Smithsonian articles from May 2005

Smithsonian archives from May 2005

Homage to the Anchovy Coast: you may not want them on your pizza, but along the Mediterranean they're a prized delicacy--and a cultural treasure.
May 1, 2005... Joan carles ninou smiles broadly and laughs easily, signs of a man who can appreciate life's jollier moments. But get him talking about anchovies and you'll soon realize that a serious streak runs through him, a streak as deep as the...

Young eyes on Calcutta: an Oscar-winning documentary showcases the resilience--and vision--of talented Indian children born in the city's brothels.
May 1, 2005... On a trip to calcutta in 1997, Zana Briski visited the Sonagachi neighborhood, the oldest and largest red-light district in Calcutta. She was intrigued by its warren of brothels and other illegal businesses. Over the next two years the...

Fire in the hole: raging in mines from Pennsylvania to China, coal fires threaten towns, poison air and water, and add to global warming.
May 1, 2005... From the back kitchen window of his little house on a ridge in east-central Pennsylvania, John Lokitis looks out on a most unusual prospect. Just uphill, at the edge of St. Ignatius Cemetery, the earth is ablaze. Vegetation has been obliterated...

Digging deep: for some stories, the roots go way back, even to childhood.(EDITOR'S NOTE)
May 1, 2005... Researching Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 1937 attempt to pack the U.S. Supreme Court ("Showdown on the Court," p. 106), historian William E. Leuchtenburg encountered a note handwritten to a Southern U.S. Senator. It read: "If you don't come...

The seeds of civilization: why did humans first turn from nomadic wandering to villages and togetherness? The answer may lie in a 9,500-year-old settlement in central Turkey.
May 1, 2005... "Basak, they need you in Building 42 again." Basak Boz looked up from the disarticulated human skeleton spread out on the laboratory bench in front of her. The archaeologist standing in the lab doorway shuffled his dusty boots...

Model family: Sally Mann's unflinching photographs of her children have provoked controversy. But one of her now-grown daughters wonders what all the fuss was about.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
May 1, 2005... In sally mann's farmhouse, in Lexington, Virginia, a photograph of her children dominates a room, much as they have dominated their mother's creative life for the past 20 years. The picture (below) is notable for both the kids' innocent beauty...

Death Valley blaze.(JUST LOOKING)
May 1, 2005... "The transformation is breathtaking," says National Park Service chief interpreter Terry Baldino of the rare explosion of wildflowers that in March obscured the harsh landscape of California's Death Valley National Park, where temperatures...

Fried eggs to savor: why a nearly 400-year-old painting remains nourishing after all these years.(THE LAST PAGE the National Gallery of Scotland, one of the least exhausting, most rewarding collections in the world that, in a few comfortably intimate rooms, contains more masterpieces to the square foot than you have the right to expect. Among the saints and great ladies, the naked beauties and the suffering martyrs, taking her rightful and honorable place is an old woman cooking eggs, by Velazquez. Velazquez )(Reprint)
May 1, 2005... I have a gallery of pictures in my head so that if I went blind, I could still enjoy them. I would direct you to the National Gallery of Scotland, one of the least exhausting, most rewarding collections in the world that, in a few comfortably...

Toulouse-Lautrec: the fin de siecle artist who captured Paris' cabarets and dance halls is drawing huge crowds to a new exhibition at Washington, D.C.'s National Gallery of Art.(Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec)(Cover Story)(Biography)
May 1, 2005... COQUETRY! DEBAUCHERY! CELEBRITY! What more could an ambitious young artist ask for? The spectacle of Paris night life, with its cabaret singers and dance hall stars, offered a new world of scandalous imagery and lurid light that no artist in...

Man for all reasons?(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... Edward Rothstein writes that Churchill's legacy is being reassessed today by historians and social commentators in various contexts ("Contemplating Churchill"). By any measure, the lasting image of Churchill, astride the world stage just prior...

Too much Irish whiskey?(LETTERS)(Letter to the Editor)
May 1, 2005... Paging through "Ireland Unleashed," I noted three photographs set in Irish pubs, along with another of people drinking on a dock. Isn't that a bit of overkill? WILLIAM L. KEOGAN VALLEY STREAM, NEW YORK I am pleased that Ireland is...

Correction.(LETTERS)(Correction Notice)
May 1, 2005... CORRECTION: "Future Shocks" misstated the amount that the Washington and Oregon coastline is rising in some places each year. It is .15 inch.

Rocky Mountain high: after a canoe capsizes, the first sight of the mountainous "Snowey barrier" lifts the corps' spirits.(LEWIS AND CLARK: 200 YEARS AGO THIS MONTH)
May 1, 2005... In may 1805, the corps crossed from North Dakota into present-day Montana. While the expedition was traveling upriver, one of the canoes capsized; Sacagawea, on board with her infant son, single-handedly saved much of the canoe's contents,...

Overcoming polio: fifty years after Jonas Salk's successful vaccine, a new exhibition traces the disease in U.S. history, including its impact on children whose lives would never be the same.(AROUND THE MALL: SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
May 1, 2005... Nearly half a million children and adults contracted polio in the United States before medical researchers announced, 50 years ago last month, that Jonas Salk and his co-workers had developed the first successful vaccine to prevent the disease....

