Description: Did you know that Joseph Francis invented the first metal life-saving boat? Or that Gail Borden invented the process for creating condensed milk? Neither did I until I heard The World Is Yours episode titled “Unheraled American Inventors,” which originally aired on April 4, 1937.Where most of the episodes I’ve listened to begin with the host walking up to two people while they
Description: I was recently given the opportunity to work as a Collections Care Intern at the Smithsonian Institution Archives for the months of November and December 2015, under the supervision and partnership of the Archives’ Collections Care Team. During my short time here, I worked on two parallel projects focused on surveying, preserving, and treating oversized archival collections:
Description: Geologist Dr. Ursula Marvin studied Moon rocks from the Apollo missions and meteorites in Antarctica. Throughout her career with the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory, Marvin championed women in science. She delivered lectures about her own experiences as a woman in geology and participated in programing to help advance women's careers. She was likely inspired to support
Description: Here at the Smithsonian we love to observe. So of course on August 23, 2011, at 1:51 PM, when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook the Washington, DC region and many of us with it, we immediately started to observe what happened and how we could document it. As the Institution's historians, inevitably we needed to know, had this happened before and what were the effects? After
Description: This post originally appeared on the National Museum of Natural History's blog, Unearthed.Who would think that behind the west wall of NMNH's paleontology hall is a painting of a goddess that created a sensation when installed in 1910? Some of you who visited the museum fifty years ago may remember the captivating Diana of the Tides as she surveyed the hall.Diana was painted
Description: Friday, September 15th, 2017 marks the 50th Anniversary of the opening of the Anacostia Community Museum. Originally named the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, Secretary Ripley envisioned this as a place to reach out to black residents of Washington, DC who were not seeing themselves in the museums on the Mall. Reporting on the opening of the museum, Secretary Ripley writes that