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Articles

Captain James Cook set out on a voyage across the Pacific 250 years ago, seemingly on a scientific voyage. But he carried secret instructions from the Navy with him as well.

Captain Cook’s 1768 Voyage to the South Pacific Included a Secret Mission

The explorer traveled to Tahiti under the auspices of science 250 years ago, but his secret orders were to continue Britain’s colonial project

New research shows that fish can tell the differences between quantities. What does that mean for our special human brains?

One Fish, Two Fish, Fish Can Count(ish?)

New research shows—again—that fish “count” like humans do. Are our cognitive evolutionary roots fishier than we thought?

The Viet-Cajun seafood boil at Grand Catch, in St. Paul.

Why Every Food Lover Should Visit the Twin Cities

Minnesota’s Twin Cities are forging a new identity, one that celebrates the region’s Nordic past while embracing its multicultural present

Mean Dog (Verso: Man Leading Mule), c. 1939-1942, by Bill Traylor, poster paint and pencil on cardboard

Born Into Slavery, Bill Traylor Would Become a Leading Light of Self-Taught Art

A new show at the Smithsonian American Art museum highlights his work

P.D. East (above as a young man) proclaimed that his Petal Paper was “a sheet designed to keep everyone happy.” That did not last.

Secrets of American History

What Made P.D. East the Fearless Wit of Forrest County

The newspaper man’s bravery rocked the racist establishment of the South—and heralded a new era of political satire

When Was the Earliest Internet Search?

Years before the birth of the Google, a forgotten experiment laid the groundwork for the ubiquitous search engine

The show honors the "living legacy” of Native peoples (above: Idalis Ramírez Rojas and her daughter Ingrid of eastern Cuba) in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean and on the U.S. mainland.

This Culture, Once Believed Extinct, Is Flourishing

A new exhibition explores the cultural heritage of the Taíno, the indigenous people of the Caribbean

A photograph of the fossil turtle Eorhynchochelys sinensis, which lived about 228 million years ago and sported a beak but no shell.

Newly Discovered Turtle Ancestors Chomped With Beaks But Bore No Shells

A 228-million-year-old fossil fills gaps in the tale of turtle evolution—and raises a few questions

Two-horned Diceratherium rhinos

When Rhinos Once Roamed in Washington State

Road-tripping through prehistoric times on the West Coast

Southern Chivalry – Argument versus Club's, John L. Magee

Before the Civil War, Congress Was a Hotbed of Violence

A new book from historian Joanne Freeman chronicles the viciousness with which elected officials treated each other

Could Lava Incinerate Trash and More Questions From Our Readers

You asked, we answered

An American flag sits atop a gravestone in the cemetery of Oak Mountain Baptist Church in Shelby County, Alabama.

Secrets of American History

The Wild Road Trip That Launched the Populist Conservative Movement

How a fiery preacher and a maverick Army general took the nation by storm

A female lion prowls inside one of the temporary enclosures at Liwonde National Park. The lions spent a few weeks acclimating to their new homes before being released into the more than 200-square-mile preserve.

Lions Are Coming Back to Southern Malawi, Where They Haven’t Been Seen for Decades

The apex predators have been returned to Malawi’s Liwonde National Park in an effort to restore the ecosystem and boost tourism

Biobot Analytics is tracking the use of opioids, neighborhood by neighborhood, by analyzing the sewage in Cary, North Carolina.

Sewage May Hold the Key to Tracking Opioid Abuse

Public health managers are hoping to pinpoint how and when people abuse drugs in order to prevent deaths

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Smithsonian Voices

For the Dog Days of Summer, Here Are 31 Artists and Their Dogs

The Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art selects works from its collections in honor of those hot August days

Dinosaurs had some bad luck, but sooner or later extinction comes for all of us.

What Makes Some Species More Likely to Go Extinct?

With help from the fossil record, paleontologists are piecing together what might make one creature more vulnerable than another

LGBTQ students are five times more likely than straight peers to miss school because they feel unsafe.

How a Little Yellow Bus Came to the Rescue of a Persecuted Schoolboy

LGBTQ activist and journalist Bil Browning reminisces about the importance of a simple toy

The couch on which Freud’s patients lay became identified with psychoanalysis itself. He shipped it to London when he left Vienna.

Secrets of American History

What Drove Sigmund Freud to Write a Scandalous Biography of Woodrow Wilson?

The founder of psychoanalysis collaborated with a junior American diplomat to lambaste the former president

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