Tabla de contenidos para September 2022 en Smithsonian Magazine

“I’d love to grip and inspect a tool made by an early hominin.” All Aboard Most of us have some dreamy idea about trains (“The Long Haul,” July/August 2022), whether it be a trip on the Orient Express or hitching a ride on a boxcar. These photos show the diversity and ubiquity of trains—and the ways they make our lives easier. Kathy Robinson | Asheville, North Carolina The Costs of War What a joy it is to see that these iconic treasures (“Russia’s Attack on History,” July/August 2022) are tucked away for safekeeping—and that they have been over and over again. Someone had the foresight to save these works, and others brought them back to glory. I hope peace comes to the region soon so these works can return home…

MARCH 12, 1941 Robert Diedrich, a school bus driver in Oxnard, California, received “a handsome medal for his heroism during a terrific windstorm” that felled power lines, confining the bus in which Diedrich was driving nine schoolchildren, the Los Angeles Times reported. “After quieting the children, Diedrich, ignoring his own safety, dashed from the bus and lifted the power lines.” MARCH 3, 1953 Driver Bernard Jakubowski evacuated 60 children from his bus in Michigan City, Indiana, after a gasoline tanker and a cattle truck collided and exploded nearby, setting the rear end of the bus on fire; Jakubowski ensured that his passengers escaped the fireball. “None of the children was hurt,” the United Press reported. MAY 24, 1959 Driver Charles Barber, just 17 years old, saved 35 high-schoolers in Lynchburg,…

QING DYNASTY DEZHOU BRAISED CHICKEN has its roots in the 17th century, when the Han Chinese used a new mix of spices, possibly including cardamom, cloves and fennel, to braise chicken. Emperor Qianlong fell in love with the meal in the 18th century, calling it “a miracle of all dishes,” and it became a royal tribute. By the early 20th century, the Deshunzhai Restaurant in the eastern city of Dezhou was serving the dish to delighted locals. But the meal remained a favorite of elites, including Chairman Mao Zedong. YUAN DYNASTY PEKING DUCK is said to have originated in the 13th century in Hangzhou, in eastern China, when street vendors began selling roast duck door-to-door, and it soon became a specialty in nearby Nanjing, too. The dish evolved over time…

Marshal Tito’s ghost was ready for his interview. Like any egotistical dictator, he had kept me waiting as he languidly made his way around his private refuge on Veliki Brijun, an idyllic, sun-soaked island off the coast of Istria in the Adriatic Sea. Finally, he looked me square in the eye and croaked: Ciao!, then Kaksi?, Croatian for “How are you?” This was followed by an expletive and an ear-piercing screech. “Koki likes you,” beamed the attendant, Lydia. “He usually only talks to women. If men go near his cage, he gets jealous and tries to bite them.” The most celebrated resident of this dreamy outpost is, in fact, a parrot named Koki—and like almost everything in Istria, a spectacular, heart-shaped peninsula on the Dalmatian coast of Croatia, he has…

EXCLUSIVE BOOK EXCERPT Many African Americans were eager to serve in the U.S. military during World War II, hoping their patriotism and courage would prove them worthy of the nation’s promise of equity for all people. But even as they battled foreign enemies that threatened our democracy, at home these men and women found themselves fighting the same racism and segregation they had endured as civilians. In a new book, Half American, Matthew F. Delmont, a historian at Dartmouth College, chronicles the service members’ struggles—including a momentous but largely forgotten Navy catastrophe that, he says, “helped force the Navy and the larger military to desegregate.” AT THE U.S. NAVY ammunition depot at Port Chicago, ondepot at Port Chicago, on Suisan Bay some 36 miles northeast of San Francisco, Black seamen…

IN SEPTEMBER 1965, the Smithsonian commemorated the 200th anniversary of founder James Smithson’s birth. President Lyndon Johnson delivered remarks on the occasion, noting that “our Nation’s first great benefactor” had bequeathed us three noble ideas: “learning respects no geographic boundaries,” “partnership between Government and private enterprise can serve the greater good of both” and “the spread of learning must be the first work of a nation that seeks to be free.” We value milestones like these, not just to celebrate, but to connect with who we are and to see how far we have come. One such pivotal event for the Smithsonian took place in 1967, when the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum opened in a former theater in Southeast Washington, D.C. Despite its humble beginnings, its ambitions were great, featuring exhibitions…

IN 1924, DURING Hollywood’s first golden age, 14 American bison arrived on Santa Catalina Island, 22 miles off the coast of Los Angeles. The animals were to appear in two movies being filmed on the island, The Vanishing American and The Thundering Herd, both adapted from Zane Grey novels. Alas, the animals didn’t make it into the former, and we don’t know if they played a part in the latter—the footage vanished long ago. But the bison remained, and some of their progeny finally made it to the big screen, in Stanley Kramer’s 1971 Bless the Beasts & Children. Descendants of the founding beasts still have star power, helping attract hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, but perhaps their most salient role over the decades is to bedevil conservationists.…

Q: Why do we see the Moon during the day but not the Sun at night? Millie | Queens Village, New York BY DEFINITION, night is the time when our side of the Earth is facing away from the Sun. That explains why we can’t see the Sun at night. But why do we sometimes see the moon in the daytime? The Moon orbits the Earth roughly once each month. For half a month it is on Earth’s daytime side, and it is visible for a least part of nearly every day during that time, especially for us in the northern summer. The difference is that at night, even a sliver is easy to spot as long as it’s in our line of sight. So the Moon isn’t a feature…

THE WESTWARD EXPANSION and urbanization of the 19th century left clusters of families scattered across rural America, with only muddy ruts and a rudimentary web of roads to connect them. To attend school, children had to walk for miles, or else, if they were lucky, they might catch a ride on a passing horsedrawn wagon. The seasonal nature of farm work, and the lack of public transportation, often meant that many children couldn’t go to school year-round. In 1852, Massachusetts passed a compulsory education law, and by 1900, thirty-one other states had similar requirements. But there was a problem: If the state was going to mandate that children attend school, the kids would have to get there. Schools responded by trundling children to and from school on horse-drawn conveyances called…

THE OLDEST CONTINUOUSLY operated Chinese restaurant in America is not in San Francisco or New York, but in Butte, Montana, where 47-year-old Jerry Tam, the great-great-grandson of the original owner, presides over the Pekin Noodle Parlor. Standing on South Main Street outside the weathered two-story brick building, with its display window of antique Chinese cooking equipment, Tam describes the Pekin as a “walk back in time”—one that illuminates the often-overlooked history of the Chinese population in Montana. The first Chinese immigrants came to Montana in the 1860s, working in the territory’s gold fields and helping build the railroads. Following close behind them were Chinese businessmen and their families, many of whom settled in Butte, the economic hub for mining activity. They established a thriving six-block Chinatown adjacent to downtown, with…

AS A YOUNG GIRL, Elizabeth “Betty” Catlett—born in Washington, D.C., likely in 1915—spent a great deal of time with her grandparents, who had been born into slavery and who took care to teach the child about her people’s ongoing struggle for basic rights. In the summers, Betty would visit her maternal grandparents in North Carolina, where she saw sharecroppers tilling hard ground and later recalled marveling at their perseverance in the face of “extreme poverty.” Portraying such people with dignity would become her artistic mission. Betty came of age during the first part of the Great Migration, in a well-educated household: Her father, John, who died before she was born, had taught mathematics at Tuskegee University in Alabama before the family moved to the nation’s capital. Her mother, Mary, served…