Skip to main content

Subscribe to Smithsonian magazine and get a FREE tote.

Travel

Despite the summer influx of tourists, says the author, the town "remains at heart a working harbor."

The Vineyard in Winter

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Geraldine Brooks delights in the allure of Martha’s Vineyard’s off-season

Your Kind of Town

Your Kind of Town

What makes your city, suburb or small town special? Share a favorite memory or anecdote about your hometown

Seen from the aircraft that Steinmetz calls his "flying lawn chair," a salt-making site at the village of Teguidda-n-Tessoumt in arid northern Niger appears to be a vast work of abstract art. The clay-lined pools hold briny water that slowly evaporates, yielding salt solids that workers truck to southern Niger and Nigeria, where the minerals are given to livestock. The bluish pools bear a salty crust that reflects the sky.

Africa on the Fly

Dangling from a paraglider with a propeller on his back, photographer George Steinmetz gets a new perspective on Africa

Equatorial Africa's rain forests have sustained Pygmies for millennia. Now other peoples are competing for the forests' resources, displacing the Pygmies.

The Pygmies’ Plight

A correspondent who chronicled their lives in central African rain forests returns a decade later and is shocked by what he finds

"Horses define Lexington in many ways," says Edwards (with Thoroughbred Park's statues).

Lexington Is Kim Edwards’ Old Kentucky Home

Far from her Northern roots, the best-selling novelist discovers a new sense of home amid rolling hills and Thoroughbred farms

John White likely did this study of a male Atlantic loggerhead on a stop in the West Indies en route to "Virginia" in 1585. "Their heads, feet, and tails look very ugly, like those of a venomous serpent," wrote Thomas Harriot, the expedition's scientist, of New World tortoises. "Nevertheless they are very good to eat, as are their eggs."

Sketching the Earliest Views of the New World

The watercolors that John White produced in 1585 gave England its first startling glimpse of America

The basillica and its storied mosaics constitute a matchless and threatened treasure. Architectural historian Dan Cruickshank calls it a "sacred mountain of a building, vast and elemental."

A Monumental Struggle to Preserve Hagia Sophia

In Istanbul, secularists and fundamentalists clash over restoring the nearly 1,500 year-old structure

Author of "Munich at 850," Charles Michener

Charles Michener on “Munich at 850”

The rebuilt museum boasts an innovative green roof, home to poppies, yellow tidytips and other native plants.

California Academy of Sciences: Greening a Higher Ground

San Francisco’s new science museum hosts its own rooftop ecosystem

We don't have a town center, Alvarez says, but we're "rich in characters and talents."

Julia Alvarez on Weybridge, VT

Other towns get more attention says novelist Julia Alvarez, but this is a place where things get done

Medieval wall gate.

Munich at 850

The livable, culture-crazy, beer-loving capital of Bavaria is coming to terms with its history

"I never thought anything would come of them," John Rich says of the some 1,000 personal photographs that he made as a reporter during the war.

One Man’s Korean War

John Rich’s color photographs, seen for the first time after more than half a century, offer a vivid glimpse of the “forgotten” conflict

Now seen as early evidence of prehistoric worship, the hilltop site was previously shunned by researchers as nothing more than a medieval cemetery.

Gobekli Tepe: The World’s First Temple?

Predating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, Turkey’s stunning Gobekli Tepe upends the conventional view of the rise of civilization

None

Colombia Dispatch 12: Still Striving for Peace

In spite of all the positive work that has done in recent years, there are concerns that the government may be cracking down too hard in the name of peace

Enrique Peñalosa, former mayor of Bogota, rides a bicycle

Colombia Dispatch 11: Former Bogota mayor Enrique Peñalosa

The former mayor of Colombia’s capital city transformed Bogota with ‘green’ innovations that employed the poor and helped the environment

A fifth-grade class of demobilized paramilitary and guerrilla soldiers at Medellin’s Center for Peace and Reconciliation

Colombia Dispatch 10: Education for Demobilized Forces

In exchange for laying down their arms, soldiers from Medellin’s armed militias are receiving a free education, paid for by the government

Medellin’s new metro cable system carries commuters in gondolas up a steep mountainside

Colombia Dispatch 9: The Story of Medellin

The Colombian city of Medellin is synonymous with the drug trade, but city leaders are hoping to keep the peace by building up communities

Women assemble tagua jewelry at the Tagueria in Bogota.

Colombia Dispatch 8: The Tagua Industry

Sometimes called “vegetable ivory,” tagua is a white nut that grows in Colombia that is making a comeback as a commodity worth harvesting

Cesar Lopez and cellist Sandra Parra perform in Bogota with his “escopetarra” at the launch of Colombia’s 2008 peace week

Colombia Dispatch 7: Turning Guns into Guitars

Musician Cesar Lopez invented a new type of guitar, made from the shell of an automatic weapon

Students perform together at the vallenato music academy

Colombia Dispatch 6: Accordion Rock Stars in Valledupar

Andres ‘Turco’ Gil’s accordion academy trains young children in the music of vallenato, the folk music popular across Latin America

Page 165 of 200