Tabla de contenidos para December 2025 en Smithsonian Magazine

EARLY ON THE MORNING OF JANUARY 8, 1902, TWO YOUNG WOMEN, SADIE SCOTT AND MINNIE RICE, STOOD ON A SNOW-COVERED TRAIN PLATFORM IN NEW ROCHELLE, NEW YORK, WAITING FOR THE 7:48 A.M. EXPRESS THAT WOULD TAKE THEM TO THEIR JOBS AS STENOGRAPHERS IN NEW YORK CITY. Nearby stood F.S. Cowdrey, a banker on Wall Street, and 21-year-old H. Frank Crosby, who worked at the American Locomotive Company on Broad Street. It was the dawn of the commuter age, and the passengers were pioneers of the suburbs, traveling daily to the rising skyline some 20 miles to the south. Not long before, their hamlet of New Rochelle had been a tony resort destination for wealthy city-dwellers. By 1890, though, it had been transformed into what the New York Times called “a…

Every year, on a late summer night, Eva Pagaling joins a group of fellow Chumash paddlers who climb into a tomol, a handcrafted wood-plank canoe, for an eight-to-ten-hour voyage from the California mainland. They head for the largest of the Channel Islands, an archipelago sometimes called the Galápagos of North America due to its stunning biodiversity. The island appears on maps as Santa Cruz; the Chumash call it Limuw. Pagaling, who is now 35, has been taking part in the annual journey since she was 10. As the youngest daughter of a master canoe builder, she grew up hearing oral histories and learning songs about her Indigenous group, among the first people to inhabit the California coast at least 13,000 years ago, but she emphasized that this annual tradition is…

IN AMERICA, CHRISTMAS is an expansive holiday. At different times, to different people, it may be a joyous celebration of the birth of Jesus, a time for families to gather, an overwrought occasion tainted by materialism—or all of that at once. Whether or not you celebrate, it’s an unavoidable element of American culture, as photographer Lee Friedlander shows in a new book, Christmas. For more than seven decades, and in places as diverse as Honolulu, West Texas and upstate New York, Friedlander, 91, has documented what he calls “the social landscape”—stoops, storefronts, roadways—without bias. The camera, he once wrote, is “a kind of net. . .. The net is indiscriminate unless you point it and then are lucky. I might get what I hoped for and then some—lots of then…

IN CITIES FROM London to Istanbul, monarchs spent the 16th and 17th centuries delighting in the hand-blown glass emerging from the island of Murano in Venice. There, artisans had elevated glassmaking to an exquisite height, each vase and stem delicately conceived and rendered. But by the 19th century, this tradition had nearly fallen away: The Venetian Republic dissolved in 1797, and now, the world-famous artistry of Venetian glass was in danger of being lost. Antonio Salviati was determined to revive it. Born in 1816 in Vicenza, Italy, just 39 miles west of Venice, Salviati became a hard-driving lawyer and then businessman. Growing frustrated by the decaying mosaics in St. Mark’s Basilica, a global land-mark and one of the city’s crowning jewels, he saw an opportunity: In 1859, he started his own…

A NEW! STERLING SILVER POLISHED CHAIN BRACELET $299 Handcrafted in Italy, this heirloom-quality sterling silver bracelet features polished oval links and a substantial 20-gram weight. Approx. 7.5"L. 10001899 B NEW! AMETHYST CABOCHON DROP EARRING $109 Smooth, rounded amethyst cabochons lend their soft luster to these sterling silver drop earrings. A polished hinge detail brings gentle movement to the design. Approx. 1"L. 10001905 C NEW! AMETHYST AND WHITE TOPAZ HOOPS $179 With over 3 carats of faceted amethyst and white topaz gemstones, these sterling silver hoops make a meaningful gift, especially for February birthdays or anyone drawn to amethyst’s associations with focus, clarity, and balance. 1" diam. 10001902 D NEW! AMETHYST BEAD BRACELET $79 Slip on some sparkle with this stretch bracelet of faceted amethyst beads and a single sterling silver…

