Smithsonian Magazine March 2025

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,…

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…

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…

ON THE NIGHT of April 14, 1936, traffic on Seventh Avenue near 131st Street in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood was at a virtual standstill, the roads jammed for ten blocks. The sort of throngs you’d expect for a generational prize fight—all of them hoping to get a ticket to the most sensational show in town, a curious adaptation of Macbeth, directed by a dramaturgical wunderkind named Orson Welles under the aegis of the Federal Theater Project, a New Deal program designed to help support the arts. It was an era of artistic and political daring, led by the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance, and Welles, then just 20 and already a respected interpreter of Shakespeare, was debuting one of the boldest productions in the history of American theater. Welles…

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…

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…