Smithsonian articles from April 2004

Smithsonian archives from April 2004

Towering mysteries: who built them and why? An amateur archaeologist tries to get to the bottom of some astonishing structures in Tibet and Sichuan Province, China.(Phenomena & Curiosities)
April 1, 2004... Martine "frederique" darragon set out from New York City for the hinterlands of western China and Tibet in 1998 to pursue an interest in the endangered snow leopard when she fell under the spell of another elusive phenomenon: old stone towers,...

And now for something completely different.
April 1, 2004... From left to right, above: Fueled by the failure of now-fired reporter Andrew Gilligan to document his claim that the government "sexed up" a dossier on Iraq, the BBC brouhaha resulted in the suicide of David Kelly, a weapons expert, and...

Bound For the Promised Land.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Bound for the Promised Land Kate Clifford Larson Random House, $26.95 It is a risky business to tamper with a national icon and trickier still to convey the full dimension of the individual behind the legend. But Kate Clifford Larson has...

Photos for all time: a new book, At First Sight, draws on all of the Smithsonian's vast archives to chart photography's profound place in history.(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... From the beginning, photography traded in volume. Picture upon picture, photographs began to form an inventory of our world--a visual catalog of things and people that were important: the tallest building, the fastest horse, our likenesses in...

Georgia at a crossroads: past armed checkpoints into outlaw lands, the author traces the history of the Caucasus republic, a leading recipient of U.S. aid and scene of a potential new cold war.
April 1, 2004... From the sooty maw of an unlit tunnel at Rikoti Pass, where the jagged massifs of the Great Caucasus and Lesser Caucasus mountains come together, we drove out into flurrying snow and whirling fog, heading west. The decayed asphalt wound down...

Flower child: a Vietnam War protester recalls a seminal '60s image, part of a new book celebrating French photographer Marc Riboud's 50-year career.(Indelible Images)
April 1, 2004... Thousands of antiwar activists, hippies, students and draft resisters streamed into the capital on one of those balmy Indian summer days that can make autumn in Washington, D.C. seem magical. October 21, 1967, wasn't the first gathering in the...

Flying high.(Just Looking)
April 1, 2004... Caption: FLYING HIGH "I felt four tons lighter," says sculptor Ray Kaskey, 61, of the occasions last October when his eight 8,000-pound bronze eagles, all boasting a wingspread of 12 feet, were each hoisted onto the site of the new National...

Manatee rights.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... What type of people think they have a "right" to boat even if manatees get chopped up by propellers ("Fury Over a Gentle Giant")? And what type of people think they have a "right" to destroy an animal's habitat? The importance people give...

Clinging to Saddam.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... In lois raimondo's article "Baghdad: Beyond the Headlines," her Iraqi driver's comment--"People love Saddam because they are afraid of him"--was a chilling reminder of a similar thought in William Faulkner's macabre short story "A Rose for...

Popham postscript.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... I enjoyed "Maine's Lost Colony," about the excavation of Popham, an early 17th-century English settlement. The colony, however, has not been quite so forgotten as some have assumed. Note the 1957 commemorative postage stamp recognizing Popham...

Please don't feed the diatoms.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... Regarding "Gas Guzzlers," about the role that diatoms play in sequestering atmospheric carbon dioxide, we should all be horrified at the idea of fertilizing oceans with iron in order to boost the growth of these phytoplankton to help reduce the...

Naughty Nelson.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... I'm surprised, in reading "Lord Nelson: Hero and... Cad!" that author Michael Ryan doesn't judge Nelson more harshly, not only in the bedroom but in affairs of state. For example, after the fall of the short-lived Parthenopian Republic in...

Bird traffic control.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... the torrejon Air Base in Spain had a problem with birds colliding into aircraft ("When Bird Meets Plane") because migrating birds flew over the base. Heeding the dictum that the best defense is a good offense, Air Force authorities arranged...

Stevens v. Buchanan (cont.).(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
April 1, 2004... readers of "Digging Into a Historic Rivalry," on the Thaddeus Stevens-James Buchanan rivalry, may be interested in this follow-up. Shortly after Buchanan's death, when the House of Representatives considered on June 3, 1868, a resolution...

Off the charts: going where few cartographers have gone before, the expedition members hope to find a river that will carry them all the way to the Pacific Ocean.(Lewis And Clark)
April 1, 2004... As the winter of 1804 turned finally to spring at Woods River, near St. Louis, Lewis and Clark continued to prepare for their expedition, debriefing traders and merchants about the surrounding area and neighboring tribes. Their primary goal was...

Baseball's anthem for all ages: in 1908, an improbable pair of music men hit a tuneful home run without ever having seen a game.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
April 1, 2004... On the eve of the 1956 World Series, a sickly, 78-year-old man lay in his Beverly Hills apartment watching television. The year had produced a "subway series"--the Brooklyn Dodgers versus the New York Yankees--and now, on his Sunday night TV...

