Smithsonian Magazine April / May 2025

“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 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…

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…

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…

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…

EVERYONE KNOWS how the redcoats clashed with patriots at Lexington and Concord in April 1775, sparking the American Revolution. Yet often forgotten is an incident that took place two days later and some 500 miles to the south, an event that proved nearly as significant to the cause of independence as the bloodshed in Massachusetts. It was the moment when the South was finally roused against the British, and its main participants were some of the nation’s most famous founders. It began after Patrick Henry convinced the conservative tobacco planters of Virginia—the largest, most populous and richest of the Thirteen Colonies—to organize a militia. That decision put Virginia’s royal governor, Lord Dunmore, in a bind. Appointed by George III in 1771, the gregarious Scottish earl had purchased plantations, bought enslaved Africans…