Description: Look at enough photographs and it’s inevitable that, at some point, you’ll find yourself pondering mortality and photography’s relationship to death. Because the medium so effectively captures fragments of lives, events, and data that have come and gone, you’re always looking at and trying to make sense of something that’s over, finished, part of the past. Writers—particularly
Description: Why would an English chemist donate his fortune to the United States, a newly formed country he had never visited? We will likely never know exactly why in 1826 James Smithson chose to bequeath more than half a million dollars to create the Smithsonian Institution.
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_arc_395101,size=300,left]When Harvard Medical School distributed these photographs of John Clavon Norman, Jr., M.D. (1930-2014) to news services in the 1960s, Dr. Norman was at an exciting stage of his career. The young physician had already made quite a journey, but there would be even more paths to blaze. He had been born in West Virginia to parents who
Description: Listen to reenactments of two articles that were published in the 1936 Smithsonian Annual Report as broadcast during The World Is Yours episode “Smithsonian Annual Report of Scientific Progress.”
Description: What was the Saint Augustine Monster? According to Wikipedia, it was a globster—“an unidentified organic mass that washes up on the shoreline of an ocean or other body of water.” This great-grandaddy of globsters kept cryptozoologists speculating and scientists testing for a century—and a piece of it lives at the Smithsonian. The St. Augustine monster was discovered by two
Description: On Thursday, October 22nd, four of our archivists/conservators were available on the Smithsonian's Facebook page to answer questions about preserving your own archival collections. The four archivists at the Q&A have specialties in the preservation and organization of audio/visual material, photos, and digital records (email, digital video, etc.) This is our fifth year hosting