Smithsonian articles from May 2007

Smithsonian archives from May 2007

"Catching Up with 'Old Slow Trot'" vindicates Gen. George H. Thomas, one of the most underrated commanders of the Civil War.(Lettera)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2007... READERS RESPOND TO THE MARCH ISSUE "Catching Up with 'Old Slow Trot'" vindicates Gen. George H. Thomas, one of the most underrated commanders of the Civil War. It's a shame he has been relegated to the dustbin of history because of...

Recalling "Old Slow Trot".(Letters)(General )(Letter to the editor)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... EVEN IN FORT THOMAS, the city that bears General Thomas' name, little is known or taught about the man. A mural in the post office is about the extent of a tribute to the war hero. Furgurson's well-written article sheds a new perspective on...

Slumming it.(Letters)(Poverty tourism)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2007... WHILE JOHN LANCASTER does a good job of presenting both sides of the debate over "reality" tours in the slums of Mumbai ("Next Stop, Squalor"), I see little moral justification for this practice. I cannot believe that the possible benefits...

Layers of history.(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2007... PALIMPSESTING may have been a way to recycle parchments for other writing ("Reading Between the Lines"), but fortunately it was also a great method of preserving some important work. PAUL DALE ROBERTS ELK GROVE, CALIFORNIA

Take my kids. Please.(Letters)(Phyllis Diller)(Letter to the editor)
May 1, 2007... TV PERSONALITY Ruth Lyons hosted a midday show in Cincinnati back in the 1950s and '60s, and occasionally had Phyllis Diller ("The Object at Hand" in "Around the Mall") as a guest. On one visit Diller came in, sat down, and said, "Ruth, you...

Corrections.(Correction notice)
May 1, 2007... The photograph that is the subject of "Operatic Entrance" (pages 16 and 17) was taken in 1957. The year was inadvertently removed from the text. Because of a typographical error, "Catching Up with 'Old Slow Trot'" misstated the year in...

Fragile beauties: from the Chesapeake to Mozambique.
May 1, 2007... THE FIRST THING TERRY SMITH DID after the New York Times transferred him from New York City to Washington, D.C., 30 years ago, was buy a boat and sail it on the Chesapeake Bay So began a love affair with the nation's largest estuary that...

Choosing sides.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Southeast Asian snakes)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... Certain Southeast Asian snakes are endowed with more teeth on the right side of the jaw than on the left. To what advantage? A new study from Kyoto University in Japan shows that the tooth arrangement helps the snakes grapple with their favored...

Illuminating.(Life As We Know It)(Taningia danae)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... Previously thought to be sluggish and dull, the eight-armed deep-sea squid Taningia danae actually puts on an exciting light show. Researchers from three Japanese institutions made the world's first video of the squid, which can grow more than...

Mutual assured hugging.(Life As We Know It)(spider monkeys)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... Displays of affection keep the peace among spider monkeys, according to a yearlong study in the Yucatan. Spider monkeys spend most of their time sorted into small groups of about 2 to 20 members. When two different cliques come together,...

Very early childhood.(Life As We Know It)(homo sapiens)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... An ancient dental record is adding new depth to early Homo sapiens' evolutionary history. Researchers from the Max Planck Institute and elsewhere used an X-ray technique to analyze the fossilized jaw, found in Morocco, of a 7-year-old human who...

Observed.(Life As We Know It)(Sitta canadensis)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... NAME: Sitta canadensis, or the red-breasted nuthatch (left). RECENTLY SEEN: Cracking the code of the blackcapped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus). THEY'RE ENEMIES? No. They help each other out. HOW'S THAT? Chickadees sound alarm...

They needed to talk: and family friend William Eggleston, his camera at his side, felt compelled to shoot.(Indelible Images)
May 1, 2007... THE DETAILS are a bit sketchy now, but everyone agrees the picture was taken in Memphis, Tennessee, on a late summer night in 1973. Karen Chatham, the young woman in blue, recalls that she had been out drinking when she met up with Lesa...

The New World's oldest calendar? Research at a 4,200-year-old temple in Peru yields clues to an ancient people who may have clocked the heavens.(Digs)
May 1, 2007... THEY WERE EXCAVATING at Buena Vista, an ancient settlement in the foothills of the Andes an hour's drive north of Lima, Peru. A dozen archaeology students hauled rocks out of a sunken temple and lobbed them to each other in a human chain....

May anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(This Month in History)
May 1, 2007... 70 YEARS AGO GOLDEN DAYS A 6 a.m. foghorn blast on May 27,1937, signals the opening of California's Golden Gate Bridge and spurs more than 100,000 pedestrians on a charge across the world's longest suspension span. Four years and $35...

Clouded comeback?(Scenes and Sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and Beyond)(leopard)
May 1, 2007... In one respect, it has been a good year for the clouded leopard, a strange and beautiful Asian cat. Fifteen cubs, 12 of which survived, were born at the Khao Kheow Open Zoo in Chonburi, Thailand, offspring of a collaboration with the...

Checking the bard's I.D.(Scenes and Sightings from the Smithsonian Museum and Beyond)(William Shakespeare)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... Nevermind the controversy over the authorship of William Shakespeare's plays. What did the man look like? Out of all the images said to depict the playwright, only one bears strong evidence of being an authentic likeness created in the bard's...

Design for a better planet: ingenious tools serve basic needs.(Scenes and Sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and Beyond)
May 1, 2007... AS A YOUNG MAN in a family of Nigerian pot makers, Mohammed Bah Abba wondered about a problem that plagues poor people in hot climates: how to keep food from spoiling without refrigeration. Then he hit upon a solution. Placing one earthenware...

