Movements
Environmental and social movements and organizations for cultural preservation
Corn Plastic to the Rescue
Wal-Mart and others are going green with "biodegradable" packaging made from corn. But is this really the answer to America's throwaway culture?
August 2006 |
By Elizabeth Royte
Waste Into Walls: Building Casas Out of Sand
A green technology guru heads to the dump in search of the stuff of dreams.
August 01, 2006 |
By Erica Ryberg
Al Gore Discusses "An Inconvenient Truth"
Environmentalist Al Gore talks about his new movie.
July 01, 2006 |
By Amy Crawford
Dada
The irreverent, rowdy revolution set the trajectory of 20th-century art
May 2006 |
By Paul Trachtman
Fearing the Worst
A church is bombed. A daughter is missing. A rediscovered photograph recalls one of the most heart-wrenching episodes of the civil rights era.
May 2006 |
By Diane McWhorter
35 Who Made a Difference: Robert Moses
A former civil rights activist revolutionizes the teaching of mathematics
November 01, 2005 |
By Neil Henry
35 Who Made a Difference: Wes Jackson
In Kansas, a plant geneticist sows the seeds of sustainable agriculture
November 01, 2005 |
By Craig Canine
The Dying of the Dead Sea
The ancient salt sea is the site of a looming environmental catastrophe
October 2005 |
By Joshua Hammer
Broad Shoulders
When union leader Cesar Chavez organized the nation's farmworkers, he launched a movement that changed history
October 2005 |
By Owen Edwards
E-Gad!
Americans discard more than 100 million computers, cellphones and other electronic devices each year. As "e-waste" piles up, so does concern about this growing threat to the environment
August 2005 |
By Elizabeth Royte
Just What the Doctor Ordered
During Prohibition, an odd alliance of special interests argued beer was vital medicine
April 2005 |
By Beverly Gage
The Old Ballgames
Civil rights chronicler Ernest Withers also photographed the glories of black baseball, including pioneering big leaguer Jackie Robinson
April 2005 |
By Carolyn Kleiner Butler
Down In Mississippi
The shooting of protester James Meredith 38 years ago, searingly documented by a rookie photographer, galvanized the civil rights movement
February 2005 |
By Carolyn Kleiner Butler
![As many as 150,000 slaves may have gained freedom (as depicted in 1863). "We will probably never know [the total]," says historian James O. Horton. "Part of the reason is that the underground was so successful: it kept its secrets well."](http://media.smithsonianmag.com/images/200*345/free_main.jpg)
Free at Last
A new museum celebrates the Underground Railroad, the secret network of people who bravely led slaves to liberty before the Civil War
December 2004 |
By Fergus M. Bordewich
Can Great Coffee Save the Jungle?
Persuaded that guilt alone won't get Americans to pay more for environmentally friendly coffee, importers are trying a market approach by giving farmers the tools to grow better beans
June 2004 |
By Katherine Ellison
Off the Beaten Track
During a civil rights march in 1965, photographer Bruce Davidson left the highway to focus on a single Alabama sharecropper and her nine children
June 2004 |
By Paul Maliszewski
On Clipped Wings
As America's first black military pilots, Tuskegee airmen faced a battle against racism
May 2004 |
By Keith Weldon Medley
Visions of China
With donated cameras, residents of remote villages document endangered ways of life, one snapshot at a time
March 2004 |
By Marlane Liddell
Digging into a Historic Rivalry
As archaeologists unearth a secret slave passageway used by abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens, scholars reevaluate his reputation and that of his neighbors and nemesis, James Buchanan
February 2004 |
By Fergus M. Bordewich
Ouch!
A new finding that fish feel pain has set off a tortured debate about the ethics of angling.
November 2003 |
By Michael Parfit
