Smithsonian articles from February 2003

Smithsonian archives from February 2003

Marching on history: when a "Bonus Army" of World War I veterans converged on Washington in 1932 to demand a promised payment, MacArthur, Eisenhower and Patton were there to meet them.
February 1, 2003... Washington, d.c. Chief of Police Pelham D. Glassford was driving south through New Jersey the night of May 21, 1932. Suddenly, a sight appeared in his headlights that he later described as "a bedraggled group of seventy-five or one hundred men...

The Natural History Of The Rich: A Field Guide.(Book Review)
February 1, 2003... THE NATURAL HISTORY OF THE RICH: A FIELD GUIDE RICHARD CONNIFF W. W. Norton, $26.95 In his quirky and stylish foray into lifestyles of the megabucks set, Smithsonian contributor Richard Conniff offers to transport us "into the world of the...

Ghosts Of The Fireground.(Book Review)
February 1, 2003... GHOSTS OF THE FIREGROUND PETER LESCHAK HARPER, $24.95 Although the great forest that once covered most of the country has been gerrymandered by civilization, vast expanses remain, much of it an enormous firetrap. Some part of the...

Lines In The Water.(Book Review)
February 1, 2003... LINES IN THE WATER BEN ORLOVE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS, $19.95 Anthropologist Ben Orlove's memoir of his work in the highlands of Peru amounts very nearly to a love story, a scientist's paean to villagers who for centuries have...

Shoot-out at Little Galloo: angry fishermen accuse the cormorant of ruining their livelihood and have taken the law into their own hands. But is the cormorant to blame?
February 1, 2003... In upstate New York on the evening of July 27, 1998, three men with shotguns put ashore on a guano-covered slab of limestone in eastern Lake Ontario called Little Galloo Island. The men pointed their guns at dozens of duck-size black waterbirds...

Grim and beautiful: learning to love complexity. (Editor's Note).
February 1, 2003... For photographer beth wald, traveling to Afghanistan (for "The Enduring Splendors of, Yes, Afghanistan," p. 30) was a dream finally fulfilled. The reality "was both more grim and more beautiful than imagined," she reports. "Glimmers of ancient...

Iceberg wrangler: when a million-ton iceberg threatens your $5 billion oil platform, who you gonna call? Jerome Baker.
February 1, 2003... There are just a handful of people in the world who do what Jerome Baker does--venture out far into the North Atlantic, tie a rope around a rogue iceberg heading toward an offshore oil platform, maneuver a 9,600-horsepower, 270-foot-long boat...

Testimony from the iceman: the 5,000-plus-year-old Neolithic man discovered a decade ago is telling scientists how he lived--and died.
February 1, 2003... The city of bolzano, in northern Italy, has many things of which it can boast. It has a scenic location, wedged into a narrow valley between the gray, craggy escarpments of the Dolomites. It has an old central district, closed to automobiles,...

The calm before desert storm: two months before the Gulf War began in 1991, President George H.W. Bush greeted U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia. (Indelible Images).
February 1, 2003... I remember being struck by this photograph of President George Herbert Walker Bush when it first came out, in Time magazine, in January 1991. I had spent several years writing speeches for Bush when he was Ronald Reagan's vice president, and...

Just looking.(at Thomas Jefferson's nose)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... NOSE JOB Bob Crisman of the National Park Service checks Thomas Jefferson's nose for cracks at the 5,725-foot-high Mount Rushmore National Memorial near Keystone, South Dakota. Gutzon Borglum, who sculpted the memorial from 1927 until his death...

Going postal: if I can't be on a stamp, can I at least put in my 37 cents' worth? (The Last Page).
February 1, 2003... Last week I asked my husband to pick up some stamps, and he returned with the Duke Kahanamoku commemorative, because they were out of American Bats. I'd never heard of Duke Kahanamoku, and now I am licking the man's back. Who is this man, and...

Letters.(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2003... Readers respond to the December issue: LOST GANGS Kudos to Martin Scorsese's new film, Gangs of New York, for re-creating New York's Five Points neighborhood with such close attention to historical authenticity, as described in Fergus...

