Smithsonian articles from March 2005

Smithsonian archives from March 2005

Contemplating Churchill: on the 40th anniversary of the wartime leader's death, historians are reassessing the complex figure who carried Britain through its darkest hour.(Winston Churchill)
March 1, 2005... Chartwell must have been a heady place to be in exile. Standing on the manor's back lawn on a misty autumn day, buffeted by brisk, sweet winds, it is easy to imagine the appeal these panoramic views of the Weald of Kent must have had for...

Where East met (Wild) West: excavations in a legendary gold rush town uncover the unsung labors of Chinese immigrants on the frontier.(Digs)
March 1, 2005... In a small lab on the outskirts of Rapid City, South Dakota, Donn Ivey, an itinerant researcher whose business card reads "Have Trowel, Will Travel," swiveled in his chair and peered into a small pile of dirt. With his left hand, he adjusted...

Future shocks: modern science, ancient catastrophes and the endless quest to predict earthquakes.
March 1, 2005... Brian Atwater paddled a battered aluminum canoe up the Copalis River, pushed along by a rising Pacific tide. At this point, a 130-mile drive from Seattle, the 100-foot-wide river wound through wide salt marshes fringed with conifers growing on...

Second thoughts: things are not always what they seem.(Editor's Note)
March 1, 2005... "Iranians are overwhelmingly hospitable people," says Afshin Molavi, an American journalist born in Iran who returned there to report "A New Day in Iran?" (p. 54). Molavi, author of the book Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys Across Iran, was...

A puzzle in the Pribilofs: on the remote Alaskan archipelago, scientists and Aleuts are trying to find the causes of a worrisome decline in fur seals.
March 1, 2005... Gale-force winds from the Bering Sea's first fall storm scoured St. Paul Island in Alaska's Pribilofs, a stunning archipelago of ancient volcanoes and sweeping tundra 310 miles from the mainland. But amid the thundering ten-foot waves and...

Hungarian Rhapsody: in a 70-year career that began in Budapest, Andre Kertesz pioneered modern photography, as a new exhibition makes clear.(Indelible Images)
March 1, 2005... Several andre kertesz photographs, including his witty picture of a dancer all akimbo on a sofa, are instantly recognizable. But a striking thing about his work, which is the subject of an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, is that even...

A new day in Iran? The regime may inflame Washington, but young Iranians say they admire, of all places, America.(Letter From Iran)
March 1, 2005... The police officer stepped into the traffic, blocking our car. Tapping the hood twice, he waved us to the side of the road. My driver, Amir, who had been grinning broadly to the Persian pop his new speaker system thumped out, turned grim. "I...

Ireland unleashed: a booming economy has fueled prosperity, transforming a society long burdened by oppression and poverty.
March 1, 2005... Here in county roscommon, the damp, boggy heart of Ireland, the evidence of poverty, destitution and despair is all around me. I see a family garbed in rags gathering for a meager meal of boiled cabbage, their staple potatoes blighted and...

Anosmia by any other name: the non-scensical life is still worth living.(The Last Page)
March 1, 2005... This past christmas my sister-in-law presented me with a reminder of how different my world is from hers... and almost everybody else's. She was opening a gift--a gift, mind you, mailed at least a week before--when she suddenly remarked...

Play it again, Oscar.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... The courage and fortitude that Oscar Peterson displayed to return to playing the piano after a stroke reduced mobility in his left hand shows not only that he has the "will to swing," but the will to live and inspire others to overcome...

Railroaded.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... As a fourth-generation native of the area, I must explain why the railroad bypassed New Philadelphia, Illinois, the biracial community founded in the 1800s ("Ahead of Its Time?"). The reason is topography. The railroad had to climb out of the...

Eating bushmeat.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... "Stop the carnage," about wildlife poaching in Africa, struck me as lacking a broader perspective about the people illegally hunting for food. While the article mentions the war-torn conditions of the countries and the lack of seafood because...

Florida beginnings.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
March 1, 2005... I enjoyed "Rethinking Jamestown," Jeffery L. Shelers' story about the ill-fated English colony. It is good to realize that these settlers, long disparaged as lazy and inept, were in fact just plain unlucky--a much-needed correction to the...

