Smithsonian articles from February 2005

Smithsonian archives from February 2005

Out of the shadows: after decades of obscurity, African-American architect Julian Abele is finally getting recognition for his contributions to some of 20th-century America's most prestigious buildings.
February 1, 2005... In the spring of 1986, Duke University students protesting the school's investments in apartheid South Africa erected shanties in front of the university chapel, a soaring spire of volcanic stone modeled after England's Canterbury Cathedral....

Christo does Central Park: after a quarter century's effort, the wrap artist and his wife, Jeanne-Claude, blaze a saffron trail in New York City.
February 1, 2005... January 2003: The steel industry was in a slump. At the Charles C. Lewis steel processing plant in Springfield, Massachusetts, president Robert Cournoyer was facing the prospect of layoffs. Then the phone rang with what would turn out to be the...

Trouble spots: two of our writers get into the thick of things in Uganda and Afghanistan.(Editor's Note)
February 1, 2005... Paul raffaele says that reporting the story of a rebel, cult army that abducts children ("Uganda: The Horror," p. 90) was the most profoundly disturbing assignment of his long journalism career. And that includes covering the Khmer Rouge...

Down in Mississippi: the shooting of protester James Meredith 38 years ago, searingly documented by a rookie photographer, galvanized the civil rights movement.(Indelible Images)
February 1, 2005... One sweltering morning in June 1966, James Meredith set out from Memphis with an African walking stick in one hand, a Bible in the other and a singular mission in mind. The 32-year-old Air Force veteran and Columbia University law student...

One per customer.(Just Looking)
February 1, 2005... Visitors to the "Gilbert Stuart" exhibition at New York City's Metropolitan Museum of Art may wonder what's going on. The Met partnered with the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery to display 14 of the artist's 100 portraits of the nation's...

Last call: hang-ups are an occupational hazard.(The Last Page)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Your call is important to us. Please hold, and an operator will be with you shortly. Your call will be answered in the order it was received. Your call is important to us. No, really. Calls like yours keep us in business! Please hold, and...

Of moose and men.(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... Some words of advice for Michael Vogel, the fellow who wanted authorities to kill the cow moose that attacked him when he jogged too close to her calf, and who later shot and killed a moose that dared to be in the path of his skis ("Herd on the...

Pecking order.(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... Richard rhodes need not have looked far to solve the "long-standing mystery" of how John James Audubon set up his specimens to draw them, as suggested in the "Birds and Beasts" Editor's Note. His system has, in fact, been common knowledge to...

Unfairly panned.(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... In "peter pan turns 100," author Norman Allen's summary judgment of playwright J. M. Barrie's work--"Only Peter Pan has stood the test of time"--is a bit unfair. Barrie authored some incomparable essays and reminiscences that deserve to be...

Weed whacking.(Letter to the Editor)
February 1, 2005... As a scientist working on controlling invasive weeds, I was delighted to see "Wicked Weed of the West." Invasive species are an increasing threat to our environment and economy, and deserve more of our attention. The research by Drs. Callaway,...

"A fine boy": with a little help from a rattlesnake's rattle, Sacagawea gives birth to a baby she names Jean Baptiste.(Lewis And Clark)
February 1, 2005... The daughter of a Shoshone chief, Sacagawea was captured as a young girl by a raiding party of Hidatsa and raised by that tribe. At about age 17, she married Toussaint Charbonneau, a trader and fur trapper who acted as an interpreter on the...

A practiced eye for the beauty of science: illustrator Alice Tangerini has rendered about 1,000 plants, delicately balancing the demands of botany research and the aesthetics of her calling.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
February 1, 2005... Alice Tangerini fingers a stalk of dried grass that has long, slender leaves and a knotted root. "I love grasses," she says. "They are so graceful." Tangerini, a botanical illustrator at the National Museum of Natural History, is standing at...

