Tabla de contenidos para April / May 2025 en Smithsonian Magazine

“The most moving thing I have ever read in your pages.” Appreciation for a Pioneer “Major Barbara’s War” (March 2025) brought to mind my father. He was a Northern Irish-Canadian surgeon and oncologist who served with the British Royal Army Medical Corps in North Africa during World War II. During that time he operated on wounded American tank crews. Later, his field hospital was shelled during the Battle of Sangro in Italy. He was badly wounded. Four surgeons wanted to amputate his leg. He knew Dr. Stimson was a highly competent surgeon. He opted to be evacuated to North Africa and have her carry out the operation. It was a success. She saved his leg. Brian Crook | Ottawa Thank you for two recent articles in your magazine. The January…

THE QUESTION of Cracker Jack’s origin is a sticky one. Some attribute its invention to Frederick Rueckheim, others to Charles Gunther, both German immigrants who migrated to the Midwest and built candy empires from the ashes of the Great Chicago Fire. Whoever first hawked the product on the streets of the Windy City, only Rueckheim was able to turn it into an American institution. He began selling molasses-coated popcorn and peanuts to members of the fire relief effort in the early 1870s. Over the next few decades, he capitalized on several innovations to set the treat apart, innovating a unique means of rotating the barrels in which the snack was made, to keep it from clumping together, and using wax-sealed packaging to keep the product fresh. The purchasing public gave…

ANITA MALAVASI’S FIRST delivery was salt. In the fall of 1943, she brought a packet of it into the mountains outside the city of Reggio Emilia, in northern Italy, to supply a growing group of soldiers lacking food staples. These fighters were the antifascist Resistance—men who’d deserted the armies of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini and were preparing to fight for freedom. Though Mussolini had been voted out of power that July, Italy was still firmly under German control, and Nazis were killing or deporting any dissident they came upon. Once 22-year-old Malavasi was comfortable sneaking salt past German checkpoints on her bicycle, she started ferrying illicit publications to the mountains, as well as clothes and food. She wore low-cut, fitted dresses and flirted to disarm Axis officers. She smuggled…

STENOPHYLLA IS A COFFEE PLANT, not a criminal, and yet it can still lay claim to its very own “Wanted” poster. In 2018, Aaron Davis, head of coffee research at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in London, was desperate to track down the rare species, which hadn’t been seen in the wild since 1954. The data he’d found in historical records suggested that stenophylla might be resistant to drought and heat—increasingly valuable traits in a warming and drying world. So he created a “Have you seen this plant?” flyer with pictures of stenophylla’s leaves, whose pointed tips resemble snake fangs. A colleague of his based in Sierra Leone, Daniel Sarmu, jumped on a motorbike and rode across the country’s rust-colored dirt roads, handing out copies to farmers. Most shook their heads:…

THE SMITHSONIAN Astrophysical Observatory (SAO) has a motto: “The sky belongs to everyone.” That’s the inspiration behind the Smithsonian Taking Astronomy to Rural Schools (STARS) program. The initiative, which plans to launch by 2026, aims to cultivate a nationwide sense of wonder and exploration. Nowhere is the need to inspire and encourage discovery greater than in rural areas, home to about 20 percent of all students in the country, where educational opportunities like field trips are hard to access and museums or planetariums are often too far away. SAO’s rural public science center at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory, located on Mount Hop-kins in remote southern Arizona, is ideally suited to run and distribute the STARS program. STARS will provide computerized telescopes, hands-on training and K-12 astronomy lesson plans tailored…

FOR 400 YEARS, the Eastern Mediterranean was the domain of two great powers: the Republic of Venice and the Ottoman Empire. As rivals, they fought seven different wars, but in peacetime they eagerly pursued mutual profit. “The Venetians were very pragmatic, and they wanted to do trade,” says Trinita Kennedy, co-curator of the traveling exhibition “Venice and the Ottoman Empire,” which makes its final stop at the Frist Art Museum in Nashville in late May. “The Ottomans . . . had all the spices and luxury goods.” The show includes some 150 works of art from Venice’s civic museums, as well as from the recently salvaged wreck of the Venetian merchant ship Gagliana Grossa, which sank en route to Istanbul in 1583, bearing 5,000 panes of glass intended for the…

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LYING ON THE ground near the center of Stonehenge, partially covered by two huge slabs that appear to have toppled over, is a 16-foot-long block of gray-green sandstone. In 1620, noted landscape architect Inigo Jones suggested that it might have been used as an altar, and it has been known as the Altar Stone ever since. Weighing six and a half tons and transported to the monument around 5,000 years ago, it was long thought to have come from south Wales. But recently, a team of researchers, by analyzing the chemical fingerprint of the rock, found out that the Altar Stone almost certainly came from the Orcadian Basin in northeast Scotland. It was an astounding discovery, because it meant the megalith must have traveled at least 465 miles to Salisbury…

Q: How do space programs get their names? Elizabeth Coen | Monterey, California NASA AND OTHERS have long sought symbolic names that reflect the nature of a given program and serve as inspiration. In the late 1950s, Abe Silverstein, NASA’s director of space-flight development, suggested program names that drew on the myths of ancient Greece and Rome. Mercury, the ancient Roman messenger of the gods, was the name chosen for the first program of human spaceflight. Gemini, the mythological twins, lent their name to the first mission with two astronauts in the vehicle. Apollo, though god of the sun, was selected to represent the lunar voyages because of his great power in the sky. The name of Artemis was chosen for the upcoming lunar missions since she was the twin…

THE FIRST CHICAGO CUBS game on the city’s North Side was held on April 20, 1916, and new fans flooded the neighborhood. The Chicago Tribune reported that 20,000 people attended the game, some of them spilling onto the field, such that an outfielder collided with a small boy in the seventh inning. “A hit into this crowd was good for two bases,” the reporter noted. Before the game even started, a circus mood prevailed: Cincinnati Reds player-manager Buck Herzog was presented with a bunch of roses, a walking stick and an umbrella, in a ceremony that also included fireworks, a half-dozen marching bands, a live donkey brought in by local Democrats and an actual black bear cub who did tricks on home plate for a movie camera. A mile-long parade…

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Shortly after dawn, more than 200 monks from an order of Tibetan exiles carry carefully bundled scriptures and 108 gold-gilt Buddha statues in a long procession toward the site revered as Siddhartha Gautama’s birthplace. Some monks beat drums or wave sweet incense. Some wear ritual crowns or hold elaborately tasseled umbrellas. Some play brass-and-copper dungchen, or long horns, which vibrate with an eerie rumble that is said to resonate with the otherworldly beauty of the Buddha’s teachings. The parade arrives at a large white building of brick and steel. Most of the monks circumambulate the building, walking past a polished sandstone pillar placed here in the third century B.C. and along the edges of a pond where it is said that Maya Devi, Siddhartha’s mother, bathed herself before childbirth. A…

In February 2013, the Moderna Museet, Stockholm’s national museum of modern art, opened a blockbuster show, “Hilma af Klint: A Pioneer of Abstraction,” heralding a then-obscure Swedish artist—a woman, a mystic—who painted at the turn of the 20th century. Believing her art carried spiritual messages that would benefit humankind, af Klint worked with non-figurative forms years before her male peers Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian and Kazimir Malevich were credited with inventing abstract art. In Stockholm, the show shattered the museum’s attendance records, and it eventually attracted more than a million visitors as it toured museums across Europe. Now, 81 years after her death, this once over-looked Swedish artist, her work barely shown in her lifetime, has become a posthumous global sensation and her country’s biggest art export. “One should not overestimate…