Smithsonian articles from November 2006

Smithsonian archives from November 2006

Watershed events: history has a funny way of interpreting the present.(FROM THE EDITOR)
November 1, 2006... PARIS-BASED Richard Covington, who has written for SMITH-SONIAN since 1991, suggested our story about the saucy queen who lost her head in the French Revolution ("Marie Antoinette," p. 56) because, he says, he wanted to find out for himself the...

It strikes me as odd that Oxfordians challenge Shakespeare's authorship because the "Stratford man" never attended university ("To Be or Not to Be Shakespeare").(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... READERS RESPOND TO THE SEPTEMBER ISSUE It strikes me as odd that Oxfordians challenge Shakespeare's authorship because the "Stratford man" never attended university ("To Be or Not to Be Shakespeare"). British literature is full of writers...

Slings and arrows.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... I SUPPOSE I MAY NEVER see the day when educated people agree as to the "real" author of the Shakespeare plays, but I am thankful that we have reached the point where the matter can be discussed without the participants pretending the whole...

No more cannibalism.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... "SLEEPING WITH Cannibals" had part of me fretting over the loss of another native culture, but a larger part feeling that this cannibal culture must change. The story of 6-year-old Wawa, marked for future slaughter, disturbs me greatly My heart...

Whose New York?(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... I HAVE NO DOUBT that Pete Hamill's "Five Years Later" is meant to be an inspiring tale about the strength of New Yorkers who endured the atrocity that struck our city However, I am troubled with his assertion that "almost all New Yorkers, old...

Child labor still exists.(LETTERS)(Letter to the editor)
November 1, 2006... LEWIS HINE'S PHOTO of child worker Addie Card ("Through the Mill") alerted Americans to the reality of child labor, but the problem persists in many parts of the world, where children are still held as virtual slaves because of tradition,...

Timeworn tot.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... The oldest known fossil of a child hominid has been found in Ethiopia. The 3-year-old female Australopithecus afarensis (the same species as the adult fossil "Lucy") lived about 3.3 million years ago. It's rare for a child's delicate bones to...

It's a snap.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(trap-jaw ant)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... The animal kingdom has a new champ: the trap-jaw ant has the fastest known bite, besting even the great white shark. With high-speed video, researchers from the University of California at Berkeley clocked the ant's millimeter-scale jaws...

Listening to Luna.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(killer whale)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... Luna (above), the killer whale separated from his pod off the coast of Vancouver Island, fascinated laypeople--and scientists. Before he was killed by a boat this past March, researchers from the UK and Canada documented that the 5-year-old...

The dinosaurs are coming!(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... When it comes to dinosaurs, scientists have only scratched the surface. There are 527 known genera, from allosaurs to tyrannosaurs. But 1,317 genera have yet to be discovered, a Swarthmore College and University of Pennsylvania study estimates....

Observed.(LIFE AS WE KNOW IT)(dictyostelium purpureum, amoeba)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... NAME: Dictyostelium purpureum, an amoeba KNOWN TO ATTEND: Family reunions WHAT FUN: Actually, they gather only when they're starving. If food runs short on the forest floors where these one-celled organisms live, they organize...

Passion fruit: Edward Weston quested for the perfect pepper.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)
November 1, 2006... August I, 1930: "The glorious new pepper Sonya brought has kept me keyed up all week and caused me to expose eight negatives--I'm not satisfied yet." DWARD WESTON photographed a lot of peppers. The most famous, sometimes labeled Pepper...

Interview David Galenson, economist, Chicago: pondering the nature of artistic genius, a social scientist finds that creativity has a bottom line.(Interview)
November 1, 2006... University of Chicago economist David Galenson recently conducted a quantitative study of artistic greatness. His findings appear in his Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity. WHAT ARE THE TWO LIFE...

R.I.P., Mighty O: a fabled aircraft carrier sunk deliberately off the coast of Florida is the world's largest artificial reef.(POINTS OF INTEREST)(USS Oriskany)
November 1, 2006... UNDER TOW and making barely two knots, the USS Oriskany seemed a shell of its former self. Once, it had been, to paraphrase John Paul Jones, a fast ship, going in harm's way Now it was a derelict, old and crippled, its bulkheads stained with...

Watching water run: uncomfortable in a world of privilege, a novelist headed for the hills.(MY KIND OF TOWN)(Fayetteville)
November 1, 2006... IT IS THE HOT, dark heart of summer in this small town that I love. Fireworks have been going off sporadically for several nights, and the teenagers next door are playing water polo in the afternoons in the swimming pool their professor parents...

November anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(THIS MONTH IN HISTORY)
November 1, 2006... 50 YEARS AGO SOVIET REPRISAL With Hungarian revolutionaries taking up arms to end Communist domination, Soviet forces attack Budapest on November 4,1956. Tanks crush the mostly working-class and student rebels in six days, killing 2,500....

Iraq's exiled virtuoso.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Rahim Alhaj, musician)
November 1, 2006... In 2004, Rahim Alhaj visited Iraq for the first time in 13 years and found that the Institute of Music in Baghdad--his alma mater--was burned and desolate. "There is no music anymore in Iraq," says Alhaj, a renowned master of the oud, a...

