Smithsonian articles from September 2003

Smithsonian archives from September 2003

Focus on the blues: Richard Waterman's never-before-published photographs caught the roots music legends at their down-home best.(Between Midnight and Day)
September 1, 2003... Dick Waterman's front porch resembles many in timeless Mississippi: wicker-back rockers, a bucktoothed rake, withered hanging plants. But step through the front door and you're in the proud, disheveled 1960s. The living-room walls are adorned...

Defusing Africa's killer lakes: in a remote region of Cameroon, an international team of scientists takes extraordinary steps to prevent the recurrence of a deadly natural disaster.(carbon dioxide poisoning )
September 1, 2003... On the night of the apocalypse, Ephriam Che was in his mud-brick house on a cliff above Nyos, a crater lake in the volcanic highlands of northwest Cameroon. A half-moon lit the water and the hills and valleys beyond. Around 9 p.m., Che, a...

Two weeks at Camp David: there was no love lost between Egypt's Anwar Sadat and Israel's Menachem Begin. But at the very brink of failure, they found a way to reach agreement.(25 years ago)
September 1, 2003... Sixty-two miles northwest of the White House, not far from the bloodied soil of the Antietam and Gettysburg battlefields, lies a rocky hilltop shaded by oaks, poplars, hickory and ash. This 125-acre site in the Catoctin Mountains of northern...

A walk across England: in the 1970s, British accountant Alfred Wainwright linked back roads, rights-of-way and ancient footpaths to blaze a beguiling trail across the sceptered isle.(Column)
September 1, 2003... When an English accountant named Alfred Wainwright first went to the lonely hills of northern England in 1930, he was a lonely man. But the cool, empty vistas of moor and mountain must have soaked up his own emptiness like a sponge, because the...

Beacon of light: groundbreaking art shines at the extraordinary new Dia:Beacon museum on New York's Hudson River.(museum news)
September 1, 2003... It's only fitting that the most eagerly awaited museum in the world of contemporary art is more than an hour removed from New York City's frenetic art scene. Many of the artists whose works went on permanent display this past May at Dia:Beacon,...

Picture this: five categories, 50 finalists, six winners.(Editor's Note)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... We want to make our first photo contest as simple as possible, so here goes. To submit a photograph for any or all of our five categories, send us an unmounted 5 x 7 or 8 x 10 color or black-and-white print and affix to the back of each...

Brooklyn rooftop, 9/11.(Indelible Images/Crossings: Photographs from the U.S. - Mexico Border by Alex Webb)
September 1, 2003... Alex Webb and Jenna Piccirillo were strangers when he photographed her with her 3-month-old son, Vaughan, on September 11, 2001. They were on the roof of the apartment building in which she was staying in Brooklyn Heights. Piccirillo, then 31...

"Wow, Isn't That Cool!"; Segway inventor Dean Kamen says when the lightbulb in your brain goes on, you may not even see it.(inventions)(Interview)
September 1, 2003... Dean Kamen, who invents 21st-century gizmos in a 19th-century factory building, looks out the window of his corner office at the Merrimack River, four floors below. The river is why this building is here in Manchester, New Hampshire: water...

Raising a stink.(Just Looking)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2003... RAISING A STINK One intrepid girl breaks from the crowd to sniff the 55-inch titan arum, or "corpse flower," that bloomed July 23 and 24 at the U.S. Botanic Garden in Washington, D.C. In those two days, 16,000 visitors came for a whiff of...

Uncivil war.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... Ah, the apotheosizing of Dixie goes on ("Making Sense of Robert E. Lee"), and Roy Blount, Jr., does his bit: Lee, the butcher of the Confederacy, is "fiery," Stonewall Jackson "ferocious," Jeb Stuart "dashing." Ulysses S. Grant is dismissed as...

West Nile virus.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... "On the trail of the West Nile Virus" was engaging and comprehensive but did not mention that, in addition to the blood-banking industry and the Red Cross, America's Blood Centers, a network of nonprofit community blood banks, continues to play...

Capitalist Korea.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... In "Korea: A House Divided," Jonathan Kandell highlights the great economic and quality-of-life differences between the two Koreas. Indeed, the Koreas offer a stark difference in the failure of the Communist system versus the proper application...

Tomato wisdom.(Letters)(Letter to the Editor)
September 1, 2003... As a postscript to the essay "Haute Tomato," I offer the following from British humorist Miles Kington: Knowledge tells us that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom prevents us from putting it into a fruit salad. HEINZ HELLIN HAWKLEY,...

