Smithsonian articles from December 2004

Smithsonian archives from December 2004

Audubon: America's rare bird: a new biography tells how the foreign-born frontiersman became one of the 19th century's greatest wildlife artists and a patron saint of the ecology movement.(John James Audubon)(Excerpt)(Cover Story)(Biography)
December 1, 2004... The handsome, excitable 18-year-old Frenchman who would become John James Audubon had already lived his way through two names when he landed in New York from Nantes, France, in August 1803. His father, Jean, a canny ship's captain with...

Chasing the Dragon: a Veteran Journalist's Firsthand Account of the 1949 Chinese Revolution.(Book Review)
December 1, 2004... Chasing the Dragon: A Veteran Journalist's Firsthand Account of the 1949 Chinese Revolution Roy Rowan The Lyons Press, $23.95 Times were when every foreign correspondent returning from China would write a book, especially...

Birds and beasts: a new book on Audubon; making waves amid mad moose.(Editor's Note)
December 1, 2004... In writing his masterful new biography of John James Audubon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Rhodes solved a long-standing mystery about the wildlife painter. "All Audubon's previous biographers have speculated about the system he...

Comfort zone: a humble stove warmed Modernist Charles Sheeler's Cubist heart.(Indelible Images)(Georgia O'Keeffe Museum exhibit)
December 1, 2004... Charles Sheeler (1883-1965) is one of the most important artists of the first half-century of American Modernism. Usually this judgment reflects his work as a painter, which is often referred to as "Precisionist"--smooth, machine-age realism...

'Tis the season.(Just Looking)(photo caption)(Brief Article)
December 1, 2004... A bog of floating cranberries looks to photographer Bob Sacha like a "giant red saucer." Sacha strapped himself into an old Huey helicopter to capture this view near Carver, Massachusetts. Workers flood the bogs and manuever connected boards,...

Ready for a close-up.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... I was fascinated by "Magnificent Magnifications," which shows beautiful microscopic images. As an art teacher who incorporates science into the visual arts curriculum, I have students paint watercolors based on cell systems and structures. The...

Pigs for foxes?(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... In "fighting for foxes," about the effort to restore endangered foxes on California's Channel Islands, the statement that "scientists are relocating the golden eagles to the mainland and plan to rid the island of pigs by killing them" made me...

Good gossip.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... While on the subway reading Robert Darnton's article, "All the News That's Fit to Sing," about the ways 18th-century Parisians kept informed, I found myself saying "Ha!" out loud when I read how Mme. Doublet's servant would separate rumors...

Grateful for grant.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... As a high-school ballplayer, I played many times at the old Polo Grounds in New York City. I can recall seeing Eddie Grant's plaque but never knew the story of why he was so honored ("Ultimate Sacrifice"). Thank you for making this hero come to...

Correction.(Letters)(Correction Notice)
December 1, 2004... Correction: As we reported, Elmer Gedeon played for the Washington Senators in 1939 and was killed in World War II. But the photograph on page 80 is of Elmer Joseph "Joe" Gedeon, who played for the Senators in 1913 and 1914. We regret the...

Spitting image.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... I couldn't help but chuckle at art conservators James Coddington and Michael Duffy's "mild enzymatic" cleaning solution--spit--in "Cleaning Picasso." In our family, the saying "spit works wonders" has long been applied to the cleaning of...

Universally noted.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
December 1, 2004... At last count, more than 285 readers have written to point out that in the story "Kilroy Was Here," the "mysterious poem" scrawled on a canvas berth on a Vietnam-bound troopship was adapted from Buffy Sainte-Marie's antiwar song "Universal...

Hunting buffalo at 38 below: as the mercury plummets, the bivouacking corps hunts with Mandan Indians and celebrates Christmas.(Lewis And Clark)
December 1, 2004... With the weather turning colder, members of the expedition hunkered down for a long winter's night at Fort Mandan, in present-day North Dakota. By mid-December 1804, it was apparent to everyone that they were in for months of bitter cold,...

Slices of life: from Hollywood to Buchenwald and Manhattan to the Kalahari, the magazine pioneered photojournalism as we know it. A new book shows how.
December 1, 2004... It has been the writer's job since ancient times to describe how people behave. With the invention of photography, it became the business of the photographer too. But while writers can gather material simply by talking with people, even on a...

Celebrity apes make a move: two computer-using orangutans from the National Zoo are the first residents of a new Iowa facility devoted to the study of primate intelligence.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and beyond)(Great Ape Trust of Iowa)
December 1, 2004... One day this past september, Azy and Indah, stars of the Orangutan Language Project at the Smithsonian Institution's National Zoo, were put into two windowed enclosures and driven to Washington Dulles International Airport, where they were...

