Description: Volunteers have been an integral part of the Smithsonian since the beginning. As our historian Pamela Henson likes to say, we have always relied on the kindness of strangers. A blog post in honor of Volunteer Appreciation Month 2015. Includes a list of Smithsonian crowdsourcing projects that volunteers can participate in.
Description: People everywhere are helping the Smithsonian Institution Archives make more of its collections deeply accessible through helping transcribe field books, journals, and diaries in our collections.
Description: While researching my last blog post on the "mad wolf" who escaped from the National Zoo, I came across an old black-and-white photograph in the Smithsonian Institution Archives that caught my eye. The image is grainy, but appears to show a man and a wolf, separated by a chain-link fence, holding each other's rapt attention while the man operates some sort of recorder. Unable
Description: What happens when you have information about a historic photograph that is contradictory? How do you decide what information is correct? Check out how one historian grapples with these mysteries.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="Explorers of the Danish Fifth Thule Expedition, Born in Greenland of a Danish missionary father and an Inuit mother, Knud Johan Victor Rasmussen, 1879-1933, was a Danish arctic explorer and ethnologist, who between 1921 and 1924, led a small band of colleagues in a journey of investigation across arctic North America from
Description: The DMZ ecology project reveals the Smithsonian’s commitment to ecological research programs as well as the complexity and contingency of an international collaboration.
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: Today is the first day of winter. Not ready for the cold weather? It could always be worse. Ornithologist (and future tropical biologist) Neal Griffith Smith once wrote in his journal:"Still pensil [sic]. Well, I've got time and temperature to write. Just sharpened the pensil with a snow knife. We are parked smack in the middle of Southampton [Island] in a bloody windstorm. It