Description: Oral history interviews sometimes reveal the central role that a mentor can play in the life of a young person, changing the road taken in that person’s life.
Description: A clause in the last will and testament of English scientist James Smithson eventually led to his estate being left to the United States "to found at Washington, under the name of the Smithsonian Institution, an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge among men.” There was much debate as to what constituted such an establishment, but many of the proposals
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="408" caption="Physicist Hans Albrecht Bethe (1906-2005) is shown being interviewed by John O’Neill (science journalist, New York Tribune), and William Laurence (science journalist, New York Times) at the George Washington University Conference on Theoretical Physics, January 1939, by Fremont Davis, Photographic print, Smithsonian
Description: We all screamed for ice cream at the old-fashioned ice cream parlor at Smithsonian's National Museum of American History between 1981 and 2006.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="Actor and environmentalist Robert Redford discusses a scene from the film "The Earth in Our Hands" with Walter Adey, director of Natural History's Marine Systems Laboratory (MSL). The film was shot in MSL's Everglades Ecosystem at the Old Soldiers' Home, 1989, Richard K. Hofmeister, Photographic print, Smithsonian
Description: In November 1938, Science News Letter published a story on Enrico Fermi winning the Nobel Prize in Physics, running a headshot of the professor. It's the kind of photo found in a passport—Fermi is looking forward with not much of a smile. The next question a historian would ask is did Science Service, the publisher, hire one of its photographers to take the photo, or acquire