Bill Moggridge, Director, Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum. Photo courtesy of IDEO/Nicolas Zurcher.

Sadly, Bill Moggridge, director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, died yesterday, at the age of 69 years old. According to the museum, he died after battling cancer. His visionary leadership will be sorely missed by the Smithsonian community and surely the design world at large.

“All of us at the Smithsonian mourn the loss of a great friend, leader and design mind,” said Smithsonian Secretary Wayne Clough. “In his two short years as director of Cooper-Hewitt, Bill transformed the museum into the Smithsonian’s design lens on the world, and we are forever grateful for his extraordinary leadership and contributions.”

In recent years, Moggridge described his career as having three phases. Early in his professional life, he was a designer. In 1982, he developed the first laptop computer, known as the GRiD Compass. Later, Moggridge was leading design teams, having co-founded IDEO, a design and innovation consulting firm with David Kelley and Mike Nuttall in 1991. In the last decade, he considered himself first and foremost a communicator, sharing his ideas about the role of design in everyday life in his books (Designing Interactions, published in 2006, and Designing Media, in 2010) and lectures.

The Cooper-Hewitt honored Moggridge in 2009 with its National Design Award for Lifetime Achievement. A year later, he joined the museum as its fourth-ever director. In his two years of direction, Moggridge encouraged lively conversation about all realms of design, engaging the field’s best and brightest—YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley, Google CreativeLab’s Robert Wong and architect Michael Graves, among others—in an interview series called Bill’s Design Talks. He was also overseeing the ongoing $54 million renovation of the Cooper-Hewitt, which is due to reopen in 2014.

“During his tenure, Bill led the museum to the highest exhibition attendance numbers on record, pioneered bringing design into the K-12 classroom and dramatically increased digital access to the collection through vehicles like the Google Art Project,” said Richard Kurin, the Smithsonian’s Under Secretary for History, Art and Culture. “His innovative vision for the future of the museum will be realized upon reopening, and his foresight will impact museum visitors and design thinkers of tomorrow. He will be greatly missed.”

I had the great opportunity to interview Moggridge in early 2011 for Smithsonian magazine, after he had received the 2010 Prince Philip Designers Prize—Britain’s most prestigious design award—for his contributions to the field. Design, he said in the interview—”It’s all about solving problems.” What I remember most though was Moggridge’s adoration for the simplest of designs, and his eloquence when it came to describing them.

“I love something as uncomplicated as a paper clip, because it is such a neat way of solving a problem with very little material,” he said. “If I think about something more sensuous, I’ve always been interested in the perfect spoon. It is delectable in a multisensory way: the appearance, the balance and feeling as you pick it up off the table, then the sensation as it touches your lips and you taste the contents.”

We Owe Allegiance to No Crown, by John Archibald Woodside. c. 1814. Photograph copyright Nicholas S. West. Photography by Erik Arnesen.

Two hundred years ago, on June 18, 1812, President James Madison—fed up with Great Britain’s interference with American trade and impressment of sailors, and wanting to expand into British, Spanish and Indian territories—signed an official declaration of war against Britain. The act plunged the United States into the War of 1812. To recognize the bicentennial, the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery debuts “1812: A Nation Emerges,” an exhibition about the often overlooked and yet, hugely significant, episode in our nation’s history.

“When I first brought it up, I got a lot of blank stares and questioning looks. What war?” says Sid Hart, senior historian at the National Portrait Gallery and curator of the exhibition. “If you gauge it by the soldiers fighting and casualties, it is small. But the consequences are huge for America. If we had not gone to war, or if we had lost the war, the timeline of American history becomes completely different and perhaps we are not the continental power that we came to be.”

The expansive exhibition, comprising 100 artifacts, aims to introduce museum visitors to the key players in the War of 1812: President Madison, Dolley Madison, Gen. Andrew Jackson, the Indian leader Tecumseh, the Canadian war hero Isaac Brock and British admirals and generals George Cockburn and Robert Ross, among other familiar and not-so-familiar faces.

Of course, many of the personalities are conveyed through portraits. Hart and his assistant guest curator Rachael Penman selected portraits based on two criteria. First, they wanted the portraits to be by the best artists of the time. And, secondly, the curators gave a preference to portraits done of the exhibition’s protagonists in the years in and around the conflict. Hart says that if there were a “Night at the Museum,” where all the portraits came to life, he would want all the subjects to recognize each other. Then, scattered throughout this gallery of important players are artifacts, each telling an interesting piece of the story.

“You have to start with something, and whether it is a dazzling portrait or an object, if you can make that initial impact, a sensory impact, you may grab somebody,” says Hart. “You may get ahold of a visitor and spark his or her interest.”

While the portraiture is spectacular, a real who’s who in the war, including 12 paintings by the famed American artist Gilbert Stuart (“Stuart’s great genius was in capturing personality,” says Hart), it was some of the other artifacts that really captivated me at a preview earlier this week. In a section of the exhibition devoted to the Navy, there is a model of the ship Constitution (also known as “Old Ironsides”) aptly positioned between a portrait of its captain Isaac Hull and the painting Escape of the U.S. Frigate Constitution depicting one of the ship’s most deft maneuvers. Constructed at the request of Franklin Roosevelt in the 1920s, the model seems to carry a curse with it. It was in the Oval Office when President Kennedy was shot. It was also in James Brady’s office when he was wounded during John Hinckley, Jr.’s attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. So it is often called the “assassination model.”

A part of the exhibit covering the 1814 burning of Washington and the war’s resolution features a red velvet dress of Dolley Madison’s and the actual Treaty of Ghent, on loan from the National Archives. Legend has it that the dress may be made from red velvet draperies the First Lady salvaged from the White House before the British raided it. Nearby, on the Treaty of Ghent, one can see the signatures of the three British and five American officers who agreed to its 11 articles on December 24, 1814, outlining status quo ante bellum, or a return to all laws, boundaries and agreements that applied before the war.

Then, as a writer, one of my personal favorites is an 1828 first edition of An American Dictionary of the English Language, Noah Webster’s first stab at what we now refer to as Webster’s dictionary. “Webster believed that language was a tool for the development of a national identity and that the standardization of spellings and definitions would help eliminate regionalism,” writes Penman, in the exhibition catalog. He felt that language could be used to unite Americans after the War of 1812. “It was Webster who made the key transitions in spelling from the standard English to the Americanized versions we know today, such as switching re to er in theatre, dropping the u from colour and honour, and dropping the double l in traveller and the k from musick,” she adds.

If anything sums up the message Hart and Penman are striving for in the exhibition, though, it is the final painting, We Owe Allegiance to No Crown, by John Archibald Woodside (above). In it, a strapping young man, with a broken chain and a squashed crown at his feet, valiantly holds an American flag. The image encompasses the feeling Americans had in the wake of the war. “We are going to create our own trade, our own language and our own heroes,” says Penman.

