Smithsonian articles from October 2009

Smithsonian archives from October 2009

Fevers: temperatures at the boiling point.(FROM THE EDITOR)(Editorial)
October 1, 2009... FERGUS M. BORDEWICH, who writes frequently for SMITHSONIAN about history, takes up the case of extremist abolitionist John Brown, whose fateful raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, 150 years ago this month exacerbated tensions...

Corrections.(Correction notice)
October 1, 2009... "Muscle Man" misstated Charles Atlas' nickname--it was Angie--and the first name of the co-author of yours in Perfect Manhood. He is Charles Gaines.

Double play: baseball's Tinker, Evers and Chance were celebrated in verse-as well as in Paul Thompson's portraits.(INDELIBLE IMAGES)(Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers and Frank Chance)
October 1, 2009... FORGET BUBBLE GUM; the first collectible baseball cards came with cigarettes. The cards transformed the game, making household names of its greatest players. In the first decade of the 20th century baseball's biggest draws included three Chicago...

Wild things: life as we know it.
October 1, 2009... FIRE POWER People used fire to prepare stone tools as many as 164,000 years ago, according to a new study in Science. That's more than 125,000 years earlier than previous evidence (from Europe) had placed tool firing, which makes stones...

When I was twelve I bought a pony.(YOUR SMITHSONIAN.COM)(Brief article)
October 1, 2009... complete with cart and harness at a farm auction. An Amishman I knew gave me a driving lesson on the spot, told me to stick to back roads and sent me home at the reins. I named my little red mare Saturday. Once, in town, Saturday untied herself...

Editors' pick.(PHOTO CONTEST)(on Adam Vaught)(Brief article)
October 1, 2009... "With the various shades of red contrasted against his skin and beard, it was the perfect frame for a face with so much character." --Adam Vaught, Buenos Aires, Argentina, on his photograph of an ascetic at a temple in Guwahati, India ...

Shark aid.(YOUR SMITHSONIAN.COM)(Brief article)
October 1, 2009... "I'm glad we're finally protecting the sharks from us. Sharks always get a bad rap. I've been bitten by a shark before, and I don't blame the shark; I blame me." --Erica Grebeck, Arlington, Texas, on "Stopping Sharks by Blasting Their Senses"...

Scoutosaurs.(CAPTION CONTEST)
October 1, 2009... What's happening in this photograph taken sometime in the 1950s at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History? Your guess is (nearly) as good as ours. Please submit your caption by October 12, 2009, at Smithsonian.com/caption

Paper trail: in Guatemala, a chance discovery of police archives may reveal the fate of tens of thousands of people who disappeared in that country's civil war.(DIGS)
October 1, 2009... RUSTING CARS are piled outside the gray building in a run-down section of Guatemala City. Inside, naked light bulbs reveal bare cinder-block walls, stained concrete floors, desks and filing cabinets. Above all there is the musty odor of decaying...

October anniversaries: momentous or merely memorable.(THIS MONTH IN HISTORY)
October 1, 2009... 140 YEARS AGO CIVIL BUT DISOBEDIENT Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi is born in Porbandar, India, October 2, 1869. Educated in Britain in the law, he is dedicated to nonviolent protest of oppression of Indians, first in South Africa and then in...

From the castle: mind-meld.(Around the Mall)
October 1, 2009... GRATEFUL DEAD FANS may remember the lyrics, "Dark star crashes, pouring its light into ashes." Mickey Hart, a drummer for the Dead, is still thinking about the cosmos, and he recently contacted Smithsonian Under Secretary Richard Kurin to...

Trailblazer: Xiangmei Gu once labored on a farm near Shanghai. Today, she is the Smithsonian's first and only conservator of Chinese paintings.(Around the Mall)(Biography)
October 1, 2009... XIANGMEI GU approaches a mid-20th-century Chinese painting with a pair of pointed tweezers. Her task is to remove the last layer of deteriorated paper that backs the painting Lofty Scholar in an Autumn Grove and to replace it with fresh paper....

Q&A.(Around the Mall)(Mark Newport)(Interview)(Brief article)
October 1, 2009... Flashy capes and skintight garments are the usual accouterments of comic book superheroes. But artist MARK NEWPORT has some fun with these larger-than-life characters with his soft, hand-knit costumes, which are on view through January 3 at the...

What's up.(Around the Mall)(art exhibitions)(Brief article)(Calendar)
October 1, 2009... UP AND COMING Through January 6, the Ripley Center displays 15 works by emerging artists, ages 16 to 25, with disabilities. The artists express how their disabilities have motivated them and influenced their lives (left: Satori, Niamh Butler,...

Prescription for murder: in Southeast Asia, phony antimalaria pills are linked to thousands of deaths. Now an elite team of scientists wielding cutting-edge forensic tools has put some counterfeiters behind bars.
October 1, 2009... In Battambang, Cambodia, a western province full of poor farmers barely managing to grow enough rice to live on, the top government official charged with fighting malaria is Ouk Vichea. His job--contending with as many as 10,000 malaria cases a...

Trekking Hadrian's Wall: the second-century Roman fortification stretched across Britain. A hike along its remains leads to spectacular crags, idyllic villages, windswept marshes, local brews--and a renewed appreciation of Rome at the height of its power.
October 1, 2009... In A.D. 122, a few years after taking control of the Roman Empire, which reached its greatest expanse by the time of his rule, Caesar Publius Aelius Traianus Hadrianus Augustus trekked to the edge of the known world. It was a bold journey, one...

Teaching cops to see: Amy Herman uses art to sharpen police officers' observation skills.
October 1, 2009... Early one morning a bunch of New York City police officers, guns concealed, trooped into the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Inside a conference room, Amy Herman, a tall 43-year-old art historian and lawyer, apologized that she hadn't been able to...

Return of the sandpiper: years of alarming decline have finally halted for a shorebird that undertakes one of the world's longest migrations. The key? Horseshoe crabs.
October 1, 2009... The horseshoe crabs come from the deep, summoned by the big spring tides. Plodding and clumsy, the crabs plow along the continental shelf and through the silty waters of Delaware Bay, then drag themselves onto beaches to lay their eggs--with...

Day of reckoning: one hundred fifty years ago, abolitionist John Brown's raid on a federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry propelled the nation closer to Civil War.
October 1, 2009... Harpers Ferry, Virginia, lay sleeping on the night of October 16,1859, as 19 heavily armed men stole down mist-shrouded bluffs along the Potomac River where it joins the Shenandoah. Their leader was a railthin 59-year-old man with a shock of...

Looking for Leonardo: for centuries an altar panel in Florence, Italy, has been attributed to Andrea del Verrocchio. But are two of its figures actually by his student Leonardo da Vinci?
October 1, 2009... There's nothing unusual about discoveries of lost works by Leonardo da Vinci. Every few months, it seems, a story hits the news that yet another "Leonardo" has been unearthed--the lost fresco of the Battle of Anghiari, a terracotta bust...

Out of this world: in the past decade, extraordinary space missions have charted flares on the Sun, detected magnetic storms on Mercury and found volcanoes on Saturn's moons.
October 1, 2009... WE'VE BEEN LOOKING at other planets through telescopes for four centuries. But if you really want to get to know a place, there's no substitute for being there. And in the past decade, more than 20 spacecraft have ventured into the deepest...