Meet yorick, man of many parts: a skeletal record of the invention of bionic body bits checks in at the Smithsonian.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond)
September 1, 2003... "Have you got yorick's head?" "Careful with those tubes!" "There's something wrong with his toes." Here at the loading dock of the National Museum of American History, the drama was more surreal than Shakespearean. A plastic...

Living it up in the 1860s at the Hotel Smithsonian.(From The Attic)(Illustration)
September 1, 2003... By day, these young men were serious scholars at the Institution. But at night they joined fellow members of the Megatherium Club, some of whom rented lodgings in the Castle, and the hijinks began. Using the imaginary call ("How! How!") of...

Hurry in.(Around the mall: scenes and sightings from the Smithsonian museums and beyond/"The Splendor of Diamonds")
September 1, 2003... "The Splendor of Diamonds" closes at the National Museum of Natural History on September 15. The seven gems displayed--together for this one and only time--are among the rarest and most valuable diamonds in the world. The Allnatt (below, about...

This month in history: September anniversaries--momentous or merely memorable.(the Western World)
September 1, 2003... 25 YEARS AGO: THE GREATEST ONCE AGAIN On September 15, 1978, ninety million TV viewers see a rematch, in New Orleans, between aging legend Muhammad Ali, 36, and titleholder Leon Spinks, 25. In a unanimous decision, Ali wins the World...

Talking to horses: Stanford Addison uses intuition, compassion and persistence to "break" wild horses.(People File/Wyoming's Wind River Reservation)(Column)
September 1, 2003... In the movie The Horse Whisperer, the mere sight of Robert Redford squatting thoughtfully in a meadow was enough to get a problem horse to shed its bad habits. Stanford Addison gets horses to shed their bad habits all the time. But he...

Uncle Sam's dolphins: in the Iraq war, highly trained cetaceans helped U.S. forces clear mines in Umm Qasr's harbor.(Phenomena & Curiosities/ U. S. Navy Special Clearance Team One)
September 1, 2003... Two weeks after the fall of Baghdad, U.S. Marine Corps Sgt. Andrew Garrett guides an inflatable boat through a cluster of American warships in the Persian Gulf off southern Kuwait. Beside him on a rubber mat lies one of the Iraq war's most...

Stopping a scourge: no one knows if SARS will strike again. But researchers' speedy work halting the epidemic makes a compelling case study of how to combat deadly viruses.(Presence Of Mind/severe acute respiratory syndrome)
September 1, 2003... It was 11 minutes after noon on the third Friday in March, and Sherif Zaki was in a meeting at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) when he got a message on his pager. "I can't believe it," the message said, "but it looks as...

Man's reach: the Cooper-Hewitt explores the wide-ranging impact of historical and contemporary designs.(From the Secretary/"National Design Triennial: Inside Design Now")
September 1, 2003... The cooper-hewitt, National Design Museum is the Smithsonian museum most distant from the great cluster of the Institution's buildings in Washington, D.C. But given its purpose, it couldn't be more appropriately situated than in New York City,...

Keeping up with Mark Twain: Berkeley researchers toil to stay abreast of Samuel Clemens' enormous literary output, which appears to continue unabated.("Is He Dead?" and "A Murder, a Mystery and a Marriage")(Critical Essay)
September 1, 2003... Ninety-three years after his death in 1910, Samuel Langhorne Clemens has been making some ambitious career moves. It's almost as though the old sage of the Mississippi, better known as Mark Twain, is trying to reposition himself as the King, as...

One room, three R's: a new book pays homage to the one-room schoolhouse, site of America's basic training.(Photo Finish)(Brief Article)(Illustration)
September 1, 2003... [ILLUSTRATIONS OMITTED] Caption: Lower Fox Creek School Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, Kansas Built 1882 From The One-Room Schoolhouse: A Tribute to a Beloved National Icon by Paul Rocheleau, Universe Publishing, 2003 ...

The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America's Greatest Museum.(by Nina Burleigh)(Book Review)
September 1, 2003... NINA BURLEIGH WILLIAM MORROW / HARPERCOLLINS, $24.95 In 1829, Englishman James Smithson died at the age of 64 and left more than $500,000--the equivalent of $9.6 million today--to the "United States of America, to found... an...

Dressed to kill: in beating the pants off Bobby Riggs, Billie Jean King inspired feminists and fashionistas alike.(The Object At Hand)
September 1, 2003... In the days leading up to Billie Jean King's monumental confrontation with self-proclaimed male chauvinist pig Bobby Riggs, the American public was spared few details about their $100,000, winner-take-all "Battle of the Sexes" tennis match,...