Smithsonian articles from April 2003

Smithsonian archives from April 2003

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2003... Readers respond to the February issue: ENDING POLIO reading "Mission Impossible?" I could not help but remember the tireless efforts of my husband, Albert Sabin, developer of the oral polio vaccine, to personally promote National Days...

Saddam: King of Terror.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... SADDAM: KING OF TERROR CON COUGHLIN ECCO / HARPERCOLLINS, $26.95 Over four decades, Saddam Hussein, who was born in 1937, raised himself from his origins as a fatherless and impoverished child near Tikrit, 90 miles north of Baghdad, to...

Hey, Waitress! The USA from the Other Side of the Tray.(Book Review)
April 1, 2003... HEY, WAITRESS! THE USA FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE TRAY ALISON OWINGS UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, $29.95 ever wonder what waitresses have nightmares about? They can't deliver the food to their customers because the plates stick to their...

The curse of count Dracula: the prospect of a tourist bonanza from a Dracula theme park in Transylvania excites some Romanians, but opponents see only red.
April 1, 2003... The breite plateau, a broad sheep-grazing ground of 300 acres or so, lies a couple of hundred miles north of Romania's capital, Bucharest, but only a ten-minute car ride from Sighisoara, the city of 38,000 that owns the land. Interspersed here...

Exotic climes: going the extra mile for bears and bats. (Editor's Note).(Arctic)
April 1, 2003... Arctic bound? A few tips: sealskin is warmer than synthetic fleece. Dogsleds outperform snowmobiles. Kayaks are better than motorboats. And pencils are far preferable to pens, which tend not to work at temperatures below freezing. These are a...

Manhattan bound: a new book of photographs by octogenarian Helen Levitt charts her amused view of an ever-evolving New York. (Indelible Images).(Here and There)
April 1, 2003... Helen Levitt, who is 89 years old and is publishing her fifth book of photographs this spring, says that out of the thousands of pictures she has taken over the decades, her favorite is the one at left, from 1982. Like many of Levitt's...

Just looking.
April 1, 2003... DUTY CALLS As United Nations inspectors searched for banned weapons in Iraq, these men from the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit at the San Diego Naval Station said good-bye to their wives before leaving for the Persian Gulf. (Photographed by...

Westward ho! Two hundred years ago this month, Thomas Jefferson purchased the Louisiana Territory from France, changing the shape of a nation and the course of history.
April 1, 2003... Understandably, Pierre Clement de Laussat was saddened by this unexpected turn of events. Having arrived in New Orleans from Paris with his wife and three daughters just nine months earlier, in March 1803, the cultivated, worldly French...

Playing by ear: people say the darndest things. At least I think they do. (The Last Page).
April 1, 2003... Ok, I'm in a restaurant and the waiter asks me if I would like marbles on my pizza. "Sir, you are perfectly mad," I'm tempted to say, a derisive grin on my face. "Who do you know who eats marbles on a pizza?" Instead I suppress my howls,...

Mr. Lincoln's Washington: the house where the conspirators hatched their heinous plot now serves sushi, and the yard where they were hanged is a tennis court. But much of the slain 16th president's capital remains surprisingly intact. (Crime! Intrigue! Tragedy!).
April 1, 2003... Washington, D.C. is chockablock with historians, but perhaps none so jaunty as satirist Christopher Buckley, who says that Congress in 1783 debated a "bill requiring air bags and rear brake lights on stagecoaches." Buckley, a Washington...

Wall flowers: a collector's passion sparks a contemporary rebirth of botanical art. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).(Shirley Sherwood)
April 1, 2003... A rare, palmlike tree stands in the Kirstenbosch National Botanical Gardens in Cape Town, South Africa, the base of its trunk surrounded by a cage. It is a male cycad, an Encephalartos woodii. No female woodiis are known to exist, and the plant...

From the attic. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... KOMODO CHAOS Komo was safe in his new home at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. with keeper Roy Jennier by his side. A few months earlier, on September 27, 1937, the Komodo dragon had arrived by freighter in New York City after a 12,854-mile...

Flight of fancy: like his heroes from aviation's golden age, Gus McLeod plans a pole-to-pole flight. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
April 1, 2003... For the moment, it sits inside a maintenance hangar at the Baltimore-Washington International Airport: a silver, snub- nosed, twin-engine prop plane. The Beech 18 looks like something you'd use to spirit Humphrey Bogart out of Casablanca. "It...

