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This chapter examines the connection between the museum space of the Smithsonian Institution and the expansive space of the American West. It explains that the symbolic role of the West in the American psyche emerged in significant part from its staging within the confines of the Smithsonian Institution and that the museum contributed to public instantiation of the idea of the American West not as a fixed place, but as a reflection of the nation itself. This chapter suggests that the museum provided its visitors an experience of the West with its collection of products of expeditions, managed observations and accumulated textual guides.

Although the Second Seminole War marked the effective end of the Gulf South as a borderland, encounters instigated by imperialism in the Southwest continued to affect the pursuit of knowledge in America. The rise of the Smithsonian Institution and the extension of U.S. governance into the West were interrelated processes: territorial expansion influenced the Smithsonian’s foundational mandate and early activities, while the Smithsonian organized, facilitated, and patronized an array of expansion-promoting scientific projects in collaboration with federal officials. The relationship between the conquest of the Southwest and the emergence of the Smithsonian reflects that violence, competition, exchange, and encounters with the environment and history were still inextricable from knowledge production at both the local and imperial levels.

This chapter examines the history of the Smithsonian Institution's venture into television production, discussing the conflict between efforts to maintain the exclusivity of materials and to achieve sustainable television presence. It explains the negotiation involved in the Institution's Smithsonian World and highlights its role in reshaping science on television. The chapter also identifies the factors that significantly influenced the history of science of American television, which include individual personalities, fiscal constraints, and political pressures.

This chapter examines the history of the emergence of sensationalistic approaches to television broadcasting in the United States as a result of television companies' drive to be competitive. It discusses the conflict between the protection of intellectual property and the desire for publicity in the production of programs related to the archives of organizations such as The Smithsonian Institution. The chapter also describes The Smithsonian Institution's first television venture titled Search for the Goddess of Love, and the role of television producer David L. Wolper in the Institution's projects.

This chapter discusses the failed efforts of the government, military, and Western Union to build a telegraph route in the 1860s across Alaska, beneath the Bering Strait, and into Europe via the Russian Empire. One central theme is the role of Robert Kennicott and the Smithsonian Institution as a scientific team of natural historians participating in this expedition. The ambiguous corporate-military entanglements of expedition members raises questions about whether the expedition was also some sort of occupying force on the ground in Russian Alaska prior to the Alaska Purchase in 1867.

By the early 1800s Georges Cuvier had proven animal extinction and Louis Agassiz a onetime Ice Age, putting in place key elements for telling past time. A new dimension of archaeology opened in mid-century with discoveries in Europe of stone artifacts associated with extinct animals in glacial deposits. The earliest traces of humanity abruptly plunged deep into the Pleistocene. The Smithsonian's Joseph Henry introduced those discoveries to America, and spurred him to send out a circular in 1862 to the institutions network of correspondents explaining what sorts of evidence to seek that might reveal a deep human antiquity on this continent. There had been occasional finds hinting at such, and so too did the great diversity of Native American languages and culture. Over the next decade the archaeological collections of the Smithsonian grew rapidly, but while some of the artifacts appeared to match “Stone Age” artifacts of Europe, similar artifacts were still being made by Native Americans, rendering their antiquity uncertain without geological evidence. By the late 1870s Henry was skeptical any would be found. Yet, just as he was abandoning hope a onetime physician was finding what appeared to be traces of Paleolithic artifacts in the Delaware Valley.

This chapter examines specimens picked from the Isaacs–Kidd midwater trawl (IKMT) samples selected from the collections available at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO). It notes that additional specimens were obtained from the IKMT, plankton net, and the MOCNESS (Multiple Opening/Closing Net and Environmental Sensing System) samples available at the National Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian Institution (USNM), the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI), and the University of Rhode Island (URI). It examines a total of 148 samples (one plankton net, 126 IKMT and 21 MOCNESS samples) collected throughout the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian Oceans. It accounts the sources, the areas they represent, the number of examples examined and the extent of geographic coverage for each ocean. It notes that citation of type material includes the number of specimens, collecting gear, sampling depth, source, expedition, cruise number, station number, latitude and longitude, area, and date of collection.

This chapter examines the history of the science-related documentary programs in the United States. It explains that television documentaries offered exciting opportunities to accompany researchers to remote sites or show complex equipment in operation, and that they engaged in the same type of investigations as the print media. The chapter describes some of the most popular television documentaries of the 1960s and 1970s, including Harvest of Shame, The Population Explosion, and The Verdict on the Silent Spring of Rachel Carson. It also highlights the programs launched by the National Geographic Society and the project initiated by The Smithsonian Institution under the leadership of S. Dillon Ripley.

