Smithsonian articles from October 2004

Smithsonian archives from October 2004

Turrets and towers: the fanciful design of the Smithsonian Castle--150 years old in December--bucked the neo-Classical trend of Washington's other monumental buildings.(From the Secretary)
October 1, 2004... The cornerstone of the Smithsonian Castle was laid in 1847. It's the oldest of the monumental buildings on the National Mall, and familiarity hasn't dimmed its original visual power. In the 1840s, the heritage of earlier great buildings in the...

All the news that's fit to sing: two hundred fifty years before the information age, Bourbon Paris buzzed--and trilled--with rumors and gossip.(Presence Of Mind)
October 1, 2004... Of all the bromides now in circulation, the claim that we have recently entered the information age is probably the most misleading. Bombarded by cellphones, the Internet and television, we mistakenly imagine that our forebears inhabited an...

For sale by owners: threatened by megastores and a shuttered local chain, a Wyoming town revives Main Street by giving power to the people.(Points Of Interest)
October 1, 2004... At the mercantile store in Powell, Wyoming, you'll find clothes to suit almost everyone. In a space about the size of a baseball diamond, lit by long rows of fluorescent lights, hiking boots and blazers fairly jostle with jampacked racks of...

Kilroy was here: en route to Vietnam in the 1960s, American G.I.'s recorded their hopes and fears on the canvas undersides of troopship sleeping berths.(The Object At Hand)
October 1, 2004... Of all the graffiti that humanity has created across the centuries, perhaps most touching are the inscriptions left behind by soldiers. Since long before the Achaeans set sail for Troy, military life has been marked by loneliness, inaction,...

This month in history: October anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.
October 1, 2004... 70 YEARS AGO: CHINESE TREKKERS Carrying tools and office supplies as well as guns, 100,000 Communists flee southeast China and the Nationalist army in October 1934. Their arduous "Long March" winds 6,000 miles to Shaanxi in the north;...

Magnificent magnifications: microscope jockeys from around the world enter their masterpieces in an annual art show.(2004 Small World Competition)
October 1, 2004... IT WAS MORE THAN 300 YEARS AGO THAT ANTONI VAN LEEUWENHOEK GASPED at the sight of what he called "little animalcules" skittering through pond water, their motion "so swift, and so various, upwards, downwards, and round about, that 'twas...

Eyeballing the vote.(Around the Mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and beyond)(Judge Robert Rosenberg of Broward County)(Interview)
October 1, 2004... A judge involved in the 2000 Florida ballot recount talks about his vision among the 40 objects in "Vote: The Machinery of Democracy," an exhibition at the National Museum of American History, is the magnifying glass used by Judge Robert...

Body sculpting.(From The Attic)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Weeks before the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden opened, 30 years ago this month, staff artist Lee Aks seemed every bit the Charles Atlas, lifting enormous works of art overhead. Aks and a colleague had crafted several dozen Styrofoam...

Bugs beware: entomologist Gary Hevel spent four years scouring his yard for insects and netted 500,000. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and beyond)).(Bugs beware: entomologist Gary Hevel spent four years scouring his yard for insects and netted 500,000. (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and beyond))
October 1, 2004... One mild evening in early June, a tiger beetle landed on the screen door of Gary Hevel's suburban Maryland home and was promptly ushered into an empty mayonnaise jar. "A good night for insects," says Hevel, an entomologist at the Smithsonian's...

Who's counting? 8 (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and beyond)).(Who's counting? 8 (Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian Museums and beyond))(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Coffins, we're reminded this Halloween season, rest in peace in the collections of the National Museum of American History, including a plain wooden box from the 1860s (below) and five 19th-century small-scale models, submitted to the U.S....

Sergeant York: the first African-American to cross the continent was "big medison" for the corps of discovery.(Lewis And Clark)
October 1, 2004... During the expedition, William Clark's personal servant, York (his full name is unknown), enjoyed a degree of freedom unusual for a slave of his time. Along with other members of the corps, he hunted for game (contradicting statutes that...

Warming debate.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... "Will tuvalu Disappear Beneath the Sea?" is an insult to your readers' intelligence. The writer assumes that global warming is a fact. There are qualified climatologists who question if global warming is occurring, whether it's man-made if it...

Prison puppies.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... After reading so many articles about bad things happening in prisons, I was truly touched by "New Leash on Life," about the program that has inmates raising puppies for the blind. To learn how these inmates give back to society is uplifting....

