How much is the Hope Diamond worth? Ask Smithsonian.

Our inquisitive readers are rising to the challenge we gave them last month. The questions are pouring in and we’re ready for more. Do you have any questions for our curators? Submit your questions here.

How much is the Hope Diamond worth? — Marjorie Mathews, Silver Spring, Maryland

That’s the most popular question we get, but we don’t really satisfy people by giving them a number. There are a number of answers, but the best one is that we honestly don’t know. It’s a little bit like Liz Taylor’s jewels being sold in December—all kinds of people guessed at what they would sell for, but everybody I know was way off. Only when those pieces were opened up to bidding at a public auction could you find out what their values were. When they were sold, then at least for that day and that night you could say, well, they were worth that much. The Hope Diamond is kind of the same way, but more so. There’s simply nothing else like it. So how do you put a value on the history, on the fact it’s been here on display for over 50 years and a few hundred million people have seen it, and on that fact it’s a rare blue diamond on top of everything else? You don’t. – Jeffrey E. Post, mineralogist, National Museum of Natural History

What’s the worst impact of ocean acidification so far?- Nancy Schaefer, Virginia Beach, Virginia

The impacts of ocean acidification are really just starting to be felt, but two big reports that came out in 2011 show that it could have very serious effects on coral reefs. These studies did not measure the warming effect of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, but rather its effect of making the ocean more acidic when it dissolves in the ocean. Places where large amounts of carbon dioxide seep into the water from the sea floor provide a natural experiment and show us how ocean waters might look, say, 50 or 100 years from now. Both studies showed branching, lacy, delicate coral forms are likely to disappear, and with them that kind of three-dimensional complexity so many species depend on. Also, other species that build a stony skeleton or shell, such as oysters or mussels, are likely to be affected. This happens because acidification makes carbonate ions, which these species need for their skeletons, less abundant.

Nancy Knowlton, marine biologist
National Museum of Natural History

Art and artifacts from ancient South Pacific and Pacific Northwest tribes have similarities in form and function. Is it possible that early Hawaiians caught part of the Kuroshio Current of the North Pacific Gyre to end up along the northwest coast of America from northern California to Alaska? — April Croan, Maple Valley, Washington

Those similarities have given rise to various theories, including trans-Pacific navigation, independent drifts of floating artifacts, inadvertent crossings by ships that have lost their rudders or rigging, or whales harpooned in one area that died or were captured in a distant place. Some connections are well-known, like feather garment fragments found in an archaeological site in Southeast Alaska that appear to have been brought there by whaling ships that had stopped in the Hawaiian Islands, a regular route for 19th-century whalers. Before the period of European contact, the greatest similarities are with the southwest Pacific, not Hawaii. The Kushiro current would have facilitated Asian coastal contacts with northwestern North America, but would not have helped Hawaiians. The problem of identification is one of context, form and dating. Most of the reported similarities are either out of their original context (which can’t be reconstructed), or their form is not specific enough to relate to another area’s style, or the date of creation cannot be established. To date there is no acceptable proof for South Pacific-Northwest Coast historical connections that predates the European whaling era, except for links that follow the coastal region of the North Pacific into Alaska.

William Fitzhugh, archeologist
Natural History Museum

Actor and director Clint Eastwood was on hand for the opening of the Warner Bros. Theater at the American History Museum. Photo courtesy of the museum

Wednesday night, the American History Museum rolled out the red carpet for one of the most legendary stars in Hollywood: Clint Eastwood. As part of a special ceremony, Eastwood was awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal for his lifetime of film contributions to American culture. He also presided over the ribbon-cutting for the new state-of-the-art Warner Bros. Theater, opened to the public after years of renovation.

“I am very pleased to be here tonight, and the Smithsonian is such a world-class museum, to be involved with it is great,” said Eastwood during his prepared remarks, before joking, “It’s great to be at the Smithsonian—at least as a recipient of a medal, not necessarily in one of the cabinets.”

The award was established in 1965 to honor the bicentennial of the birth of James Smithson, the namesake of the Smithsonian whose 1829 bequest laid the groundwork for the founding of the institution. Eastwood is the latest of many extraordinary figures in science, art, entertainment and a range of other areas to be honored for “distinguished contributions to the advancement of areas of interest to the Smithsonian.” Previous recipients have included Walter Cronkite, Stephen Hawking, Jim Henson and Lady Bird Johnson.

Eastwood was honored for the remarkable range of achievements that have stretched across his six decades of acting and directing. Warner Bros. CEO Barry Meyer, who was on hand to celebrate the event, noted that Eastwood is individually responsible for two of the studio’s eight Academy Awards for Best Picture, winning in 1992 for Unforgiven and 2004 for Million Dollar Baby. He also won the Best Director award for each of the films.