“1812: A Nation Emerges,” opening today, is on display at the National Portrait Gallery through January 27, 2013.

Dr. Leale's bloodstained cuff. Image courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

It was about 10:15 p.m. on April 14, 1865, when John Wilkes Booth snuck up behind President Lincoln, enjoying “Our American Cousin” at Ford’s Theatre, and shot him point-blank in the head. The assassin brandished a dagger and cut Maj. Henry Rathbone, a guest of the president’s, before leaping to the stage, yelling “Sic semper tyrannis,” before fleeing.

According to most surviving accounts, the scene was sheer chaos. “There will never be anything like it on earth,” said Helen Truman, who was in the audience. “The shouts, groans, curses, smashing of seats, screams of women, shuffling of feet and cries of terror created a pandemonium that through all the ages will stand out in my memory as the hell of hells.”

A newly discovered document, however, offers a different perspective. Late last month, a researcher with the Papers of Abraham Lincoln—an online project that is imaging and digitizing documents written by or to the 16th president—located a long-lost medical report at the National Archives in Washington, D.C. The report was written by Dr. Charles Leale, the first doctor to tend to the dying president. Leale, a 23-year-old Army surgeon, ran from his seat in the audience to the president’s box, a distance of about 40 feet away.

The first page of Leale's 22-page medical report, found at the National Archives. Image courtesy of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln.

In the report, Leale describes what happened next:

“I immediately ran to the President’s box and as soon as the door was opened was admitted and introduced to Mrs. Lincoln when she exclaimed several times, ‘O Doctor, do what you can for him, do what you can!’ I told her we would do all that we possibly could.”

When I entered the box the ladies were very much excited. Mr. Lincoln was seated in a high backed arm-chair with his head leaning towards his right side supported by Mrs. Lincoln who was weeping bitterly. . . .

While approaching the President I sent a gentleman for brandy and another for water.

When I reached the President he was in a state of general paralysis, his eyes were closed and he was in a profoundly comatose condition, while his breathing was intermittent and exceedingly stertorous.”

Although the full report does not shed much new light on the assassination or how doctors attempted to treat Lincoln’s fatal injury, it is, no doubt, an amazing find. Daniel Stowell, director of the Papers of Abraham Lincoln told the Associated Press last week that the document’s significance lies in the fact that “it’s the first draft” of the tragedy.

I was particularly interested in what Harry Rubenstein, chair of the National Museum of American History’s political history division, thought of the firsthand account. Rubenstein is curator of the museum’s permanent exhibition on presidents, “The American Presidency: A Glorious Burden.” He also curated the much-acclaimed 2009-2011 exhibition “Abraham Lincoln: An Extraordinary Life.”

The museum holds in its collections Leale’s bloodstained cuffs that he wore the night of Lincoln’s assassination and the ceremonial sword that Leale carried while serving as an honor guard while Lincoln’s body lay in state at the White House and the U.S. Capitol. (The estate of Helen Leale Harper, Jr, granddaughter of Dr. Leale, bequeathed both to the Smithsonian Institution in 2006.)

Rubenstein is fascinated with the subdued tone of the report. “You are used to all these reports of mayhem and the chaos and the confusion,” he says. “Here, you are seeing it from the view of somebody who is trying to gain and take control.” The curator points to Leale’s choice of words, “the ladies were very much excited,” as one of the report’s understatements. “A lot of the emotion is removed from this, and it is a very clinical look at what took place, in comparison to others,” says Rubenstein.”To me, it is this detached quality that is so interesting.”

Leale gives a detailed description of looking for where Lincoln’s blood was coming from and assessing his injuries. The report chronicles the president’s condition up until the moment shortly after 7 a.m. the next day when he dies. “It is just interesting to see the different perspectives of this one pivotal historical moment,” says Rubenstein.

Actress Betty White holds a lemur leaf frog during her tour today at the National Zoo. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

Betty White is a self-described “zoo nut.” At age 90, she balances her still-thriving acting career with advocacy work for zoos—particularly the Los Angeles Zoo, where she serves as a trustee. “Wherever I travel, I try to steal time to check out whatever zoo is within reach,” she writes, in her latest book Betty & Friends: My Life at the Zoo.

White visited with Mei Xiang, a 13-year-old panda. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

Last night, here in Washington, D.C., White regaled an audience at George Washington University’s Lisner Auditorium with stories of the many animal friends she has had over the years. The Smithsonian Associates, a division of the institution that offers lectures, film screenings, live performances and workshops, hosted the sold-out event.

The actress gets a quick lesson in kiwi reproduction. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

Today, White made a stop, as one might expect, at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. When I interviewed White last week in anticipation of her trip, she was excited for this side excursion. “I have been to the National Zoo a couple of times, but this time I get a backstage tour, and I am really thrilled,” she said.

White hugs a kiwi goodbye, before heading on to see the zoo's Western lowland gorillas. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

White started her morning at the Giant Panda House, where she met 13-year-old Mei Xiang. She fed Mei a pear, and the panda showed White how she extends her arm through the cage to have her blood routinely drawn. Next, White visited the Bird House, where she hugged a kiwi. “We have a very unusual kiwi here, our ambassador kiwi,” says Kathy Brader, the zoo’s kiwi expert. “Kiwi are not known to be warm and fuzzy creatures. In fact, they are usually quite aggressive. But Manaia is just this really laid back kind of puppy dog.” White fed six-year-old Manaia some “kiwi loaf,” a mixture of beef, mixed vegetables, chopped up fruit and bird pellets, and the bird climbed up into her lap. “I have only seen him do that with two other people, besides me,” says Brader. Not only did she respond to the bird himself, adds Brader, but White wanted to hear about the zoo’s work with the birds. The zookeeper gave the actress a little lesson in kiwi reproduction. “They actually lay one of the largest eggs per body weight,” Brader later explained to me. “In human terms, it is like a 100-pound woman having a 15 to 20-pound baby.”

White then watched the Western lowland gorillas, including three-year-old Kibibi, in their habitat. She held a tiny lemur leaf frog, admired some Japanese giant salamanders and visited with the elephants. (White had heard about Shanthi, the zoo’s harmonica-playing elephant.) She was even introduced to “Rose,” the zoo’s Cuban crocodile, named after her “Golden Girls” character, Rose Nylund. “You could tell that this was someone who really generally cares about zoos,” says Brader. After her tour, from 12:30 p.m. to 2 p.m., White signed copies of her books for the public.