One from the heart: an anthropologist's discovery about a Mayan language leads to a heartfelt tale. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
February 1, 2003... A bright red heart pierces the book's rough, black cover. Inside, some of the words are written in a mysterious language--but even in translation they read like poetry: "My heart aches: I am in love." "You perfume my heart: you give me...

Colonial Africa: the big picture. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
February 1, 2003... He gazes confidently into the camera, headdress, bracelets and medallion proclaiming his high status. Clearly, says Christraud M. Geary of the National Museum of African Art, this unnamed Mangbetu chief (left) from the Belgian Congo of the...

Hurry in. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
February 1, 2003... "Traditions in Elegance: 100 Teapots from the Norwich Castle Museum" closes at the U.S. Botanic Garden March 30. Among the 18th- and 19th-century pots on display is this porcelain beauty from 1770 London. A collaboration with the National...

George Washington slept here: kudos to Ann Pamela Cunningham, who rose from her invalid's couch to save the first president's beloved home. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
February 1, 2003... "It was a lovely moonlit night that we went down the Potomac," South Carolinian Louisa Dalton Bird Cunningham wrote to her invalid daughter, Ann Pamela Cunningham, late in 1853. "I went on deck as we passed Mount Vernon." What she saw shocked...

Who's counting? (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).(Asian longhorn beetles in National Museum of Natural History)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... 121 ASIAN LONGHORNED BEETLES POPULATE THE INSECT COLLECTION OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY. A CHINA NATIVE THAT HITCHHIKED HERE IN 1996 IN SHIPPING CRATES, THE INCH-LONG BEETLE HAS KILLED 7,468 MAPLE, BIRCH AND OTHER TREES IN...

From the attic. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).(Brief Article)
February 1, 2003... FLOOR-TO-CEILING MAKEOVER It was 1901, and the Smithsonian's 20-year-old National Museum was getting a new terrazzo floor. The craftsmen most likely were immigrants from northern Italy, where mosaic workers in the 15th century created the...

Matisse & Picasso: as a new exhibition makes clear, these friends--and rivals--spurred each other to change the course of 20th-century art.
February 1, 2003... Modern art was born ugly. "It was Matisse who took the first step into the undiscovered land of the ugly," an American critic wrote, describing the 1910 Salon des Independents in Paris. "The drawing was crude past all belief, the color was as...

Cast in bondage: copper neck tags evoke the experience of American slaves hired out as part-time laborers. (The Object At Hand).
February 1, 2003... It seems, at first glance, an innocuous if enigmatic artifact, a copper medallion 1.5 inches square, rough-edged and engraved with the words "Charleston. 571. Porter. 1856." But the inscription--a city, a number, an occupation and a...

Southern comfort: traveling back roads, brothers Matt and Ted Lee track down authentic foods for mail-order customers hankering after a taste of the Deep South. (People File).
February 1, 2003... Matt and Ted Lee remember the pungent smell of boiled peanut shells souring on the floor of the aging red Toyota that took them on trips to the beach when they were teenagers in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1980s. "You boil the...

Mission impossible? An international campaign to rid the world of polio has made dazzling progress. But some experts question whether the scourge can ever be eradicated.
February 1, 2003... Their cargo on ice, the health workers inched over cratered roads for several hours to reach the Dinka's cattle camp in southern Sudan, a region oppressed by civil wars for three decades. The whole camp, down to the scrawniest toddler, walked...

World class: Smithsonian Associates circle the globe for fun and firsthand adventure. (From the Secretary).
February 1, 2003... When Americans hear the word "Smithsonian," most are likely to make a spontaneous and powerful association: "museums." But to regard the Smithsonian as a physical presence only is to miss a great measure of its contribution. The Institution's...

The enduring splendors of, yes, Afghanistan: a writer and photographer crisscross a nation ravaged by a quarter century of warfare to inventory its most sacred treasures.
February 1, 2003... OUR QUEST BEGINS BESIDE an austere sarcophagus of white, black and pink marble with a simple little ivory-colored mosque below and vast terraced flower gardens beyond, high above the dusty, war-battered city of Kabul. The man buried beneath...