Description: In celebration of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, this is the first in a series of installments from Smithsonian Institution Archives staff highlighting women in science photographs. We will post portraits of women science here throughout the month. Formidable (adj). Having qualities that discourage attack; tending to inspire awe or wonder. What a word!
Description: This philanthropist’s passion for research and adventure inspired him to join a series of collecting expeditions with the Smithsonian in the 1950s.
Description: Lucy Hunter Baird did not shy away from her father’s towering legacy in American science, she embraced it. As the only child of Spencer Fullerton Baird, second Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, Lucy Baird developed a passion for her father’s discipline of ornithology (the study of birds) and strove to chronicle his extraordinary life in a biography. Although she was
Description: It can be so frustrating to put great effort into something, and then to have your work and achievements called into question. I can't begin to imagine how frustrated Samuel Pierpont Langley was in 1903. By that time, he had spent over forty years studying astrophysics and aerodynamics. His work on astronomically-derived time measurement in the late 1860's is the heart of the
Description: Tracing the history of the Smithsonian Women’s Committee, created in 1966 to raise funds to support the Institution, especially its educational programs.
Description: This summer, members of the Archives staff packed their bags and headed to the 2019 Joint Annual Meeting of the Council of State Archivists (CoSA) and Society of American Archivists (SAA). When they returned, they refected om the most useful sessions and what topics they're looking for in the future.
Description: Research has been at the core of Smithsonian’s mission from the beginning, and sharing that research—through activities like publishing papers and data—is still key to fulfilling that mission for the “increase and diffusion of knowledge.”