Smithsonian articles from December 2008

Smithsonian archives from December 2008

Big deals: revelry and architecture.(FROM THE EDITOR)
December 1, 2008... NICHOLAS SCHMIDLE, who lives in Washington, D.C., spent nearly two years in Pakistan as a fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs, which funds overseas writing fellowships. An article Schmidle published earlier this year in the New...

Stephen Kinzer's sober review of Iran's history and interactions.(LETTERS)
December 1, 2008... Stephen Kinzer's sober review of Iran's history and interactions with the West and Russia ["Inside Iran's Fury"] is a must read for every American. It does not absolve what the radical clerics and President Ahmadinejad are saying and doing,...

Defending the Shah.(LETTERS)
December 1, 2008... KINZER's dismissal of the regime of Mohammad Reza Shah as purely evil, without mentioning the democratic reforms he put in place, sadly, makes the rest of his "scholarship" suspect. The Shah, for all his greed and corruption, tried to lead...

Blame game.(LETTERS)
December 1, 2008... IF I WERE deputy manager of West-lands Water District and knew you were writing a story about a crashed salmon fishery caused in large part by poisoned and depleted water resources ["Farewell to the King?"], I, too, would probably try to...

Swiftboating George.(LETTERS)
December 1, 2008... RE: YOUR FICTITIOUS article of 3 January 1789, about "swiftboating George Washington" [Last Page: "Same Olde, Same Olde"], I know not of which Delaware boat veterans you refer, but the men of my Regiment were the only ones to ferry members of...

Correction.(Correction notice)
December 1, 2008... AN IMAGE on page 62 does not depict Darius (c. 549-486 B.C.), as the caption says, but Darius III (c. 380-330 b.c.).

Moment of reckoning: one of the three civil rights workers murdered in Mississippi in 1964 was James Chaney. His younger brother, Ben, would never be the same.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
December 1, 2008... IN THE 44 DAYS that his brother and two other young civil rights workers were missing in Neshoba County, Mississippi, 12-year-old Ben Chaney was quiet and withdrawn. He kept his mother constantly in sight as she obsessively cleaned their...

Wild things: life as we know it.
December 1, 2008... ESCHEWING CHEWING How did sauropods, plant-eaters that were the biggest animals ever to walk the earth, get such massive bodies? They didn't chew, say researchers in Bonn and Zurich. The dinosaurs' "enormous gut capacity" (a Diplodocus)...

Splendor in the bluegrass: far from her northern roots, the best-selling novelist discovers a new sense of home amid rolling hills and Thoroughbred farms.(MY KIND OF TOWN)
December 1, 2008... WHEN I MOVED TO Lexington, Kentucky 12 years ago, I often had the sense of having taken half a step back in time. It was nothing I could pinpoint exactly. Though Lexington is small enough that I can drive to pretty much any part of town in 15...

This month in history; December Anniversaries momentous or merely memorable.
December 1, 2008... 100 YEARS AGO MAGNETIC PERSONALITY Jack Johnson, 30, becomes the first African-American Heavyweight Champion of the World when police stop his pounding of Canadian Tommy Burns in Sydney, Australia, December 26,1908, after 14 rounds. The...

What's killing the aspen? The signature tree of the Rockies is in trouble.(PHENOMENA)
December 1, 2008... IT'S A RELENTLESSLY SUNNY DAY in the Rocky Mountains, and here at 9,000 feet, on the Grand Mesa in western Colorado, the aspen trees should be casting a shadow But something is wrong in this stand: the treetops are nearly bare, their branches...

Channel too.(FROM THE CASTLE)
December 1, 2008... THE VIETNAM VETERANS MEMORIAL here in Washington, with 58,260 names carved in black granite and personal mementos left by families and friends, is deeply moving. As is the documentary "Remembering Vietnam: The Wall at 25." You can watch this...

The past is prologue: how a film helped preserve a native culture.
December 1, 2008... SEATTLE-BASED PHOTOGRAPHER Edward Curtis had a singular passion. Beginning in the 1890s, he set out to document what he and most of his contemporaries believed was a "vanishing race"--that of the American Indian. For 30 years, Curtis...

Holiday spirit.(JUKEBOX)
December 1, 2008... For 50 years, Ella Jenkins-once dubbed the "first lady of the children's folk song" by an admiring critic--has brought a unique touch to music, composing bedtime ballads inspired by spoken-word poetry and African folk tunes. In 2004, the...

