Tabla de contenidos para May 2023 en Smithsonian Magazine

JACK JOHNSON WAS known for his patient boxing style—allowing his opponents to tire themselves out, then punishing them brutally once they’d run out of gas. With his uncanny timing and devastating blows, he became the first Black American to win the world heavyweight championship, in 1908. After that victory, many white commentators, including the novelist Jack London, fumed over Johnson’s success and swagger, and agitated for Jim Jeffries, a white former heavyweight champion, to emerge from retirement and put Johnson in his place. The big moment came on Independence Day 1910, before a crowd of 20,000 spectators in Reno, Nevada. In perhaps the most famous 15 rounds in American boxing, the out-of-shape but still formidable Jeffries took on the six-foot, 200-pound Johnson, nicknamed the “Galveston Giant” after his Texas birthplace.…

THE MEDITERRANEAN MONK SEAL begins its life in a cave. Even after it grows to hunt and mate in open water, the seal sticks to its monkish ways. These retiring creatures—the only seal species in the Mediterranean region —are among the scarcest marine animals in the world, with a population around 800. About half can be found in Greek waters, where an island or inlet might be home to just a few monk seals. Their ancestors were much more social. In The Odyssey, Homer described monk seals crowding together like a flock of sheep. The first-century Roman scholar Pliny the Elder wrote that the seals could be trained “to salute the public with their voice and at the same time with bowing.” When the Alsatian naturalist Johann Hermann named the…

Across 1 More, in Mexico 4 Letters before Constitution 7 Selfie, e.g. 10 “Able was I ___ I saw Elba” (famous palindrome) 11 Informal instant 12 Critical hospital locale 13 Job for a AAA vehicle 14 Workers at Westminster Abbey 16 “Wait, did ___ something?” 18 Gets together with 19 Yemen’s capital, as it’s sometimes spelled 20 Well-suited 21 One of many that cover 10 percent of earth’s land 24 “Live” tree in the hull of Old Ironsides 25 Animals with methanogens living in one of their four stomach compartments 28 Retort to “Are so!” 31 “Quit ___!” (“Enough already!”) 32 Purported quality of Frank Johnson’s jazz 34 Dr. of rap music 35 Do some lawn work 36 Square on a phone screen 37 Quirky 38 Suffix with differ 39…

CLARICE BECKETT spent most of her adult life caring for her parents, who disapproved of her artistic ambition. But in the soft light of early morning and evening, Beckett roamed Melbourne with an easel, aiming, she wrote, “to give as nearly as possible an exact illusion of reality.” After she died of pneumonia in 1935 at age 48, her father burned many of her canvases. The rest were stored in a shed, where weather—and possums—destroyed all but a few hundred. In the late 1960s, Beckett’s sister brought those to the attention of a Melbourne curator, who exhibited them at her gallery; today she is one of Australia’s most beloved artists. A major retrospective of her work opens this month at the Geelong Gallery in Geelong, Victoria. Beckett was a modernist…

ON MARCH 9, 1819, a supremely gifted musician named Francis “Frank” Johnson played a concert at the Masonic Hall on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. Johnson and his bandmates were free Black men; the audience was white and well-to-do. The building was a monumental Gothic Revival masterpiece with a towering steeple. Johnson, a 26-year-old composer and multi-instrumentalist, was already a sensation in Philadelphia. A book about the city published that year described him as the “leader of the band at all balls” and “inventor-general of cotillions,” a dance craze that was overtaking the city. The author, Robert Waln, a former U.S. representative from Pennsylvania, also marveled at Johnson’s flair for reinventing a sentimental song into an irresistible, foot-stomping jig or reel. At some point during the show, the hall caught fire.…

