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: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="406" caption="On January 25, 1904, a military procession to Smithsonian Institution grounds brings the remains of James Smithson (c.1765-1829) whose bequest created the Smithsonian, His remains had been transported by Alexander Graham Bell, a member of the Board of Regents, from Genoa, Italy, after the Italian cemetery had fallen into
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="427" caption="After three years at the National Portrait Gallery, (l-r) William Trossen, Terry Conable, Lina Best and David Price are moving the Gilbert Stuart portraits of George and Martha Washington for shipment to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where they will be displayed under an alternating exhibition plan worked out in 1980
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="334" caption="Paul Rhymer, Exhibits Specialist in Taxidermy at Exhibits Central, shows off the radio-controlled badger he created for Brian Miller, a post-doctoral fellow working at the National Zoo's Conservation and Research Center (CRC) in Front Royal, VA, The "robo-badger" had been found as road-kill and mailed to Rhymer frozen,
Description: The 19th century was a transformative time for the natural sciences. New discoveries didn't just happen in an armchair. Scientists adventured into unfamiliar territory by land and sea on expeditions, and their new findings fed new theories. Groups like the Columbian Institute for the Promotion of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences formalized America's place
Description: This blog post was edited in October 2021 for clarification. While surveying and collecting specimens in the Aleutian Islands in 1871-1872 for the United States Coast Survey, later renamed the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey, naturalist William Healey Dall befriended George Tsaroff (1858-1880), an Unangan (Aleut) teen from Unalaska Island who had been hired as local
Description: I’ve been inspired by the snowflakes Wilson A. Bentley photographed through a microscope in the late 1800's ever since I first saw them in the Archives. Bentley donated 500 of his photographs to the Smithsonian in 1903 (you can read more about them in a post by Archives colleague, Courtney Esposito). The images capture nature at its most creative, mathematical, and elegant.
Description: It is too hard to know everything that lives inside an archival collection. Join us in opening up some of our miscellaneous folders and discover what is inside!