Table of contents for January / February 2026 in Smithsonian Magazine

Unearthing Truths “The Lost City of the Silk Road” (December 2025) merits a couple of reads because it covers so much history and sociology. I am always delighted when my old assumptions—and those of the teachers who introduced me to them—are proved wrong. It is always because history, biology and sociology are so much more nuanced and varied than we ever thought. Here’s to the persistent archaeologists who are spending so much time and effort expanding our ideas about an ancient culture that was truly amazing. Sandra Woodall | San Antonio Saving Them All? A big thank you to Douglas Starr for his cover story (“Gimme Shelter,” December 2025) on Best Friends Animal Society. Starr was admirable in his effort to wrap his arms around the extensive work and mission…

ADIVISIVE presidential election threatened to destroy the Union. It was 1860, and Abraham Lincoln, on record as being morally opposed to the enslavement of human beings, had swept nearly every county in the Northeast and Upper Midwest, and lost every single one south of the Mason-Dixon line. He’d also lost every county in and around New York City, fracturing the nation’s largest state. The city’s mayor, Fernando Wood, decided to act. Wood could see the Union was coming to an end. Expecting the breakup to be peaceful, he wanted his metropolis to seek its independence as well, ending an unhappy, two-century-long marriage between the Dutch-founded city and the New England-settled upstate New York, rival cultures that had never seen eye to eye. “While other portions of our state have unfortunately…

We were only three days into a 27-day journey through the forests of eastern Nepal, pushing through low clouds and a steady downpour. “Are we going the right way?” I asked Arjun Rai, my guide on the Mera Peak trekking trail. “I think so,” he said, rain dripping from the bill of his baseball cap. “I’m pretty sure.” The mist was so dense we could see barely 100 feet ahead. It was an especially wet September, the end of monsoon season. As we descended a narrow, muddy gulch, we reached a rushing waterfall that cascaded down a rocky incline and directly blocked our path. To cross it, we slipped off our shoes and socks and waded barefoot through the icy torrent, which dropped off sharply to our right. Rai crossed…

IF CURATORS HAD rookie seasons, mine was in 1984 when I led an inaugural exhibition for the California African American Museum called “The Black Olympians.” As Los Angeles’ stadiums were swept, roads renovated and banners hung to set the stage for that year’s Summer Olympics, I located a piece of track made from the same material as the one at the Games, allowing visitors to step into Carl Lewis’ shoes as he raced and jumped to match Jesse Owens’ four-gold-medal record from 1936. That artifact was my foray into contemporary collecting, a common practice at the Smithsonian. We gathered a voided ticket from an NBA fan during the Covid-19 pandemic. We took in a TI-84 calculator like those my children used in school. From lunch boxes to self-driving cars, the…

BORN IN 1871, painter Emily Carr resisted her prim upbringing in British Columbia. Instead of flowers and gardens—deemed proper subjects for a lady artist—Carr felt drawn to the region’s lush, temperate rainforests, “the deep, sacred beauty of Canada’s still woods,” as she wrote in her autobiography. After decades working in obscurity, she won the respect of fellow artists in her later years, then renown across Canada after her 1945 death. “It’s work that’s beloved and also fraught,” says Richard Hill, curator of a major exhibition of Carr’s nature paintings, opening in February at the Vancouver Art Gallery. Her depictions of First Nations cultures have recently been criticized as patronizing, he notes, but while Carr’s attitude may now seem dated, her artistic influence remains powerful, especially in her own province. Carr…

One morning this past June, INSIDE THE MISSION CONTROL BUILDING AT NASA’S JOHNSON SPACE CENTER IN HOUSTON, 20 OR SO FLIGHT CONTROLLERS WERE SEATED AT CONSOLES ARRANGED IN NEAT ROWS. THE ATMOSPHERE WAS INTENSE, AS IN A CLASS ROOM WHEN A GROUP OF PEOPLE ARE TAKING A TEST, WHICH, IN A WAY, THESE PEOPLE WERE. WHEN I’D ENTERED AT THE BACK OF THE ROOM, NO ONE HAD GLANCED UP. They were staring at their computer monitors and occasionally looking up at three screens, each 4 feet by 8 feet, mounted on the wall. The left screen was filled with numbers. On the middle screen, an image of Orion, NASA’s new deep-space crew capsule, its solar panels deployed, appeared to float motionless in space. The right screen, which resembled an Excel spreadsheet,…

