Smithsonian articles from July 2004

Smithsonian archives from July 2004

What is this thing called love: a new movie explores composer Cole Porter's sparkling musical gifts and his remarkable, unorthodox marriage.
July 1, 2004... a stand of logs burns brightly in the fireplace, snowflakes flicker at the window, and servants attend the gentlemen and ladies gathered around a grand piano played by a young Cole Porter, on holiday break from Harvard law school. Carolers,...

The rocky road to revolution: while most members of Congress sought a negotiated settlement with England, independence advocates bided their time.
July 1, 2004... We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness--That to secure these rights,...

Great finds: celebrating a magazine's good fortune--and a nation's.(Editor's Note)
July 1, 2004... since the magazine was founded nearly 35 years ago, science and natural history have been among the most critical ingredients in Smithsonian's unique mix. For some 29 years, the much-loved Jack Wiley, who retired in 2001 and died last February...

Hubble's last hurrahs? The orbiting space telescope has captured billions of years of star births and deaths, galactic collisions and the accelerating expansion of the universe. Now its own fate is in doubt.
July 1, 2004... The future of the Hubble Space Telescope doesn't look so bright at the moment. After 14 years of service and 650,000 images, many of them breathtaking, Hubble may have only a few years left. This summer, scientists and politicians are debating...

Dazzle by the dozen: a 1947 portrait by the renowned Irving Penn broke the fashion mold and celebrated an elegance all too rare today.(Indelible Images)
July 1, 2004... Irving Penn, now in his 80s and still hard at work, is considered one of America's greatest living photographers. He has set an unsurpassed standard for still life and portraiture and has been a powerful, creative force in fashion photography...

Reinventing Pakistan: welcome to Lahore, where an explosion of art and media is offering a vibrant alternative to the strictures of religious conservatives and is transforming one of America's most important--and most ambivalent--allies.(Letter From Lahore)
July 1, 2004... one night, as troops from Pakistan's army massed 300 miles away to hunt for remnants of Al Qaeda in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan, I went to a concert in my hometown of Lahore. It was a pleasant evening, warm, with a light breeze...

Galvanizing law.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... i take issue with "The Law that Ripped America in Two." Yes, the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 increased the likelihood of civil war. However, it was only one of many developments that helped to move us away from being a nation of slaves and...

Digging it.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... andrew lawler's article "Rocking the Cradle" was fascinating. I consider Iranian archaeologist Youssef Madjidzadeh and his colleague Akram Gholami heroes for their efforts excavating their site of a mysterious culture near Jiroft in...

Unsung heroes.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... "yellowstone: In the Beginning" omitted mention of the crucial role played by a photographer in helping to create the park. The Hayden Survey of 1871 included William Henry Jackson, who documented the expedition using the cumbersome wet plate...

State of being.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... in "the (scientific) Pursuit of Happiness," Chip Brown writes as though he and his peers are unhappy and they wish to acquire happiness. But it's not something you possess. Happiness is an attitude, a state of being. To try to find it by...

Tuskegee Airmen.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
July 1, 2004... your readers might be interested to know that as part of the National Park Service's development of the Tuskegee Airmen National Historical Site ("On Clipped Wings") we are conducting interviews with many men and women connected to the...

Grass menagerie: preparing to trade with Indians, the Corps of Discovery engages some other denizens of the territory.(Lewis And Clark)
July 1, 2004... Sixty-nine days into the expedition, July 21, 1804, the corps reached the mouth of the Platte River, which symbolically divided the Lower and Upper Missouri. Now the men would travel through lands little known to white traders. Along the Upper...

Raised from the deep: by examining the remains of men who died 140 years ago aboard a Civil War submarine, a Smithsonian anthropologist is determining their identities.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
July 1, 2004... on the evening of February 17, 1864, eight Confederate sailors wriggled through the narrow hatch of the H. L. Hunley, a 40-foot-long submarine made from plates of iron. The men knew the risks of their top-secret mission. The year before, the...

Haiti comes to the mall.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)(National Mall)
July 1, 2004... What does a fortress in Haiti (above), the largest in the Western Hemisphere, have to do with an event on the National Mall this summer? Along with celebrating Latino music and the culture of the Mid-Atlantic states, the Smithsonian Folklife...