Special delivery.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(children dispatched by post)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... Through snow, rain, gloom of night and... diapers? This anonymous c. 1900 photograph from the Smithsonian's National Postal Museum spoofs the idea of sending a youngster through the mail, but the scenario wasn't that far-fetched. In 1914, a...

Ways of seeing: inviting artists to help showcase its collections is just one way the Hirshhorn Museum is expanding its vision.
November 1, 2006... BOLD initiatives by a new director are revitalizing the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Smithsonian's museum of modern and contemporary art. Even if you visited last summer, come back this winter and you'll see how dramatically...

Sky writer: Anne Morrow Lindbergh chronicled the flights made with her celebrated husband.(THE OBJECT AT HAND)
November 1, 2006... THE AIRPLANE that Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic on his historic trip from New York to Paris in 1927 was famously named the Spirit of St. Louis. Today, it constitutes one of the most treasured artifacts at the Smithsonian National...

Q & A.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Lucy Lawless)(Interview)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... Lucy Lawless, star of Xena: Warrior Princess, which aired from 1995 to 2001, has given her signature costume to the Museum of American History. She spoke with the magazine's Katy June-Friesen. WHAT DO YOU AND XENA HAVE IN COMMON? Well,...

Who's counting?(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(National Museum of the American Indian)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... 26 whole Chilkat robes, used for ceremonial dances by several Native peoples of the North Pacific coast (a twined wool and cedar bark robe c. 1880), are in the collections of the National Museum of the American Indian.

What's up.(SCENES AND SIGHTINGS FROM THE SMITHSONIAN MUSEUMS AND BEYOND)(Brief article)
November 1, 2006... TOPPER Is there a more stirring piece of our past? The hat Abraham Lincoln wore to Ford's Theatre the night he was shot--April 14, 1865--is among 150 historic items at the Air and Space Museum, as of November 17, while the Museum of American...

New faces of 1946: an unpopular president. A war-weary people. In the midterm elections of 60 years ago, voters took aim at incumbents.(Harry S. Truman)
November 1, 2006... WELL BEFORE VOTERS streamed to the polls in the November 1946 midterm election, Republicans scented victory. Not once in Franklin Delano Roosevelt's 12-year presidency had they gained control of Congress, but the Democrats no longer had FDR...

Marie Antoinette: the teenage queen, now the subject of a new movie, was embraced by France in 1770. Twenty-three years later, she lost her head to the guillotine. (But she never said, "Let them eat cake").
November 1, 2006... LATE SEPTEMBER sunlight filters onto the blue velvet furnishings of the jewel-box theater built for Marie Antoinette at Versailles. The painted, original backdrop depicts a rustic farmhouse hearth, and I can just imagine the young queen...

The smart and swinging bonobo: civil war in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has threatened the existence of wild bonobos, while new research on the hypersexual primates challenges their peace-loving reputation.
November 1, 2006... Led by five trackers from the Mongandu tribe, I tread through a remote rain forest in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, on the trail of the bonobo, one of the world's most astonishing creatures. Along with the chimpanzee, it's our closest...

Song and dance man: growing up in a gritty urban neighborhood, Erich Jarvis dreamed of becoming a ballet star. Now the scientist's studies of how birds learn to sing are forging a new understanding of the human brain.(PROFILE)
November 1, 2006... IF YOU WERE LOOKING for an animal in which to study the evolution of language, the zebra finch--a native of Australia that weighs about an ounce and has a brain the size of a grape--might not seem an obvious choice. Until recently, in fact, few...

Chile's driving force: once imprisoned by Pinochet, the new Socialist president Michelle Bachelet wants to spread the wealth initiated by the dictator's wrenching economic policies.(Biography)
November 1, 2006... ON THE EVENING of March 12, a broadly smiling woman emerged on the balcony of La Moneda, Chile's presidential palace in the heart of Santiago, the capital. Inaugurated the day before as the first woman to be elected chief of state in that...

Pilgrims' progress: we retrace the travels (and travails) of the ragtag group that founded Plymouth Colony, gave us Thanksgiving and laid the foundation for democracy in the New World.
November 1, 2006... ON AN AUTUMN NIGHT in 1607, a furtive group of men, women and children set off in a relay of small boats from the English village of Scrooby, in pursuit of the immigrant's oldest dream, a fresh start in another country. These refugees, who...

Sharp pencils: how three pioneering reporters reshaped the way the press covers elections--and politics itself.(PRESENCE OF MIND)(Theodore H. White, Joe McGinniss, Timothy Crouse)
November 1, 2006... THE 1960S AND EARLY '70S were among the most tumultuous periods in American politics--assassinations, riots, the conservative uprising, Watergate--but also among the most interesting journalistically. During this period three of the most...

Strings attached: "you want the greatest guitar ever?" Dad asked.(LAST PAGE)
November 1, 2006... FOR MY 8TH BIRTHDAY, I WANTED A GUITAR. My father had played a little back in his day. He said he dreamed of being a rock star with a traveling band surrounded by beautiful women. He said Grandpa could never afford a nice guitar for him, but he...