Smithsonian

“Why did we turn an isolated teenage girl into the world’s most famous Holocaust victim?”

In the 1960s, Mary Jane Jones modeled herself after Aretha Franklin, but she had the emotion and range of an original soul singer. After a crooked James Brown impersonator forced her to perform as Franklin, she got famous from her own talent, until she gave up show bizness to raise her sons.

Author Andrew M. Davenport highlights how the work of an oral history project, Getting Word, has informed a shift in the visitor experience of Thomas Jefferson’s primary estate, Monticello.

Pete Marra, head of the Smithsonian Migratory Bird Center, is pushing a controversial conservation idea: that as the single-biggest man-made danger to bird and small mammal populations in the United States, outdoor and feral cat populations should be controlled, either by keeping pets inside, or by euthanasia and sterilize-and-return programs.

A gold rush of fossil-finding is turning China into the new epicenter of paleontology.

In a compelling history of the strike of sanitation workers that brought Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. to Memphis in 1968, Ted Conover connects the concerns of Memphis fifty years ago with present-day, national movements around labor and income inequality.

In the wake of a sexist email scandal that has led to new management of the Miss America Pageant, Bad Feminist author Roxane Gay reports on 1968 protests by radical feminists against all that the pageant stands for.

When the Nazis purged Germany of so-called “degenerate art” and looted from occupied countries, some private dealers like Hildebrand Gurlitt capitalized off the opportunity to hoard masterpieces and make a profit. Professionals now search what’s called ‘provenance’ to return recovered art to its original owners. It’s patient, difficult work, when it works.

A remarkable discovery in Lithuania — an escape tunnel from the Nazi killing site at Ponar — brings a legendary tale of survival back to life.

Writing Dale Maharidge and photographer Matt Black traveled through Maine, Ohio, and California for this piece updating the landmark study of the American working poor, Now Let Us Praise Famous Men.