Eastwood receiving the James Smithson Bicentennial Medal. Photo courtesy of the American History Museum

Additionally, the event marked the culmination of efforts to create a new state-of-the-art theater for the museum. Enabled in part by a $5 million donation by Warner Bros., what was the Carmichael auditorium has now been renovated into an intimate 264-seat theater, featuring digital 3D capability, a 32-foot screen and an unprecedented degree of accessibility. “This theater, with 5.1 sound and the 3D capabilities and everything else that it has, is really worthy of being here in the Smithsonian,” said Eastwood.

To mark the occasion, the museum has opened a new display of celebrated film artifacts in the Constitution Ave. lobby, on loan from Warner Bros. The display cases feature Eastwood’s costume from the 1992 Western Unforgiven, Humphrey Bogart’s suit from Casablanca, robes worn in the Harry Potter movies and other legendary items.

The Warner Bros. Theater will be used to screen new documentaries and present film festivals celebrating America’s cinematic history. The first festival, held from February 2-5, will feature the films of Humphrey Bogart: Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre and The Big Sleep. Tickets to the festival sold out shortly after going on sale, but moviegoers can watch for tickets to go on sale for future events at the museum’s page.

Upcoming festivals include “Clint Eastwood’s Westerns” from June 22-24, “The Advent of Sound” from July 13-15 and “The Civil War on Film” from October 19-21. The Eastwood festival will feature screenings of some of his all-time classics: Unforgiven, Pale Rider, The Outlaw Josey Wales and the documentary, The Eastwood Factor.

Accepting the award, Eastwood joked about having his career’s work honored in such a way. “They’re opening with Humphrey Bogart films for the first run, and I realize that Mr. Bogart has been decesased for some years now,” he said. “So I was kind of hoping it’d be a while before they run Clint Eastwood movies.”

Take a guided tour of the universe in the Air and Space Museum's portable planetarium. Image courtesy of Air and Space.

Friday, February 3 Under the Stars

Explore the night sky up close from the Air and Space Museum’s observatory with astronomers and astronomy educators who will guide you through the different planets and constellations of the winter sky. Then zoom out for a view of the universe in the museum’s inflatable planetarium. $25 general admission, $20 for members. 8:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. Air and Space Museum.

Saturday, February 4 Black History Month Family Day

Celebrate the start of Black History Month with performances including the blues stylings of “Guitar Man” Warner Williams and a puppet show, Can You Spell Harlem? Plus, learn the art of step in a workshop by the Taratibu Youth Association step performers. After the festivities end, head over to the McEvoy Auditorium for a screening of Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair. Free. 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Film screening at 3:30 p.m. National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum.

Sunday, February 5 The Big Sleep

Classic film noir The Big Sleep is breaking in the American History Museum’s brand new Warner Brothers Theater on Sunday. First, join NPR film commentator Murray Horwitz for a pre-screening discussion of historical tidbits and elements to pay attention to in the film. Afterward, let private eye Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) lead you through a whirlwind of blackmail, murder and love in this 1946 masterpiece. Free. Pre-film talk at 1:00 p.m. Screening starts at 2:00 p.m. Warner Brothers Theater, American History Museum.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the goSmithsonian Visitors Guide. Additional reporting by Michelle Strange.

The Black List features portraits of fifty African Americans who are influential in their fields, such as Chris Rock, above. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

February is Black History Month, and if you’re wondering how to properly commemorate the holiday, look no further. There are lots of (mostly free) events around the Mall this month celebrating African American heritage.

Black History Month Family Day: On Saturday, February 4, kick off the month with a full afternoon of music, performances and crafts at the National Portrait Gallery and American Art Museum. Enjoy the blues stylings of “Guitar Man” Warner Williams and a puppet show, Can You Spell Harlem? Plus, learn the art of step in a workshop by the Taratibu Youth Association step performers. After the festivities end, head over to the McEvoy Auditorium for a screening of Chris Rock’s documentary, Good Hair. Free. 11:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. Film screening at 3:30 p.m.

Tales from Mother Africa: Kenyan poet, singer, storyteller and dancer Anna Mwalagho weaves traditional tales from “Mama Africa” into an interactive performance at S. Dillon Ripley Center’s Discovery Theater on February 2 and 3. The program is geared toward young children, but a little singing and dancing is good for adults, too. Tickets required: $8 for adults, $6 for children, $5 for Resident Associate Members, $3 for children under 2. 10:15 a.m. and 11:30 a.m.

Enslavement to Emancipation: Celebrate the 150th anniversary of the passage of the District of Columbia’s Emancipation Act in 1862 with a video and discussion at the Anacostia Community Museum. The talk will touch on a wide range of subjects, including the Civil War, laws governing slavery, the abolitionist movement, and civil rights. Free. Reserve a spot at 202-633-4844. February 5 at 2:00 p.m. and and February 24 at 10:30 a.m.

