Tabla de contenidos para June 2023 en Smithsonian Magazine

TWITTER: @SmithsonianMag  INSTAGRAM: @smithsonianmagazine FACEBOOK: smithsonianmagazine “I could almost smell the musty aroma of ancient British history.” Fighting Fire With Fire Every year my heart breaks at the devastation and loss from forest wildfires (“Under Control,” April/May 2023). It is heartening to learn that communities are coming together to take the lead in preventing this loss and devastation. It seems counterintuitive to “burn” to prevent fires, but the data shows that it works. Going back to the old ways isn’t always a bad thing. K Spezia | Queens, New York For too long, many folks have looked to the government for answers when, in fact, programs like these work so much better. What an uplifting story about citizens helping each other. The results speak for themselves, and if government programs…

RUTH HANDLER, who co-founded Mattel with her husband, Elliot Handler, and Harold Matson in 1945, noticed her daughter, Barbara, playing with paper dolls and dreaming about what kind of woman she would become. Ruth decided there should be a proper doll onto which girls could project their highest aspirations. (In another version of this origin story, Ruth got the idea from an adult novelty doll she’d seen while vacationing in Switzerland.) Ruth named the doll Barbie, after her daughter. The first model went on display in March 1959 at the annual Toy Fair in New York City. In Barbie’s first television ad, broadcast that same year, a woman sings from the point of view of a young girl, promising that one day, she’ll be just like Barbie. “Til then, I…

SOME CHILDREN ARE obsessed with soldiers, dinosaurs, princesses. Edna Lewis grew up in love with food and the land that yielded it. “I loved walking barefoot behind my father in the newly ploughed furrow, carefully putting one foot down before the other and pressing it into the warm ploughed earth, so comforting to the soles of my feet,” Lewis wrote in her seminal 1976 cookbook, The Taste of Country Cooking. On some occasions, the plough would expose the roots of a sassafras bush, which Lewis and her father would take back home to brew tea the next morning. “Planting season was always accompanied by the twilight arrival of the whippoor-will repeating breathlessly and rapidly,” she recalled on another occasion. For Lewis, the “birds, the quiet, flowers, trees, gardens, fields, music, love,…

After living in New York City for a year, I decided it was time to go home to Puerto Rico. I had grown increasingly worried that the island’s unique art forms and crafts, which draw on centuries of Caribbean, African, Spanish and American influences, were in danger of disappearing. Upon my return I collaborated with artists and artisans for two years, documenting their daily lives and how they worked to keep traditions alive, educate others and reconcile the Indigenous and modern worlds. One of the greatest threats to the island’s artistic heritage is the recent exodus of residents. Since 2010, some 500,000 Puerto Ricans have left, a population decline of nearly 12 percent. The exodus, prompted by Hurricane Maria and the Covid-19 pandemic as well as diminished services and rising…

Q: Ancient Greek mythology and art depict lions. Did lions once live in Greece? Larry Rideout, Boston YES! LIONS have a huge historic range. Evidence has been found that as far back as the Neolithic period lions used to exist throughout Africa, Southwest Asia, the Middle East and Southeast Europe (including present-day Greece). Of course today that range has been drastically reduced to fragmented populations throughout Africa and a very small extant population in India (around the area of the Gir Forest). Craig Saffoe, curator of large carnivores, National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute Could an astronaut ever be struck by anything during a spacewalk? Steven Clark, Arlington, Texas ASTRONAUTS CAN BE struck by debris at any time. Large debris can be monitored from Earth, so astronauts can prepare. But small items—even…

OFTEN, CURATING an exhibition is about getting out of the way of the story and allowing the collections to speak for themselves. That is not the case for “Treasures and Trouble: Looking Inside a Legendary Blues Archive,” a new show at the National Museum of American History about the folklorist Robert “Mack” McCormick and his expansive archive on blues artists in Texas and the Deep South from the early 1900s through the 1970s. Mc-Cormick began collecting material in the 1950s and continued until his death in 2015. His archive, covering hundreds of artists, is among the world’s largest and most significant collections on the blues and other vernacular musical traditions. The exhibition, however, is as much about the process of curation and collection—for the Smithsonian curators and certainly for McCormick…