The National Zoo tweeted: "Ambika, our 64-year/old elephant, seems to sense a kindred spirit in @BettyMWhite." Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

In Betty & Friends, the actress credits her love for zoos to her parents, who were also animal lovers. ”It was from them I learned that a visit to the zoo was like traveling to a whole new country inhabited by a variety of wondrous creatures I could never see anywhere else in quite the same way,” she writes. “They taught me not to rush from one exhibit to the next but to spend time watching one group until I began to really see the animals and observe their interactions.”

It its collection, the National Museum of American History has a fallout shelter, exhumed from a yard in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Image courtesy of NMAH.

“We do not want a war. We do not know whether there will be war. But we know that forces hostile to us possess weapons that could destroy us if we were unready. These weapons create a new threat—radioactive fallout that can spread death anywhere.

That is why we must prepare.”

-The Family Fallout Shelter (1959), published by the United States Office of Civil and Defense mobilization

The Andersons of Fort Wayne, Indiana, were preparing for nuclear fallout even before the government disseminated this booklet, which includes building plans for five basic shelters. In 1955, the family of three purchased a steel fallout shelter, complete with four drop-down beds, a chemical pit toilet and a hand cranked air exchanger for refreshing their air supply, and had it installed 15 feet below their front lawn for a total of $1,800.

Neighbors watched as a crane lowered the shelter, resembling a septic tank, into a pit. A few years later, in 1961, there was reportedly more commotion, when, at about the time of the Berlin Crisis, the Andersons had the shelter reinterred. Because it had not been sufficiently anchored, with the area’s water table in mind, it had crept back up until it finally poked through the surface.

Larry Bird, a curator in the division of political history at the National Museum of American History, first heard about the Cold War relic in 1991. Tim Howey, then-owner of the Fort Wayne home, had written a letter to the museum. He had removed some trees and shrubs that had hid the shelter’s access point and a few ventilation pipes for years, and, as a result, was fielding more and more questions from curious passers-by. While Howey was tiring of the attention, there was clearly public interest in the artifact, and he wondered if perhaps the Smithsonian would want it for its collection.

At the time, Bird was on the lookout for objects that would tell interesting stories about science in American life. Some of his colleagues at the museum were preparing an exhibition on the topic and were trying to recruit him to curate a section specifically on domestic life. “I saw the letter, and I thought this is your science in the home right here,” recalls Bird.

The curator had to see the fallout shelter for himself, and in late March of 1991, he made a scouting trip to Fort Wayne. Louis Hutchins, a historian, and Martin Burke, a museum conservator, accompanied him. “When you actually see it and sit in it,” says Bird, “it raises more questions about just what they thought they were doing.”

Martin Enterprises removed the shelter from Tim Howey's front yard. Image courtesy of NMAH.

For starters, in the case of nuclear attack, exactly how long was a family expected to stay burrowed in this tiny space? (Bird recently posted a video (embedded below) to YouTube of his first climb down into the shelter, which gives a sense of just how cramped the quarters are.) ”There is enough space for a six-foot person to stand up in the crown of it,” he says.

The curator found most government literature on fallout shelters to be pretty nondescript in terms of how much time had to pass after a bomb struck before it was safe to emerge, but the magazine Popular Science made an estimate. “The best guess now is: Prepare to live in your shelter for two weeks,” declared an article from December 1961. After being in it, Bird says, “That is probably about the length anyone would want to stay in one of these things before they killed each other or ran out of supplies and then killed each other.”

The fallout shelter, the museum team decided, was a powerful symbol of the fear that was so pervasive in the United States during the Cold War. “If you had money and you were frightened enough, it is the kind of thing that you would have invested in,” says Bird. And, in the 1950s and ’60s, many people, like the Andersons, were investing. “The shelter business is booming like a 25-megaton blast,” Popular Science reported.

The shelter was delivered at the museum, where it was on display from the spring of 1994 to this past November, when the "Science in American Life" exhibition closed. Image courtesy of NMAH.

The National Museum of American History arranged for Martin Enterprises, the company that had originally installed the shelter, to exhume it and haul it to Washington, D.C. on a flatbed. (As it turned out, the company did it for free.) “Some people thought that it would be so corroded. But you have to go along and do the job to find out,” says Bird. “It turned out it was fine.”

Until this past November, the family fallout shelter was on display in the museum’s long-running “Science in American Life” exhibition. A window was cut into the side of the double-hulled structure, so that visitors could peer inside. The museum staged it with sleeping bags, board games, toothpaste and other supplies from the era to suggest what it might have looked like when its owners had readied it for an emergency.

After his involvement in the acquisition, Bird started to get calls to let him know about and even invite him to other fallout shelters. “There are many, many more,” he says. “I imagine that the suburbs in Virginia and Maryland are just honeycombed with this kind of stuff.”

* For more about disaster shelters, read Smithsonian staff writer Abigail Tucker’s story on a recent boom in the luxury bomb shelter market.

A scene from Uncharted 2: Among Thieves, designed for PlayStation 3 in 2009. Sony Computer Entertainment America / SAAM

On March 17, Ollie Cantos took his 12-year-old triplet sons, Leo, Nic and Steven—not otherwise big fans of art—for a visit to the Smithsonian American Art Museum. But what Cantos hadn’t told the boys was that the museum was debuting its new exhibition “The Art of Video Games.”

“They absolutely live for video games,” says Cantos, an attorney that works for the federal government. The boys have a Nintendo GameCube and a Wii, also a broken PlayStation 2. They are aficionados of combat games, such as Dragon Ball Z and Marvel vs. Capcom, and play them in a room in their home equipped with a booming surround sound system.

“When we finally got there, we walked in, and they had no idea still. We went to the front desk, and I said, ‘Hi, we are here for ‘The Art of Video Games?’” says Cantos. “Suddenly, the three of them lit up. ‘Video games!’”

To a lot of folks, Cantos says, our interest in gaming seems counterintuitive. “Because none of us can see at all,” he says. “We are totally blind.” Cantos has been blind his entire life. “I have light perception, but they don’t,” he says, of his three sons.

Cantos and his sons spent more than three hours touring the exhibition. Leo, Nic and Steven played Pac-Man, Super Mario Brothers, The Secret of Monkey Island, Myst and Flower in one room, where the games are projected on backdrops 12 feet high. Another room contains an interactive timeline of the 40-year history of video games, with 20 kiosks featuring systems from the Atari 2600, released in 1977, to Wii and PlayStation 3. Each kiosk has the actual gaming device in a display case, and visitors can press buttons to hear about four games that were popular on the system. “They listened to every word on the headsets at every kiosk,” says LeeAnn Lawch, a docent at the museum.

