Description: Here at the Smithsonian we love to observe. So of course on August 23, 2011, at 1:51 PM, when a 5.8 magnitude earthquake shook the Washington, DC region and many of us with it, we immediately started to observe what happened and how we could document it. As the Institution's historians, inevitably we needed to know, had this happened before and what were the effects? After
Description: Anthropologist and Director Emeritus, Diana Parker (at podium), produced the Smithsonian's Folklife Festival for 25 years and worked in over 40 nations to bring the festival to D.C. #Groundbreaker
Description: A previously unpublished photograph, from the Science Service "morgue" files in Accession 90-105, shows two Nobel laureate physicists, Anton Lorentz and Albert Einstein, in 1926.
Description: As we digitize the Archives’ collections to make them available online, I am constantly being exposed to handwriting from the past two centuries. As a result, I have a deeper appreciatiation of how many different things influence the way a person’s writing appears on the page, things beyond the quality of their penmanship. Writing on the deck of a ship, on horseback or on
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="368" caption="Interior of Office of Printing and Photographic Service's cold storage vault, 1983, by Richard K. Hofmeister, Smithsonian Institution Archives, Record Unit 371 Box 4 Folder September 1983, Negative Number 2004-10338."][/caption] To be sure, the Smithsonian has a lot of photographs. Millions of them in hundreds of
Description: 2022 will mark the Smithsonian's 175th Anniversary. In honor of that, we're taking a look at what some of the design work went into making the Smithsonian's 150th Anniversary celebration happen.