Smithsonian articles from October 1990

Smithsonian archives from October 1990

Smithsonian horizons. (repatriation of native American remains and artifacts) (column)
October 1, 1990... Steps are under way to restore the American Indian'sculturalpatrimony, a complex and long-overdue process The legislation authorizing construction of the new National Museum of the American Indian contains important provisions for the...

Around the Mall and beyond. (the endangered cheetah, and a tiger cub born from in vitro fertilization) (column)
October 1, 1990... Everyone knows that a cheetah can run faster than the speed limit on the Interstate. Not so many people know that this leopardlike animal is really a different breed of cat, with a genus all to itself: Acinonyx; or that there's only one species,...

The object at hand. (the first automobile journey across country)
October 1, 1990... How it came to pass would later be recalled this way: "One day well along in May [19031 a company of gentlemen were sitting in the University club in San Francisco talking over among themselves the progress of automobiling in the United States....

The hard fight was getting into the fight at all. (black soldiers in the Civil War)
October 1, 1990... It was a charge to remember, that doomed three quarter-mile rush down a naked beach and up the bristling earthworks of Fort Wagner. When it was over nearly half the 54th Massachusetts, a black regiment of 600 volunteers, had been killed, wounded...

In turn-of-the century Paris, an explosion of brash new art. (Fauvism)
October 1, 1990... The scandal of the Parisian art world in 1905 was Room Vll of the third annual Salon d'Automne in the Grand Palais, its walls throbbing with raw color. Color squeezed straight out of tubes; color assaulting the eye and senses; color that...

Pigeon racing: homing in on an 'invisible' sport.
October 1, 1990... The first thing you must understand about a longdistance pigeon race is that most of it is invisible. Is this true of any other sport? Before the sudden appearance of the bird on the landing board-or, if you are very observant, in the sky-the...

A quick way from here to there was also a frolic. (Pennsylvania Turnpike)
October 1, 1990... It is the most powerful image among postcards that half a century ago helped romanticize the Pennsylvania Turnpike: a night view of "The Turnpike's Picturesque Midway Inn and Service Station at Bedford" on "America's Dream Highway." The big...

High-tech hokum is changing the way movies are made. (LucasArts' Industrial Light & Magic)
October 1, 1990... I LucasArts' fire trucks stood ready in the gulch. Camera crews bristled along the cliffs, like machine-gun nests. It was a minute until the train wreck. Even the executive from Steven Spielberg's Amblin Productions, who had been protesting a TV...

Recording our leap upward to the stars. (Space Places, a book by Robert Ressmeyer)
October 1, 1990... At the age of 12, Roger Ressmeyer built himself a telescope out of a 5-foot-long cardboard tube and a 6-inch mirror that he'd polished and ground in h's basement for 120 hours. "I was a complete space nut," the photographer says today. Son of a...

Space Places.
October 1, 1990... At the age of 12, Roger Ressmeyer built himself a telescope out of a 5-foot-long cardboard tube and a 6-inch mirror that he'd polished and ground in h's basement for 120 hours. "I was a complete space nut," the photographer says today. Son of a...

Way Down Under, it's revenge of the (yech!) cane toads.
October 1, 1990... "Gross" is the word that springs most readily to mind. The thing is big, fat, ugly-and alive. It sleeps all day, eats voraciously, breeds insatiably and promptly poisons most of the animals that try to eat it. Not that many predators would want...

Winsome, weird and wonderful - art made by children. (Oslo's International Museum of Children's Art)
October 1, 1990... This museum has nothing in a glass case, nothing remote or sheltered from touch. In Oslo's International Museum of Children's Art, what a feast of imagination and feeling and color! The walls of blue or green or burgundy or even white are all...

It is no disgrace to be second fiddle to a Stradivarius. (Joseph Nagyvary and his attempt to reproduce 18th century Italian violins)
October 1, 1990... Joseph Nagyvary heads north on Agrimony Road, away from his office in the sleek new Blochemistry Building at Texas A&M University. Ten minutes later, the 56-year-old professor turns his white Toyota onto a dirt road and pulls up at a rundown...

Lincoln Ellsworth, the forgotten hero of polar exploration.
October 1, 1990... F Lincoln Ellsworth was a made-to-order American hero. Like his contemporary Charles A. Lindbergh, he was brave and independent, tough and resourceful, and modest to a fault. Like his other contemporary, and sometime rival, Richard E. Byrd, he...

'What I would give for a snapshot of him when he was 21!' (author researches the life of his great-great-grandfather, William Kernan )
October 1, 1990... Ancestors are old by definition. You see them in brittle, fading photographs in oval frames or possibly in actual painted portraits that your family believes are immensely valuable, and they are wearing peculiar clothes, and they are old....

Eminent Victorians.
October 1, 1990... Eminent Victorians A. N. Wilson Norton, $25 When Lytton Strachey published his Eminent Victorians in 1918, he meant to deflate and even ridicule the pomposity of his virtuous biographical subjects. Now, in an age that cherishes the Victorian in...

The Pencil: a History of Design and Circumstance.
October 1, 1990... The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance Henry Petroski Alfred A. Knopf, $25 Henry Petroski's book is an unusually handsome item: taller and narrower than a standard hardback, larded with illustrations, dressed in a classy typeface,...

The Adventures of Captain Alonso de Contreras: a 17th Century Journey.
October 1, 1990... The Adventures of Captain Alonso de Contreras: A 17th Century Journey Translated by Philip Dallas Paragon House, $19.95 The 17th century has just begun. William Shakespeare is putting on his plays in the Globe Theatre, London; Queen Elizabeth is...

Vincent Van Gough, 2 vols.
October 1, 1990... Vincent Van Gogh Vol. 1: Paintings by Evert van Uitert, Louis van Tilborgh, Sjaar van Heugten Vol. 2: Drawings by johannes van der Wolk, Ronald Pickvance, E.B.E Pey Rizzoll, $90 In today's dizzying world of art superstars and auction...

That gilded yo-yo, an elusive prize. (childhood memories of yo-yo training) (column)
October 1, 1990... There is a category of objects with which we are more comfortable and familiar than other things. A common yellow wooden pencil. It isn't even necessary to describe it. Every 20th-century American, if not everyone on the planet, gets a picture...