Running argument.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... David Burnett's photo of Mary Decker was spot on ("Fallen Star"). However, I take issue with the article's tone toward Decker herself. I saw that race, and the many replays after. When she stepped on Zola Budd's foot, she was not trying to...

Paper chase.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... I entered the workforce when copiers were not as accessible as they would later become ("Making Copies"). They were operated by clerks who made sure the document copied was company business. One day a clerk was having trouble getting legible...

Tell some more.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... "In search of William Tell" made no mention of perhaps the only U.S. community named after the legendary archer. Tell City, Indiana (pop. 8,000), was founded in 1858 by a group of Swiss and German immigrants. Today, Tell City features a replica...

Food flights.(Letter to the Editor)
October 1, 2004... During world war ii we saw lots of strange flying objects in Stratford, Connecticut, with both Vought Aircraft Industries and Sikorsky Aircraft Corporation using the airport. The strangest we called the Flying Oyster. We never knew what it was...

Cleaning Picasso: the artist's groundbreaking Les Demoiselles d'Avignon gets a face-lift from experts at New York's Museum of Modern Art.
October 1, 2004... The conservation laboratory at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is a brightly lit sanctuary where 20th-century masterpieces are brought for cleaning, restoration and, in case of damage, repairs. Although the operations performed here are...

Shaggy dog story: one man's search for companionship, four legs preferred.(The Last Page)
October 1, 2004... I didn't have my first dog until I was 21 and married, too old for a dog and too young for a wife. We couldn't have major mammals when I was a kid because my family had had a collie before I was born and it came to an untimely end beneath an...

Fountain head.(Just Looking)(Brief Article)
October 1, 2004... Gargoyles galore douse visitors to Crown Fountain at Millennium Park, a 24.5-acre art complex that opened in July near Chicago's downtown lakefront. Two LED screens, each encased in 50-foot glass towers flanking a shallow pool, display the...

When the shooting started: a century and a half ago, Britain's Roger Fenton pioneered the art of war photography.(Indelible Images)
October 1, 2004... The crimean war, when British, French and Turkish troops united to invade the Crimea in 1854 and take the naval base at Sevastopol from the Russians, was in many ways the first modern war. The telegraph and railroad both played vital roles,...

Fighting for foxes: a disastrous chain of events nearly wiped out California's diminutive island fox. Scientists hope it's not too late to undo the damage.
October 1, 2004... The channel islands fox is one of America's most photogenic creatures--and one of its most endangered. The tiny fox is North America's smallest wild canid, with adults weighing a mere four pounds, and for thousands of years it had the run of...

Four fateful elections: what if Lincoln had lost in 1860, or if Theodore Roosevelt had won in 1912? How did Franklin Roosevelt, in 1932, and Ronald Reagan, in 1980, emerge to lead a dispirited nation?
October 1, 2004... Among George Washington's many distinctions, one of the most enduring must be that he was twice elected president unanimously and without opposition. Only one of his successors came close to that feat: the unopposed James Monroe, who, in 1820,...

New digs: introducing a new department and the editor who runs it.(Editor's Note)
October 1, 2004... This month we debut a new department. The subject of the new department "Digs" is archaeology, which readers tell us they can't get enough of. Our first "Digs" concerns the excavation of a courthouse that Thomas Jefferson designed from 1821 to...

Ultimate sacrifice: at age 33 in 1917, the Harvard-trained lawyer and Major League baseball player Eddie Grant volunteered to serve in World War I. He fought as he'd played: selflessly.
October 1, 2004... A chill rain, half sleet at times, had fallen through the night in the craggy ravines of France's Argonne Forest. Now, at dawn, fog hung low over the ground. Pale light seeped in from a sun rising somewhere out of sight. Capt. Eddie Grant and...

Foundation Father: archaeologists in Virginia find the footprint of Thomas Jefferson's lost courthouse.(Digs)
October 1, 2004... Brian bates was standing in front of a red brick county courthouse in Buckingham, Virginia, trying to describe something he has never seen--something, in fact, that vanished more than 130 years ago. "The original portico was massive," he said...

Adirondacks style: at six million acres, New York's funky wilderness preserve, one of America's largest refuges, is also one of the most alluring. An aficionado explains why.
October 1, 2004... Many, if not most, visitors to New York's vast Adirondack Park lay claim to a favorite vantage point. Mine is the summit of Coon Mountain--actually a craggy, wooded hill that rises only 500 feet above Lake Champlain. Coon Mountain will not...