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Science
Theater of Relief
Medical procedures used to be a scream-filled endurance test until doctors at this Boston institution learned to tame the pain of patients
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When a Carpenter in California Found a Nugget of Gold, It Started a Rush Toward Nothing Less Than the Modern World
A new book by historian Nathaniel Philbrick makes the case that James Marshall’s 1848 discovery set in motion events from the Civil War to the rise of Silicon Valley
Smart News
A New Personalized Cancer Vaccine Could Keep Skin Cancer From Coming Back, Drugmakers Say
Shipwreck Hunters Discover the Ruins of a British Destroyer That Split in Half During a Tragic Peacetime Accident 118 Years Ago
Scientists Gave Dogs MRIs and Learned That They’re Surprisingly Good at Distinguishing Between Human Emotions, Even Some Negative Ones
An ‘Extremely Rare’ Half-Male, Half-Female Bird Temporarily Took Up Residence Outside of Chicago
These ‘Extremely Rare’ 17th-Century Drawings Were Astonishingly Well-Preserved. Now They Are on Display for the First Time in Nearly a Century
Latest Features
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Travel
Rediscovering America’s Original Grand Tour
Follow along as we retrace the route one journalist laid out in “The Fashionable Tour,” from New York City to Niagara Falls, when memories of the fight for independence were still fresh
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History
How to Build a Character
Silence Dogood. Richard Saunders. Benevolus. Sidi Mehemet Ibrahim. All were pen names that allowed Franklin to say things he couldn’t have otherwise said
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Most Popular
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Special Report
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America at 250: The Revolutionary Spark
A Smithsonian magazine special issue in celebration of the nation's 250th
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Photo of the Day
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Rewilding a Pangolin
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Podcast
Smithsonian Podcast: There’s More to That
Smithsonian magazine covers history, science and culture in the way only it can — through a lens on the world that is insightful and grounded in richly reported stories. In There’s More to That, meet the magazine’s journalists and hear how they discover the forces behind the biggest issues of our time.
Latest Episodes
The Remarkable, Amazing Stories of Route 66 Reflect the Twists and Turns of 100 Years of Americana
April 23, 2026 | 34 minutes
History
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When an American Airplane Crashed Into a School in 1944, an English Village Lost Almost All of Its Youngest Children. Why Has WWII’s Worst Civilian Aviation Accident Been Forgotten?
On August 23, 1944, a test flight over the village of Freckleton, located in northwest England, ended in disaster, claiming the lives of 61 people, including 38 students between the ages of 4 and 6
Science
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Earth’s Organisms Developed Via Evolution. Some Theorists Wonder: What if the Entire Cosmos Did, Too?
The idea that universes evolve like organisms sat on the fringes of theoretical physics for decades. Then, a Substack post and a 2022 find by the James Webb Space Telescope boosted the concept
Innovation
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The First At-Home Test for Infected Ticks Could Improve Lyme Disease Diagnosis
LymeAlert will hit the market in August. The latest tool against the tick-borne illness could become a medicine cabinet staple
Travel
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A New Generation of Chefs Reimagines Indonesian Cuisine in the Netherlands to Tell the Stories of Its Origins
The shift reflects a larger cultural moment, with chefs asking whether the cuisine should remain tied to colonial nostalgia or evolve into a reflection of modern Indonesian identity
Arts & Culture
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The History of the Beach Read, From 19th-Century ‘Moral Debasement’ to BookTok
The still-popular genre got its start 150 years ago, when publishers profited off the rise of travel in the United States during an otherwise slow publishing season
At the Smithsonian
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These Shark Look-Alikes Have Long Confounded Fishers and Scientists on the East Coast. Tracking Where They Migrate Could Help Clear the Confusion
Researchers are tagging and tracking spinner sharks to map out their geographic distribution, because they’ve seen that the range of the very similar blacktip shark has shifted