Innholdsfortegnelse for July/August 2025 i Smithsonian Magazine

WHEN THE ICONIC building we call the Smithsonian Castle closed for renovations in 2023, I moved into an office overlooking the place where I started my Smithsonian career: the National Air and Space Museum, which is opening five new galleries in July, with more to come in 2026. Every day, I am treated to the awe-inspiring view of 18-wheelers offloading everything from the celebrated “Glamorous Glennis” Bell X-1 aircraft that first broke the sound barrier to SpaceShipOne, the first privately operated crewed spacecraft. One exhibition opening this month, “Futures in Space,” is unlike any gallery I have ever seen at Air and Space. It is built around a set of questions about the future of space travel: Why continue to go to space? Who makes these decisions? What does the…

CHIROMANCY Reading the lines of the palm may have originated in India before spreading to the Middle East and Europe. Aristotle believed the creases of the palm indicated the length of a life, and by the Renaissance, palmistry had become so popular that it was denounced by the pope. Shakespeare had Othello tell his wife, Desdemona, that her hand “argues fruitfulness and liberal heart.” Not all palm readings are so happy: According to an English guide published around 1700, if a small half-moon shape is lodged in someone’s “middle line,” they’re fated to suffer from “cold and watery diseases.” TASSEOMANCY Reading tea leaves may have originated in China—tea’s birthplace—thousands of years ago, when people first began examining the wet dregs left at the bottoms of their cups. After tea arrived…

LESS THAN TWO HOURS after sunrise, with the shadows still blue and slanting hard in a dense growth of balsam firs and spruces, the baby bird blundered into a fine black net strung along the ridgeline of Mount Mansfield, at 4,393 feet Vermont’s tallest mountain. Desirée Narango, a conservation scientist with the Vermont Center for Ecostudies, or VCE, retrieved the rescued bird and with practiced fingers spread one of its wings like a fan. From the bird’s mottled and rumpled feathers, Narango could see that this slate-colored bird was a darkeyed junco, a sparrow species found in various color combinations across North America. The bird was just a few weeks out from leaving its nest. It was too young to tell its sex. But she was less interested in the…

Q: I have an ancestor who was in Massachusetts in 1640. What is the best way to research ships that arrived before that time? Douglas H. Kerr | Okatie, South Carolina BRITISH SHIPS of the colonial era made lists of their passengers, crew and cargo, although not all such records are still available today. As the first passenger ship to make landfall in New England in 1620, the Mayflower was of particular historical interest, so historians have spent a lot of time researching its 102 passengers. Some left behind written records of their journey in letters and journal entries. Many, many Americans can trace their ancestry to the Mayflower—myself included. My grandmother was a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants (also known as the Mayflower Society), which has…

Following the Leader I really look forward to reading the Institutional Knowledge column written by Lonnie G. Bunch III. Secretary Bunch writes on a variety of topics; sometimes about the Smithsonian but often back stories or perhaps “side” stories to something of interest. He always provides me with some detail, some different way of viewing an event or some nugget of information I did not know about. Each time I read his column I can truly say, “I learned something.” John McLeese | Prairie Village, Kansas A Pilot’s Legacy Thank you for the article about Bessie Coleman’s life as a pioneering Black woman aviator, her youngadult time in Chicago and her premature death (“Queen of the Air,” June 2025). That explains why O’Hare International Airport has a major public onair…

STANDING AT the top of the Empire State Building in the late December chill, Berenice Abbott knew she only had one chance. The photograph she planned to take required a 15-minute exposure, and this was the only evening of the year when the sky would be dark for long enough before the city’s office workers turned out their lights and went home. “She’s hauling this large-format camera around and trying to focus the image,” says Grace Hanselman, curator of a retrospective opening in July at the Clark Art Institute in Massachusetts to mark the centennial of Abbott’s first photographs. “She’s in the dark, too. It’s incredibly difficult.” Best known for her pictures of New York in the 1930s, as well as for portraits of fellow artists and writers in 1920s…

ELL! HERE COMES ol’ Charlie Brown!” says one of the children as Charlie saunters past. “Good ol’ Charlie Brown…. How I hate him!” Blissfully ignorant of his peers’ disdain, Charlie continues smiling—after all, he’s making his debut as the lead character in the very first “Peanuts” strip on October 2, 1950. Before, Charlie played little more than a bit part in “Li’l Folks,” a four-panel strip by local cartoonist Charles M. Schulz. Running in Minnesota’s St. Paul Pioneer Press from 1947 to 1950, the strip earned Schulz $10 a pop and showcased youngsters who were wise in whimsical ways beyond their years. In 1950, Schulz took a somewhat spiffed-up “Li’l Folks” to United Feature Syndicate for nationwide distribution. The group agreed to publish the strip, with one stipulation: The name…

NOT FAR FROM one of Milan’s last remaining medieval gates is a tiny shop door, sandwiched between shuttered storefronts. Cross the threshold, and you’ll enter a gilded world of esoteric symbols: stars, skeletons and fools. This is Il Meneghello, the workshop of some of Italy’s last known great tarot artisans. Inside, on the register, is a portrait of its original owner, Osvaldo Menegazzi. While tarot may be a game or hobby for many, for Menegazzi, it was always first and foremost about the art. Before his death in 2021, he had become world-famous for his painstaking, hand-painted reproductions of some of the world’s most ancient and storied tarot decks. His desk, a mess of paints and materials, is just as he left it. On a rainy day last spring, I…

HISTORIANS SPECULATE that the first golfer was likely a shepherd who grew bored with his work one day, swung his crook and made contact with a rock that went flying. He hit more, and “purely by accident, one of the stones disappeared into a hole,” legendary sportswriter Herbert Warren Wind mused in 1948. Once a second shepherd appeared to compete—or perhaps as soon as one of them began cursing over a misdirected ball—golf was invented. The earliest man-made golf balls ever uncovered were primitive spheres made of hardwood on the east coast of Scotland in the 14th century. By the early 1600s, players were using balls of cowhide stuffed with goose feathers. When doused with water, the leather shrank, and the feathers expanded, and this rough-hewn ball would have flown…

IN THE ANNALS OF EUROPEAN travel, few summer holidays have been so artistically productive as the trip taken by the aspiring 25-year-old writer Ernest Hemingway in July 1925 to Pamplona, the elegant Spanish provincial town in the foothills of the Pyrenees. “Hem,” as he was called by his friends, traveled from Paris with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, to attend the annual Festival of San Fermín, whose most famous element is the running of the bulls, where mostly young men in white outfits with red bandanas and sashes race a dozen enormous bulls and steers through narrow cobbled streets, with the occasional bloody goring or stomping along the way. It was an immersive event with an electric mood, as he had found during his first visit with Richardson two years…

For almost four years, Richard Stephens’ brain felt as if it were jiggling around inside his skull. If he turned his head, his vision wobbled for a few seconds before it became steady again. To cope, he had to constantly pause to stabilize himself and make every movement deliberately to avoid getting a headache. Though he initially had to be in a wheelchair, he trained himself to walk around with a cane and even to keep working his job as an employee benefits counselor, though he had to be driven there. Stephens already knew what ailed him: bilateral vestibular loss. He no longer had function in the sensory machinery responsible for balance. The involuntary movement of his vision was a common symptom. The trouble had begun after a motor scooter…