Ink dot art.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)(Smithsonian Institution. National Portrait Gallery)
July 1, 2004... The Wall Street Journal's signature pen-and-ink drawings of the newsworthy have been donated to the National Portrait Gallery a lot of readers of the Wall Street Journal ask the newspaper about the computer program that produces the curious...

Who's counting?(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)(Smithsonian Environmental Research Center)
July 1, 2004... 162 Non-native plant, animal and microbe species, released deliberately or accidentally by people over the past two centuries, thrive in the Chesapeake Bay, according to the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center in Edgewater, Maryland....

This month in history: July anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
July 1, 2004... 80 YEARS AGO: MURDER MOST FOUL Nathan Leopold, 19, and Richard Loeb, 19, plead guilty in July 1924 to killing a Chicago child for a thrill. In a nation-gripping trial, defense attorney Clarence Darrow rails against the death penalty. Loeb is...

Splendid isolation: when the first astronauts to walk on the Moon returned from their July 1969 lunar expedition, they were confined to quarters.(The Object At Hand)
July 1, 2004... [Mobile Quarantine Facility] it has been 35 years since Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon, just before 11 p.m. E.D.T. on July 20, 1969--an astounding feat to those of us who witnessed it on the flickering screens of...

Yellowstone Grumbles: pent-up water and steam threaten to burst through the park's surface. (And we're not talking Old Faithful here).(Phenomena & Curiosities)
July 1, 2004... yellowstone national park is a land of many perils. Occasionally, one of the three million yearly visitors strolls up to a 2,000-pound bison and is gored. Others eat poisonous plants, snowmobile on avalanche-prone slopes, or plunge off a cliff...

Star struck.(Photo Finish)
July 1, 2004... In war and peace Americans display an unflagging passion for stars and stripes Chester, Connecticut Stanford, California Old Orchard Beach, Maine Rio Rancho, New Mexico Kent, Connecticut

The anti-burb: Arcosanti, a struggling community in the Arizona desert, preaches the virtues of close quarters.(Points Of Interest)
July 1, 2004... a science fiction-like wonderland of domes and apses on a desert mesa 70 miles north of Phoenix, Arcosanti is Paolo Soleri's rejoinder to the American ideal of a house with a lawn and a two-car garage. "The single-family house is the single...

Plutarch's exemplary lives: an ancient Greek wrote the book on biography then and now.(Presence Of Mind)
July 1, 2004... the first years of the millennium have become, for interesting reasons, a golden age of popular political biography. The young British writer Simon Sebag Montefiore has just produced Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, a savagely intimate...

Everybody take a seat: comfort for the masses? Or a tacky blight? Seemingly overnight, the one-piece plastic chair has become a world fixture. Can you stand it?
July 1, 2004... Maybe you're sitting on one right now. It has a high back with slats, or arches, or a fan of leaf blades, or some intricate tracery. Its legs are wide and splayed, not solid. The plastic in the seat is three-sixteenths of an inch thick. It's...

"All music is folk music": Smithsonian Folkways Recordings may soon be coming to a computer near you.(From the Secretary)
July 1, 2004... In 1948, moses asch founded Folkways Records in New York City, and for the next four decades, till his death in 1986, he and his legendary label introduced the listening public to an unprecedented expanse of musical sounds and oral traditions...

Secrets of the Maya: deciphering Tikal: after decades of intense research, the ancient ruins of Mexico and Central America are yielding new insights into the pre-Columbian culture.
July 1, 2004... Tikal's great plaza, at the heart of what was one of the most powerful city-states in the Americas, is surrounded by monumental structures: the stepped terraces of the North Acropolis, festooned with grotesque giant masks carved out of plaster...

Shrines and stelae.
July 1, 2004... Between 1956 and 1969, Tikal's central tombs and temples were mapped by University of Pennsylvania archaeologists. But as the six-square-mile survey map (right) shows, Tikal sprawled far beyond its "downtown," highlighted below. Towering over...

Of majesty and mayhem: an exhibition of ancient Maya art points up the opulence and violence of the great Mesoamerican civilization.(National Gallery and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco)
July 1, 2004... while most of europe was mired in the Dark Ages, the Maya of Mexico and Central America flourished. Living off a bounty of corn, they devised an elaborate calendar, charted stars and planets and invented the most complex written language in the...