SYLVAN GOLDMAN, a businessman and Oklahoma native, was working for a California grocery wholesaler after World War I when he became fascinated by the new “supermarkets” that put everything under one roof. Still, he noticed a problem: Shoppers were buying only what they could carry in bags and baskets. In 1920, he and his brother, Alfred, brought the supermarket concept back to Oklahoma, where they established their own chain of stores. But Goldman still fretted over the persistent problem of shoppers being limited by their arms. Goldman’s first prototype for a shopping cart, in 1936, was wonderfully crude. It consisted of two folding chairs placed seat-to-seat with wheels attached to the bottom and a basket on top. He introduced the first official shopping cart on June 4, 1937, at the…

Across 1 Flat-screen monitor type, for short 4 Vietnam’s capital 9 Agnew who resigned as vice president 11 School with the most women’s basketball championships, familiarly 12 Constant critic 13 Classic rock’s ___ and the Dominos 14 Upcoming NASA mission likened to Apollo 8 16 Its forests absorb up to 20 times more CO2 than its terrestrial forest counterparts 17 “i” or “j” feature 18 Opposite of WSW 19 Z’s point value in Scrabble 20 Light run 23 “___-ching!” 24 “No-___,” philosophy championed by the Best Friends Animal Society 25 Long-lost Silk Road city thought to be found in modern-day Uzbekistan 27 Kurosawa from Tokyo 29 Vertical line on a graph 30 Helpful offerings for solvers 31 Theater awards since 1956 32 Horse-and-buggy people 33 Symbol shone in the Gotham City sky Down 1 Teeny-tiny 2 Move around stealthily…

FOR MILLENNIA before steamships busied the river’s waters, Native Americans roved it in dugout canoes, spearing sturgeons known to fly into the air like birds. The Hudson River’s restless ribbon cuts a 315-mile course down New York State, hightailing it across the backbone of the Appalachian Mountains, hurtling past the Highlands where George Washington held back the British, before emptying into the harbor where Lady Liberty stands with lifted lamp on a pedestal of limestone mined from the river’s valley. Franklin D. Roosevelt fished in it, naturalist John Burroughs rowed on it, Winslow Homer painted it, and Washington Irving thanked God he was “born on the banks of the Hudson.” “There’s no American history without the story of the Hudson,” says historian Douglas Brinkley. The Hudson’s journey begins about two…

THE FILM WAS long and getting longer by the day. Worse still, the director was bent on shooting outdoors, on a mountainous peninsula west of Tokyo, and the rain, during the interminably long production period between 1953 and 1954, was just as bent on falling in heavy sheets. Before production was anywhere close to wrapped, the budget was already ten times that of the average Japanese film, and the ballooning expenses led to extended hiatuses in shooting as the Toho Motion Picture Company scrambled to find more money. In the national press, meanwhile, the production was already a byword for bloat and dysfunction. The director had earned the disparaging nickname “Kurosawa Tenno,” or “Emperor Kurosawa,” a nod to his authoritarian bearing—and to the way his most ambitious film was expanding into…

OVER HER TWO-DECADE CAREER, beginning with her first solo show in 1940 at the age of 80 and ending with her death in 1961, Anna Mary Robertson Moses achieved extraordinary fame for her vivid seasonal landscapes and tableaux of rural life—Americans shoeing horses, or picking apples, or taking sleigh jaunts in the snow. In 1949, President Harry S. Truman presented the painter, known as Grandma Moses, with an award for outstanding accomplishment in art. In the ’50s, she appeared on the cover of Time and made a painting of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Pennsylvania farm, commissioned by the president’s cabinet for the third anniversary of his inauguration. Because of Moses’ popularity, many contemporary critics saw her as a quaint, self-taught folk artist, sidelining the painter from a place in serious American…

A BEST SELLER! MURANO STEMLESS WINE GLASSES SET OF 4 $109 Raise a toast to the masterful artisans of Murano, Italy, who craft this vivid glassware. Iconic Murano artworks are found in the Ceramics and Glass Collection of the National Museum of American History. 71781 B NEW! MURANO GLASS BOTTLE STOPPER $42 EACH Handcrafted by Italian artisans, these vibrant Murano glass bottle stoppers add the joyful color and spirit of Venice’s Carnevale to any gathering and make thoughtful gifts for the host. 4"L x 1.75" diam. 10001944 Blue, Orange, Green, Red C MURANO PITCHER $149 This vibrant Murano glass water pitcher is an easy way to make weeknight meals a little more lively. Great for entertaining, perfect for a housewarming gift, and lovely as a holiday present. No two will…