Star bright.(From The Attic)(astronomer Fred Lawrence Whipple)(Brief Article)(Obituary)
December 1, 2004... "Now that's a snowball," said Smithsonian astronomer Fred Lawrence Whipple when he first saw the icy chunk, above, at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in February 1986. It was part of a stunt arranged by...

Artistic touch.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and beyond)(American Indian Museum For Life in All Directions sculpture)
December 1, 2004... At the American Indian Museum, a sculptor reaches out to the hemisphere's indigenous peoples on the national museum of the American Indian's opening day this past September, a 6-year-old girl running through the hallway outside the ground-floor...

Who's counting?(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and beyond)(photo caption )
December 1, 2004... 1 GALERA, A TOOL USED IN THE 19TH CENTURY TO POLISH THE MARBLE CHIPS IN A TERRAZZO FLOOR, HAS COME TO THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF AMERICAN HISTORY. RETIRED TERRAZZO MECHANIC ATTILIO FRANCESCHINA, 77 (RIGHT), OF SEATTLE, DONATED THE GALERA AFTER...

This month in history: December anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable).
December 1, 2004... 60 YEARS AGO: BATTLING IN THE BULGE December 16, 1944: Exhorting his troops to "gamble everything!" Adolf Hitler launches a surprise offensive against the Allies across an 85-mile front in the Ardennes region of Belgium and Luxembourg. He...

Herd on the street: in Anchorage, Alaska, you never know when a moose will show up on your doorstep.
December 1, 2004... The first time I ever laid eyes on a moose, I was lucky I didn't get the snot kicked out of me. My wife and I were finishing up a mountain hike in Wyoming late one afternoon when we rounded a corner and came face to face with a big bull planted...

Tray bon! Thanksgiving leftovers--260 tons in all--gave birth to an industry.(The Object At Hand)(history of Swanson TV dinners)
December 1, 2004... Had my hyperkinetic mother been inclined to meditate, her mantra would have consisted of two brand names: Birds Eye and Swanson. Mom was a working woman in the early 1950s, when that was far from the norm and, in suburban New Jersey, at least,...

Treasure quest: for more than a decade, American Robert Graf has combed the waters of a Seychelles island for a multimillion-dollar booty stashed by pirates nearly 300 years ago.(People File)
December 1, 2004... I've been treading water in a small, man-made lagoon for about half an hour, waiting for Robert Graf to surface. The 49-year-old American treasure hunter has cordoned off this rectangular swath of Indian Ocean in the Seychelles, and now he's...

Peter Pan turns 100: but the boy who never grew up shows no signs of getting old.
December 1, 2004... Since his debut a century ago, he has graced the stage in innumerable productions around the world and the screen in a classic animated Disney feature and live-action movies. His image is used to sell peanut butter and cross-country bus trips....

Wicked weed of the West: spotted knapweed is driving out native plants and destroying rangeland, costing ranchers millions. Can anybody stop this outlaw?(Phenomena & Curiosities)
December 1, 2004... Wayne Slaght is a rancher. He manages the 10,000-acre Two Creek Ranch in Powell County, Montana, the ranch he grew up on and that his father managed before him. It's in bear country, and he knows every grizzly that passes through this rolling...

Being there: robotic spacecraft allow geologists to explore other planets as if they were on-site.(From the Secretary)
December 1, 2004... The spacecraft Messenger, launched by NASA in August, will travel for six-and-a-half years before it goes into orbit around the planet Mercury for a mission that's to last two days. Two Mercury days, that is--a day on the planet, from sunrise...

Free at last: a new museum celebrates the Underground Railroad: the secret network of people who bravely led slaves to liberty before the Civil War.(National Underground Railroad Freedom Center)
December 1, 2004... The phone rang one drizzly morning in Carl Westmoreland's office overlooking the gray ribbon of the Ohio River and downtown Cincinnati. It was February 1998. Westmoreland, a descendant of slaves, scholar of African-American history and former...

The Vikings: a memorable visit to America: exploring the New World a thousand years ago, a Viking woman gave birth to what is likely the first European-American baby. The discovery of the house the family built upon their return to Iceland has scholars rethinking the Norse sagas.
December 1, 2004... Roughly 1,000 years ago, the story goes, a Viking trader and adventurer named Thorfinn Karlsefni set off from the west coast of Greenland with three ships and a band of Norse to explore a newly discovered land that promised fabulous riches....

Vilnius remembers: in Vilnius, Lithuania, preservationists are creating a living memorial to the nation's 225,000 Holocaust victims.
December 1, 2004... Behind a phalanx of grimly featureless Stalinist-style buildings east of Pylimo--the central boulevard bisecting Vilnius, Lithuania's capital--lie a derelict playground and rutted basketball court. Several teenage boys, shirtless, wearing baggy...