Search results for ""smithsonian""

The first black to graduate from West Point in the twentieth century, Davis led the all-black Tuskeegee Airmen in World War II and retired a three-star general. His autobiography both chronicles the life of a great American and provides an incisive account of race relations in the segregated and desegrated military.

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Beyond Grief explores high-style funerary sculptures and their functions during the turn of the twentieth century. Many scholars have overlooked these monuments, viewing them as mere oddities, a part of an individual artist's oeuvre, a detail of a patron's biography, or local civic cemetery history. This volume considers them in terms of their wider context and shifting use as objects of consolation, power, and multisensory mystery and wonder. Art historian Cynthia Mills traces the stories of four families who memorialized their losses through sculpture. Henry Brooks Adams commissioned perhaps the most famous American cemetery monument of all, the Adams Memorial in Washington, D.C. The bronze figure was designed by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who became the nation’s foremost sculptor. Another innovative bronze monument featured the Milmore brothers, who had worked together as sculptors in the Boston area. Artist Frank Duveneck composed a recumbent portrait of his wife following her early death in Paris; in Rome, the aging William Wetmore Story made an angel of grief his last work as a symbol of his sheer desolation after his wife’s death. Through these incredible monuments Mills explores questions like: Why did new forms--many of them now produced in bronze rather than stone and placed in architectural settings--arise just at this time, and how did they mesh or clash with the sensibilities of their era? Why was there a gap between the intention of these elite patrons and artists, whose lives were often intertwined in a closed circle, and the way some public audiences received them through the filter of the mass media? Beyond Grief traces the monuments' creation, influence, and reception in the hope that they will help us to understand the larger story: how survivors used cemetery memorials as a vehicle to mourn and remember, and how their meaning changed over time.

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From 1984 through 1995 a small band of ecologists led by Pan Wenshi from Peking University conducted a study of wild giant pandas in the Qinling Mountains of Shaanxi Province. This project was the first Chinese-led conservation project in China and was conducted during a significant transition period in Chinese history, as the country opened its society and science to the world. The project focused on behavioral observation of wild giant pandas, but evolved to include physiology, nutrition, ecology, land-use policy, and population biology as the staff became more aware that the issues with captive pandas (assisted reproduction, unusual diet, and genetic inbreeding) were not the most critical to survival of wild populations. It is evident in this work that, as the scientists gained knowledge, they came to see giant panda conservation as wrapped in landscape ecology and human/wildlife interactions. The group was seminal in the Chinese government's enactment of a logging ban to their study area by advocating for pandas at the national level. The project was summarized in a 2001 volume, but its publication in Mandarin limited its influence on the greater conservation community. This English version of the original work translates, condenses, and refines the original volume, with added contextual chapters on the importance of this volume and how our understanding of giant panda conservation is shaped by this pioneering field work.

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In the twentieth century, scientists in the relatively new field of biology played an important role in exposing the threats of environmental degradation, loss of species diversity, habitat fragmentation, scarce energy resources, and human population growth. In the essays found in A New Century of Biology, some of the world's most notable biologists consider how their discipline must evolve to address these problems in the twenty-first century. The next one hundred years, the contributors argue, will likely be dominated by breakthroughs in evolutionary biology and systems ecology; by an increased need for scientists to integrate research, teaching, and service missions; and by problem-solving ventures on greater spatial and temporal scales. Because human activity and increased population will continue to have a profound impact on the environment, biologists must define an effective strategy for integrating the biological sciences with global economics and human social structure. The eleven contributors are leaders in the fields of ecology, and evolution, morphology, and development, behavior, microbiology, ecosystem energetics and biogeochemistry, biodiversity and conservation biology, and human sciences. While acknowledging the real problems their discipline must address, they offer an optimistic agenda for the future.

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Despite his prolific career as the first US federal photographer, John Wood has been largely forgotten. With 160 stunning, high-resolution images, MAGNIFICENT INTENTIONS establishes Wood as a leader among American photographers of the time and provides historical context for his overlooked work and legacy, which includes:The first inauguration photo, from James Buchanan''s inauguration in 1857Newly uncovered evidence that Wood was the photographer who documentedAbraham Lincoln''s first inauguration in 1861,the only surviving photograph of that historic eventHundreds of photographs of the construction of public buildings in DC, most notably the U.S. Capitoland the Washington AqueductPioneering innovations in the use ofphotography to duplicate maps and plansduring the Civil WarThe first panoramic photos of Washington, DCAdrienne Lundgren,senior photograph conservator at the Library of Congress, explores how Wood''s life shaped his photographic eye and examines innovative techniques that

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Celebrated for mobiles and stabiles that enliven city squares and museums around the world, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) is not widely recognized as a portraitist. Throughout his career, however, Calder created portraits of a wide variety of subjects: well-known entertainment and political figures, sports stars, artist friends, family members, and himself. Some of these portraits are traditional likenesses in oil on canvas or ink on paper, but most explore new conceptions of form and identity in the medium of sculpture. Executed over a fifty-year period from the early 1920s to the 1970s, Calder's portraits reveal a real talent for portraiture, for encapsulating individual character traits in both representational and abstract art, and in two and three dimensions. Calder recorded his friendships in a remarkably vivid and generous way. Through his relationship with his subjects he continually defined and redefined himself, and his oeuvre in the genre of portraiture became a life narrative.

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