Monticello, Slavery, and the Hemingses: Join NPR host Michel Martin and Harvard Law professor Annette Gordon-Reed for a discussion about the six Monticello slave families featured in the exhibition “Paradox of Liberty: Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello” at the American History Museum. Hosted by the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Martin and Gordon-Reed will challenge conventional wisdom about slavery and the political reality of the era. Professor Gordon-Reed’s book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family will also be discussed. Free. February 6 from 7:00 to 9:00 p.m. Baird Auditorium, Natural History Museum.

Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975: The Black Power movement has been both venerated and vilified, but what exactly did it mean? Test your knowledge at the National Portrait Gallery’s screening of The Black Power Mixtape 1967-1975, which documents this tumultuous period and features interviews with activists Angela Davis, Bobby Seale and Stokely Carmichael. Free. February 18 at 1:00 p.m.

The Black List: Reinterpreting the exclusionary definition of a “blacklist,” photographer/filmmaker Timothy Greenfield-Sanders and NPR’s Elvis Mitchell compiled a list of people who represent the African American experience in the 20th century. The result is an inspiring exhibition of large-format photographic portraits and film interviews of artists, politicians, writers, athletes and civil rights activists who have made a difference in their fields. The 50 portraits on display include musician John Legend, artist Kara Walker and political activist Angela Davis. On view at the National Portrait Gallery until April 22.

Groundbreaking for the National Museum of African American History and Culture: Almost a decade after the establishment of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, construction on the museum site breaks ground on February 22. Catch the webcast of the groundbreaking ceremony, which will feature speeches and musical performances starting at 9:00 a.m. The museum construction should be finished in 2015, so you’ll have plenty of time to head down to the new site between the Washington Monument and the American History Museum and check its progress.

For the full schedule of Black History Month events, click here.

The Art of Video Games exhibit opens at the American Art Museum on March 16.

We know you’ve got enough “looking forward to 2012″ lists under your belt by now; our Who to Follow post alone will keep you pretty busy. But we can’t resist sneaking in just one more. Here’s our guide to the exhibitions we’re most excited for this year. Mark your calendars now so you’ll have no excuse to say you’re bored later.

A new look at Monticello: Founding father Thomas Jefferson called slavery an “abominable crime”. . . but owned more than 600 slaves who sustained his plantation, Monticello. “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty,” opened on January 27 in the American History Museum‘s National Museum of African American History and Culture Gallery, and focuses on the long-overlooked history of slave life at the third president’s Virginia home. Be sure to keep up with the latest news from Monticello on Twitter at @TJMonticello.

Happy birthday, Jackson Pollock: If he were alive today, Jackson Pollock would have turned 100 on January 28. To honor the stormy life and revolutionary work of the modern art icon, the Archives of American Art presents Pollock’s personal family photos, letters, and writings in “Art Memories Arrested in Space, a centennial tribute to Jackson Pollock” at the Reynolds Center through May 15.

Game on: Can video games be art? To answer that question, the American Art Museum‘s upcoming exhibit, “The Art of Video Games,” pulls together the most arresting graphics and innovative designs in the gaming world, on view March 16 through September 30. Even if you forgot to vote for your favorite game, don’t miss out on GameFest, which kicks off the exhibit with three days packed with open play, panel talks with artists and designers, and live-action gaming. To tide you over til March, follow curator Chris Melissinos at @CMelissinos for updates and teasers.

Hokusai: In anticipation of the Cherry Blossom Centennial, the Sackler Gallery presents a study of Katsushika Hosukai, Japan’s most famous artist (yes, that’s his Great Wave that has probably graced every college dorm wall in America). “Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji,” his most acclaimed woodblock print series, was first published in 1830 when Hokusai was in his 70s and goes on view on March 24 through June 17. The gallery has set up an interactive website with more information on Hokusai’s life and artistic technique.

Ai Weiwei: The controversial Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, arrested last year, brings a new installation, “Fragments,” to the Sackler Gallery beginning May 12. Using antique wood salvaged from Qing Dynasty temples, Ai worked with skilled traditional carpenters to create what he calls an “irrational structure” that both affirms and defies centuries of architectural traditions. In October, the Hirshhorn gets in on the action with an exhibit of 25 of Ai’s recent works entitled “Ai Weiwei: According to What?” For an English translation of Ai’s Twitter, follow @aiwwenglish.

Monticello, Thomas Jefferson's plantation, was run by hundreds of enslaved African Americans in his lifetime. Image courtesy of Monticello.

In June of 1776, Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence that “all men are created equal.” But after he signed his name to that now immortal document, he returned home to Monticello and resumed a lifestyle that denied this equality to more than 600 men, women and children who toiled as slaves on his Virginian plantation. Over the course of the third president’s lifetime, Jefferson would set only two of them free.

