Tabla de contenidos para June 2024 en Smithsonian Magazine

Taste of Nostalgia I never pass by a child’s lemonade stand without stopping to buy some and then offer a generous tip (“Sweet Dreams,” April/May 2024). It’s not the beverage that I seek—that is usually over-or under-sweetened and sometimes served under less than sanitary conditions. I enjoy seeing the smiles on the faces of the children as they become flush with cash and conspire to determine what happiness that cash will buy after the stand is closed. The aftertaste of these cool drinks is always a déjà vu of the memories of my own childhood lemonade stand. That’s why I usually buy two glasses. John M. Nonnemacher | Hazleton, Pennsylvania Young Revolutionaries I graduated college 43 years ago with a bachelor’s in history. This is the first time I’ve ever…

BORN TO A FORMERLY ENSLAVED mother in Guadeloupe, Guillaume Lethière (1760-1832) moved to Paris as a teen with his plantation-owner father and launched his artistic career during the tumultuous years before the French Revolution. Lethière’s talent as a painter of portraits of the rich and famous, landscapes, and scenes from history won him plum academic posts and a place at the center of Creole society. But in the two centuries after his death, the neo-Classicist has faded into relative obscurity. That’s set to change in June with the world’s first-ever Lethière retrospective, at Massachusetts’ Clark Art Institute. The show aims not just to rehabilitate Lethière as an artist but also to tell the story of a remarkable life. He lived in an age of “drastic shifts in politics and painterly…

ANCIENT HUMAN footprints, preserved in a dry lakebed at White Sands National Park in New Mexico, reveal remarkably vivid vignettes of life in the late Pleistocene: children jumping in puddles and splashing, a group of hunters stalking a giant sloth. The scientists studying these footprints initially estimated their age as between 11,500 and 13,000 years. But now, radiocarbon dating has allowed experts to make a bombshell discovery: The oldest of these footprints are nearly 23,000 years old. For many decades, archaeologists were convinced that the first people to arrive in the Americas came some 13,000 years ago, after the Ice Age glaciers melted. The White Sands footprints, whose age scholars estimated again, in a paper published this past October, by analyzing tree pollen and quartz grains in the sedimentary layers,…

Q: Where do we get the seeds for seedless fruit? Dan Holden | Essexville, Michigan YOU DON’T NEED seeds to grow seedless fruit. In one method, you take vegetative cuttings of the parent plant and root them out, essentially cloning it. Another is grafting, or taking a branch of the parent plant and joining it to a different plant. But most seedless bananas and watermelon are grown from triploid plants. Those are plants that have three sets of chromosomes (either through natural mutation or through breeding), and this keeps the plants from pairing chromosomes to reproduce. This makes them sterile, and the fruits they produce lack seeds. When a sterile plant develops fruit, it’s called parthenocarpy, which is Greek for “virgin fruit.” Joe Brunetti, lead horticulturist, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center Q:…

IN SEPTEMBER OF 2004, I flew from Chicago to Washington, D.C. for the grand opening of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). I fought my way through the crowds and stood near the Smithsonian Castle, where I watched a procession of thousands of Native people from across the Americas, many dressed in full traditional regalia, as they marched on the National Mall. The six-day event remains the largest gathering of Indigenous people that has ever occurred in Washington, D.C. This year, our annual Folklife Festival—a decadeslong Smithsonian summer tradition on the National Mall that celebrates the depth and diversity of culture—will honor the 20th anniversary of the museum’s opening, along with other milestones. This year marks a century since the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, which granted…

FUTURE TITAN OF INDUSTRY Henry Clay Folger Jr. lived the first part of his life in Dickensian poverty. Born in Brooklyn in 1857, he used essay contests to pay for his education at Amherst College, where he hand-washed his own laundry to save money and still could not afford coal for heat. And he was a deep admirer of William Shakespeare: He recalled delight in reading the Bard’s plays and poems “far into the night” while still at Amherst. A guest lecture by 75-year-old Ralph Waldo Emerson inspired Folger to search out the author’s 1864 “Remarks at the Celebration of the Three Hundredth Anniversary of the Birth of Shakespeare,” further enflaming his passion. Still, little about his early life indicated Folger would amass the largest collection of Shakespeareana in the…

In 1909, more than a decade before the 19th Amendment would grant her the right to vote, Lulu Hunt Peters had already achieved a rare status for a woman of her time. She earned a doctor of medicine degree from the University of California, when fewer than 5 percent of American medical students were female, and she was the first woman to intern at Los Angeles County General Hospital; she led its pathology lab for a time and later served as chair of the public health committee for the California Federation of Women’s Clubs in Los Angeles. The role, wrote the Santa Cruz Evening News, came with “more power than the entire city health office.” She lectured frequently about public health and child nutrition. Over the next decade, though, what…

IN THE LATE 1920s, an ambitious young Stanford grad named Wally Byam found himself in booming Los Angeles, far from the rural Oregon of his youth, where he and his family had been happy, and frequent, campers. Byam, a magazine publisher, couldn’t wait to ditch his suit and tie to go camping on days off, but his wife proved less enthusiastic about sleeping on the dewy ground. He devised a compromise, elevating their tent on a wooden platform that sat atop the chassis from an old Ford Model T; the Byams’ own car then towed the tent-laden contraption. “I guess we looked like an itinerant patent-medicine show,” he’d later tell a reporter. “But it worked.” So Byam kept tinkering, building a teardrop-shaped trailer out of plywood as a sturdier substitute…

BOTTLED RAGE, sublime violence, threats and tears, love and anger. Never has a woman bared so much of her soul,” the French dramatist and poet Théophile Gautier wrote of Italian opera singer Giulia Grisi in the 1830s. Gautier was the first to use “diva”—Latin for “goddess” —to describe an opera soloist of epic talent. In the next two centuries, the term moved from describing performers—Bette Davis, Eartha Kitt, Diana Ross, Beyoncé—to describing almost anyone who’s fierce, provocative and generally beaucoup. In her latest book, American Diva: Extraordinary, Unruly, Fabulous, Deborah Paredez, who teaches creative writing at Columbia University, celebrates divas of all sorts, arguing that their successes are particularly inspiring for people in marginalized communities, especially racial minorities. Paredez weaves historical accounts of these bold women into a thrilling cultural…