Smithsonian Magazine

“This article opened my eyes to delicious dates and their interesting history.” Document Detectives “Invisible Evidence” (November/December 2022) is a fascinating piece about how mass spectrometry of proteins found on old documents might provide evidence of the medical condition of the author. But how can one sample from one document be relied on to reach any definitive conclusion? We could reasonably expect that powerful figures often depended on servants, who presumably would also assist with documents. How were these documents handled after being written? Can anyone really know? Evidence, yes. Diagnosis, only perhaps. Larry W. Wolf | Gettysburg, Pennsylvania “Invisible Evidence” brought to my mind stamps, which used to be licked before being stuck on envelopes. Many collections contain the stamps used for sending important letters starting around the 1840s. The sealed undersides of…

WHEN I WAS IN NINTH GRADE, I asked my dad who I should write about for a book report, thinking he would suggest Willie Mays or Mickey Mantle. Instead, he gave me W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Souls of Black Folk. At the time, I had no idea who or what that was—and neither did any of my classmates when I gave my report. Now, I realize that publication provided a North Star for my entire career. Du Bois, a prolific historian and sociologist, has long been an inspiration to me, and it was one of the great honors of my life to receive the W.E.B. Du Bois Medal from Harvard University in 2019. His scholarship on structural racism shaped my life’s work by giving me a way to use history as…

U.S. HISTORY: HOW ENTERTAINERS PLAY A ROLE The cleaning lady with the flamboyant fantasy life When Carol Burnett debuted her charwoman character on a TV special in 1962, it was a hit—and an easy choice to feature on “The Carol Burnett Show,” which premiered five years later and ran for 11 seasons. Wearing a patchwork ensemble of tattered layers, the charwoman dreams of a more exciting life that doesn’t include pushing a mop. “She wants to be, in her mind, Gypsy Rose Lee, a famous striptease artist,” Burnett says in an exclusive interview. “So she starts doing the bumps and the grinds and the whole thing.” The charwoman idea first struck the much-honored comedianactor as she listened to “The Stripper” by David Rose and His Orchestra on the radio. The costume is…

ON EASTER SUNDAY 1939, Marian Anderson, wrapped in a fur coat against the April chill, stepped to the microphone atop the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and launched into “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” First lady Eleanor Roosevelt had assembled an integrated crowd of 75,000 people—an unprecedented honor for a Black artist—who listened in solemn awe. Todd Duncan, a singer and voice teacher in the audience that day, described Anderson’s performance as indelible: “I know my soul has it and it will never, never leave,” he told the Washington Post. One of the greatest contraltos in the history of American music, Anderson is best known for breaking color barriers. Indeed, no female American performer achieved more historic firsts. Perhaps the most widely celebrated came in 1943, when she became the…

IN 1960 MARIA COLE, the wife of Nat King Cole, asked Marian Anderson about adding her signature to a statement by prominent Black Democrats endorsing John F. Kennedy for president. Anderson replied that she considered it “not possible” to have her name “identified in any particular party.” That revealing exchange is just one glimpse into the artist’s private life offered by the Marian Anderson Collection at the University of Pennsylvania, which holds the most comprehensive cache of Anderson materials in the world: photographs, diaries, contracts, interviews, sheet music and more, much of which has been digitized since 2017 and is available online. The archive is packed with clues to Anderson’s life and artistry. What was she reading in 1941 as a 44-year-old? Her books list that year included W.E.B. Du Bois’ Black…

THE AFRICAN AMERICAN artist William H. Johnson (1901-1970) had been painting expressionist landscapes in Europe for more than a decade when the threat of war forced him to return to the United States in 1938. With the move home came a dramatic shift in style and subject, as Johnson heeded Harlem Renaissance leader Alain Locke’s call to “do something on your own people.” “He committed to Black life in America,” says Virginia Mecklenburg, a curator at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which holds more than 1,000 of Johnson’s works. This phase of his career, characterized by a pseudo-folk sensibility that hints at African sculpture, culminated in his Fighters for Freedom series, now on a national tour organized by the museum. The series places the Black American story within a broader…