A new exhibition, “Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty,” now on view at the National Museum of American History, addresses this fundamental contradiction in the life of one of America’s greatest leaders. “Jefferson wrote and saved 19,000 letters in his life, so we know a vast amount about him,” says Elizabeth Chew, a curator at Monticello and co-curator of the exhibition, along with Rex Ellis of the National Museum of African American History and Culture. “But all we had of these enslaved people,” Chew adds, “was his list of their names.”

From this list, Chew and Ellis, wove together a picture of another Monticello, home to the weavers, spinners, blacksmiths, tinsmiths, nail-makers, carpenters, sawyers, charcoal-burners, stablemen, joiners, and domestic servants that kept the plantation operating. The exhibit features Jefferson’s records and artifacts from Mulberry Row—the slave quarters. But most importantly, it follows six families through the generations: arrival at Monticello as slaves; dispersal at Jefferson’s death in 1827; migration across the country down to their descendants today.

These families are descended from Elizabeth Hemings and her children, Edward and Jane Gillette, George and Ursula Granger David and Isabel Hern and James and Cate Hubbard. Thanks to the Getting Word oral history project at Monticello, which has collected interviews from more than 170 descendants, the exhibit tells colorful stories about how they lived, what their work was, what skills they had, where they came from, and where they went.

According to Chew, looking at Monticello through the eyes of slaves is a relatively new perspective. Until the mid-1980s, tours at Monticello avoided the topic of slavery, often referring to slaves more euphemistically as “servants.” Sometimes they were cut out of the story entirely; tour guides and signs “would say things like “the food was brought” from the kitchen to the dining room,” Chew says. “Now we would say, the head cook Edith Fossett and her assistants brought the food from the kitchen to the dining room.”

For Chew, the most significant aspect of this exhibit is “the degree to which we can make the story of slavery the story of individual people and families.”

Bringing these people back into the narrative is essential to understanding Thomas Jefferson’s life and work. As Ellis said in a press preview, “They represent the community who brought him to his father on a pillow when he was born to those who adjusted the pillow under his head when he died.”

By extension, understanding Jefferson’s own complexities illuminates the contradictions within the country he built. “Most Americans probably don’t think of it, but the founders founded this country as a slave society, and that didn’t go away for a hundred years,” Chew says. The paradox of Jefferson, who called slavery “an abominable crime” and proposed several plans to end the slave trade, is a perfect lens for the national tensions that resulted in the bloodiest war in American history.

At their core, however, these stories are first and foremost about individuals and families. Because many African Americans cannot trace their family back past the Civil War, the stories collected here are especially precious. Bill Webb, a descendent of the Hemings family, explains his decision to try to find out his lineage: “I love history. I think it’s about a sense of who you are, and knowing some of your history.” Webb’s ancestor, Brown Colbert, was sold by Thomas Jefferson to another slaveowner in Lexington, Virginia, before he was freed by the American Colonization Society on the condition that he leave the United States for Liberia in Africa. Though Colbert and the children who accompanied him died shortly after arriving in Liberia, one of his daughters stayed in America and became the matriarch of Webb’s family. “They kept his name through generations–Brown, Brown, Brown,” Webb says.

Of course, the story doesn’t end there. Webb, for one, plans to return to the exhibit many times with his family: “I’ve warned my friends who live in DC that they’ll see a lot of us, because it takes time to absorb everything. There’s just so much to see.”

“Slavery at Jefferson’s Monticello: Paradox of Liberty,” presented by Monticello and the National Museum of African American History and Culture, is on view at the American History Museum from January 27 through October 14, 2012.

Now that you’ve probably burned through the lists of historians, innovators, and food-writers to follow this year, we’re bringing it back home to the Smithsonian. As always, the Mall is cooking up some fascinating, crazy, and sometimes grotesque stuff for 2012. Bookmark these people and projects to keep up with this year:

Nicholas Pyenson: Pyenson studies and curates fossils of marine mammals. Get a feel for what is going on inside his lab and follow his team into the field—fresh from an expedition in Chile—at his blog, Pyenson Lab.

Postal Museum: Time for a pop quiz: A “hamper dumper” is:

a) machine in postal processing

b) bin of misprint stamps

c) failed mail vehicle

d) philatelic tool.

If you know the answer, you should be following the Postal Museum (@postalmuseum) for their daily #PostalQuiz and other philatelic factoids.

Biodiversity Heritage Library: As part of the Biodiversity Heritage Library consortium, the Smithsonian Libraries collects and digitizes biodiversity research for open online access—essentially, a bio-wiki. Check out @biodivlibrary for the species of the day: plants that eat worms, albino penguins and other bizarre creatures you never knew existed.

