Description: A couple of months ago, Tony Cohn, host of Smithsonian’s Sidedoor podcast, contacted the Archives about an upcoming episode they were preparing. Sidedoor highlights the unseen or little-known stories about collections at the Smithsonian. The Archives’ work was recently front-and-center of an episode of The Sidedoor Podcast about America’s first food spy.
Description: This blog post was edited in October 2021 for clarification. While surveying and collecting specimens in the Aleutian Islands in 1871-1872 for the United States Coast Survey, later renamed the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, naturalist William Healey Dall befriended George Tsaroff (1858-1880), an Unangan (Aleut) teen from Unalaska Island who had been hired as local
Description: For forty years, from around 1900 to 1941, Margaret W. Moodey (1862-1948) worked as a scientific aide in the Department of Geology at the United States National Museum. Her colleagues came to value her experience identifying, classifying, and cataloging geological specimens, which over the years, included gems and precious stones, fossil vertebrates and plants, and
Description: An overview of the history of Martha the passenger pigeon, the last of her species, who was donated to the National Museum of Natural History 100 years ago.
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_arc_306419,size=200,left]During World War II, Science Service correspondent Emma Reh (1896-1982) spent several years living and working in Paraguay. Her letters home, like the ones written when she worked in Mexico and the American West, typically combined personal and professional news with her colorful descriptions of the countryside and people.Emma had