Hurry in.(AROUND THE MALL: SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Dorothy Dandridge, Oscar winning African American actress)(Brief Article)
May 1, 2005... Playing what one critic called a "slangy, come-hither" beauty in Carmen Jones (1954), Dorothy Dandridge was the first African-American to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Actress. Through Aug. 28, ninety posters trace black cinematic history...

Flying high: the winner of an out-of-this-world race, SpaceShipOne will land this summer at the National Air and Space Museum.(AROUND THE MALL: SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
May 1, 2005... "When that sunny, blue sky just suddenly turns to black, that was the biggest thrill," says pilot Michael Melvill, who flew into space last September in the world's first civilian-built and financed rocket ship, SpaceShipOne. "It takes a few...

Life on Mars? It's hard enough to identify fossilized microbes on Earth. How would we ever recognize them on Mars?
May 1, 2005... ON AUGUST 7, 1996, reporters, photographers and television camera operators surged into NASA headquarters in Washington, D.C. The crowd focused not on the row of seated scientists in NASA's auditorium but on a small, clear plastic box on the...

This month in history: May anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
May 1, 2005... 60 YEARS AGO: IT WAS IN ALL THE PAPERS Five and a half years after invading Poland, Germany surrenders to the Allies and the Soviet Union in Gen. Dwight Eisenhower's headquarters in a Reims, France, schoolhouse May 7, 1945. V-E Day, May 8,...

Casualty of war: a sculptor's provocative memorial acknowledges the high cost of conflict.
May 1, 2005... In Venice, on the square in front of the grand Dominican Church of Saints John and Paul (Zannipoli, in the Venetian dialect), stands a colossal bronze statue of a 15th-century military leader, Bartolomeo Colleoni, a mercenary who led the...

Rising from the ashes: the eruption of Mount St. Helens 25 years ago this month was no surprise. But the speedy return of wildlife to the area is astonishing.
May 1, 2005... Virginia dale was in the first helicopter load of ecologists to land at Mount St. Helens after it erupted 25 years ago this month. "I just remember how bizarre it was going out into that landscape," she says of the suddenly gray, ash-covered...

Fatal triangle: how a dark tale of love, madness and murder in 18th-century London became a story for the ages.
May 1, 2005... Unseasonable heat and humidity on the evening of April 7, 1779, did not stop Londoners' usual pursuit of business and pleasure. Over in Whitehall, the first lord of the admiralty, the Earl of Sandwich, discussed with his harried colleagues the...

Science matters: the Institution decides to focus on four basic questions.
May 1, 2005... Right from the start, the Smithsonian gave pride of place to science. The Institution's third secretary, Samuel Pierpont Langley, put our first astronomical observatory, which he described as a "one-story building, or rather shed," on prime...

Tribal fever: twenty-five years ago this month, smallpox was officially eradicated. For the Indians of the high plains, it came a century and a half too late.
May 1, 2005... On may 4, 1837, Francis A. Chardon, the churlish head trader at Fort Clark, a fur-company outpost on the Upper Missouri River, reported in his journal, "Last night the Cock crowed five times." The superstitious Chardon then added: "Bad News...

Showdown on the court: buoyed by his reelection but dismayed by rulings of the U.S. Supreme Court, a president overreaches.
May 1, 2005... As the first election returns reached his family estate in Hyde Park, New York, on a November night in 1936, Franklin Delano Roosevelt leaned back in his wheelchair, his signature cigarette holder at a cocky angle, blew a smoke ring and cried...

Diane Crump: pioneering jockey.(WHERE ARE THEY NOW?)
May 1, 2005... Diane Crump, the first female jockey to ride in a Kentucky Derby, on May 2, 1970, recalls being the only girl "on the backside [stable area]" when she received her license to exercise racehorses at age 16. She also well remembers the elation...

the year we were born: a look back at the world in Smithsonian magazine's first year.(May 1970)
May 1, 2005... The Confederate Memorial Carving on Georgia's Stone Mountain, the largest high relief sculpture in the world, is dedicated May 9. Begun by Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum in 1923, the carving features the figures of (left to right)...

On May 29, the California Court of Appeal overturns Black Panther leader Huey Newton's voluntary manslaughter conviction for the murder of John Frey, an Oakland, California, police officer.(IN THE NEWS)
May 1, 2005... On May 29, the California Court of Appeal overturns Black Panther leader Huey Newton's voluntary manslaughter conviction for the murder of John Frey, an Oakland, California, police officer. Newton, co-founder (with Bobby Seale) of the...

A National Guard unit fires on students protesting U.S. military involvement in Cambodia at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, May 4.(IN THE NEWS)
May 1, 2005... A National Guard unit fires on students protesting U.S. military involvement in Cambodia at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, May 4. Allison Krause, 19, Sandra Lee Scheuer, 20, Jeffrey Glenn Miller, 20 (lying at right with a kneeling Mary...

1970 Pulitzer Prize winners.(THE LIST)
May 1, 2005... Fiction: Collected Stories by Jean Stafford Drama: No Place to be Somebody by Charles Gordone History: Present at the Creation: My Years in the State Department by Dean Acheson Biography or Autobiography: Huey Long by T. Harry...

Comings & goings.(IN THE NEWS)
May 1, 2005... BORN: Naomi Campbell Model, May 22 BORN: Joseph Fiennes Actor, May 27 DIED: Billie Burke, 84 Actor, May 15 DIED: Walter Reuther, 62 President of the United Auto Workers, May 10