Who's counting? (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
April 1, 2003... 250 POSY HOLDERS GRACE THE COLLECTIONS OF THE HORTICULTURE SERVICES DIVISION. USED BY WELL-DRESSED WOMEN OF THE MID-1800S AS FASHION ACCESSORIES--EITHER CARRIED, WORN AS A PIN OR SUSPENDED FROM A CHAIN LINKED TO A FINGER RING--THE POSY...

New under the sun. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... NEW UNDER THE SUN In January, astronomers Matthew Holman of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and J.J. Kavelaars of the National Research Council of Canada in Victoria, British Columbia, announced the...

Hurry in. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).(Brief Article)
April 1, 2003... "Floating World Revealed: Ukiyo-E Paintings and Prints," an exhibition of the Freer Gallery's Edo-period Japanese art, closes May 26. Theaters, bordellos and teahouses flourished in 19th-century Edo (today's Tokyo); the Floating World refers to...

Visit the Smithsonian. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
April 1, 2003... For a free Associates' planning packet, call Smithsonian Information, 202-357-2700 or 202-357-1729 (TTY), 9 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday through Saturday, or send an e-mail to info@si.edu. INFORMATION CENTER: Upon arrival, stop at the Smithsonian...

A conversation with Maya Angelou at 75.(Interview)
April 1, 2003... Turning 75 this month, Maya Angelou has led many lives. She is best known as a writer, for her numerous books of poetry and her six poignant memoirs, including the masterful 1969 I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In February, she won a Grammy...

This month in history: April anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
April 1, 2003... 30 YEARS AGO: TOWERING SYMBOL At the dedication of the newly completed Twin Towers, April 4, 1973, project architect Minoru Yamasaki called the World Trade Center a "living symbol of man's dedication to world peace." Yamasaki died in 1986 at...

Power balls: out of the park: signed balls soar into the stratosphere. (The Object At Hand).
April 1, 2003... In 1927, five-year-old elliot spencer contracted a life-threatening infection of the blood, causing the New York City Health Department to post a quarantine notice on the door of his family's Bronx apartment. When a microbe-phobic neighbor...

Hewed from history: in Charleston, South Carolina, shipwrights re-create a 19th-century schooner. (Points Of Interest).
April 1, 2003... Under a soaring white tent, two volunteers coated in sawdust pull a 15-foot-long oak plank through an eight-foot-tall band saw. Gas-powered planers and circular saws howl and screech. The deafening noise suits the half-dozen men armed with...

The stuff of genes: fifty years after the discovery of DNA's structure, the payoff hasn't matched the hype. But really, we've only just begun. (Presence Of Mind).
April 1, 2003... In january 1953, deoxyribonucleic acid, DNA, was known to scientists numbered in the low hundreds. Its function puzzled, at most, a few score. The question of its three-dimensional molecular structure interested perhaps a dozen people. That...

Particulars of context: there's art in the history at the Archives of American Art. (From the Secretary).
April 1, 2003... A work of art is not absolute and autonomous; it's human, made by an individual for presentation to a world that may embrace or dismiss it, or do neither exactly, or both in turn. To state the obvious: artists and their art exist within a...

Degas and his dancers: a major exhibition and a new ballet bring the renowned artist's obsession with dance center stage.
April 1, 2003... "Yesterday i spent the whole day in the studio of a strange painter called Degas," Parisian man of letters Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his diary in 1874. "Out of all the subjects in modern life he has chosen washerwomen and ballet dancers...it...

Bringing up baby: scientists zero in on the caring and cunning ways of a seldom-seen waterbird. (Phenomena & Curiosities).
April 1, 2003... A red-necked grebe carries on its back a riotously patterned hatchling that appears both eager to explore this new world and reluctant to leave its downy throne. Because red-necks are especially elusive, darting underwater or hiding amid the...

Bear trouble: only hundreds of miles from the North Pole, industrial chemicals threaten the Arctic's greatest predator.
April 1, 2003... Carved by harsh winds and ancient glaciers and marked by jagged mountains and fjords, Svalbard, Norway, comprises a group of islands 650 miles inside the Arctic Circle, closer to the North Pole than to Oslo. One of the last true wildernesses,...

To fly! A new book traces the Wright brothers' triumph 100 years ago to an innovative design and meticulous attention to detail.
April 1, 2003... "We look back now, and it's so obvious that December 17, 1903, was the date flight happened. It wasn't so obvious back then," says James Tobin, author of To Conquer the Air: The Wright Brothers and the Great Race for Flight, published this...

Fabricating art: Laura Breitman fashions photo-realist collages out of whole cloth.
April 1, 2003... The large glass doors in Laura Breitman's Warwick, New York, studio frame views of dense woods and rock ledges soon to be covered with wild columbine. In winter, when the tangled branches are dusted with snow, the scene closely resembles one of...