/https://public-media.smithsonianmag.com/filer/d5/a1/d5a12f94-c54b-4e9f-a44b-23ee0eb860dd/granger_0128833_highres.jpg "What if Napoleon Hadn't Lost Europe and Other Questions of Alternate History")
Across pop culture, history is being unraveled and remade. There’s the post-World-War-II dystopia that emerges from a triumphant Nazi Germany in the TV show “The Man in the High Castle” (based on a Philip K. Dick book of the same name). There’s the furor that erupted in 2017 over a proposed HBO series called “Confederate,”currently […]
With 25 years of hindsight, Jurassic Park marks a pivotal point in the history of visual effects in film. It came 11 years after 1982’s Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan debuted computer-generated imagery for a visual effect with a particle system developed by George Lucas’s Industrial Light and Magic to animate a demonstration […]
The way Bill Bowerman told the story, one of Nike’s greatest innovations came to him at breakfast. The University of Oregon track coach, who meticulously crafted custom shoes for each of his athletes, had been struggling to develop a shoe that the team could wear to train on surfaces other than the track. His “eureka” […]
It’s not every TV season that a show comes along that fits so snugly into Smithsonian.com’s wheelhouse. That’s why we were so excited when “Timeless” got picked up for a second season, giving us self-professed history nerds a chance to geek out on the show and learn a few things in the process. The show […]
Sometimes what’s absent from a museum says more about history than what’s included. Two contemporary artists—Titus Kaphar, who is African-American, and Ken Gonzales-Day, who is Mexican-American—have spent their careers addressing this issue. In the National Portrait Gallery’s newest exhibition, “Unseen: Our Past in a New Light,” the two artists take contrasting approaches—and work in two […]
For more than 40 years, Greg MacGillivray has taken his oversize IMAX cameras to the top of Everest, into the eye of a hurricane and out in deepest space. With his latest IMAX feature America’s Musical Journey, though, he focuses on something more abstract: the sounds of one of the country’s greatest cultural exports. Led […]
Maria Guagnin By Jake Buehler Art carved into rock by prehistoric people can tell us a lot about the places they lived. Now rock engravings in north-west Saudi Arabia suggest that the region was once home to a host of unexpected animals. Skeletal remains are the best record of wildlife in prehistoric ecosystems. However, very few of […]
NEW YORK (Reuters) – A rising U.S. stock market normally reduces fear among investors, but the blistering pace of the current rally has instead also driven up the anxiety factor in the market. The S&P 500 Index and the Cboe Volatility Index, which is the main gauge for measuring investor fears that benchmark stocks will […]
On Monday, Bloomberg declared Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos the wealthiest man in history. With a worth of $ 108 billion as of January 12th, he dethroned the previous title holder, Bill Gates, who is worth $ 93.2 billion. Bezos donated $ 33 million in college scholarships for DREAMers. According to TheDream.Us, a nonprofit organization that […]
The scale of the overdose epidemic is hard to fathom. In 2016, overdoses claimed 64,000 lives—more than the US military casualties in Vietnam and Iraq combined. The origins of today’s crisis, a perfect storm of potent, easily accessible opioids, trace back to aggressive pharmaceutical marketing and liberal painkiller prescribing in the 1990s and 2000s. Here’s how it […]