Smithsonian Magazine December 2025

A Name Worth Remembering I deeply enjoyed “Inside the Comeback at Valley Forge” by Maryland historian Richard Bell (September/October 2025). Although it was otherwise informative and gracefully written, I could not help noticing that it suggests that Friedrich Wilhelm von Steuben used the title “Baron von Steuben” while reforming the Continental Army. Alas, Steuben’s actual use of the title “von” while in America was nonexistent. He indeed had used “von” during his earlier military career in Europe, but he adopted the French title “baron” in his job applications to Benjamin Franklin in June 1777, and he never looked back. Stephen Gilbert | Rio, Wisconsin In addition to the physical monuments to Steuben, there are the living ones. For example, the annual September German American Steuben Parade up Fifth Avenue in…

AT THE START of my tenure, I vowed to bring the Smithsonian to every home in America. Though it was a lofty goal, I knew we already touched so many lives in innumerable ways: a child experimenting with a micro-scope from the National Museum of Natural History, friends exploring a digital art exhibition—even an early riser pouring a morning cup of coffee. The Smithsonian’s Bird Friendly coffee program, turning 25 this year, has a secluded headquarters in the Migratory Bird Center at the National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute, but its footprint is worldwide. In the 1980s, Smithsonian ornithologist Russell Greenberg was conducting research in Latin America when he noticed an unusual shortage of migratory birds. Greenberg eventually confirmed that the drop was due to the local agricultural industry’s efforts…

FOR MILLENNIA before steamships busied the river’s waters, Native Americans roved it in dugout canoes, spearing sturgeons known to fly into the air like birds. The Hudson River’s restless ribbon cuts a 315-mile course down New York State, hightailing it across the backbone of the Appalachian Mountains, hurtling past the Highlands where George Washington held back the British, before emptying into the harbor where Lady Liberty stands with lifted lamp on a pedestal of limestone mined from the river’s valley. Franklin D. Roosevelt fished in it, naturalist John Burroughs rowed on it, Winslow Homer painted it, and Washington Irving thanked God he was “born on the banks of the Hudson.” “There’s no American history without the story of the Hudson,” says historian Douglas Brinkley. The Hudson’s journey begins about two…

1. HUMPBACK WHALE One sign that the Hudson’s not as dirty as it used to be is the occasional appearance of humpback whales, sometimes spotted in the river as they hunt Atlantic men-haden fish. In 2016, a humpback ventured as far as the George Washington Bridge near Manhattan’s northern tip; another was spotted in 2020 near the Statue of Liberty, in Upper New York Bay. 2. LINED SEAHORSE Everybody knows these tiny tenants of the tideway have an unusual reproductive arrangement, in which the males carry the eggs until they hatch. The seahorse’s other fascinating feature is the development of a square tail that allows it to cling to stationary objects, like Hudson River Park’s artificial reef system, which stretches from Pier 26 to Pier 34. 3. HOGCHOKER A bottom…

IN AMERICA, CHRISTMAS is an expansive holiday. At different times, to different people, it may be a joyous celebration of the birth of Jesus, a time for families to gather, an overwrought occasion tainted by materialism—or all of that at once. Whether or not you celebrate, it’s an unavoidable element of American culture, as photographer Lee Friedlander shows in a new book, Christmas. For more than seven decades, and in places as diverse as Honolulu, West Texas and upstate New York, Friedlander, 91, has documented what he calls “the social landscape”—stoops, storefronts, roadways—without bias. The camera, he once wrote, is “a kind of net. . .. The net is indiscriminate unless you point it and then are lucky. I might get what I hoped for and then some—lots of then…

THE FILM WAS long and getting longer by the day. Worse still, the director was bent on shooting outdoors, on a mountainous peninsula west of Tokyo, and the rain, during the interminably long production period between 1953 and 1954, was just as bent on falling in heavy sheets. Before production was anywhere close to wrapped, the budget was already ten times that of the average Japanese film, and the ballooning expenses led to extended hiatuses in shooting as the Toho Motion Picture Company scrambled to find more money. In the national press, meanwhile, the production was already a byword for bloat and dysfunction. The director had earned the disparaging nickname “Kurosawa Tenno,” or “Emperor Kurosawa,” a nod to his authoritarian bearing—and to the way his most ambitious film was expanding into…