Smithsonian Magazine September / October 2025

OCCASIONALLY, to the chagrin of my team, I enjoy sneaking out of meetings and wandering around Smithsonian buildings—sometimes the galleries of the nearby Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, sometimes my old stomping grounds at the National Museum of American History. I once even visited the Feather Identification Lab at the National Museum of Natural History, where I learned how its scientists attempt to stop birds from flying into aircraft. Whether our curators are sharing an impromptu lesson on entomology or 17th-century portraiture, I always reflect, “Wow. There really is nowhere else where I could do this.” I am not the first Secretary to have this thought. Sixty years ago, then-Secretary S. Dillon Ripley wanted to share that same feeling of discovery not only with visitors to our museums, but also…

WHERETHE REVOLUTION ECHOES STILL In Charleston, South Carolina, the story of America’s fight for independence comes alive, not just in textbooks or museums, but underfoot, in the very streets, gardens, and fortifications that bore witness to revolution. As one of the most significant cities of the Revolutionary War, Charleston stood at the crossroads of strategy and struggle. British occupation. Colonial resistance. Local heroism. The siege of 1780. These aren’t distant memories, but chapters you can still explore. Start your journey at The Charleston Museum, the nation’s first, to set the stage for centuries of Lowcountry history. Stroll The Battery, where cannons once defended Charleston Harbor. Step inside The Powder Magazine, South Carolina’s oldest public building, where colonial militias stored arms. Tour the Heyward-Washington House, home to a signer of the…

Art Informing Life “Peanuts” creator Charles Schulz (“Life, in a Nutshell,” July/August 2025) had the courage cartoonists drawing animals didn’t need. His introduction of Franklin, a Black character added after Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, may have cost him a few readers, but it helped heal a centuries-old fracture that still needs work. Schulz was heroic as well as empathetic. David Weinstock | Fairfax, California Loud Silence “A Shared Fate” (July/August 2025) is a stark reminder that humans need to continue to improve our environmental stewardship. On my morning walks, I am often haunted by the quiet stillness. The clouds of insects I remember as a child are gone. The scattered wildflowers in the roadside ditches rarely have bees buzzing around them. Yet in the air I often…

IN 1889, A SAN FRANCISCO tavern called the Palais Royale debuted a hot new attraction: a modified Edison phonograph that, when a customer inserted a nickel, played music from a single wax cylinder. Electrical sound amplification was still years away, so customers had to insert stethoscope-like tubes into their ears to hear anything, ideally toweling down the tubes afterward to remove earwax ahead of the next listener. Despite this unwieldy setup, the machine reportedly brought in more than $1,000 (some $34,000 today) in less than six months, and coin-operated music machines soon proliferated in bars, at drugstores and even in new listening parlors across the country. Alas, poor sound quality meant selections couldn’t be soft or subtle, so popular offerings included such earsplitting numbers as John Philip Sousa marches and the…

THOUGH THE MOB had been involved with music since at least the start of the Jazz Age, the jukebox, with its all-cash business model and fungible record-keeping, showed clear potential for tax evasion and money-laundering operations and quickly caught the attention of organized crime. By the 1940s, Mafiosi, foremost among them Meyer Lansky, had pioneered the typical racket: Buy up all the jukeboxes in an area and lease them to businesses in exchange for 50 percent or more of the take. But the scheme’s true brilliance was its scope: The mob owned not only the jukeboxes, but also, often, the record companies supplying the discs and the contracts of the artists cutting the records. It was a masterpiece of vertical integration, and it worked gangbusters. By the mid-1950s, one enterprising…

THE RAPE OF THE Sabine Women, an episode in which Rome’s legendary founders forcibly abducted brides from a nearby community, has been a popular subject in painting and sculpture since the Renaissance—so popular, in fact, that we may miss the brutality of the original myth. “There’s almost this sense of familiarity-blindness to these stories,” says American artist Jesse Mockrin, who depicts the Sabine drama from the perspective of the women themselves in her large-scale 2024 painting The Descent, one of more than 12 new works on view in a solo exhibition opening at Toronto’s Art Gallery of Ontario in September. Riffing off 16th- and 17th-century Baroque artists like Caravaggio and Peter Paul Rubens, who brought new levels of technical virtuosity and theatrical flair to scenes from the Bible and mythology,…