Archives of American Art Pinterest: The American Art Pinterest lets you browse the archives and “pin” the images you like to your virtual board. Mix and match from collections like “facial hair of note” and “ain’t no party like an artist’s party.”

Book Dragon: The Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program’s Book Dragon is the pet project of former APA Media Arts Consultant Terry Hong, featuring reviews of “books for the multi-cultural reader.” Hong highlights literature for kids and adults alike that speaks to the Asian American experience. Follow her at @SIBookDragon.

Smithsonian Vids: For a moving view of the Institution, follow @SmithsonianVids. Meet a scientist studying frog-eating bats, or get a video tour of Smithsonian Folkways Recordings from Grateful Dead drummer Mickey Hart.

Smithsonian Marine Station: This Natural History Museum field station, located in Fort Pierce, Florida, tweets news updates and photos from the field (er, coral reef) @SmithsonianSMS. Plus, there’s #followfriday trivia every week.

Field Book Project: Also, from the Natural History Museum and the Smithsonian Institution Archives check out this blog, where researchers post updates on their initiative to compile an online database of field books and journals documenting biodiversity research. Besides progress updates, you’ll also find excerpts of century-old field notes from explorers, birdwatchers and scientists (including lots of fun, old-timey sketches) and learn a lot more than you ever thought there was to know about indices.

Encyclopedia of Life: Take your best shot and enter the picture in the Smithsonian’s Encyclopedia of Life Flickr photo contest. The bi-weekly contest could be (and has been) any theme from “backyard life” to “sexual dimorphism.” Even if you don’t enter, be sure to browse the entries for gems like this.

And of course, if you’re not following them already, the museums are always Tweeting up a storm. Here’s the checklist:

American Indian Museum: @SmithsonianNMAI

National Portrait Gallery: @npg

American Art Museum: @americanart

Anacostia Community Museum: @anacostiamuseum

American History Museum: @amhistorymuseum

Air and Space Museum: @airandspace

Museum of Natural History: @NMNH

Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden: @hirshhorn

Freer and Sackler Galleries: @FreerSackler

Museum of African Art: @NMAfA

National Zoo: @NationalZoo

Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum: @cooperhewitt

Smithsonian: @Smithsonian

Guest blogger and Portrait Gallery historian Amy Henderson.

This post is part of our on-going series in which ATM invites the occasional post from a number of Smithsonian Institution guest bloggers: the historians, researchers and scientists who curate the collections and archives at the museums and research facilities. Today, Amy Henderson from the National Portrait Gallery weighs in on the influences of food in the American culture. She last wrote for us on the inimitable historical sites that you must see when visiting Washington, D.C.

As the words ring out in the musical Oliver, “Food, glorious food,” the pleasures of cooking, serving and dining are something to be celebrated. What we eat reflects our lives and times, whether it’s hot sausage and mustard, or Waldorf salad. Do we watch “Top Chef,” “Cooking with Julia,” and “The Essential Pepin?”  Does our pulse beat faster when we spot a fabulous new gadget at our favorite kitchen store? Do we have a cat that likes baby arugula? These are telltale signs that some of us consider “food” something more than ”fuel.”

There are several images of iconic food personalities held within the collections of  the National Portrait Gallery. Two of my favorites are

Visionary chef Julia Child. Photo courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery (© David A. Marlin)

Julia Child and food writer M.F.K.Fisher. I have labored through the nearly 20 pages of Julia’s recipe for French bread and produced a baguette that was almost worth the effort, and I have been snared by several of Fisher’s books because of their wonderful titles—Consider the Oyster and How to Cook a Wolf come instantly to mind. One of my fondest Smithsonian memories was meeting Julia Child when the National Museum of American History first began to acquire her collection, which now includes her entire kitchen. She was very tall, superbly gracious and approachable, and looked you squarely in the eye during conversation: this was not a woman who suffered fools.

Nurturing our recognition of the national dialogue about food, on January 20, the Portrait Gallery will host a very special event to showcase food pioneer Alice Waters, founder of the Berkeley, California-based Chez Panisse Restaurant and Café, the Edible Schoolyard and a leader of the slow food movement. In more than 40 years as chef, author, and proprietor of Chez Panisse, Ms. Waters has dedicated herself to a culinary philosophy based on using only the freshest local organic products, served only in season. Education is a key to this commitment, and her Edible Schoolyard—a one acre garden with an adjacent kitchen—is a model public school curriculum program for nearly 1,000 students.

