Smithsonian articles from July 2003

Smithsonian archives from July 2003

Riddles of the Anasazi: toward the end of the 13th century, something went terribly wrong among the Anasazi. What awful event forced the people to flee their homeland, never to return?
July 1, 2003... The four of us walked slowly down the deep, narrow canyon in southern Utah. It was midwinter, and the stream that ran alongside us was frozen over, forming graceful terraces of milky ice. Still, the place had a cozy appeal: had we wanted to...

Matters of time: everything old is news again. (Editor's Note).
July 1, 2003... For david roberts, who writes about why the ancient Anasazi people of the American West abandoned their cliffside dwellings some 700 years ago ("Riddles of the Anasazi," p. 72), one of the more intriguing ruins was one he failed to reach. "The...

Ruling the roost: before the advent of factory farms and supermarkets, the self-made kings of New York City's butter and egg trade lived extra large. (Indelible Images).
July 1, 2003... The men in this picture are butter and egg men. They liked to joke that their wives were fat because they buttered their toast on both sides. Such was the reputation of butter and egg men, who were wealthy but regarded as a bit crude. Old money...

Just looking.
July 1, 2003... Front row seat On July 14, 2002--Bastille Day--cyclists in the 89th Tour de France speed through the village of Landujan in northwestern France on the 135-mile-long eighth leg of the three-week race. The first Tour was held 100 years ago...

Korea a house divided: fifty years after the armistice, the two Koreas' legacy of conflict underlies a deepening crisis.
July 1, 2003... Driving northeast from seoul, I follow the course of the sinuous Han River, past harvested rice fields, up into steep, forested hills. Forty minutes outside the thriving South Korean capital, the Seoul Studio Complex looms like a fortress. Its...

Portrait of the artist as a plucky duck: wildlife painter Ron Louque, winner of the 2003 Duck Stamp Contest, proves that persistence pays off. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
July 1, 2003... Ron louque likes ducks. He paints them, photographs them and even stuffs them. But what the 51-year-old artist has wanted most of all is to win the highly competitive, and lucrative, annual Federal Duck Stamp Contest. So every year for the past...

The flag was still there. (From The Attic).
July 1, 2003... By 1914, the century-old Star-Spangled Banner that had inspired Francis Scott Key's poem was "a frail piece of bunting," said a curator at the time. On May 1 of that year, Smithsonian secretary Charles Walcott called upon expert needlewoman...

Hurry in.
July 1, 2003... "Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Seasons of Life and Land," featuring photographs by Subhankar Banerjee, is at the Natural History Museum through September 2. In March, Senator Barbara Boxer, Democrat of California, cited the pictures to argue...

Voices from the Middle Passage. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond).
July 1, 2003... An exhibition recounts the "triangle trade" that exchanged African lives for goods the smithsonian's Anacostia Museum and Center for African American History and Culture hosts "Captive Passage: The Transatlantic Slave Trade and the Making...

This month in history: July anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
July 1, 2003... 150 YEARS AGO: WEST MEETS EAST Navy commander Matthew Perry, bearing letters from President Millard Fillmore to the Japanese emperor, sails the USS Susquehanna into Edo (now Tokyo) Bay, challenging Japan's isola-tionist policy. The U.S. seeks...

Here's looking at you, kids: for three decades, the fluoroscope was a shoe salesman's best friend. (The Object At Hand).
July 1, 2003... If you were born anywhere between 1920 and about 1950, you probably recall an odd-looking cabinet that once lured customers into shoe stores across the country. The shoe-fitting fluoroscope used cutting-edge technology--the x-ray--to...

Batteries included: let's hear it-shhhh, not so loud--for electric boats. (Points Of Interest).
July 1, 2003... Speedboats have the kick of an amusement park--spray in the face, a noisy, bucking rush across the water. I prefer boating at the other extreme, in a kayak or canoe. I like the intimacy with the water--the elegant silence. I also like the...

Making sense of Robert E. Lee: the enigmatic Confederate general led the fateful Battle of Gettysburg 140 years ago this month. It was not his finest hour.
July 1, 2003... "it is well that war is so terrible, or we should grow too fond of it."--robert e. lee, at fredericksburg Few figures in American history are more divisive, contradictory or elusive than Robert E. Lee, the reluctant, tragic leader of the...

Lighthouse of the skies: the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory probes the universe for the unimaginable. (From the Secretary).
July 1, 2003... The largest budget in the Smithsonian belongs not to any museum but to one of our research centers, the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory (SAO). As far back as 1838, when the disposition of the bequest that would establish the Smithsonian...

On the trail of the West Nile virus: some scientists race to develop vaccines against the scourge while others probe the possible lingering effects of the mosquito-borne infection.
July 1, 2003... During the dry hot summer of 2002, a telltale silence enveloped Chicago and its suburbs like an insidious fog, too subtle to notice at first, too strange to ignore after a while. Residents in the affluent North Shore communities and the...

North to freedom: a groundbreaking chronicle sheds new light on one of the most dramatic chapters in American history.
July 1, 2003... BEYOND THE RIVER: THE UNTOLD STORY OF THE HEROES OF THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD ANN HAGEDORN Simon & Schuster, $25 Few stories in American history combine as much suspense, adventure and moral righteousness as the Underground...

Egypt's crowning glory: New Kingdom customs rise triumphantly from the dead in "The Quest for Immortality," a dazzling display of treasures from the tombs of the pharaohs.
July 1, 2003... Like some 24-carat Band-Aid, the finely worked gold plaque, inscribed with animal-headed gods and a giant eye, once covered an incision in the abdomen of Psusennes I of Egypt's 21st Dynasty. Through the cut 3,000 years ago, embalmers removed...

Olmsted's triumph.
July 1, 2003... One hundred and fifty years ago this month, the New York State legislature set aside the land that would become Central Park. By 1876, landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted and architect Calvert Vaux had transformed the swampy, treeless 50...

Haute tomato: I can forgive the French almost anything. Except dessert. (The Last Page).
July 1, 2003... I so admire the french--their ability to carry a dinner table argument all the way into next week; their taste for crimes of passion; even their penchant for unpredictable diplomacy. I especially admire their authority in matters of cuisine. So...

Letters.
July 1, 2003... Readers respond to the May issue: CASTRO'S NATURE I am appalled that "The Nature of Cuba" fawns over the ecological policies of one of the worst tyrannical rulers in the world today. Why are you so caring about frogs and birds and so...