HE HAD HIS FIRST fateful meeting with Barbie when the two co-starred in a 1961 TV commercial. Since then, Ken—full name, Ken Carson—has served as her longtime on-and-off romantic partner and has enjoyed an astonishingly varied career, including stints as an astronaut, Olympian in multiple sports, soda jerk, dog trainer, dentist and rapping rock star. Of course, Ken has to be a Renaissance man to keep up with Barbie. These are just a few of his many lives. 1961 KEN Introduced as Barbie’s boyfriend at that year’s Toy Fair, the 12-inch-tall doll (a half-inch taller than Barbie) had a molded plastic coif and was ready for aquatic adventures: Ken ’61 came with sandals, a yellow beach towel and a pair of stylish red swim trunks. 1978 SUPERSTAR KEN Amid…

LEWIS’ RECIPES evoke her connection with the earth—and her love of earthy flavors. This recipe, for instance, recommends asking the butcher to let the pheasants hang for a week, to increase their gaminess. Never mind that most of us no longer procure meat from a friendly neighborhood butcher. Usually we keep an anxious eye on sell-by dates to avoid gamy meat. But earthy? We are on Lewis’ side when it comes to flavorful roasts, pungent herbs and zesty fruits. Roast Stuffed Pheasants FROM IN PURSUIT OF FLAVOR (1988) Nutty wild rice goes well with pheasant, and the sweetness of the grapes is a pleasant contrast to the birds’ gaminess. You will need 2 cups of raw wild rice to make 4 cups cooked. SERVES 4 4 cups cooked wild rice1…

NEARLY FOUR centuries before Johannes Gutenberg produced the first Bible on a printing press, monks and artisans in China were drawing on their own rich printing tradition, crafting more than 165,000 wood blocks to create a religious canon far, far longer than the Bible. The extraordinary text is at the center of a new exhibition at the Huntington Library in California, where visitors can view The Scripture of the Great Flower Ornament of the Buddha, created in 1085. Part of a larger compendium of Buddhist law and aphorisms, it was the third attempt in Chinese history to centralize, translate and print Buddhist scripture. Each page is joined to the next accordion-style; unfurled, it stretches to 31 feet. To create this anthology, a temple in the province of Fujian commissioned thousands…

Generations have learned about the Holocaust from Anne Frank, a teenage girl whose extraordinary diary, first published in 1947, documented her two-year experience hiding from the Nazis. Countless readers, deeply moved by Anne’s courage, have wondered about the life of this brilliant German Jewish girl before her seclusion. Now My Friend Anne Frank, by Hannah Pick-Goslar, sheds new light on those poignant early years. After fleeing Germany and relocating to the Netherlands, the Frank family—father Otto, mother Edith, daughters Margot and Anne—found a home in Amsterdam with other After fleeing Germany and relocating to the Netherlands, the Frank family—Jewish refugee families, including the Goslars: Hans, Ruth and Hannah, nicknamed Hanneli. Anne and Hannah first meet at a neighborhood store as young girls clinging to their mothers. The two would attend…

TOP OF THE PAGE: A CONCEPT BEFORE ITS TIME New chronology of Afrofuturism unites yesterday and tomorrow What would our world look like if the colonization of Africa and the oppression of its people never occurred? The answer is something that can only be imagined, and for decades Black artists and leaders have done just that, creating versions of that alternative universe. From liberator Harriet Tubman’s reliance on the stars for guidance to the otherwordly 1970s costumes worn by the Labelle singers (right), the “Afrofuturism” exhibition at the National Museum of African American History and Culture offers a look at how generations of Black people have envisioned themselves and their futures. “It’s important to recognize how Afrofuturism really provides pathways for artists and others to express radical sentiment in their art…

NEARLY ALL THE United States’ greatest structures—the Empire State Building, the Washington National Cathedral, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to name just a few—owe much of their grandeur to a humble source that keeps on giving: a band of limestone in south-central Indiana. This geological richness stretches back at least 345 million years, when the tropical waters of a warm inland sea ground up the remains of calcite-bearing invertebrates, forming carbonate sand—not the more common quartz sand—fated to lithify as some of the world’s most prized limestone. During this period, Indiana was a “carbonate factory,” says Todd Thompson, director of the Indiana Geological and Water Survey and Indiana’s state geologist. Cycles of deposition and erosion winnowed this precious carbonate bed to a 35-mile stretch of prime quarry between what are…