One woman's view.(From The Attic)
April 1, 2004... ONE WOMAN'S VIEW In the September 1897 issue of Ladies' Home Journal, 33-year-old Frances Benjamin Johnston advanced the thoroughly modern notion that women might earn a living with a camera. Her tip: "Serve an apprenticeship in the...

Da Vinci: encoded: a new Smithsonian book explores the genius of Leonardo.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)(Book Review)
April 1, 2004... Why does Leonardo da Vinci so fascinate 485 years after his death? He is a fixture of pop culture, his works constantly reproduced, quoted, parodied. The Mona Lisa's ironic smile advertises everything from hotels to restaurants to computers....

Who's counting.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)(Jim Thorpe )
April 1, 2004... 2 Wheaties boxes bearing the image of athlete Jim Thorpe can be found in the National Museum of the American Indian's cultural resources center in Washington, D.C. Thorpe, whose Indian name Wa-Tho-Huk translates as Bright Path, was of Sauk...

This month in history: April anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
April 1, 2004... 150 YEARS AGO: HALLOWED HALLS Hoping to educate black missionaries to serve in Liberia, John Miller Dickey founds, in Pennsylvania, the Ashmun Institute, the first liberal arts college for African-Americans. Renamed Lincoln University in 1866,...

"Titanic sank this morning": an artifact from the doomed ocean liner evokes that catastrophic night in April 1912.(The Object At Hand)
April 1, 2004... Not long after the release of James Cameron's blockbuster movie Titanic a few years ago, I saw a bumper sticker that made a waggish point. At the time, half the U.S. population seemed to be obsessed with worry over whether actor Leonardo...

Tunnel visionary: intrepid explorer Julia Solis finds beauty in the ruins of derelict urban structures.(People File)
April 1, 2004... Call me a masochist, but I've come to cherish my outings with Julia Solis, a flame-haired original who lives in a rough part of Brooklyn, New York, near the fetid Gowanus Canal. She's smart, amazingly curious and absolutely fearless. These...

Remembering the Alamo: move over, John Wayne. John Lee Hancock's epic re-creation of the 1836 battle between Mexican forces and Texas insurgents casts the mythic massacre in a more historically accurate light.
April 1, 2004... Each year some three million visitors, eager to glimpse a fabled American landmark, converge on a tree-shaded section of downtown San Antonio. In this leafy urban neighborhood, many of them, whether from Berlin or Tokyo or Dime Box, Texas,...

Playing hardball: can you name all the presidential pitchmen below?(Photo Finish)
April 1, 2004... 1. Woodrow Wilson, 1916 2. Ronald Reagan, 1988 3. Herbert Hoover, 1932 4. George W. Bush, 2001 5. Richard Nixon, 1959 (as vice president) 6. Jimmy Carter, 1983 (post-White House) 7. William Taft, 1910 8. Franklin Roosevelt, 1933 9. Warren...

Birds of a feather: scores of teams battle for fame and glory in the no-holds-barred World Series of Birding.(Points Of Interest)
April 1, 2004... Half past midnight in New Jersey's Great Swamp is an eerie time in an eerie place. Thick ground fog swirls around snags of beeches and oaks. A cuckoo calls in the distance, a grace note above the throaty chortles of frogs. Otherwise, all is...

Colossal ode: without Emma Lazarus' timeless poem, Lady Liberty would be just another statue.(Presence Of Mind)
April 1, 2004... Near the end of the 1942 movie Saboteur, one of director Alfred Hitchcock's early American efforts, the heroine, played by Priscilla Lane, catches up with an enemy agent at the top of the Statue of Liberty. Pretending to flirt, she says it's...

A task for every talent: since the Smithsonian's earliest days, the help of volunteers has been essential.(From the Secretary)
April 1, 2004... The monument that exists to the men and women who have volunteered their services to the Smithsonian throughout its history is nothing less than the Institution itself. Without volunteers, the Smithsonian--as America and the world have come to...

Vaunted Vancouver: set between the Pacific Ocean and a coastal mountain range, the British Columbia city--with a rain forest in its midst--may be the ultimate urban playground.
April 1, 2004... Shafts of sunlight soften the brooding darkness of the Canadian Pacific rain forest, shadowed under a canopy of 200-foot-high Douglas firs. A rustle of pine needles turns out not to signify the slithering of an unseen snake--merely a winter...

Saving the music tree: artists and instrument makers have banded together to rescue Brazil's imperiled pernambuco, the source of bows for violins, violas and cellos.
April 1, 2004... The office of the botanical research station of the Center for Cacao Research, a farmer's cooperative outside Porto Seguro, Brazil, is a small, whitewashed and mud-spattered cinder block house with bare tile floors and a poster on the wall that...