The Connecticut River cuts between the Green Mountains of Vermont and the White Mountains of New Hampshire and rushes into the heart of Massachusetts, where Denise Barstow Manz stands in the wind, surveying the land her family has farmed for 217 years. “We have some of the best soil in the entire world,” says Barstow Manz. “It’s called Hadley silt loam.” She explains how the rich Connecticut River flood plain that’s wedged between the river and the Mount Holyoke mountain range behind her nourished tobacco, asparagus, broom corn and squash for her 1800s ancestors, and how it now grows hay and corn for the current farm’s 600 dairy cows. Her dad, David Barstow, co-owns the farm with his brother, Steve Barstow, and his niece and nephew, Shannon and Steve II.…

WINNER: GRAND PRIZE Arnfinn Johansen, 57 Rorosvidda Mountains, Norway PHOTOGRAPHED: APRIL 2021 Among the peaks of a range in Norway, nocturnal mountain hares violently compete for the opportunity to procreate. It’s mating season, a fight for life. Johansen, who has been practicing nature photography since 1980, recalled that there were five or six hares present during the bout. “They fought each other two and two. Then, the others stayed away watching.” Johansen was also a patient observer, spending eight or nine hours in a nearby cabin shooting through the darkness. Previously, Johansen worked strictly in black and white, and he preferred this photograph without color. “It simplifies and reduces distractions,” he says. WHAT A PHOTOGRAPH SUBTLY suggests or even conceals is sometimes just as important as what’s clearly on display.…

MOST 19TH-CENTURY schoolmistresses are long forgotten, but Leah Maguire of Pennsylvania—known as “The Madam”—embroidered her own legacy. She taught her teenage sewing pupils to replicate her flamboyant style on their blank linen squares, with blocked borders, brassy colors and eruptions of the tricky technique known as queen’s stitch, visible in the upper-corner acorns of this 1828 sampler. Working in a typically anonymous art form, Leah’s girls boldly spelled their own names in thread—and their teacher’s, too. “It was really important that her name be on there, along with some kind of pious Bible verse,” says Jennifer Van Horn, a University of Delaware art historian. At a time when women had almost no control over legal documents and played a second-class role in literature and the arts, Leah’s “samplers were tools…

It ranks as one of the greatest feats of exploration in modern times. For five months, beginning in mid-December 1913, a team composed at its peak of more than 100 men, Brazilian and American, made its way across South America’s great heartland, by land and on rivers, on foot and by horse, mule, truck, steamboat, barge, launch and canoe, moving supplies, pack animals and boats across more than 2,500 miles. Two men of markedly different backgrounds led this extraordinary undertaking. Theodore Roosevelt, only a few years removed from the American presidency, was among the world’s most celebrated figures. But throughout the time he was in the wilderness, he mostly deferred to his more experienced Brazilian counterpart, a 48-year-old Brazilian Army colonel named Cândido Mariano da Silva Rondon. By any measure—number…

When the 2021 Dixie Fire barreled toward Jeff Greef’s Northern California cabin, he heeded the mandatory evacuation order, packed his truck and grimly drove away. In the days leading up to his departure, he had watched the sky darken with billowing clouds of smoke that made it feel like night. Greef, a former building inspector in the Bay Area, had recently retired and relocated to the picturesque Sierra Nevada. For the past few years he had vacationed on this land and used that time to gird against potential wildfires. He built his cabin with fire-resistant cement board siding and a metal roof. Following advice from the local fire safe council, he thinned his ten-acre forest. With the support of the landowner-led Plumas Underburn Cooperative, he completed an underburn, a prescribed fire…

The criminal abuse that King Leopold II of Belgium notoriously visited upon the people of the Congo River Basin, beginning with his illicit appropriation in the 1880s of the vast territory he called the Congo Free State, did not end after he ceded control of the colony to the Belgian Parliament in 1908. For many more decades, brutal apartheid existed in the Belgian Congo and adjacent colonies—Belgium also gained the territory known as Ruanda-Urundi, corresponding to the present-day republics of Rwanda and Burundi—and this forced segregation gave rise to an especially heinous policy that is only now coming fully into view. Marriage between white and Black people was made impossible by colonial administrators. Children of mixed-race parentage were not officially recognized by the state, which depended upon clear hierarchies and…