Tabla de contenidos para March 2025 en Smithsonian Magazine

Making “Herstory” EVEN BEFORE IT HAS A HOME ON THE MALL, THE SMITHSONIAN AMERICAN WOMEN’S HISTORY MUSEUM IS SHARING STORIES OF OVERLOOKED PIONEERS ONE OF THE FONDEST memories I have from my time as an educator at the National Air and Space Museum is meeting Nichelle Nichols, whose role as Lieutenant Uhura on “Star Trek” served as a model for girls and women of color. Her influence was so great that Martin Luther King Jr. implored her to stay on when she considered quitting after the show’s first season. She not only stayed, but also went on to recruit women and minority applicants for NASA’s space shuttle program, continuing a lifetime of inspiring others to boldly go where no one had gone before. There are so many of those stories,…

LEAD-ICINE Upper-class men and women in ancient Egypt commonly defined their eyes with kohl—a dark powder made from lead sulfide. Strangely, the makeup seemed to offer protection from common eye infections; recognizing this, Egyptians may have synthesized the lead cosmetic specifically to enhance its medicinal properties. In 2009, modern chemists actually tested the toxic remedy’s effectiveness by mixing lead salts with human skin cells. Sure enough, the lead-affected cells produced more immune-response chemicals, preventing infection. ALL ROADS LEAD TO ROME Though Romans famously channeled water through lead pipes, that water might not have been their main problem: Mountain streams were rich in calcium, which coated the pipes in a layer that may have prevented lead from entering the water. In fact, historians think Romans likely got their daily dose of…

X (TWITTER):@SmithsonianMag INSTAGRAM: @smithsonianmagazine FACEBOOK: smithsonianmagazine What’s in a Name? I was disappointed to read of the renaming of Faneuil Hall (“The Long Hall,” January/February 2025). It is the same as tearing down the statue of a historical figure. We lose the opportunity to speak of the good and bad of that person or, in this case, the history that has taken place in those precious few blocks of Boston. Renaming Faneuil Hall will do the exact opposite of its intention. It will “sanitize” the history of the hall. Who is going to ask the question about Peter Faneuil if there is no Faneuil Hall? Steven Pinson| Baltimore Filling In the Gaps I’m profoundly grateful for your article “Diving for History” (January/February 2025). I was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and…

FOR NEARLY 700 YEARS, samurai were Japan’s social elite, skilled not only in combat but also in politics and the courtly arts. To equip these warriors in accordance with their status required an entire class of artisans, from the blacksmiths and leatherworkers who made their weapons and armor to the embroiderers who applied detailed designs to their coats and shoes. Samurai “clearly understood the functional requirements of armor,” Gabriel Barbier-Mueller, who with his wife, Ann, is the most important collector of samurai regalia outside Japan, said in a 2017 interview, “but the aesthetic was important, too…. No two armors are alike.” The scion of a prominent Swiss clan who were patrons of Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, Barbier-Mueller took his family legacy in a new direction, making his fortune in…

Robert Caro has spent most of his life asking questions of others, and he rather prefers it that way. He is gracious and fascinating company, but while he takes evident pride in the work he has done, he’s ambivalent about too much talking of himself. Toward the end of our final meeting, he’ll mutter with wry good humor, “I never want to use a sentence with ‘I’ in it again.” Recently, Caro has found himself doing quite a few interviews. Most have been to mark the 50th anniversary of the book that made his name: The Power Broker, a 1,162-page biography of the urban planner Robert Moses, the man who, in Caro’s persuasive telling, did more to shape 20th-century New York than any elected official. But Caro has also agreed…

Q: Are humans the only species to drive another to extinction? Tom Ruppel| Dixon, California HUMAN ACTIVITIES are the most prominent cause of species extinction today, but not the only one. A recent study estimated that over half of contemporary extinctions in land vertebrates were caused, at least in part, by invasive species. The domestic cat is among the worst offenders; its cuteness belies how devastatingly effective it is at hunting birds and small mammals. The cat’s influence has been most severe on islands where native species evolved without predators and therefore have no defenses. One can assign humans some of the blame for introducing predators. However, the fossil record shows that species have been going extinct for far longer than humans have been around. Some extinctions were caused by changes…

WHEN CITIZEN KANE premiered on May 1, 1941, it wasn’t at some historic Hollywood theater, or even at one of New York’s fancy movie houses. Instead, the film destined to become the most admired of all time opened more modestly, at a former vaudeville hall on Broadway. All glitzier plans had been scuttled by newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst, who believed, correctly, that the film was a thinly veiled indictment of him. Hearst banned his many newspapers from even mentioning Orson Welles’ filmmaking debut, and in many accounts, the magnate had offered a handsome bounty, worth more than the film’s budget, to purchase the negatives, simply for the pleasure of destroying it. Welles later said a Hearst minion had tried, unsuccessfully, to frame Welles by sending a 14-year-old girl to…

ONE DAY IN March of 1911—the same month as the infamous Triangle shirtwaist factory fire in New York City that trapped and killed 146 workers—a woman named Alice Hamilton arrived at the Sangamon Street works, a lead-smelting plant on Chicago’s East Side, and asked to take a look around. The owner welcomed her in. She was a small woman, unassuming. What harm could she bring to a powerful boss? She walked by the kettles and furnaces. She observed the sweating men holding shovels and prods. The air was stifling, full of humidity, and several times she covered her nose and mouth to dampen the scent of industrial chemicals wafting through the unventilated rooms. On the floor were pieces of scrap metal and a film of metallic dust, some of which also…

BEFORE SHE WAS a legend, Josephine Baker was a little girl from Missouri who loved to make funny faces. Teachers chided her for this habit; Baker paid them little heed. “Our faces aren’t made to sleep,” she later said. Baker’s life was so full that it’s easy to imagine she never slept. Born in 1906, Baker became one of the 20th century’s biggest celebrities, known as “the Black Venus,” an enthralling dancer and singer whose career took off when she left the United States as a teenager for France, where she eventually became a citizen. (Left, Baker performs at the Folies Bergère, c. 1925.) She toured the globe and became the first Black woman to star in a major film, Siren of the Tropics, in 1927. During World War II,…

SPRING, 1944. Allied forces have taken Sicily and begun the treacherous push up Italy’s boot, but the advance has stalled near the Abbey of Monte Cassino, a historic monastery planted atop a rocky hill in the Apennine Mountains. Using the abbey as an observation post with gun emplacements near its foundation and in the surrounding cliffs, the Germans command the narrow mountain passes of Route 6—the road to Rome. Allied soldiers take heavy fire as quickly as they can scale the hill. The wounded are passed from one stretcher-bearer to another along hazardous, winding trails before they are loaded into ambulances. As the offensive unfolds, a British Army hospital at Pompeii, the closest large medical facility to the action, is flooded with casualties—soldiers caked in mud and blood, some in…