Smithsonian articles from May 2006

Smithsonian archives from May 2006

Rocky roads: not for the fainthearted.(EDITOR'S NOTE)
May 1, 2006... EVEN THOUGH the subject that Jennifer Wallace teaches at Cambridge University is English literature, she has long been fascinated by archaeology and what she calls "the need that people have for concrete objects to lend a sense of reality to...

The Maestro: a legendary test pilot celebrates his 95th birthday--and reminds us why we restore and preserve historic aircraft.(From the SECRETARY)
May 1, 2006... FOR SURVIVING the very high death rate among test pilots, John Myers thanks good fortune. On the other hand, it was his extraordinary flying skills that led to his nickname, "Maestro." He graduated from Stanford University with a political...

Doggone.(readers response)
May 1, 2006... Readers respond to the March issue: "Bone Voyage," featuring Toni Anzenberger's photographs of his dog, Pecorino, at European landmarks, unleashed dozens of letters. "In troubling times, photos such as these provide a welcome lift to both...

Wetland worries.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... AS A LIFELONG Florida resident, I have seen much of our state ruined by greed, poor planning and overdevelopment ("Everglades"). Here in Brevard County, the Indian River Lagoon--one of the nation's most biologically diverse estuaries--has...

Ruined memorial?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... I WONDER IF it might not have served a nobler purpose if the Church of Our Lady in Dresden had been left in ruins ("Crowning Glory"). As a college student I was transfixed by the sight of the destroyed church; the devastation of that glorious...

Utah's cowboy curator.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... WALDO WILCOX deserves credit for the preservation of Fremont sites on his land ("Secrets of the Range Creek Ranch"), particularly in the context of Utah's long tradition of illegal pothunting. On my first day of fieldwork as a Forest Service...

By the book.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2006... ALTHOUGH I AGREE with textbook author Joy Hakim that there is potential for an "exciting embrace" of religion and science, I must disagree with two of her statements ("Joy of Science"). She says "science is about things that are provable." As a...

Fearing the worst: a church is bombed. A daughter is missing. A rediscovered photograph recalls one of the most heart-wrenching episodes of the civil rights era.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)(Sixteenth Street Baptist Church)
May 1, 2006... IT IS A MOMENT that divides before and after. Less than 24 hours earlier, the two sisters at the center of the photograph were worrying over house curtains. Now they fear that the 11-year-old daughter and only child of Maxine Pippen McNair...

Cruise to the new world?(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Long ago, as many of us learned in school, some Asian peoples likely walked across the Bering Strait land bridge to North America. But some archaeologists believe that the first emigrants came by sea more than 20,000 years ago, when the land...

Not dead yet.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(kha-nyou re-discovered)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Visiting a meat market in Laos last year, scientists came across a strange bushy-tailed rodent that they thought was a new species. But now paleontologists at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh say the truth is even stranger:...

The smart set.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Orangutans living in isolated groups share so many distinctive learned behaviors--from the sounds they make to how they eat--that primatologists say such groups have their own cultures. Now Carel van Schaik of the University of Zurich, who...

Time to eat.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(hummingbirds food behavior)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... Hummingbirds dart from flower to flower, draining each blossom of its nectar. But new research suggests they're not just zooming around recklessly--they're on a tight schedule. Flowers refill with nectar every few hours, so hummingbirds would...

Observed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(sexual behavior of Daphnia pulex)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... NAMES: Daphnia pulex, or water flea. ONCE NOTED FOR: Reproducing both sexually and asexually. NOW NOTED FOR: Providing evidence that sex is better. THIS WAS IN DOUBT? Yes. Sexual reproduction costs lots of energy, and an individual...

Copernicus unearthed: archaeologists believe they have found the remains of the 16th-century astronomer who revolutionized our view of the universe.(DIGS)(Nicolaus Copernicus)
May 1, 2006... NICOLAUS COPERNICUS was the first to demonstrate that the earth orbited the sun, upsetting the prevailing notion that the earth was the center of the cosmos. But the Polish astronomer died in obscurity in 1543 and was buried in an unmarked...

War and remembrance: an Indian artist's traditional tribute honors Native American soldiers who served in Vietnam.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)(Emil Her Many Horses)
May 1, 2006... AFTER THE Indian Wars ended on the Great Plains and in the Black Hills at the end of the 19th century, tribal nations were dispersed, uprooted or confined to reservations, sovereign in name but severed from tradition. In that long twilight, the...

Forging its own future: dedicated metalsmiths help a Memphis museum revive a lost American art form.(POINTS OF INTEREST)(National Ornamental Metal Museum)
May 1, 2006... FROM THE GAZEBO at the National Ornamental Metal Museum, high on a bluff south of downtown Memphis, the world resembles nothing so much as a mural by Thomas Hart Benton. Day and night, barges steer through a wide bend of the Mississippi, while...

Is hip-hop already history? Yo! A vintage turntable is one thing. But a new Smithsonian history initiative to collect hip-hop artifacts raises questions about the rebel music's crude, even violent side.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(National Museum of American History)
May 1, 2006... WHETHER THE SMITHSONIAN WILL get jiggy is an open question, but the Institution has launched a new initiative to research hip-hop, the once outlaw street music that over three decades has grown into the driving force behind a...

Kiwi question.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... At the time of this printing, the National Zoo couldn't yet say for certain whether the kiwi chick born there in February--the first in more than 30 years--is a boy or a girl. Geneticists have tested the bird's DNA, but they're only 70 percent...

