Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="448" caption="Temperance Parade, Church of the Nazarene, Medora, Illinois, photographer unknown, real-photo postcard, 1908, Courtesy of Luc Sante, 2009."][/caption] One of the thrills of seeing—when you stop to pay attention to it—is how complex and quickly the process of looking and making sense of what we see happens. According to
Description: Section of Vertebrate Paleontology staff of the United States National Museum, with research associate Oliver Perry Hay, and assistant curators Charles Whitney Gilmore and James Williams Gidley, MNH-38548A.
Description: One of the challenges of being a reference archivist is focusing on the inquiries received, while suppressing the bits of information you come across that may be of personal interest (the corner of my desk is occupied by an ever increasing list of topics I aspire to research further on my own time). Recently, however, a colleague who is familiar with my interest in rare and
Description: [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="430" caption="Expedition Members Excavating Fossils, Scientific field research headed by Charles W. Gilmore, curator of vertebrate paleontology for the U.S.
Description: Louise Daniel Hutchinson (1928-2014) was founding Research Director at the Anacostia Neighborhood Museum, now the Anacostia Community Museum, and was a pioneer in both oral and community history. #Groundbreaker.
Description: Among the many photos in the Archives' collections are images from the Panamanian island, Coiba, where former Smithsonian Secretary Alexander Wetmore, conducted ornithological research. We've featured some of these images on the blog before, and I always wondered about their captions, which mentioned that Coiba was a penal colony.
Description: The 2018 public domain graduates, including Aleister Crowley, René Magritte, Alice B. Toklas, Pierre Bonnard, and Winston Churchill! [via Public Domain Review]The history of dealing with lack of light in Scandanavia, and Happy Solstice! [via Mosaic Science]Aww, baby pictures of the internet from 1973! [via Open Culture]Close-ups of Jupiter from NASA look like impressionist
Description: [edan-image:id=siris_sic_6861,size=300,right] Some students look forward eagerly to the new school year; others dread the end of summer and the long year ahead. How did the Smithsonian’s founding donor, James Smithson (1765-1829), feel about school? Smithson attended Oxford University in England from 1782 to 1786, receiving a Masters of Arts degree in chemistry and mineralogy.