Description: Explore what happened in 1969 when a man brought a hatchet and butcher knife to Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History to attack a display of snakes.
Description: Today is Giant Panda cub Bao Bao’s third birthday, and yesterday her little brother, Bei Bei, turned one. This marks the first time in the forty-four years of panda conservation at the National Zoo that there have been two healthy cubs in residence at the zoo at the same time, but that’s not for lack of trying.
Description: Sometimes a single picture or new piece of information can open a window to a whole new perspective. In my case, it was a couple of sentences—spoken at a recent presentation at the Best Practices Exchange 2010 conference in Phoenix, Arizona—that turned out to be revelatory. The conference was a gathering of archivists, librarians, record managers, and digital curators whose
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_10581,size=200,left]Vicarious research is one of the great joys of the reference desk at the Smithsonian Institution Archives. From our front-row (well, only-row) seat outside the reading room, we catch tantalizing glimpses of our patrons’ manifold research topics.The reference team fields around 6,000 queries per year. Ask us what people have been
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="221" caption="Uniformed Letter Carrier with Child in Mailbag, by Unidentified photographer, c. 1900, National Postal Museum."][/caption] Since the Smithsonian began uploading photos to the Flickr Commons, there have been some clear crowd favorites. The photo above, for example, is by far our most popular photo on the Flickr Commons,