Smithsonian Magazine January / February 2025

“I have visited Jamestown and never heard of this part of its history.” Love Thy Neighbor “An American Tale” (December 2024) shows the worst and the best of the American character. One of the worst episodes of racism saw Japanese people sent to internment camps, for no good reason, to live in deplorable conditions. Mary Tsukamoto, however, eventually found that “acts of thoughtfulness, kindness, neighborliness and caring were contagious” there. While rampant ethnic prejudice abused Japanese people in the whole society, Americans like Bob Fletcher lived up to our best ideals and helped his neighbors because “it was just the right thing to do.” Jane C. Newpeck | Canton, Connecticut “An American Tale” is a powerful reminder of what doing right means, even when there is pressure to do otherwise.…

WHEN I WAS A CHILD GROWING up in New Jersey, our home was so many things to me: a space to grow, a place that nourished me and a refuge from the hardships of adolescence. I remember that house so vividly, its swinging doors leading to the kitchen, the French doors opening to the dining room, the cozy sun parlor. But what fascinated me most was the coal bin, with a metal chute feeding coal to the basement, ready to be shoveled into the furnace that would generate so much heat even on the coldest winter day. Memories like these speak to the form and function of design, and how homes reflect their geography and the eras in which they were built. More than that, they evoke the trappings of…

IN 1740, WHEN Boston was a colonial outpost of 16,500 people, an extravagantly wealthy merchant named Peter Faneuil offered his city a gift. To replace the informal scrum of vendors gathered at the city’s docks, Faneuil proposed a modern marketplace to suit the ambitions of a growing city that, in just a few decades, would find itself hurtling toward Revolution. The project had its share of detractors, so to get it built, Faneuil and his cohort of rich merchants had to steamroll smaller traders. It was an ironic beginning for a building that, over the next 284 years, would serve as a forum for practically every significant debate in American society—and even as a symbol for the tradition of public debate itself. Born in New York to a French family, Faneuil…

BEHIND THE heavy oak door of her two-story brick house, Harriet Bell Hayden kept rifles, kegs of gunpowder and even a secret tunnel. Her willingness to defend freedom-seekers made her and her home a linchpin of Boston’s Underground Railroad. Born in Kentucky in 1816, Harriet Bell escaped enslavement in 1844 with her husband, Lewis Hayden, making their way to safety in Canada with the help of a white Northerner. But the antislavery cause brought the couple back to the United States two years later, and they settled in Boston’s Black and abolitionist neighborhood of Beacon Hill determined to make a mark. Between 1850 and 1860, it’s estimated that Harriet sheltered hundreds of people fleeing slavery. In the evening, you might have found a table of men studying in her home,…

FRANCE HAS LONG derived a portion of its national pride from its culinary sophistication, but during the late 19th century—a time of war and social upheaval, as well as the cultural flowering of the Belle Époque—the issue of food could sometimes be fraught. Aristocrats feasted while peasants toiled and poor Parisians starved, and new delicacies like the banana debuted against a backdrop of imperialist adventures. To artists like Claude Monet and Paul Gauguin, all of it was also rich fodder for a new approach to painting, showcased in the play of light over a silver pitcher or the slimy floors of a bustling fish market. “This is as much a social history as it is the story of food,” says Mark Scala, chief curator at the Frist Art Museum in…

IN EARLY 2020, Daniel Bachman stood at the edge of a creek in Falmouth, Virginia, recording the sounds of the insects chittering and buzzing around him. He had come to the creek for the history it held. Nearby, slate-colored markers identified the site as the area where an English naval officer had kidnapped Pocahontas in 1613. The markers flanked a section of U.S. Route 1 still named at the time for Jefferson Davis, the lone president of the Confederate States of America. Bachman, then 30 years old, had already won national acclaim, and toured throughout the United States and Europe, with a sprawling collection of vernacular guitar music, spread across more than a dozen releases. Fans in the music press had likened him to the legendary John Fahey, known as…