Chapter fifty-seven looks at Hodge’s last days. As he finished What is Darwinism?, the trustees of the Seminary began discussing who might replace Hodge. The answer was his son, Archibald Alexander Hodge, who joined the Seminary’s faculty in 1877. Archie and his father co-taught Hodge’s classes in his final year. He gave several conference talks near the end of his life concentrating on the path one needed to follow to get to heaven. Hodge’s last public act was giving the prayer of his long-time friend, Joseph Henry. A few weeks later, he died, widely eulogized as one of America’s greatest theologians.

This chapter examines the challenges faced by early attempts to teach science for elementary education through television in the United States, explaining that the use of open-circuit television programming was problematic and that commercial channels were unwilling to donate airtime to instructional programs which might not sustain viewers. It also mentions that science popularizers who worked without compensation to produce sustaining programs for radio did not extend the same support for television. The chapter also highlights the lack of support from the Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) and The Smithsonian Institution.

This chapter describes the special courses on human skeletal palaeopathology offered by the Smithsonian Institution and the University of Bradford, along with lists of lecturers, their professional degrees, and affiliations. It then addresses the question of whether there is an ongoing need for special courses in human skeletal paleopathology to be offered at educational centers outside of the regular university course curriculum.

This chapter traces the history of cultural intervention in traditional arts in Hawaiʻi. It first looks at the 1989 Festival of American Folklife, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institution, and how it fit into ongoing negotiations over ethnographic authority. It then considers how, at the end of the monarchy, traditional arts were politicized and collected as a way of establishing a record of indigenous civilization in relation to nineteenth-century ideals held by European powers. It also examines the role of religious institutions and national and local government in shaping ethnic identity by sponsoring ethnographic studies and cultural revivals. Finally, it discusses collaborations between the Hawaiʻi State Foundation for Culture and the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts to establish programs for cultural preservation based on assessments of traditional culture as both valuable and endangered. The chapter shows how tourism and tradition are bound together in the marketing of Hawaiʻi.

The chapter extends the discussion of social memory to the problem of new “identity archives” designed to “remember” certain elements of the past. Drawing on the work of Ann Stoler and Nicolas Dirks, the chapter takes up what Stoler has termed the archival “grain.” It argues with her that archives themselves need to be “read” in terms of the arguments embedded in their sources. In this connection the chapter also raises the question of archives as “monuments” to contested kinds of historical understanding; and re-examines the well-known “Abraham case” in which an archival historian was accused of misusing sources in ways that reflected contested views about archives themselves. The discussion here is set against the background of paper-based historical archives, but developed in terms of the current problems of information technology. It concludes with the ways identity archives themselves reflect ongoing contestation about the nature of sources and their uses.

This chapter examines the influence of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) on the television broadcasting of science in the United States, highlighting the role of the BBC as a training ground for documentarians and discussing The Smithsonian Institution's screening of The Ascent of Man, produced by BBC and Time-Life Inc. It also discusses the significant influence of The Ascent of Man on public television in the United States and considers the success of NOVA, produced by WGBH.

This chapter explores Richard Nixon’s and Henry Kissinger’s disdain for hegemony and search for primacy as they sought to refurbish America’s tarnished reputation. Through their pursuit of détente with the Soviet Union and China, their resort to the Nixon Doctrine (to exit as gracefully as possible from Indochina), and the meeting at the Smithsonian Institution in December 1971 to restore America’s global economic stature, they attempted to achieve U.S. primacy in world affairs. Their efforts to implement the novel grand strategy of strategic globalism fell short, as seen in the difficulty of extricating the United States from Vietnam, Nixon’s Watergate imbroglio, and the presence of competing visions of world order among allies, most notably in West Germany’s pursuit of Ostpolitik.

Enroute from Line Islands to Phoenix Islands we went to Kingman Reef, a barely awash coral atoll 35 miles from Palmyra, to pick up former Shuttle Astronaut Chuck Brady. The Ham radio operator, along with his Carolina neighbors, was broadcasting from the remote Baker and Howland Islands. I weave their story into the history of the whaling and guano mining history of the islands that also brought rats to the islands. I examine paramilitary colonization by Hawaiian schoolboys anticipating trans Pacific flight and the role Baker and Howland Islands played in Amelia Earhart’s visit and later in WWII. Two boys died when the islands were bombed by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and the men cannot be buried at the military cemetery at Punchbowl. Their story of the Panalu’ua Memoirs was written by Edwin Bryan, Jr. of the Bishop Museum. I recount the last reunion of the former schoolboys, now old men.