Beyond words: Lincoln's timeless tribute endures as literature.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)
December 1, 2008... IN AMERICAN HISTORY, November 19, 1863, might be considered a day of wind and fire. The place was the Gettysburg battlefield, four and a half months after the bloody and pivotal victory of the Union's Army of the Potomac over Gen. Robert...

Q&A.
December 1, 2008... In 1976, installation artists CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDE built Running Fence, a 24.5-mile fabric divide that sliced through Northern California's Sonoma and Marin counties. They spoke with Anika Gupta about a forthcoming Smithsonian exhibit on...

Making history.
December 1, 2008... STARDUST MEMORIES Space enthusiasts can now get an up-close look at the latest extraterrestrial explorer. In 2006, NASA's Stardust capsule returned from a seven-year, three-billion-mile trip to collect dust from comet Wild 2-the first mission...

What's up: African alchemy North African artisans combined gold and silver to forge jewelry like the khamsa (19th or 20th century), meant to protect wearers from the evil eye. See the good omens at the Museum of African art until January 11.
December 1, 2008... FACE TIME Abraham Lincoln's political career spanned three decades. Witness his transformation from young congressman to beleaguered president in a series of rare images at the National Portrait Gallery through July 5, 2009. GRAPHIC...

Faith & ecstasy: Pakistan's violent extremists may get most of the attention, but the nations peaceful, life-affirming Sufis have numbers--and history--on their side.
December 1, 2008... In the desert swelter of southern Pakistan, the scent of rose-water mixed with a waft of hashish smoke. Drummers pounded away as celebrants swathed in red pushed a camel bedecked with garlands, tinsel and multihued scarfs through the heaving...

Brave New World: the watercolors that John White produced in 1585 gave England its first startling glimpse of America.
December 1, 2008... JOHN WHITE WASN'T THE MOST EXACTING PAINTER that 16th- century England had to offer, or so his watercolors of the New World suggest. His diamondback terrapin has six toes instead of five; one of his native women, the wife of a powerful chief,...

Fading glory: in Istanbul, secularists and fundamentalists clash over restoring the nearly 1,500-year-old Hagia Sophia.
December 1, 2008... ZEYNEP AHUNBAY LED ME THROUGH the massive cathedral's cavernous nave and shadowy arcades, pointing out its fading splendors. Under the great dome, filtered amber light revealed vaulted arches, galleries and semi-domes, refracted from...

Karsh reality: the portraitist Yousuf Karsh took a singular approach to fame and the famous. As the centennial of his birth approaches, how do his photographs hold up?
December 1, 2008... PHOTOGRAPHY FANS KNOW HIM as the man who shot Winston Churchill--shot him in 1941 in a back room at the Canadian Parliament, having plucked the great man's cigar from his mouth and been rewarded with aglower that made the cover of Life...

The Pygmies' plight: a correspondent who chronicled their lives in central African rain forests returns a decade later and is shocked by what he finds.
December 1, 2008... Some 50 Pygmies of the Baka clan lead me single file through a steaming rain forest in Cameroon. Scrambling across tree trunks over streams, we hack through heavy undergrowth with machetes and cut away vinelike lianas hanging like curtains in...

Capitol fellow: in 1792, a self-taught architect from Tortola designed America's defining monument, where a new visitor center opens this month.
December 1, 2008... IN THE TORRID SUMMER OF 1792, WILLIAM THORNTON, the 33-year-old son of wealthy planters on the Caribbean island of Tortola, labored over a set of architectural drawings. Thornton, who had been trained as a physician but was now trying his...

Woman, interrupted: after 44 years, Mary Pinchot Meyer's death remains a mystery. But it's her life that holds more interest now.(PRESENCE OF MIND)
December 1, 2008... ON A PERFECT OCTOBER DAY in 1964, Mary Pinchot Meyer--mistress of John Kennedy, friend of Jackie Kennedy and ex-wife of a top CIA man, Cord Meyer--was murdered in the rarefied Washington precinct of Georgetown. It was half past noon. I...

Amazon warriors: thanks to the Internet, everyone's a book critic.(THE LAST PAGE)
December 1, 2008... I ONCE HAD A JOB writing jacket copy for children's books. All I had to do was summarize the plot and end with a question like "Can the triplets escape the Curse of the Dead Leopard?" The series was so popular that people would have bought...