The newly commissioned Alice Waters portrait. Photo courtesy of the Portrait Gallery

Happily, Ms. Waters will attend the unveiling of her portrait at this event. Created by photographer Dave Woody, the image depicts the chef standing beneath the branches of an enormous mulberry tree in her Edible Schoolyard—a perfect setting for this champion of local, organic food. As the winner of the 2009 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition, Woody was commissioned to portray Alice Waters. The photograph is large-scale, and Waters points out that the giant mulberry tree behind her symbolizes the importance of the sustainable environment, one of her priorities:  “It’s a set of values,” she said of the portrait’s message. “This represents hope for me in the future and for the kids.”

The liveliest part of the Alice Waters event promises to be Chef José Andrés’ onstage interview with her. The winner of the 2011 James Beard Foundation’s Outstanding Chef Award, Andrés is host of the PBS series “Made in Spain” and founder of state-of-the-art restaurants across the country. He has a special relationship with the Portrait Gallery, first because his restaurants brought an essential ingredient to the museum’s Penn Quarter neighborhood as it morphed from a place of desolation to one of the most vibrant parts of the nation’s capital.  And while he helped to make it possible for the Portrait Gallery to be in the heart of Washington’s food, sports, and entertainment district, Andrés personally feels deep affection and  respect for the museum in return. He told me that he likes to walk through our galleries and the Kogod Courtyard “to be inspired.” The American Dream is very real to Chef José, and he says that he “finds energy”  among the portraits of the historical figures that line our walls.

The Alice Waters portrait will be on view at the Portrait Gallery beginning January 20. Director Martin E. Sullivan believes that this image marks both a recognition of  “the changing way the nation thinks about how people are connected to food and the environment,” and “a lively celebration of this relatively new conversation in American culture.”
Bon appetite!

A cultural historian at the National Portrait Gallery, Amy Henderson specializes in “the lively arts,” particularly media-generated celebrity culture. Her books and exhibitions run the gamut from the pioneers in early broadcasting to Elvis Presley to Katharine Hepburn and Katharine Graham. She is currently at work on a new dance exhibition entitled “One! Singular Sensations in American Dance,” scheduled to open in September 2013.

UPDATE 1/19/2012: This post was updated to clarify that the National Portrait Gallery Commission reviewed a number of worthy candidates and voted to ask Dave Woody to create a portrait of Alice Waters.

Honor Martin Luther King, Jr. this weekend. Image courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery.

Friday, January 13 Happy Birthday, Martin Luther King Jr.

Celebrate the birthday of the civil rights leader at the Anacostia Community Museum’s 27th annual event, featuring keynote speaker Harry E. Johnson Sr., President and CEO of the Washington, D.C., Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial Project Foundation and a step performance by the Omicron Eta Lambda Chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, Inc. Free. 7:00 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. Baird Auditorium, Natural History Museum.

Saturday, January 14 To the Mountaintop
The timeless words that stirred a nation come alive as actor Xavier Carnegie presents selections from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s most powerful speeches and sermons. The combination of live performance, historic photographs and audio recordings goes a step beyond “I have a dream” to honor the legacy of all who struggled for a more perfect union. Free. 11:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., 2:30 p.m. and 4:00 p.m. repeats Sunday and Monday. Flag Hall, American History Museum.

Sunday, January 15 Native Dance

As the Native Storytelling Festival wraps up, enjoy a final performance by the singers, dancers and drummers from St. Labre Indian School in Montana. The group, under the guidance of Benjamin Headswift, draws on a rich cultural heritage that includes Crow and Northern Cheyenne cultures. They will perform the Grass Dance, the Crow Hop, and several other pow-wow style dances. Stick around afterwards to meet the students. Free. 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. National Museum of the American Indian.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the goSmithsonian Visitors Guide. Additional reporting by Michelle Strange.

Morse's 1837 telegraph receiver prototype, built with a canvas-stretcher. Photo courtesy of the Smithsonian Institution Archives

A crowd of hushed spectators packed into the small red factory house at the Speedwell Ironworks in Morristown, New Jersey, unsure of what to expect next. Samuel Morse, along with his colleagues Leonard Gale and Alfred Vail, had packed over two miles of wire into the building, attempting to demonstrate to the public that his strange new invention could be used to transmit messages over long distances. Finally, the inventors manipulated a primitive transmitter, and a receiver scratched Morse’s simple message—”A patient waiter is no loser”—via a code of lines and curves. On this day in 1838, the small group of onlookers saw something special: the first-ever public demonstration of the telegraph.

Of course, as with all technological breakthroughs, the development of the telegraph had started years earlier, says curator Harold Wallace of the American History Museum. But unlike many other inventions, the telegraph was the result of an unusual mix of personal circumstances, artistic influences and pure happenstance. For the first four decades of his life, Morse was first and foremost an artist. “He was a painter of modest renown,” says Wallace. “Not top tier, perhaps, but his name was known.”