Video games are just as addictive to the visually-impaired, explains Cantos, a former owner of an Atari 2600 and a fan of classic games including Space Invaders and Ms. Pac-Man. (He also plays Ms. Pac-Man, Angry Birds and Temple Run on his iPhone.) As for his sons, he adds, “They are making their way through the levels somehow.”

Leo, Nic and Steven prefer combat games, because they can compete head-to-head and stay within one virtual space. “I thought maybe driving games aren’t their thing, but they love Mario Kart 7,” says Cantos. “I don’t really know how they do it, but they keep doing really well.” Adventure games that require maneuvering through a three-dimensional space, jumping over and through things, are, naturally, more difficult for them. But Cantos has coached some of his sons’ friends to provide verbal cues as they navigate their way through different scenes. “Their friends feel like they get to help. They don’t want my boys to die in the game, so they are like, ‘No, no, no. Go left! Right!’ There is a lot of yelling that tends to take place. In the meantime, my boys are in suspense too. Their adrenaline is going because they are trying to do exactly what their friends tell them,” says Cantos. “When they succeed, they all feel victorious.”

As the Cantos family toured “The Art of Video Games,” Lawch read panels and described the graphics and actions of the games. A retired registered nurse, she has experience working with visually-impaired individuals. “Mostly, I tried to translate the visuals to descriptions utilizing additional senses. ‘The air appears hot. There don’t appear to be any nature sounds like birds or waterfalls—just hot, dusty and dry wind. It might smell like hot metal or burning tires,’” says Lawch. Keeping up with the action was a challenge. “He’s running through fire, jumping over a cliff. He’s going to fall. Things are exploding,” says Lawch. “I have never talked and read so fast in my life!”

Cantos and his sons visited the exhibition during the opening weekend in hopes that they would cross paths with some of the movers and shakers within the video game industry. They met Billy Mitchell, a former record holder for Kong and Pac-Man and star of the 2007 documentary “King of Kong,” as well as Chris Melissinos, the exhibition’s curator and self-admitted game addict. Now, they are eager to connect with video game designers. “The big thing that we want programmers to know is to just factor us in,” says Cantos. “We would like to not be an afterthought. We are just another part of the video game market.”

At this point, text-adventure games accommodate the visually-impaired, but many graphics-based games, popular today, could use some accessibility features. Cantos suggests that designers program the games so that menu options and any other text or narrative that appears on the screen is read aloud. Like subtitles for the deaf, maybe an option for verbal descriptions could be offered at the beginning of a game.

“My boys are willing to market test it,” says Cantos. His sons, he adds, have spread the Gospel of video gaming to others who otherwise may not have considered it much. “They are very, very passionate about this stuff,” says Cantos.

As a father, Cantos is grateful to the video game industry for providing an incentive for his sons to do well in school. “If they don’t do well with their grades, then they don’t get to play,” says Cantos. “They are just like any other kids. They like to have fun.”

The Huichol, a native people in the Sierra Madre mountains of west-central Mexico, are known for their elaborate beadwork. Typically, the community’s artisans adorn bowls, masks, animal skulls and gourds with brightly-colored glass beads. The tiny beads are arranged in geometric patterns as well as to represent fanciful depictions of animals and crops that carry spiritual significance.

However, in 2010, two Huichol families—the Bautistas from Jalisco and the Ortiz from Nayarit, Mexico—embarked on a project that gave a contemporary spin to the traditional art form. In no less than 9,000 hours, eight family members used resin to adhere more than two million beads to the exterior of a 1990 Volkswagen Beetle, on display at the National Museum of American Indian through May 6. The eye-catching work of art is called the Vochol, a name derived from a combination of “Vocho,” a slang term in Mexico for a VW Beetle, and “Huichol.”

In this video, Kerry Boyd, assistant director of exhibitions, operations and program support at the American Indian Museum, describes the car and its vivid imagery. The Vochol was given a grand welcome Tuesday evening by Smithsonian Institution Secretary G. Wayne Clough, Mexican Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan, museum director Kevin Gover and the Washington, D.C.-based mariachi ensemble Mariachi Los Amigos.

The art project was made possible by the Museo de Arte Popular in Mexico City, the Association of Friends of the Museo de Arte Popular, the Embassy of Mexico and the Mexican Cultural Institute. After its stay at the American Indian Museum, the car will continue on its international tour, and will ultimately be auctioned off with the proceeds to go towards promoting the work of other native Mexican artists.

In January 2011, the Smithsonian Channel approached Kevin Hockley, an Ontario-based model maker, with a tall (and rather long) order: Build us a snake.

Several years ago, Carlos Jaramillo, a paleontologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, and scientists from the University of Florida, University of Toronto and Indiana University unearthed fossils of a prehistoric snake in northern Colombia. To tell the story of the discovery, the film producers wanted a full-scale replica of the creature.

Kevin Hockley and his model of Titanoboa. Courtesy of Robert Clark / INSTITUTE

The snake, however, was not your typical garter snake or rattlesnake, which Hockley had sculpted before, but Titanoboa, a 2,500-pound “titanic boa” as long as a school bus that lived 58 million years ago.

Hockley’s 48-foot long replica of Titanoboa slurping down a dyrosaur (an ancient relative of crocodiles), is being unveiled today at Grand Central Station in New York City. The sculpture will be on display through March 23, and then it will be transported to Washington, D.C., where it will be featured in the exhibition “Titanoboa: Monster Snake” at the National Museum of Natural History, opening March 30. Smithsonian Channel’s two-hour special of the same title will premiere on April 1.

“Kevin seemed like a natural choice,” says Charles Poe, an executive producer at the Smithsonian Channel. Poe was especially impressed by a narwhal and a 28-foot-long giant squid that the artist made for the Royal Ontario Museum. “He had experience making museum-quality replicas, and even more important, he’d created some that seem larger than life. When you’re recreating the largest snake in world history it helps to have a background in the fantastical,” Poe says.

In fact, Hockley has been in the business of making taxidermy mounts and life-size sculptures for more than 30 years. He mounted his first ruffed grouse as a teen by following instructions from a library book. Hockley spent his high school years apprenticing as a taxidermist in Collingwood, Ontario, and he worked a dozen years at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, creating mounts as well as artistic reconstructions of animals and their habitats. Today, as owner of Hockley Studios, a three-person operation headquartered on the 15-acre property where he lives, near Bancroft, Ontario, he builds bronze sculptures of caribou, lynx and wolves and life-like replicas of mastodon and other Ice Age animals, such as extinct peccaries and jaguars, for museums, visitor centers and parks.

