Smithsonian Magazine November 2025

MY FATHER SERVED in the United States Army in Germany toward the end of World War II. Though we only occasionally discussed his time overseas, I grew up understanding that the military experience is, for many Americans, both a personal reality and a national point of pride. Veterans Day was a big deal for my family; it was a reminder of the bravery of my father and his fellow troops. We always attended the local parade to celebrate these heroic public servants. Similarly, throughout the year, the Smithsonian commemorates veterans and their sacrifices. Many of our earliest acquisitions and exhibitions were rooted in the military. After opening in 1881, the Arts and Industries Building (then the U.S. National Museum building) housed George Washington’s uniform. In 1907, Eben Appleton, the grandson…

“This is a valuable introduction to a new way of looking at the world.” Crimson Harvest The article “High on the Bog” (September/October 2025) sent me on a nostalgic trip back to my childhood in southern New Jersey. The cranberry bogs in the state’s Pine Barrens may not be as commercially grand in scale as those in Massachusetts, but the operation is the same. I would very much like to read a pre-industrial history of cranberry harvesting. Arlene Rabin | New Tripoli, Pennsylvania How is it that Smithsonian chose to publish an article about cranberries and completely ignored the state that is by far the largest producer of cranberries in the United States? That state would be Wisconsin. Gene Sandvig | Waterford, Wisconsin A Hero at Valley Forge Hats off…

EDWARD STRATEMEYER had a plan to get American children reading. An ambitious paper merchant in Newark, New Jersey, he’d founded a publishing company, the Stratemeyer Syndicate, in 1906, with the goal of dominating the emerging juvenile fiction market. The company’s success came largely from series books, written by an army of ghostwriters spinning wholesome adventure stories under company owned pseudonyms. Over the next quarter-century, the Stratemeyer Syndicate would create some of the most enduring characters in children’s literature—Tom Swift, the Bobbsey Twins—whose plucky exploits instilled in young people a love of reading that arguably wouldn’t be duplicated until the Harry Potter books came out at the end of the century. It was in 1927 that Stratemeyer introduced the characters who would become the company’s tent pole: the Hardy Boys, two small-town…

FELIX SNATTMAN THE BRUTISH SMUGGLER This adventure from 1927 treats readers to an archnemesis ideally suited to the age of Prohibition: Ganny Snackley, a ruthless opium smuggler who leads a crew of American roughnecks with “evil, bearded faces” to distribute the dope of a mysterious sailor with “a villainous countenance.” In the 1959 revision, Snackley becomes the (slightly) less fiendish Felix Snattman. THE HAUSNERS SOPHISTICATED PHONIES The 1969 revision of this 1942 classic pits the Hardy brothers against their mirror opposites: Hugo and Hans Hausner, debonair Swiss thieves contracted to steal a legendary lost sword that once belonged to a Swiss Italian vineyard owner. The Hausners try to carry out their plot by posing as sophisticated Italian travelers. The final duel features an umbrella. TEDDY BLAZE: COLD WAR TURNCOAT For this 1970…

AFTER GETTING HIS START as a sketch artist on the front lines of the Civil War, depicting camp life and battles in regular dispatches to Harper’s Weekly, Winslow Homer turned his sense of the dramatic to the natural world, capturing light and shadow, wind and waves in the vivid watercolors that helped establish him in the American canon. “He was discovering, pushing, experimenting in a medium that was only beginning to be taken seriously in America,” says Ethan Lasser, co-curator of an exhibition featuring nearly 100 works by Homer that opens this month at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “He did something with these materials, these little powder cakes and water, that no one else has done.” One of the first institutions to acquire the Boston-born artist’s work, starting in…

IN THE FALL OF 1945, a bit more than six years after Nazi Germany invaded Poland and started the biggest and deadliest conflict in history, a largely self-taught lawyer from a tiny hamlet in the southwest corner of New York State set out to convict the surviving Nazi leadership of crimes “so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated.” In his roughly four-hour opening statement at the first Nuremberg trial, Robert H. Jackson, chief prosecutor for the United States, offered the first full public picture of how the Nazis had planned and carried out the many horrors that shock the world to this day, including the systematic murder of an estimated six million Jews. The war in Europe had…