George Washington sat here.(From the Attic)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... GEORGE WASHINGTON SAT HERE By most accounts, the 1840 installation of Horatio Greenough's gigantic 12-ton sculpture of a partially nude George Washington in the U.S. Capitol was a critical disaster. It remained in the rotunda for only three...

Ready for its close-up: though it's still crucial to NASA for tests, the Enterprise boldly goes where no space shuttle has gone before.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
February 1, 2005... Trekkies, take note. The Enterprise, the first space shuttle ever built and the only one with a name from a sci-fi TV show, became the first to go on permanent public display at an unveiling this past fall at the National Air and Space Museum's...

Hurry in.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)(art exhibitions)(Brief Article)
February 1, 2005... Beat a path to the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition of 70 build-it-better sketches, including a 1938 patent drawing for a Maidenform bra. "Doodles, Drafts, and Designs" is at Washington, D.C.'s Octagon Museum until May 1, before moving on to...

This month in history: February anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
February 1, 2005... 25 YEARS AGO: MIRACLE TEAM With the score tied at 3-3, American Mike Eruzione slams the puck into the Soviet Union's goal in the hockey "game of the century" at the 1980 Olympics in Lake Placid, NY. The underdog U.S. team's win over the...

Romance and the stone: a rare Burmese ruby memorializes a philanthropic woman.(The Object At Hand)(Carmen Lucia Buck)
February 1, 2005... We don't need Wagner or Tolkien to tell us how powerful rings can be, though it must be said those two make the point pretty convincingly. Most of us have conducted our own ring cycles since childhood. When I was a boy, one of my most prized...

Back home on the range: when a group of Native Americans took up bison ranching, they brought a prairie back to life.(Phenomena & Curiosities)
February 1, 2005... A bison's death "is now such an event that it is immediately chronicled by the Associated Press and telegraphed all over the country," conservationist William T. Hornaday wrote in 1889. Fifty years earlier, bison by the tens of millions had...

Savoring pie town: sixty-five years after Russell Lee photographed New Mexico homesteaders coping with the Depression, a Lee admirer visits the town for a fresh slice of life.
February 1, 2005... The name alone would make a stomach-growling man wish to get up and go there: Pie Town. And then too, there are the old photographs--those moving gelatin-silver prints, and the equally beautiful ones made in Kodachrome color, six and a half...

Our adaptable ancestors: recent discoveries of skull fragments and tools testify to the resourcefulness of early humans.(From the Secretary)
February 1, 2005... In novels and movies, archaeologists leap over pits, swing from vines and disarm ingenious traps as they gallivant around the world in search of buried treasure. They behave less like scientists than swashbuckling explorers with an old map and...

Sicily Resurgent: across the island, activists, archaeologists and historians are joining forces to preserve a cultural legacy that has endured for 3,000 years.
February 1, 2005... As it happened, I was with vulcanologist Giuseppe Patane just three days after Sicily's Mount Etna--at 10,902 feet, the tallest active volcano in Europe--erupted in October 2002. As Patane, who teaches at the University of Catania and has spent...

Invasion of the snakeheads! The voracious "Frankenfish" has turned up in the Potomac River, Lake Michigan and a California lake, sparking fears of an ecological Armageddon. But is the Asian import a monster--or the victim of monster hype?
February 1, 2005... The scene is a sheriff's office near a mountain lake, where a hunter and his dog have been found dead. The sheriff sets a bright orange hunting vest on his desk in front of an anxious woman. She nods, identifying it as her husband's. "He loved...

Uganda the horror: in Uganda, tens of thousands of children have been abducted, 1.6 million people herded into camps and thousands of people killed: a dispatch from the world's "largest neglected humanitarian emergency".
February 1, 2005... As the light faded from the northern Ugandan sky, the children emerged from their families' mud huts to begin the long walk along dirt roads to Gulu, the nearest town. Wide-eyed toddlers held older kids' hands. Skinny boys and girls on the...