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Articles

Bettie Closs and Owen Kovalik anxiously await their turn on stage at the 2016 national spelling bee.

The History of the Spelling Bee

Even in the age of autofill, America is still in love with the centuries-old tradition

Hobo King Dutch, who first set out to ride the rails when he was 10 years old, meets up at the festival’s boxcar with Britt resident John Pratt.

The Last of the Great American Hobos

Hop a train to Iowa, where proud vagabonds gather every summer to crown the new king and queen of the rails

Smoke and flames rise from Notre-Dame Cathedral on April 15, 2019.

Last Night, I Watched Notre-Dame Burn

Our own travel writer, in Paris yesterday, recounts her experience witnessing the devastating fire at the cathedral

Three generations of the Marsili family at home in Siena, Italy. From left: Maria Elena; Letizia and her son Ludovico; matriarch Maria Domenica.

The Family That Feels Almost No Pain

An Italian clan’s curious insensitivity to pain has piqued the interest of geneticists seeking a new understanding of how to treat physical suffering

Empress Dowager Cixi by Katharine A. Carl, 1903

New Scholarship Is Revealing the Private Lives of China’s Empresses

Lavish paintings, sumptuous court robes, objets d’art tell the stories of Empress Cixi and four other of the most powerful Qing dynasty women

The arrestingly modern hominin at the Neanderthal Museum, near Dusseldorf, is the work of renowned paleo-artists Adrie and Alfons Kennis.

What Do We Really Know About Neanderthals?

Revolutionary discoveries in archaeology show that the species long maligned as knuckle-dragging brutes deserve a new place in the human story

A photographic plate of the 1919 total solar eclipse, taken by Andrew Claude de la Cherois Crommelin and Charles Rundle Davidson during an expedition to Sobral, Brazil. The 1919 eclipse was used by Arthur Eddington, who observed it from the island of Principe off the west coast of Africa, to provide the first experimental evidence of Einstein's theory of relativity.

What the Obsolete Art of Mapping the Skies on Glass Plates Can Still Teach Us

The first pictures of the sky were taken on glass photographic plates, and these treasured artifacts can still help scientists make discoveries today

Detail of photograph by Eadweard Muybridge

When California Went to War Over Eggs

As the Gold Rush brought more settlers to San Francisco, battles erupted over another substance of a similar hue: the egg yolks of a remote seabird colony

Nanayakkara has gone out of his way to ensure students and scientists in his prolific lab are enabled to create based on their interests, and collaborate with each other on their ideas.

Inside Professor Nanayakkara’s Futuristic Augmented Human Lab

An engineer at the University of Auckland asks an important question: What can seamless human-computer interfaces do for humanity?

Michelle Williams as Gwen Verdon and Sam Rockwell as Bob Fosse in Fosse/Verdon

How Broadway Legends Bob Fosse and Gwen Verdon Made Headlines Long Before ‘Fosse/Verdon’

She was a megawatt performer, one of the best Broadway dancers of the last century, but it’s his influence that is remembered today

Scientists and ocean advocates are hoping to find a way to both protect sea turtles and other threatened species and help fishermen make a living.

How Scientists Are Using Real-Time Data to Help Fishermen Avoid Bycatch

Using a strategy called dynamic ocean management, researchers are creating tools to forecast where fish will be—and where endangered species won’t be

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Smithsonian Voices

Why Is This Smithsonian Paleontologist Dressed as Santa?

Cat-loving paleontologist answers your questions in the National Museum of Natural History’s YouTube series, “The Doctor Is In.”

Shortly after the first human space flight, the Soviet Union began planning to send a woman to space.

The First Group of Female Cosmonauts Were Trained to Conquer the Final Frontier

Two decades before the first American woman flew to space, a group of female cosmonauts trained in Star City of the Soviet Union 

Identical twin astronauts, Scott and Mark Kelly, are subjects of NASA’s Twins Study. Scott (right) spent a year in space while Mark (left) stayed on Earth as a control subject.

NASA’s Study of Astronaut Twins Creates a Portrait of What a Year in Space Does to the Human Body

Wide-ranging research compares astronaut Scott Kelly to his earthbound twin brother, Mark

In 1836, both camps in the so-called Bank War—supporters of U.S. president Andrew Jackson, and supporters of the Second Bank of the United States president Nicholas Biddle—lobbed accusations of conspiracy to sway Americans to their sides.

History of Now

Conspiracy Theories Abounded in 19th-Century American Politics

Rumors of secret alliances, bank deals, and double-crossings were rampant in early American elections

The Cheerwine Festival in Salisbury, North Carolina, is just one of the many food and drink festivals taking place this spring in the American South.

American South

Ten of the South’s Most Mouth-Watering Food Festivals

From Vidalia onions to beer cheese, the American South has culinary celebrations covered

Gold tells the "story that colonialism sought to deny, of indigenous, structured, wonderful, cultured civilizations," says the Smithsonian's Gus Casely-Hayford.

Why There Is More to Gold Than Meets the Eye

The Smithsonian’s Gus Casely-Hayford says the precious metal was both a foundation for massive West African empires and a cultural touchstone

Giusti founded Brigaid to bring professional chefs into public school cafeterias to create made-from-scratch menus.

This Former Noma Chef Is Revamping the School Cafeteria

Dan Giusti used to serve $500 lunches. Now he’s working to deliver meals on a kid’s budget.

Rhiannon Giddens is joined by Canadian-American musician-songwriter Allison Russell (Po’ Girl, Birds of Chicago), Leyla McCalla (Carolina Chocolate Drops) and Amythyst Kiah (Amythyst Kiah & Her Chest of Glass) for the new album Songs of Our Native Daughters.

Hitting the High Notes: A Smithsonian Year of Music

Why These Four Banjo-Playing Women Resurrected the Songs of the Enslaved

The new Folkways album “Songs of Our Native Daughters” draws spiritually from slave narratives and other pre-19th-century sources

The image reveals the black hole at the center of Messier 87, a massive galaxy in the nearby Virgo galaxy cluster. This black hole resides 55 million light-years from Earth and has a mass 6.5 billion times that of the sun.

Astronomers Capture First-Ever Image of a Supermassive Black Hole

The Event Horizon Telescope reveals the silhouette of a black hole at the center of a galaxy 55 million light-years away

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