Morse was first provoked to think about communications technology because of a tragedy: in 1825, while painting the portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette in Washington, D.C., he received a letter indicating his wife was sick. By the time he reached his home in New Haven, Connecticut, she had already been buried. Stricken by grief, he vowed to develop a faster way to send messages in such crucial circumstances.

For several more years, Morse struggled in vain to succeed in the art world, but in 1832, serendipity intervened. On a transatlantic voyage, returning home from study in Europe, he met Charles Thomas Jackson, a Boston physician and scientist, who showed him a rudimentary electromagnet he had devised. Morse became convinced that he could somehow send a message along a wire by opening and closing an electrical circuit, which could be recorded by an electromagnet on a piece of paper via a written code.

Back in the U.S., he moved forward with his idea, meeting with Joseph Henry, another scientist working in electromagnetism—and the man who would later become the first secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, in 1846. “He met with Henry, who explained how the electromagnets worked and showed his experimental ones,” says Wallace. “And if you look at the electromagnets—the ones Morse uses, and the experimental ones from Henry—it’s obvious they’re the same design. He’s definitely riffing off of Henry, as far as the electromagnet, which is one of the most important pieces of the apparatus.”

Morse returned to his New York apartment and, in 1837, he crafted a primitive telegraph receiver—now part of the Smithsonian’s collections and currently on display at the American Art Museum—that was able to register and record the fluctuations in an electrical circuit. “The most interesting thing about the prototype is that he took an artist’s canvas stretcher and made it into a telegraph receiver,” Wallace says. “So right there, you can see the shift from painter to telegrapher, all in one piece.”

With a means of recording electromagnetic signals theoretically in place, Morse worked with Gale, Vail and others over the next several years to improve the system and make it practical for use over far distances, incorporating Vail’s transmitter key and a code of dots and dashes, which of course would become known as Morse Code. Despite these improvements, the group had some difficulty convincing others that telegraphy was a worthy investment. “It was not difficult to convince people at the time that it was potentially useful,” Wallace says. “What really was the hard sell that Morse and others had to make was whether it could be practical. Could you create wires miles and miles long and send a signal through them?”

To raise capital for long-distance lines, he turned to the U.S. government, and after a small-scale demonstration with wires strung between different committee rooms within the Capitol, he was awarded $30,000 to build a 38-mile line from Baltimore to Washington, D.C. On May 1, 1844, Morse’s communication device was finally met with wide scale public enthusiasm, as the Whig Party’s presidential nomination was telegraphed from Baltimore to D.C. far faster than a courier could have traveled.

Later that month, the line was officially opened for public use—with a message quite a bit more well-known than that of the the earlier Speedwell Ironworks demonstration. This, too was recorded on a strip of paper, which now resides in the American History Museum’s collections. Short yet meaningful, the bible quotation set the stage for the approaching age of electronic communication: “What Hath God Wrought.”

Come make your own stamp collection at a drop-in workshop at the Postal Museum. Photo courtesy of the museum

Friday, January 6 “This is Not a Film”

The Iranian Film Festival kicks off with “This is Not a Film,” a last-minute Cannes submission shot secretly on an iPhone and smuggled into France on a flash drive hidden in a cake. The film depicts the sequestered life of famed director Jafar Panahi (The Circle; Offside), whose 2010 arrest sparked an international outcry. Banned from traveling, giving interviews, or making films, Panahi is seen talking to his family and lawyer on the phone, discussing his plight with Mirtahmasb, and reflecting on the meaning of the art of filmmaking. (Dirs.: Mojtaba Mirtahmasb and Jafar Panahi, Iran, 2010, 75 min., Persian with English subtitles) Free. 7:00 p.m. Freer/Sackler Gallery.

Saturday, January 7 Stamps!

Jumpstart your own stamp collection in a hands-on workshop for all ages, then join curator Daniel Piazza on a tour of the philatelic rarities of “Collecting History: 125 Years of the National Philatelic Collection” before it closes on January 9. Highlights include rarities that once belonged to Egypt’s King Farouk and Japanese-American internment camp mail from World War II. Free. 12:00 to 3:00 p.m. Postal Museum, Museum Atrium.

Sunday, January 8 Masterworks of Three Centuries

Celebrate the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society’s 35th season with an eclectic Baroque concert, as Kenneth Slowik presents Bach’s compendious Goldberg Variations, BWV 988.  $22 member, $20 senior member, $28 general admission. Pre-concert talk at 6:30 p.m. Concert begins at 7:30 p.m. American History Museum, Hall of Musical Instruments.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the goSmithsonian Visitors Guide. Additional reporting by Michelle Strange.

Come see the ZooLights holiday festival on January 1st. Photo courtesy of the National Zoo.

