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Articles

James Smithson by Hattie Elizabeth Burdette, 1872

Why This Wealthy British Scientist Saw So Much Potential in the United States of America

James Smithson’s biographer offers insight into ideals born of the Age of Enlightenment that gave rise to the founding of the Smithsonian

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The Stranger and the Statesman

An excerpt from Nina Burleigh’s book, The Stranger and the Statesman: James Smithson, John Quincy Adams, and the Making of America’s Greatest Museum

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General Resent

In this interview, Ernest “Pat” Furgurson, author of “Catching Up with ‘Old Slow Trot,’” says some people are still fighting the Civil War

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Celebrating St. Patrick

On March 17, everyone’s green-even the Chicago River. Yet St. Patrick remains colored in myth

Congress finally passed the suffrage amendment in January 1918, but the Senate and the states took more than two years to approve it. In August 1920, a young Tennessee representative cast the deciding vote—at the urging of his mother—and ratified the amendment, thereby enfranchising half of the U.S. population. After a 72-year struggle, women had finally won the right to vote.

Equal Say

A photographic essay of how women won the vote

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Squirrelologist

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Wild Things: Life as We Know It

Gray seals, alligators and the world’s largest flower

Although Brazil protected indigenous territories in the 1980s, many miners and loggers ignore Native boundaries; they see cultural mapping as a threat.

Rain Forest Rebel

In the Amazon, researchers documenting the ways of native peoples join forces with a chief to stop illegal developers from destroying the wilderness

Sometime after 1938, a forger, perhaps oblivious to the document's historic nature, tried to boost its value by painting Byzantine-style illuminations on a few of its pages.

Reading Between the Lines

Scientists with high-tech tools are deciphering lost writings of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes

Pallid sturgeons, which can reach six feet long and live 60 years, flourished for eons in murky American waters.

Curtains for the Pallid Sturgeon

Can biologists breed the “Dinosaurs of the Missouri” fast enough to stave off their extinction?

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DeLorean Tremens

Hold onto your flux capacitors, time machines have nearly arrived

Cowbirds (a male, above) "are more highly evolved than we previously thought," says Jeff Hoover.

Wiseguys with Wings

“Mafia” cowbirds muscle warblers into raising their young

"If global warming's worst predictions come true in 100 years," says Fabio Carrera, "the real issue is preserving Venice as a liveable place—not stopping the occasional tide from coming in."

Venice’s Uncertainty

A new floodgate system should protect the city from high tides—unless climate change interferes

Roald Amundsen and his crew looking at the Norwegian flag at the South Pole, 1911

Antarctica’s Lost & Found Dept.

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Saul Steinberg at Morgan Library

A Space-Time Anomaly of Matter-Energy Reactions

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Planet — well, Forest — of the Apes

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That Seahorse-Shaped Space in Our Brain

IKEA’s $.05 Campaign to Save the Environment

Frank Gehry's Louis Vuitton design

Art in Glass Houses

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