Description: Spectacular natural events, like eclipses, have long been the bread-and-butter of science journalism. Science Service, too, succumbed to the lure of combining colorful, firsthand descriptions with technical explanations.
Description: As a remarkable auction of artifacts of a bygone aristocratic world takes place, we look at a surprising connection between Mary, Duchess of Roxburghe and the Smithsonian’s founding benefactor, James Smithson
Description: Bloggers on The Bigger Picture often describe how, in the course of their work, they come across intriguing archival objects and artifacts that trigger new insights into history. “Hands on” encounters with compelling evidence from the past are thrilling and can be provocative. But so can different sorts of encounters, including those that are driven by data, rather than
Description: Each week, the Archives features a woman who has been a groundbreaker at the Smithsonian, past or present, in a series titled Wonderful Women Wednesday.
Description: Opening on April 6, 2018, A box of ten photographs highlights the portfolio of Diane Arbus, an American photographer known for her black-and-white images of marginalized individuals, including the mentally ill, circus performers, and transgender people. The exhibition, at the Smithsonian American Art Museum (SAAM) until January 21, 2019, traces the history of Arbus's
Description: When Dr. Ted Reed became director of the National Zoological Park in 1959, he committed himself to carrying out the zoo’s complete set of mandates that included research, education, and conservation of endangered species. All these came together in a new non-public facility, the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, founded in 1975 in Front Royal, Virginia.
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="National Museum of Natural History physical anthropologists Lucille St. Hoyme (1924-2001), J. Lawrence Angel (1915-1986), and Thomas Dale Stewart (1901-1997) hold a seventeen and one half foot long beard found in a North Dakota attic, 1967, by Unidentified photographer, Photographic print, Smithsonian Institution