screeched in the jungle. Herons, snowy egrets, brown pelicans and parakeets darted across the coffee-colored water and soared over our heads. The river is known as a destination for white-water rafting. But these days it’s also become the scene of a more unsettling natural phenomenon. Joining me on the vessel was Alejandro Mira, a veterinarian from Medellín, and Joshua Wilson, an American jujitsu champion and world traveler who had hitched a ride with Mira and me and was sharing the experience with his followers on social media. Fishermen motoring from the opposite…