Smithsonian Magazine June 2025

DURING MY CHILDHOOD in New Jersey, my friends and I would explore the undeveloped spots around high-tension power lines that had been left to nature, fascinated by the sporadic pockets of biodiversity teeming with life. I often brought home what I found, until the day my mom discovered snakes in my closet. That put a stop to my adventures in biodiversity science. There has been no such end to exploration at the Smithsonian Environmental Research Center (SERC), where for 60 years ecologists have studied interactions between humans and coastal zone ecosystems, not only at its main campus in Edgewater, Maryland, on the Chesapeake Bay, but also at coastal sites around the globe. From Antarctica to San Francisco to Belize, SERC scientists do groundbreaking and vital research in coastal zones, home…

“Your thought-provoking article illustrates the shifting balance between faith and history.” Urban Unearthing Tony Perrottet’s “The City Beneath the City”(April/May 2025) is certainly one of the most thoroughly intriguing and meticulously researched articles. This gem detailing the ancient underground aqueducts of Rome gives both a visual and historical account of man’s insatiable appetite to overcome nature and create astonishing engineering marvels to uplift the human condition. Kudos to all involved in this inspiring account. Thomas Giacoponello | Warwick, Pennsylvania Buzzworthy What a remarkably educational and interesting story “Born to Bee Wild” (April/May 2025) was. At 87, it has been a long time since I’ve had lessons in biology or science. The fact that there are about 3,600 different species of bees in the United States alone was almost an unbelievable…

ON DECEMBER 10, 1927, radio host George D. Hay announced the end of an hourlong opera program on Nashville’s WSM radio. Next up was the much more down-home Barn Dance. “For the past hour, we have been listening to the music taken largely from the Grand Opera,” Hay ad-libbed, “but from now on we will present the Grand Ole Opry.” It was an inadvertent and fateful christening for what would become a cultural institution and eventually the longest-running radio program in the country, introducing tens of millions of listeners to a distinctly American-born genre of music. As Hay playfully commented, the Opry offered a stark contrast to other highbrow programs populating the airwaves, swapping symphonies and arias for jaunty renditions of old Anglo-Celtic, European and African-American ballads played on the…

Member for 56 YEARS BILL MONROE It’s often been said that if there were a Mount Rushmore of the Opry, Bill Monroe’s face would be featured. In 1938, the mandolinist formed the Blue Grass Boys, a group so essential in the development of the style that it would ultimately give the genre its name. So popular was the group’s music on the weekly radio program that the show’s manager once told Monroe, “If you ever leave the Opry, you’ll have to fire yourself!” Monroe, who died in 1996, helped launch the careers of other Opry legends like Flatt and Scruggs, and also inspired trailblazers far beyond the country music world: Elvis covered his “Blue Moon of Kentucky”; and Jerry Garcia traveled with Monroe’s tour before forming the Grateful Dead. Member for 57…

BRITISH ARTIST and writer Margaret Ithell Colquhoun was a pioneer of Surrealist “automatism,” creating images from charcoal shavings or letting her unconscious take charge of a pen. Such methods had a “divinatory power,” she explained, comparing them to “the practices of clairvoyants who use … tea leaves and coffee grounds to set in motion their telepathic faculty.” While she traveled in the same circles as household names like Salvador Dalí, Colquhoun broke with Surrealism in 1940 to focus on the occult, a move that may have contributed to her relative obscurity by the time of her death in 1988. This month, however, a major retrospective of Colquhoun’s work will open at London’s Tate Britain, after a stint at the museum’s Cornwall branch. It’s the first since her rediscovery by a…

IT FELT LIKE A HOMECOMING. Thousands of onlookers cheered wildly as daredevil pilot Bessie Coleman arced her Curtiss Jenny biplane into a spiral above a Houston field. The weather was scorching, but Coleman kept her cool as she cruised through loop-de-loops and gunned across the blue skies at 75 miles per hour. The aviator was already a colossal figure to many in the audience. In recent years, her globe-trotting escapades had taken her to Los Angeles, Chicago, Paris, Amsterdam and beyond. The Chicago Defender had declared her the “Queen of the Air.” Now, back home in Texas on June 19, 1925, she was finally achieving her true aerial ambitions, as a main attraction in the first-ever all-Black air show in the state—and doing it on Juneteenth, no less. “I am…