MILES DEWEY DAVIS III’s first memory was a bluehot flame on the family stove. “I felt fear, real fear,” he recalled in his 1989 autobiography. He was also exhilarated. That blue, he said, presented “an invitation, a challenge.” Afterward, “I have always believed … that my motion had to be forward, away from the heat of that flame.” Davis was born to a prosperous middle-class family in Alton, Illinois, on May 26, 1926. The next year the family moved 20 miles or so down the Mississippi River, to East St. Louis—or East Boogie, as it came to be known because of its crackling music scene. Davis’ father, Miles Davis Jr., was a dental surgeon. His mother, Cleota Henry Davis, was a violinist and pianist and tried to steer her son toward…

CURTIS KAUFFMAN was always crazy about Coca-Cola merch. In 1990, just after he and his wife, Gina, purchased their first home in Hagerstown, Maryland, he began converting his basement into a soda fountain straight out of the 1950s: a counter composed of white subway tile, white-legged stools with red seats, old-timey signs listing the price of an ice-cold Coke (a bargain at 5 cents). He even stood up a life-size cutout of James Dean sporting a Coke-branded apron. Kauffman’s amateur setup was more than just a cool room he could show off to friends and family: It was the start of his serious obsession with collecting nostalgic objects. I had heard about Kauffman and his fixation on the past from my father-in-law, who lives in Greencastle, Pennsylvania (population: 4,200), barely…

The knock on Samuel Green’s door must have felt inevitable. It was April 1857, and in the past decade hundreds of Black Marylanders had slipped off the farms and plantations where they were enslaved. Now local white leaders were beginning to suspect that Green knew more about the runaways than he let on. Green was a free Black man who lived in a cottage in Dorchester County, on the Eastern Shore of the Chesapeake Bay, where he farmed a modest plot and preached the word of God. Opening his door that April evening, Green came face to face with the law. “You are suspected of holding correspondence with the North,” a county sheriff told him, “and I shall search your house.” The sheriff and his posse soon found what they…

Across 1 Working hard on the job 5 Celebrity gossip website 8 Language spoken in Carthage 10 Marathon or mile run 11 Vulnerable avian in the Falklands 13 Whom Samuel Green aided in rescues from slavery 14 Figures of speech 17 Whistle blower 20 Doesn’t float 21 Come at ___ (have consequences) 23 Quaff sought in the mountains of Nepal 24 Small parts of an archipelago 25 ___ of the Brians (noted ice event) 28 Consumer of crop waste from Kenyan farmers 32 Ominous midmonth time 33 Bad things to get crossed 34 Metropolis that once sought its own nationhood, for short 35 Miles Davis’ Birth of the ___ Down 1 Mo. after Mar. 2 Yours, in Italian 3 Business magazine with an annual “5000” list 4 Setting for many…

Q: Did Benjamin Franklin really fly a kite in a thunderstorm? THANKS TO FRANKLIN, we know lightning is simply a discharge of atmospheric electricity—but historians still debate whether he conducted the kite experiment. That debate, however, misses a more important story. In 1749, Franklin wrote a proposal for an experiment to prove that lightning and electricity are the same; that experiment involved erecting a tall metal rod to accumulate atmospheric electricity. In 1752, a team of French experimenters became the first to try it. Franklin’s idea gained credibility because the French scientists—men of standing, not some British colonist—lent it their imprimatur. Franklin would use his investigations into atmospheric electricity and high-pointed conductors to invent the lightning rod. Steve Madewell, former interpretive exhibits coordinator, National Museum of American History Q: Did…