Smithsonian Magazine December 2024

“The Indians’ side of the story should be in all American history books.” X (TWITTER): @SmithsonianMag INSTAGRAM: @smithsonianmagazine FACEBOOK: smithsonianmagazine Hiding in Plain Sight “The Role of His Life” (November 2024) gave me a deeper understanding of how the anti-Jewish movement in Germany started before World War II, and I was blown away by Leo Reuss’ passion for acting. I can’t even begin to imagine what he went through. It saddened me to see how the masses loved his performances when they did not realize that he was Jewish, and once they found out, they turned on him completely. The lengths that people will go to in order to preserve their hate. It was an incredible story. Kevin Molohon | White Bear Lake, Minnesota Forgotten Fruit I thoroughly enjoyed Mark Schapiro’s…

Guests of Honor CUE THE PANDA CAM: THE NATIONAL ZOO’S TWO NEWEST RESIDENTS, BAO LI AND QING BAO, WILL MAKE THEIR DEBUT NEXT MONTH THE GIANT PANDA is arguably the (adorable) face of the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI), so people were understandably dismayed when Tian Tian, Mei Xiang and Xiao Qi Ji returned to their native China last year, as was always the plan outlined in our conservation program. I was asked so many times—out in public, on the National Mall, in the halls of Congress—“Is the Smithsonian getting the pandas back?” There was never a doubt in my mind this treasured species would return. Pandas are simply too important to our education outreach and conservation science. For the past five decades, the National Zoo, in…

IN 1995, WHEN Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater was less than 60 years old, a group of engineers traveled to the rural highlands outside Pittsburgh to inspect the house’s iconic cantilevered terraces, thrust out over their waterfall in defiance of gravity—and, as it turned out, of good sense. Even before construction was completed in 1937, cracks had appeared in the concrete parapets. By the mid-1990s, the balconies had sagged in some places by more than seven inches. “You could feel them bounce—it was like a diving board,” says Lynda Waggoner, who started guiding tours at Fallingwater as a teenager in 1965 and served as the house-museum’s director from 1996 to 2018. The extravagant gesture that made Fallingwater the most famous modern house in the United States had nearly brought the entire…

MARION MAHONY graduated with a bachelor’s degree in architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1894—only the second woman in the school’s history to do so. A year later, the Chicago native became Frank Lloyd Wright’s first employee at his upstart architecture firm in her hometown. A brilliant graphic artist with a deep interest in Japanese printmaking, Mahony created the signature aesthetic of Wright’s perspective drawings, bursting with exquisite detail. She also made the drawings for fully half of the 100 lithographs in the 1910 Wasmuth Portfolio, a compendium of Wright’s creations that inspired a generation of European architects, changing the course of 20th-century design. Never quick to cede credit, Wright rarely acknowledged his enormous debt to his brilliant young colleague. Indeed, Mahony took over some projects entirely, as…

AS POPULAR MUSIC grew into a mass industry in the early 20th century, a murky assortment of companies popped up and began a practice that came to be known as “song-sharking.” Advertisements enjoined ordinary Americans to send in their original poems and lyrics, which the company would set to music for a rather large fee—a few hundred dollars, depending on the year. Early song-sharking companies in the 1910s merely set customers’ lyrics to sheet music and mailed the sheaves to the customer as a collector’s item. In later decades, sharking companies enlisted whole teams of session musicians to give people’s submissions the full-blown studio treatment and put them on records. And while many Americans were no doubt satisfied with the novelty of hearing someone on the gramophone singing their lyrics,…

ARTHUR ALLEN carefully packed his camera and luggage at his home in Ithaca, New York. He would soon head south to the backwood swamps of Osceola County, Florida, to search for a ghost bird: the ivory-billed woodpecker. Most scientists considered it extinct; Allen was desperate to prove them wrong. The year was 1924, and Allen was an energetic ornithology professor at Cornell University, about to take a sabbatical. A stocky, outgoing man with a bushy mustache, he’d always been popular with his students, who called him Doc Allen and liked how he never talked down to them. He’d been born and raised in working-class Buffalo, New York, moving to Ithaca in 1904 to study at Cornell and never left. Allen was not the first to be enthralled by this charismatic…