Evil tines: the fork, devilish and maligned, was the last of the utensils to arrive at the table.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)
May 1, 2006... IN THE IITH CENTURY, a Byzantine princess ate her sweetmeats with a forbidden object: a two-tined gold fork. At the time, the Church so opposed forks that after she succumbed to the plague, a Franciscan theologian called her untimely death "a...

Who's counting?(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Grant Wood's American Gothic on display at the Smithsonian's Renwick Gallery)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... 10,000 PEOPLE PAID HOMAGE TO GRANT WOOD'S AMERICAN GOTHIC IN THE FIRST TEN DAYS IT WAS ON DISPLAY AT THE SMITHSONIAN'S RENWICK GALLERY IN WASHINGTON, D.C., WHERE IT WILL REMAIN UNTIL JUNE 11. THE 1930 PAINTING, PART OF A NEW EXHIBITION ABOUT...

This month in history: May anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
May 1, 2006... 30 YEARS AGO: MON DIEU! A dramatic blind wine tasting on May 24, 1976, in Paris is attended by France's elite wine experts. Much to France's horror and America's delight, two California wines score top honors (the winning red, a 1973...

A tale of two Chinas: as the red-hot Chinese economy feeds the world's appetite for consumer goods, the one-time workers' republic is more than ever a nation of haves and have-nots.
May 1, 2006... THE DIMLY LIT ROOM has low ceilings and poor ventilation. The machinery is outdated and the glue guns leak. Rubber cement fumes spike the air. Rolls of leather stand alongside a pile of rubber soles. In a corner, a woman cuts synthetic material...

Dinosaur shocker! Probing a 68-million-year-old T. rex, Mary Schweitzer stumbled upon astonishing signs of life that may radically change our view of the beasts that once ruled the earth.
May 1, 2006... SHE IS NOT YOUR TYPICAL PALEONTOLOGIST. Neatly dressed in blue Capri pants and a sleeveless top, long hair flowing over her bare shoulders, Mary Schweitzer sits at a microscope in a dim lab, her face lit only by a glowing computer screen...

Shifting ground in the Holy Land: archaeology is casting new light on the Old Testament.
May 1, 2006... CLUTCHING A BIBLE and a bag of oranges he picked at the kibbutz where he lives, Haifa University archaeologist Adam Zertal climbs into an armored van beside me. A vehicle full of soldiers is in front of us; two Israeli Army vans are behind us....

Dada: the irreverent, rowdy revolution set the trajectory of 20th-century art.
May 1, 2006... IN THE YEARS before World War I, Europe appeared to be losing its hold on reality. Einstein's universe seemed like science fiction, Freud's theories put reason in the grip of the unconscious and Marx's Communism aimed to turn society upside...

Mt. Rushmore: with a Native American superintendent, the South Dakota monument is becoming much more than a shrine to four presidents.(DESTINATION AMERICA)
May 1, 2006... BLAME IT ON CARY GRANT. The climactic chase in Hitchcock's 1959 thriller North by Northwest, in which he and Eva Marie Saint are pursued by foreign spies around the faces of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Thomas Jefferson and Theodore...

Angel Island: a rugged outcropping in the San Francisco Bay remains a refuge hidden in plain sight.(DESTINATION AMERICA)
May 1, 2006... PILOTING HIS 33-foot sloop Aphrodite, my friend Andy Turpin eases behind a bluff to enter Ayala Cove--an anchorage on 740-acre Angel Island. As we approach the dock, waves from our wake lap at a narrow beach curving around the horseshoe-shaped...

Hallowed highway: from Gettysburg to Monticello, a 175-mile thoroughfare leads through a rich concentration of national history.(DESTINATION AMERICA)
May 1, 2006... "HOW DO I GET to Ball's Bluff--the Civil War site?" I ask a docent at the visitors' center in Leesburg, Virginia. "Oh, it's easy," she replies with a wave of her hand. "You just drive past all the housing until you can't go any farther." ...

Tombstone: in this Arizona outpost, residents revere the Wild West--and live it.(DESTINATION AMERICA)
May 1, 2006... IN 1877, silver prospector Ed Schieffelin set out from Camp Huachuca, an Army post in southeastern Arizona, heading for the Dragoon Mountains. The soldiers warned him he'd find nothing there but his own tombstone. When Schieffelin struck...

Minneapolis: the Guthrie Theater's new home, designed by architect Jean Nouvel, makes a dramatic entrance.(DESTINATION AMERICA)(Brief article)
May 1, 2006... ON JUNE 24, the Guthrie Theater--since its inception in 1963 one of the nation's centers for regional dramatic productions--takes up residence in a newly completed building on the banks of the Mississippi River. Created by French architect Jean...

Sitka: a tradition-rich village lies at the doorstep of a vast Alaskan wilderness.(DESTINATION AMERICA)(Column)(Travel narrative)
May 1, 2006... AS I KAYAK into the mouth of the Indian River, just off the Pacific Coast village of Sitka, Alaska (pop. 8,900), I gaze up at a sight almost surreal: along a forested trail hugging the coastline, totem poles up to 50 feet tall--the work of...

Dirty little secret: to see the Revolutionary War through the eyes of slaves is to better understand why so many of them fought for the crown.(PRESENCE OF MIND)
May 1, 2006... TEN YEARS after the surrender of George III's army to General Washington at Yorktown, a man known as British Freedom was hanging on in North America. Along with a few hundred other souls, he was scratching a living from the stingy soil around...