Creating Titanoboa wasn’t easy. Scientists piecing together what the prehistoric creature might have looked like provided Hockley with some basic parameters. “They linked it strongly to modern-day snakes, which was very helpful,” says Hockley. “It was sort of a blend of a boa constrictor and an anaconda.” He studied photographs and video of boas and anacondas and visited live specimens at the Indian River Reptile Zoo, near Peterborough, Ontario. “I could see the way the skeleton and the musculature moved as the animal moved,” says Hockley. “There are all these little bulges of muscle at the back of the head that convey the animal’s jaws are working.” He made sure that those bulges were on his model. Hockley also noted the background colors of anacondas and the markings of boa constrictors. Jason Head, a vertebrate paleontologist and herpetologist at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, surmised that the coloration of the prehistoric snake might have been similar. “Of course, this is speculation,” says Hockley. “It could have been pink with polka dots for all we know.”

A replica model of the 45-foot-long snake thought to be of Anaconda descent. Courtesy of Robert Clark / INSTITUTE

The first step to building the replica was coming up with a pose. Hockley produced a scale model in clay, an inch of which represented a foot of the actual replica. The snake’s body forms two loops, where museum visitors can wander. “I tried to make it interactive, so you can actually get in and feel what it is like to be surrounded by a snake,” says Hockley. He stacked large sheets of 12-inch-thick Styrofoam high enough to make a snake with a 30-inch circumference. He drew the pose on to the Styrofoam and used a chainsaw, fish filet knives and a power grinder with coarse sand paper disks on it to carve the snake. Hockley applied paper mâché to the Styrofoam and then a layer of polyester resin to strengthen it. On top of that, he put epoxy putty and used rubber molds to texture it with scales. “The hardest part was trying to make the scales flow and continue as lines,” he says. When the putty dried, he primed and painted the snake. He started with the strongest markings and then layered shades over the top to achieve the depth of color he desired. “It makes the finished product that much more convincing,” he says. The snake was made in six sections to allow for easier transport, but devising a way to seamlessly connect the parts was also tricky. Hockley used a gear mechanism in a trailer jack, so that by ratcheting racheting a tool, he can draw the pieces tightly together.

From start to finish, construction of the replica took about five months. As for materials, it required 12 four-foot-by-eight-foot sheets of Styrofoam, 20 gallons of polyester resin, 400 pounds of epoxy resin and numerous gallons of paint. Smithsonian Channel producers installed a camera in Hockley’s studio to create a timelapse video (above) of the process.

“It was an amazing opportunity,” says Hockley. The artist hopes that his model of Titanoboa gives people an appreciation for how big animals could be 60 million years ago. Since snakes are coldblooded, the size they can attain is dependent on the temperature in which they live, and temperatures during Titanoboa‘s time were warmer than today. As a result, the snake was much bigger than today’s super snakes. “Hopefully they will be awestruck by its realism,” he says. “A little bit of fear would be nice.”

Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin was a scientific illustrator for Science Service in the 1920s. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Each March, the Smithsonian Institution Archives celebrates Women’s History Month by posting historical photographs of female scientists, science journalists and engineers to a Flickr Commons album. Taken from the 191os to 1960s, the portraits capture many women who were pioneers in their fields. But for a number of the photographs, however, there is little in terms of caption information identifying the women.

The women are pictured at their desks with microscopes, botanical illustrations or jarred specimens; standing at chalkboards displaying graphs and equations; and in labs tending to test tubes, beakers and petri dishes. A few are scraping away at archaeological sites.

“There are a lot of firsts,” says supervisory archivist Tammy Peters of the photos that are identified. “First woman to get a PhD in geology, or first woman to get this particular degree.”

The images come from a cache of records from a news organization called Science Service. Founded in 1921, Science Service popularized and disseminated scientific information. (It is now called the Society for Science & the Public.) ”It was kind of at the forefront of putting information about these women out there,” says Peters.

But with so many of the photos lacking identification, the Smithsonian Institution Archives decided it would reach out to the public for help in identifying and researching the scientists. Each March, a handful of largely unidentified portraits are posted to the Archives’ Flickr site.

“I was a little skeptical at first about what we could achieve through crowd-sourcing,” says Peters, “but we had really great success.” According to the archivist, the first real “OMG moment” was sparked by a photograph (above) posted in March 2009. In it, a young woman with a black bob, eyes deadlocked on the camera, sat at a desk, pen in hand. She was identified simply as “E.S. Goodwin.”

Thanks to the detective work of Flickr users, bits and pieces surfaced—first, her wedding announcement and then a high school yearbook photo. The woman was positively identified as Elizabeth Sabin Goodwin, an artist based in Washington, D.C. who had attended the Corcoran School of Art in the 1920s. Given that her portrait was in the Science Service files, the archives guessed that Goodwin was a scientific illustrator.

Then, came a surprise. Linda Goodwin Eisenstadt posted a comment: “This is my grandmother.” Eisenstadt was able to fill in many of the gaps in Goodwin’s life story. She lived from 1902 to 1980, and was, in fact, an illustrator for Science Service. In the 1920s, she drew cartoonographs, which comically illustrated political, social and economic statistics.

Bertha Pallan has been referred to as the first female Native American archaeologist. Courtesy of Smithsonian Institution Archives.

Marcel Chotkowski LaFollette, a research associate at the archives, compared drawings Eisenstadt provided to others in the Smithsonian collections and ultimately found 38 unsigned cartoonographs that she could comfortably attribute to Goodwin.

“This is still is one of my favourite ‘stories’ on Flickr,” wrote Flickr user Brenda Anderson.

Of the 15 photographs of scientists the archives posted this month, Peters has strong leads on eight. She was particularly curious about Bertha Pallan, an “expedition secretary” shown holding atlatl darts (right).

“Certain images are going to attract your attention. This was one of them,” says Peters. “It is a stunning picture.” So far, Flickr users have reported that Pallan grew up in Southern California in the early 1900s. She married three times; her third husband was Oscar Cody, or “Iron Eyes Cody,” an actor who played Indian roles in numerous 20th-Century American films. Most significantly, Pallan has been referred to as the first female Native American archaeologist. She was secretary for an expedition of the Gypsum Cave in Nevada, when this photograph was taken.

Perhaps you know more.

Browse through this year’s additions.

In February, to commemorate Black History Month, the Smithsonian Channel, Comcast and the National Museum of American History hosted an essay contest for high school students. Participants were asked to watch “Seizing Justice: The Greensboro 4,” a Smithsonian Channel program about the 1960 sit-in at the F.W. Woolworth store in Greensboro, North Carolina. Then, they had to answer one of three questions for the chance to win an iPad 2. More than 200 students entered, but it was 15-year-old Kaleb Harris, a sophomore at DeMatha Catholic High School in Hyattsville, Maryland, who won the grand prize.

