Description: [caption id="attachment_4168" align="aligncenter" width="261" caption="Albumen portrait of the Reverend Levi L. Hill, Baptist minister and early daguerreotypist, West Kill, New York and New York City, b. 1816-d. February 9, 1865. Inscription on reverse, “Levi L. Hill, Died February 9, 1865, He is Asleep in Heaven.”"][/caption] Just when we think that we must have at last
Description: C. Malcolm Watkins (1911-2001), curator of cultural history at the National Museum of American History, was a pioneer of material culture studies and historic archeology.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="305" caption="Cake, by Daniel Nelson, Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0."][/caption] It’s hard to believe, but it has been two years to the day that THE BIGGER PICTURE has been in existence (note: that rogue January post doesn’t count as it was backdated)! The blog was started by the Smithsonian Photography
Description: The creation and design of the Smithsonian Institution Building, commonly known as the “Castle”, is no mystery; however, the stories of some of the early individuals involved in the formation of the Smithsonian’s collection are less commonly known. We need to ask who collected the specimens and produced research on the objects that visitors now see when they enter Smithsonian
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