The Missouri breaks: as spring warms the North Dakota plains, ice--and injured feelings--begin to thaw.(Lewis And Clark)
March 1, 2005... In early March, Toussaint Charbonneau, one of the expedition's interpreters, returned to camp bearing gifts from a North West Company agent. Lewis and Clark considered the gifts a bribe, and suspected Charbonneau of being in league with the...

Scientists nab stowaways, foil invasions: for centuries alien plants and animals transported from distant ports in ships' ballast water have posed a threat to native marine species. New research suggests that a solution to the problem may be at hand.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
March 1, 2005... The entrance to the No. 4 port-side ballast tank of the cargo ship is a gaping hole in the deck, through which a rusty ladder pokes into a damp, spooky murk. Timothy Mullady and Esther Collinetti of the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center...

Easter Monday.(From The Attic)(African American Family Celebration)(Brief Article)
March 1, 2005... EASTER MONDAY Almost since the Smithsonian's National Zoo opened, in 1891, African-American families have gathered there the day after Easter (above, in 1936) to picnic and roll brightly colored eggs down Lion-Tiger Hill, at the park's...

Please pass the boar: a new cookbook pays tasty tribute to traditional fare of the Americas' indigenous peoples.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)(Book Review)
March 1, 2005... On her wedding day 40 years ago, Marty Kreipe de Montano's mother gave her a cookbook that included instructions for preparing woodchuck, moose and white-tailed deer. A few months ago, de Montano, a 60-year-old Prairie Band Potawatomi Indian...

4. (Who's Counting?).(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
March 1, 2005... CHEETAH CUBS (TWO MALES AND TWO FEMALES) WERE BORN NOVEMBER 23 AT THE NATIONAL ZOO--THE FIRST LITTER OF ITS KIND AT THE ZOO IN ITS 115-YEAR HISTORY. THE MOTHER, 4-YEAR-OLD TUMAI, IS PATIENT, SAYS THE ZOO'S JACK GRISHAM, EVEN WHEN THE CUBS SIT...

This month in history: March anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
March 1, 2005... 40 YEARS AGO: FREEDOM MARCH After two failed attempts, Martin Luther King Jr. leads 3,200 marchers on a 50-mile trek from Selma, Alabama, to the capitol in Montgomery March 21, 1965. The marchers, swollen to some 25,000, arrive to demand...

Modigliani misunderstood: a new exhibition positions the bohemian artist's work above even his operatic life story.(Amedeo Modigliani)(Modigliani: Beyond the Myth)(Biography)
March 1, 2005... Late in 1919, in a squalid Paris studio strewn with wine bottles, Amedeo Modigliani painted a wistful portrait of his 21-year-old lover, Jeanne Hebuterne. A few months later, on January 24, 1920, the impoverished artist died of tubercular...

The shirt off his back: Jerry Seinfeld's silly, frilly prop takes its place in television history.(The Object At Hand)
March 1, 2005... Let me get something out of the way: I'm a bit of a hypocrite. For years I've disdained Trekkies, those odd souls who obsess over the adventures of Captain Kirk and the crew of the Enterprise on "Star Trek," the folks who stick pointed Vulcan...

Traces of a lost people: who roamed the Colorado Plateau thousands of years ago? And what do their stunning paintings signify?
March 1, 2005... Deep in a high-desert canyon filled with contorted cottonwoods, stunted blackbrush, cactuses and melodious canyon wrens, the "Holy Ghost" hovers above a sandy wash. Surrounded by lesser figures, the striking specter nearly eight feet tall...

Child of wonder: Cristian Samper's lifelong love of flora and fauna inspires creative new displays of the world's largest collection.(From the Secretary)
March 1, 2005... From a young age, Cristian Samper felt little uncertainty about what he wanted to be when he grew up. Director since 2003 of the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History (NMNH) and at age 39 the youngest person to lead the museum in its...

Prescient and accounted for: a century after his death, novelist Jules Verne, who imagined Moon flight and deep-sea voyages, looks more prophetic than ever.(Tribute)(Biography)
March 1, 2005... Jules Verne, the French science fiction pioneer who died 100 years ago this month, is typically viewed in this country as a lightweight. For that, Hollywood deserves some blame. The 1959 movie adaptation of Verne's Journey to the Center of the...