According to Harris, he wrote his winning essay at his mother’s urging. He was not familiar with the story of the Greensboro sit-in, but he watched the Smithsonian Channel segment and learned about Joseph McNeil, Franklin McCain, David Richmond and Ezell Blair, Jr. (now Jabreel Khazan), the four African-American students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, who defiantly sat down at the whites-only luncheonette. Harris was moved when he visited the National Museum of American History and saw the actual lunch counter where the nonviolent protest was held.

“I honestly don’t know if I could have done what they did back in the day,” says Harris. “I would have liked to have tried, but it might have taken awhile for me to get used to it.”

In his essay, Harris reflects on the Civil Rights movement and what its leaders set out to do. He writes:

Have the goals of the Civil Rights movement been achieved? Yes and no. The Civil Rights Movement was centered on justice and equal treatment for African Americans and other races. Not all of the goals have been reached. The goals of freedom, education and justice have been reached, but there is still racism that is present to this very day.

In fact, Harris recalls a time just last year when he felt that he faced discrimination as an African American. He and his family were driving to California and had stopped at a restaurant in Texas late one evening. When they asked if they could be seated for dinner, the restaurant employees said they were just closing. “We saw a bunch of white people staring at us like we were awkward and out of our territory,” says Harris. “I didn’t like the way that felt.”

At a recent event for area high school students at the National Museum of American History, Joseph McNeil, one of the “Greensboro 4,” announced that Harris was the essay contest winner. The teenager had the opportunity to meet McNeil. “It was inspirational,” says Harris. “Also, it was kind of funny because the first thing he said to me was ‘Wow, that was really good. It sounded like I wrote that myself.’”

McNeil spoke to the group about why he did what he did and the gumption it took to be able to sit down at the segregated lunch counter. For as serious as the address was, McNeil also conveyed a sense of humor. “He talked about how the pie and the coffee wasn’t all that great,” says Harris. The two exchanged email addresses so that they might stay in touch.

Juliette Gordon Low by Edward Hughes, 1887. Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

On March 12, 1912, Juliette Gordon Low gathered 18 girls in her hometown of Savannah, Georgia, and swore them in as the first Girl Guides (later called Girl Scouts) in the United States. The inductees signed an official register and hoisted up mugs of hot chocolate to toast the momentous occasion.

One hundred years later, more than 50 million girls have made the same Girl Scout Promise—to serve God and my country, to help people at all times, and to live by the Girl Scout Law. With over 3.2 million members, the educational organization has the distinction of being the largest for girls in the world.

Rightly so, much is underway to celebrate the centennial of the Girl Scouts. Historian Stacy A. Cordery’s biography, Juliette Gordon Low: The Remarkable Founder of the Girl Scouts, published just last month, provides an intimate look, through diaries, letters, institutional correspondence and photographs, at Low’s life and the personal challenges, including the loss of her hearing and a failed marriage, that she overcame on our way to establishing the organization. (For an interview with Cordery, see “The Very First Troop Leader.”) This summer, on June 9, the National Mall will play host to the largest of the festivities, “Rock the Mall,” a sing-along expected to bring together some 200,000 Girl Scouts, friends and family from around the world. And, of course, welcoming visiting Girl Scouts wandering north of the Mall, is the National Portrait Gallery, and its current exhibition “Juliette Gordon Low: 100 Years of Girl Scouts.”

The centerpiece of the exhibition, which opened January 13 and runs through January 6, 2013, is a grand portrait of Low by artist Edward Hughes (above). Gifted to the National Portrait Gallery by the Girl Scouts, the painting was commissioned in 1887 by Low’s husband William Mackay Low shortly after the two married and moved to England. Hughes, an esteemed London portrait painter whose subjects included the royal family, depicts her in full Southern-belle, Georgia-dubutante glory, wearing an airy, pink, floral dress. Actually, the portrait stands in contrast to many photographs of Low taken decades later, after she founded the Girl Scouts, in which she is suited in crisp uniforms.

A couple of these photographs, on loan from the Juliette Gordon Low Birthplace in Savannah and the Girl Scout National Historic Preservation Center in New York City, accompany the portrait, as well as a few artifacts, including the patent for the Girl Scout symbol, a trefoil with each leaf standing for one part of the three-fold Girl Scout Promise; an official Girl Scout Membership Pin; and a 1927 reprint of the 1920 edition of Scouting for Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts.

Scouting for Girls, Official Handbook of the Girl Scouts (1920 edition, 10th reprint). Courtesy of Sophie Louise Smith.

The “once a Girl Scout, always a Girl Scout” mentality came out in the organizing of the exhibition. Both the pin and the handbook are on loan from National Portrait Gallery staff members. “It wasn’t a goal, but it sort of organically happened,” says Kristin Smith, an exhibition and loan specialist. “As we were talking about it in different meetings, people would say, ‘I was a Girl Scout,’ and they would offer up something that they had.” Smith, a former Girl Scout herself, purchased the copy of the handbook and loaned it to the museum in her daughter’s name. “My daughter, Sophie, is a Brownie now,” says Smith. “I thought she would be thrilled to see her name on the label in the exhibit.” Later this month, Sophie and her troop are participating in “Her Story,” a museum program that uses the collection to teach Girl Scouts about historical figures who sought justice and equality for women. The program qualifies scouts for a certain badge.

“What I would like them to see is the history of the organization—how far back it goes and how strong it is today in terms of the number of members internationally,” says Smith. “Also, the spirit of Juliette Gordon Low. She was such an incredibly strong woman, who had a difficult life but really created an amazing legacy for herself.”

Author Stacy A. Cordery will discuss her biography of Juliette Gordon Low and sign copies this Wednesday, March 14, at 6 p.m., in the National Portrait Gallery’s Robert and Arlene Kogod Courtyard.

One March morning in 2008, Carlene Stephens, curator of the National Museum of American History’s division of work and industry, was reading the New York Times when a drawing caught her eye. She recognized it as a phonautograph, a device held in the museum’s collections. Credited to a Frenchman named Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1857, the phonautograph recorded sound waves as squiggles on soot-covered paper, but could not play those sounds back.

The article reported that scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California, had managed the seemingly impossible. They played back the sounds.

Using equipment housed developed in collaboration with the Library of Congress, Carl Haber and Earl Cornell, a senior scientists in the lab’s physics and engineering divisions, analyzed high resolution digital images scans of a phonautogram found in a Paris archive. (A group known as First Sounds had discovered a recording there and had sent scans of it to Haber and Cornell.) The recording was a 10-second clip of the French folk song “Au Clair de la Lune.” Made on April 9, 1860, the sound snippet predates the oldest known playable sound recording— Handel’s oratorio, made by Thomas Edison and his associates in 1888.