The dirt on global warming.(Scenes and Sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and Beyond)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... Smithsonian scientists have found that, contrary to expectations, increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere generates more of the gas, potentially adding to the greenhouse effect. Climate experts have long assumed that because carbon dioxide...

Doodle dandy: with a few deft strokes, Saul Steinberg turned institutional letterhead into signature works of whimsy.(The Object at Hand)
May 1, 2007... IN 1967, then-Secretary of the Smithsonian S. Dillon Ripley invited Saul Steinberg to serve as the Institution's first and only artist-in-residence. The Romanian-born Steinberg, schooled in philosophy in Bucharest and architecture in Italy, had...

Q & A.(Scenes and Sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and Beyond)(Interview)
May 1, 2007... Starting this month, prints by SEAN SCULLY are exhibited at Smithsonian's American Art Museum. The Irish-born, New York-based artist spoke with the magazine's Courtney Jordan. YOU'RE A RENOWNED ABSTRACT PAINTER, SO WHAT'S THE APPEAL IN...

What's up.(Scenes and Sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and Beyond)
May 1, 2007... INTERIOR MOTIVE Artists Virgil Marti and Pae White have adorned the Hirshhorn's minimalist lobby with foam couches draped in wool tapestry "newspapers," curtains strung from gilded plastic bones and windows cocooned in tape. Experience the...

Interview Daniel Gilbert, psychologist, Cambridge, Massachusetts: what will make you happy? A social scientist explains why it's so hard to predict.(Interview)
May 1, 2007... In Stumbling on Happiness, just released in paperback, the Harvard psychologist explores why we human beings are poor "affective forecasters," or predictors of future emotion. LET'S DO A TEST: HOW DO YOU THINK YOU'LL FEEL AT THE END OF...

Beyond Jamestown: after the colony was founded, 400 years ago this month, Capt. John Smith set out to explore the riches of Chesapeake Bay. With Smith's journals to guide him, a modern-day sailor retraces that historic voyage.(DestinationAmerica)
May 1, 2007... IT WAS A CHAMPAGNE DAY on the James River: blue sky, puffy white clouds, sun sparkling on fast-moving water. With Jamestown slipping behind us, we headed downstream in the wake of Capt. John Smith, the first Englishman to explore the broad...

Cajun country: zydeco and etouffee still reign in western Louisiana, where the zesty gumbo known as Acadian culture has simmered since 1764.(DestinationAmerica)
May 1, 2007... IT'S SATURDAY MORNING in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana (pop. 7,902). My bloody mary sports a dilly bean, my eggs share a plate with crawfish etouffee and my flatware is bouncing around like a Mexican jumping bean. This is the zydeco breakfast at...

The Berkshires: the hills are alive with the sounds of Tanglewood--plus modern dance, the art of Norman Rockwell and a literary tradition that goes back to Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville.(DestinationAmerica)
May 1, 2007... FROM THE DESK at which he wrote Moby-Dick--a touchstone of American literature and arguably the greatest seafaring novel ever published--Herman Melville could gaze upon the forested hills and sloping fields of western Massachusetts' Berkshire...

Galena, Illinois: Ulysses S. Grant's postwar retreat is not the only reason to visit this restored Victorian showcase.(DestinationAmerica)
May 1, 2007... IN HIS MEMOIRS, Ulysses S. Grant makes scant mention of the April 1860 afternoon that he moved with his family to the port town of Galena, Illinois, on a Mississippi tributary 144 miles northwest of Chicago. Perhaps that's understandable. The...

Highlights & hotspots.(DestinationAmerica)(Brief article)
May 1, 2007... AKRON, OHIO The question doesn't rank up there with, say, What is gravity? But where was the hamburger invented? To promote its claim, Akron hosts the National Hamburger Festival on July 21 and 22. Over 20,000 people served, including...

What camera? Look what photographer Robert Creamer can do with a flatbed scanner.(Interview)
May 1, 2007... The sunroom in Robert Creamer's home is filled with dead and dying things: browning lotus leaves, heron bones, a halved nautilus shell exposing spiraling empty chambers, plates of desiccated irises, and other flora and fauna. Like most good...

Greg Carr's big gamble: "I had the idea at 25 that if I made a lot of money, I could do whatever I wanted," says the Boston entrepreneur. And so, in one of the largest private commitments in African conservation, he's putting $40 million into a spectacular national park in war-ravaged Mozambique.(Interview)
May 1, 2007... The children come running as soon as the boat pushes onto the riverbank, mooring next to empty handmade fish traps. Greg Carr is at the front of the group of visitors clambering ashore. He lifts one child into the air, makes a face at another...

Epic hero: how a self-taught British genius rediscovered the Mesopotamian saga of Gilgamesh--after 2,500 years.(George Smith)(Biography)
May 1, 2007... IN NOVEMBER 1872, George Smith was working at the British Museum in a second-floor room overlooking the bare plane trees in Russell Square. On a long table were pieces of clay tablets, among the hundreds of thousands that archaeologists had...

Organization man: Carl Linnaeus, born 300 years ago, brought order to nature's blooming, buzzing confusion.(Biography)
May 1, 2007... FOR TWO YEARS in the late 1970s I followed in the footsteps of Carl Linnaeus: I toiled in the field of taxonomy The small corner of nature's jigsaw puzzle that I tackled was a group of marine sponges whose baffling variability defied easy...

Change of heart: Anna Jarvis wanted to honor mothers. She lived to rue the day.
May 1, 2007... LIKE ANY APPLE-PIE-EATING, baseball-watching American son, I love my mother and will bestow upon her the requisite round of filial attentions this Mother's Day. But I also want to pay tribute to another woman--a largely forgotten Philadelphia...