Friday, December 30 Treasures at the Museum

Treasures at the Museum, by Deborra Richardson, chief archivist of the American History Museum, is a chapter book that introduces children to archives through the imaginative journey of young characters Robbie and Brittany. On Friday, come meet the author and have a copy of the book autographed. A terrific gift idea for children in grades K-4, this book is sure entice young readers to the preservation of history. Free. 2 to 4 p.m. American History Museum, Archives Center, 1st Floor West

Saturday, December 31 Flights of Fancy

Bring children of all ages to the Air and Space Museum‘s Flights of Fancy story series. Museum staff read tales of legendary aviators, hot-air balloons and space exploration, and each session also includes a hands-on art activity. This week, the book is Comets, Stars, the Moon and Mars, a collection of space poetry and paintings by Douglas Florian. Free, with sessions at 11 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. Air and Space Museum.

Sunday, January 1 Last Day of ZooLights

This New Year’s Day, visit the Zoo for your last chance to see Zoo Lights until the next holiday season. The nighttime holiday festival features light displays, special animal exhibits, entertainment and the Zoo’s new “iceless” skating rink featuring a high-tech acrylic material. Come to the area’s only free holiday light show and enjoy an extensive LED display illuminating the trees, walkways and buildings, along with life-size animal light silhouettes. 5 to 9 p.m. National Zoo.

For a complete listing of Smithsonian events and exhibitions visit the goSmithsonian Visitors Guide. Additional reporting by Michelle Strange.

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.

An early working version of Hollerith's tabulating machine. Photo courtesy of the American History Museum

In 1890, the U.S. Government had a problem. With the nation’s population growing rapidly, hand-counting the results was proving impractical—the 1880 census took a full 7 years to tabulate. Policymakers worried that the 1890 census wouldn’t even be counted by 1900, making reapportionment of congressional seats—as required by the Constitution—impossible.

Enter the Buffalo, New York, native Herman Hollerith. The engineer was pondering this very problem in the early 1880s when, on a train, his eyes fell upon a conductor’s punch card. Hollerith’s work over the next decade eventually led to the groundbreaking invention of the punch card tabulating machine, installed in a federal government office for the very first time on this day in 1888.

“Hollerith had actually worked on the census of 1880, and he was really intrigued by the notion of trying to automate the process,” says Peggy Kidwell, curator of computing history at the American History Museum, which is home to an early version of Hollerith’s device. He began by experimenting with paper rolls that were punched with holes to represent information, but eventually settled on punch cards, which were more durable and could be fed through a counting machine more easily.

Given the capacities of previous devices of the era, Hollerith’s prototype was revolutionary. “What happened is that you took a card, and you had the punch, and you put in a hole whereever there was something that you wanted to enter as information,” Kidwell says. For the census, each card represented an individual, and each hole a point of data—for example, a hole in one location would represent a male, and a hole in a different spot would represent a female.

“On the tabulating machine, there was a contact point where there were little cups of mercury—as many cups as there could be holes in the card,” says Kidwell. “When it pushed the card down, if there was a hole, you made electrical contact, and that made the machine register the piece of information.” A series of dials across the “dashboard” of the device displayed the counts for a number of categories.

The tabulating machine's card puncher. Photo by flickr user ArnoldReinhold.

Although an operator still had to manually feed the cards through the counter, this was exponentially faster than simply counting census forms by hand. The machine also included a sorter, which could select a particular group of cards based on multiple criteria. “You could find out, for example, all the Norwegian-born people in Minnesota,” Kidwell says. “If you were of Norwegian descent, you would have a hole for that, if you lived in Minnesota, you’d have another hole, so you could pick out and count all of the cards that had both.”

Before the 1890 census, the machine was first tested in several smaller capacities, including the health departments of Baltimore and New York, and the U.S. War Department, which marked the first federal use of the device. “The department’s Records and Health division would use the machine for compiling monthly health statistics on individual soldiers,” says Kidwell. “Each card represented an individual, and each hole position stood for a particular type of information, such as the type of disease, whether it had been contracted in the line of duty, and whether the solider had been admitted to sick report.”

By the time the census rolled around, the tabulating machine was finely tuned and ready to go. Without the inventions, experts had estimated, the 1890 census would have taken 13 years to fully tabulate. With the device in place, the tabulation finished ahead of schedule and under budget.

Although the tabulating machine looks more like an ancient relic than a modern computer, its invention proved to be pivotal in the history of information technology. With the proceeds from leasing his machines to the Census Bureau, Hollerith founded the Tabulating Machine Company in 1896. Eventually, it would merge with several other firms in 1911, and was renamed International Business Machines in 1924.

The company continued to develop faster and more complex tabulating machines over the next several decades. “The scope of what the machines were able to do expanded, and that meant that the company had enough money to invest in the kinds of research that would be needed when you got really expensive machines, like electronic computers,” says Kidwell. You might know the company better by its acronym, still in use today: I.B.M.

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.