“When I read the article, I thought, oh my gosh,” says Stephens. The American History Museum has about 400 of the earliest audio recordings ever made. Pioneers (and competitors) Thomas Edison, Alexander Graham Bell and Emile Berliner donated the recordings and other documentation to the Smithsonian in the late 19th century. The inventors conducted experiments from 1878 to 1898, and stashed their research notes and materials at the Smithsonian, in part to establish a body of evidence should their patents ever be disputed.

There are a few cryptic inscriptions on the wax discs and cylinders and some notes from past curators. But historians did not have the means to play them. Stephens realized that a breakthrough was at hand.

“I have been taking care of these silent recordings for decades. Maybe finally we could get some sound out,” says Stephens.

So she contacted Haber and Peter Alyea, a digital conversion specialist at the Library of Congress. Stephens called their attention to a group of recordings made in the 1880s by Alexander Graham Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell and another associate Charles Sumner Tainter. The team had created an early R&D facility at Washington, D.C.’s Dupont Circle, called Volta Laboratory. (Today, the site is home to Julia’s Empanadas at 1221 Connecticut Avenue.)

“From 1881 to 1885, they were recording sound mechanically. They recorded sound magnetically. They recorded sound optically, with light. They tried to reproduce sound with mechanical tools, also with jets of air and liquid. It was an explosion of ideas that they tried,” says Haber. “There are periods of time when a certain group of people end up in a certain place and a lot of music gets created, or art—Paris in the 1920s and ’30s. There are these magic moments, and I think that historians and scholars of technology and invention are viewing Washington in the 1880s as being one of those moments.”

Eager to hear the content, Haber and Alyea selected six recordings—some wax discs with cardboard backing, others wax on metal and glass discs with photographically recorded sound—for a pilot project.

“We tried to choose examples that highlighted the diversity of the collection,” says Haber. In the last year, they have put the recordings through their sound recovery process, and on Tuesday, at the Library of Congress, the pair shared a first listen with a small audience of researchers and journalists.

The snippets are crude and somewhat garbled, but with a little help from Haber, who has spent hours and hours studying them, those of us in the room could make out what was being said. “To be or not to be, that is the question,” declared a speaker, who proceeded to deliver a portion of Hamlet’s famous soliloquy on one disc. A male voice repeated a trill sound as a sound check of sorts and counted to six on another. From one recorded in 1884, a man enunciated the word “barometer” five times. And on yet another, a voice states the date—”It’s the 11th day of March 1885″—and repeats some verses of “Mary had a little lamb.”

In fact, during one recitation of the nursery rhyme, the recorders experience some sort of technical difficulty, made obvious by a somewhat indiscernible exclamation of frustration. “It is probably the first recorded example of someone being disappointed,” jokes Haber.

The National Museum of American History hopes to continue this partnership with Lawrence Berkeley and the Library of Congress so that more of the sound experiments captured on early recordings can be made audible. At this point, the voices on the newly revealed recordings are unknown. But Stephens thinks that as researchers listen to more, they may be able to identify the speakers. In its collection, the museum has a transcript of a recording made by Alexander Graham Bell himself. Could the inventor’s voice be on one of the 200 Volta recordings?

“It is possible,” says Stephens.

Male voice reciting opening lines of “To be, or not to be” soliloquy from Hamlet, probably 1885:

Tone; male voice counting “One, two, three, four, five, six”; two more tones; deposited at the Smithsonian in October 1881:

Male voice saying “ba-ro-me-ter,” produced on November 17, 1884:

Male voice saying the date and reciting “Mary had a little lamb,” produced on March 11, 1885:

This post was updated on December 22, 2012 to include the contributions of Earl Cornell and the group First Sounds.

Alaska Airlines Boeing 737-400 D. Photo by Jeffrey Milstein. Courtesy of the National Air and Space Museum.

As a kid growing up in California, Jeffrey Milstein loved to go to the Los Angeles International Airport to watch the planes come in. He quickly became obsessed with aircraft, building model airplanes and sweeping out hangars in exchange for flying lessons from a former Navy pilot. As a teenager, he earned his wings—a private pilot’s license.

Flying is a hobby for Milstein, not a profession, however. He studied art and architecture at the University of California at Berkeley and had a successful career as an architect and graphic designer. In the last decade, though, Milstein has concentrated his efforts on photography and, in doing so, has been able to work his love for aviation back into the fold.

“Returning to the airport approaches, this time behind a camera instead of a control column, he photographed aircraft at the precise moment when they passed overhead, inbound to land,” writes Walter J. Boyne, former director of the National Air and Space Museum in the foreword to Milstein’s 2007 book AirCraft: The Jet as Art.

Now, borrowing the same name as Milstein’s book, a new exhibition at the National Air and Space Museum through November 25, 2012, features 33 of Milstein’s formal portraits of the underbellies of airplanes. The images measure up to 50 by 50 inches.

“Milstein’s photographs of frozen moments evoke speed, technology and the excitement of flight,” said Carolyn Russo, curator of the exhibition, in a press release. “The enormity of the images seem to pull you into the air, as though you are going along for the ride.”

Capturing a plane traveling at up to 175 miles per hour at just the right moment and angle is no easy task. ”It’s like shooting a moving duck,” Milstein told msnbc.com. “The planes are moving so fast, and I have only a hundredth of a second to get my shot. I have to keep the camera moving with the plane and then fire the shot exactly at the top dead center. It took a lot of practice.” The photographer’s favorite place to shoot from is runway 24R at LAX. ”You have to find the right spot underneath the flight path. Not too far away and not too close. The plane can’t be coming in too high or too low, and if the wing dips a little bit to correct for wind, the symmetry will be unequal. It is just a matter of finding the ‘sweet spot’ so that the aircraft is lined up exactly in the camera’s frame,” he told Russo.

Then, in Photoshop, Milstein strips away the backgrounds of his photographs, replacing them with stark white backdrops as to not detract from the seams and detailing on the planes undersides. He blows them up in size and creates bold, photographic archival-pigment prints to sell and display in galleries.

“My first career was architecture, and if you think about it the way I am presenting the aircraft is really like architectural drawings,” said Milstein in a 2007 interview. Some describe the photographs as “clinical.” Russo has compared them to a collection of pinned butterflies. But, as Boyne puts it, Milstein allows the planes “to stand alone in all their stark, efficient, minimalist beauty.” Keyword: beauty. The way that Milstein presents the airplanes, they are eye candy for both aviation fanatics and art aficionados. His photographs cast airplanes as both marvels of engineering and masterpieces of art.

* For more of Milstein’s photographs, see Air & Space magazine’s story, “The Jet as Art.”

Courtesy of the National Museum of American History, Smithsonian Institution.

