Smithsonian History

This post originally appeared on the Smithsonian Institution Archives’ blog. Nell MacCarty’s internship was part of the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives’ 50th Anniversary Internship program, with funding provided by the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian National Board.

Smithsonian Libraries and Archives wants to help you gain a better understanding of information literacy and further your skills in this crucial area. In an age where there are myriad sources of information, unending news coverage, and a vast, often unregulated digital world, how can you tell which sources to trust for reliable information?

Nothing about the Smithsonian Institution can be described as small, especially the impact of its staff. As an intern with the Smithsonian Libraries and Archives Summer Scholars’ Program in the Institutional History Division, I had the opportunity to learn more about staff at the Smithsonian Associates.

We’re celebrating new publications, exciting exhibitions, and the festive holiday season with another round of digital jigsaw puzzles. This collection of images highlights a few winter favorites as well as recent Smithsonian Libraries and Archives projects.

Play them right here on our blog or use the links to play full screen. Each puzzle is set to be 100 pieces but they are customizable to any skill set. Click the grid icon in the center to adjust the number of pieces.

Three Cheers for 100 Years of Fine Arts research at the Smithsonian!

This post was written by Lezlie Hernandez, a Summer 2021 intern at the Smithsonian Institution Archives, sponsored by the American Women’s History Initiative. Her project focused on researching the history of Smithsonian women in science. 

We’re looking forward to hosting Steven Turner, author of The Science of James Smithson, for our Annual Dibner Lecture on December 1st, 2021. Turner will explore a few lesser-known tales of Smithson’s work in a talk entitled “What Was James Smithson Doing in the Kitchen & Classroom?” Ahead of his lecture, Turner shares his recreation of Smithson’s coffee recipe.

Between 1849 and 1851, Johan George Heck published his encyclopedia Bilder-Atlas zum Conversations-Lexicon and the work continues to offer valuable insight into life in the 19th-century.

Serena Katherine “Violet” Dandridge (1878-1956) was one of the Smithsonian’s first female scientific illustrators and a supporter of women’s suffrage. Dandridge grew up in Shepherdstown, West Virginia, and moved to Washington, D.C. in 1896 to study art.

1996 marked the 150th anniversary of the Smithsonian Institution. It was also in that year that the Office of Public Affairs (OPA) published Asian Pacific American Resources at the Smithsonian. This resource brochure was meant to aid teachers, students, and researchers by providing them with information on Smithsonian collections, databases, publications, fellowships, internships, and more that were of significance to Asian Pacific Americans. The OPA also produced similar brochures on African and African American, Latino, and Native American resources.

Over the course of 175 years, the Smithsonian has grown to encompass 21 museums and nearly a dozen research centers—becoming a global organization working across history, culture, and science. How a stranger’s legacy became the world’s largest museum and research complex is a story full of surprising twists and turns of fate. What do we know about the Smithsonian’s mysterious founder, a man who left his fortune to the United States, a country he never visited?

Today, on the Smithsonian’s birthday, we are pleased to celebrate the launch of a new, refreshed, and greatly expanded web exhibition, Smithson to Smithsonian.  

What does it take to paint a wildflower that blooms for a single day in a deep forest? For Mary Vaux Walcott, it involved spending up to seventeen hours a day out of doors with her paintbox to capture the shape, movement, and colors of delicate petals and leaves.