Plymouth Rock, located on the shore of Plymouth Harbor in Massachusetts, is reputed to be the very spot where William Bradford, an early governor of Plymouth colony, and other Pilgrims first set foot on land  in 1620. Yet, there is no mention of the granite stone in the two surviving firsthand accounts of the founding of the colony—Bradford’s famous manuscript Of Plymouth Plantation and Edward Winslow’s writings published in a document called “Mourt’s Relation.”

In fact, the rock went unidentified for 121 years. It wasn’t until 1741, when a wharf was to be built over it, that 94-year-old Thomas Faunce, a town record keeper and the son of a pilgrim who arrived in Plymouth in 1623, reported the rock’s significance. Ever since, Plymouth Rock has been an object of reverence, as a symbol of the founding of a new nation.

“It is important because of what people have turned it into,” says Larry Bird, a curator in the National Museum of American History’s division of political history. “To possess a piece of it is to look at a historical moment in terms of image making and imagery. We choose these moments, and these things become invested with values that continue to speak to us today.”

In 1774, Plymouth Rock was split, horizontally, into two pieces. “Like a bagel,” writes John McPhee in “Travels of the Rock,” a story that appeared in the New Yorker in 1990. (Bird considers McPhee’s story one of the best pieces written about the rock.) “There were those who feared and those who hoped that the break in the rock portended an irreversible rupture between England and the American colonies,” writes McPhee. Actually, the upper half was transported to the town square where it was used to rile up New Englanders to want to gain independence from the Mother Country. Meanwhile, over the course of the next century, people, wanting a stake in the history, slowly chipped away at the half of the rock still on shore.

The National Museum of American History has two pieces of Plymouth Rock in its collection. “The one that I like is painted with a little affidavit by Lewis Bradford, who is a descendent of William Bradford,” says Bird. “He paints on it the exact moment of time in which he chips it from the ‘Mother Rock.’” The label on the small, four-inch by two-inch rock reads, “Broken from the Mother Rock by Mr. Lewis Bradford on Tues. 28th of Dec. 1850 4 1/2 o’clock p.m.” The artifact was donated to the museum in 1911 by the family of Gustavus Vasa Fox, a former Assistant Secretary of the Navy.

Much larger, weighing in at 100 pounds, the second hunk of rock was once part of a 400-pound portion owned by the Plymouth Antiquarian Society. The organization came into possession of the rock in the 1920s; it bought the Sandwich Street Harlow House, where the stone was being used as a doorstep. The society ended up breaking the 400-pound rock into three pieces, and the museum acquired one in 1985.

“Like a Lincoln fence rail piece, a tiny piece of Mount Vernon or even a piece of the Bastille, Plymouth Rock is part of who we are as a people,” says Bird.

Bird plans to feature the piece of Plymouth Rock chipped by Lewis Bradford in his forthcoming book, The Triumphal Souvenir. The book and its coinciding exhibition, planned for 2013, highlight personal mementos of the historical past.

Martha Stewart will give a presentation on entertaining in the home and sign copies of her latest book. Image courtesy of the Susan Magrino Agency.

Nearly 30 years ago, a caterer named Martha Stewart published her first cookbook, Entertaining. The bestseller became the template for hosting get-togethers of all kinds—cocktail parties to clam bakes, omelette brunches to Chinese banquets, Thanksgiving dinners and Christmas open houses, even at-home weddings. Needless to say, it launched Stewart’s career.

This Thursday night (7 p.m. at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C.), Marc Pachter, interim director of the National Museum of American History, will be sitting down with the author, entrepreneur, magazine publisher, television host and all-around doyenne of domesticity to discuss the evolution of American domestic culture and her profound impact on it. The program, hosted by the Smithsonian Associates, is in timing with the recent release of her latest book, Martha’s Entertaining: A Year of Celebrations—an update to her inaugural book. I spoke with Stewart, by phone, in advance of the event:

First of all, how would you describe the role you have played in the evolution of American domestic culture?

It wasn’t planned, but what’s happened, what actually occurred, was that the role of the champion of the homekeeping arts became mine. And, pleasantly, so. It has been wonderful for the last 30 years to be considered a teacher, a mentor and an important force in promoting the domestic arts as an art form rather than a chore.

What is the most dramatic way in which domestic culture has changed in America in the last three decades?

I think really what’s happened is that so many people are taking pride in their homes, more pride than they had before. I think what we have done is make the home more important in terms of a place where you can express yourself personally, where you can entertain, where you can decorate, where you can garden with style and with knowledge. And, we have been providers of the style, of the knowledge, of the information and the inspiration.

You have had such a huge impact on domestic culture—to the point that if someone is really crafty and skilled at entertaining and decorating, she is often called a “Martha Stewart.” To you, what does it mean to be a “Martha Stewart?”

Well, it means someone who is interested in actually enjoying life in a more intellectual way. Intellectual, not hoighty-toighty, but in a celebratory way.

In your new book Martha’s Entertaining, you have a section devoted to breakfast trays. And, you admit that the idea of breakfast served in bed is old fashioned. But, I wonder, are there any other domestic traditions you mourn the loss of?

There are kind of a lot of them. One of them is the family meal. Sitting down at the table for the family dinner every night has really become a thing of the past. Most homes do not have that. I think people don’t even realize how good it was. We always sat down. There were eight of us, and we sat down. It took awhile. It took 18 years for there to be eight of us. My mom had babies over a period of 18 years. But when we all sat down, we talked. We had a conversation. The parents actually led the conversation. And, I don’t remember it being anything but a pleasant experience. I am sure there were arguments and stuff, but I don’t remember it as anything but interesting. That doesn’t exist anymore, because of school schedules, work schedules, travel schedules, sports schedules. Sports teams and the avid nature of high school sports really kind of took away from all of that.

When does sticking to tradition become a bad thing?

If it becomes boring. If it becomes rote. If it becomes totally unchanged. I mean, you have to evolve. Just as technology has evolved, traditions evolve. I think when you look through the pages of the new entertaining book, you can see big elements of change in my style. I certainly change from year to year over the 30 years. My Christmas now looks pretty different from what it used to look like, but there are still inklings of the old traditions within the new.

In your new book, you say, “entertaining guests is not really about ‘shortcuts.’” But pulling off a multi-course meal or a cocktail party requires a certain level of efficiency. As a career woman, isn’t there a shortcut that you would endorse?

Oh, I mean, you learn the shortcuts along the way. I used to bake all my bread. I don’t bake my bread anymore, unless I am trying out bread recipes. I know where to get the very, very best breads. I also am able to, thank heavens, have help now. When I wrote the first Entertaining book, I didn’t have any help. Now, I have much more help.

At the event, Martha Stewart will also be giving a presentation on entertaining in the home and signing copies of Martha’s Entertaining. For ticket information, visit the Smithsonian Associates’ website.