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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

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.

Deere & Company donated a John Deere Model D Tractor to the National Museum of American History in 1966. Image courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

Unless, like my husband, you hail from a place like Nebraska, where it is common knowledge that Farmall tractors are candy apple red, New Hollands’ are royal blue and Allis-Chalmers’ are orange, I suspect that John Deere tractors, with their kelly green bodies and bright yellow hubcaps, are the only ones that are instantly recognizable.

You know the machine, because the John Deere company has become a world leader in the manufacturing of agricultural and landscaping equipment. But how much do you know about John Deere, the man?

For starters, today is the anniversary of his birth—on February 7, 1804, in Rutland, Vermont. Deere was raised in Middlebury, Vermont, about 30 miles to the north of Rutland. In the mid-1820s, after a four-year blacksmithing apprenticeship, he began outfitting farmers with hay forks and shovels. When business got rough in the mid-1830s, he set out for the Midwest, ultimately landing in Grand Detour, Illinois. There, he quickly discovered that pioneer farmers were struggling to cut through the area’s thick soil with the cast-iron plows they had brought from the sandy-soiled East. So, he introduced a solution: a steel plow. According to the National Museum of American History, which has Deere’s original (pictured below) in its collection, the steel plow made vast areas of the Midwest agriculturally viable.

John Deere's steel plow revolutionized farming in the Midwest. Image courtesy of the National Museum of American History.

Deere was churning out 1,000 plows a year by 1848, constantly improving his design. He once said, “I will never put my name on a product that does not have in it the best that is in me.” And, in 1868, he incorporated as Deere & Company. Deere died in 1886, at the age of 82, the business carried on under his son Charles’ direction, followed by William Butterworth, Charles’s son-in law, and then Charles Deere Wiman, a great-grandson of John Deere.

The John Deere Model D, the first tractor the company built, marketed and named after the innovative blacksmith, was added to the product line in 1923. One (pictured above) of the two-ton, 15 horsepower machines, which cost about $1,000 by the mid-1920s, is also among the treasures at the National Museum of American History.

“Tractors, in general, are really important inventions and helped make the green revolution—the era from 1920 to 1940 when agricultural productivity really took off—possible. The John Deere Model D was very popular in the early wave of internal combustion tractors,” says Peter Liebhold, chair and curator of the Division of Work and Industry at the National Museum of American History. “The company continues to be very important in terms of innovation in agricultural equipment. Today, John Deere continues to innovate with developments in applying GPS to make precision farming a reality.”

President-elect John F. Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy. Photograph by Richard Avedon. Courtesy of National Museum of American History.

Acclaimed fashion and portrait photographer Richard Avedon brought his portable studio to the Kennedys’ Palm Beach, Florida-compound on January 3, 1961, to take some photos for Harper’s Bazaar and LOOK magazines. The atmosphere in the oceanfront home was hectic, or so I’ve read in accounts of the event. The president-elect was dictating memos to his secretary in between clicks of the camera. A hair stylist was sculpting Jacqueline Kennedy’s brunette bob, and dress makers were pinning an Oleg Cassini dress that Jackie would wear just a couple weeks later at a pre-inaugural concert.

The resulting pictures were the only known formal photographs of the Kennedys taken between John’s election and inauguration. Six of the images appeared in the February 1961 issue of Harper’s Bazaar, and then they remained largely unseen. Richard Avedon donated them, among other photographs, to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, in 1966. It wasn’t until 2007, when Shannon Thomas Perich, an associate curator of the photographic history collection at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, published the collection in her book The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family that they were again in the public eye. Thanks to the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service (SITES), they have since traveled around the country. Now, fifty years after they were taken, the portraits have returned to the American History Museum, where they are on display through February 28.

View a photo gallery of more of these images

The exhibition has an intimate feel to it, which is amplified by its inclusion of contact sheets of the unedited, outtakes of Avedon’s work that day. One particular sheet shows 12 photos, some of John alone and others with Jackie, that allude to the surrounding commotion. The president-elect is laughing in a couple. In another, his eyes are closed, and a few of the couple appear as though they are in mid-conversation. Yet, these more informal portraits stand in contrast to a seated image of John and Jackie, both fully attentive to the camera, hanging nearby. (This portrait, above left, graces the cover of Perich’s book.)

Avedon, who photographed famous cultural figures, performers, writers and leaders from the 1950s to his death in 2004, was at the peak of his career at the time. The focus Avedon was able to capture in John and Jackie’s faces in the portrait above, despite all the action bustling around them, is testament to his craft.

“The white, or gray, background hides the details of the house that would compete for visual attention. There is no surrounding context to provide visual clues as to how one should interpret the photograph, so this forces the viewer’s attention to the sitter,” says Perich. “Avedon further controls this pairing down of visual information by printing in a graphic, contrasty way. There are few middle-tone grays, creating stark blacks and whites. The printing places bright emphasis on their hands and faces.” (Avedon’s editing becomes even more clear when the negative and the final print are compared side-by-side in the exhibition.)

Perich says that Avedon’s intent was to create photographs that didn’t just flatter the president-elect, but also revealed some deeper insight into what might make him a worthy president. However, in a 1961 Newsweek article, Avedon admits that that all-telling photograph eluded him. “What his photographs do reveal,” adds Perich, “is how much [Kennedy] enjoyed being with Caroline; it’s easy to see the joy in his face.”

The gallery space itself—situated between the American History Museum’s exhibition, “Communities in a Changing Nation” and the “First Ladies” exhibition—provides some notable context, says Perich. Thoughts of civil rights, more specifically Kennedy’s push for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, may linger with visitors as they exit the preceding exhibition, and encounter the photograph of John holding his three-year-old daughter Caroline in his lap. In the next gallery, you can hear the recording of Michelle Obama talking about Jackie Kennedy’s grace and style, while admiring the image of Jackie cradling the 5 1/2 week-old John Jr.

“For here is this beautiful, intriguing, dynamic family, and we know what’s going to happen to them,” says Perich. “Thoughts about Jackie’s time as First Lady and Kennedy’s political career swirl around to create a moment that puts them into a historical context and explains why they continue to be relevant.”

Courtesy of National Postal Museum.

There is a scene in A Hard Day’s Night, the 1964 mockumentary about the Beatles (starring the Beatles), when John Lennon leaves a band practice with a dancing girl on his arm. His manager asks where he is going, and the Brit quips, “She’s gonna show me her stamp collection.”

His comment was facetious, of course. But that’s not to say that Lennon, who was murdered 30 years ago today, wouldn’t have found a stamp collection appealing. (Seriously.) After all, the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum has a rare album of Lennon’s—his boyhood stamp album.

Former curator of philately Wilson Hulme first read about the existence of the album in May 2005. The then-owner Stanley Gibbons Ltd., a London stamp and autograph dealer, was looking to sell it, and the National Postal Museum jumped on it. Stanley Parkes, an older cousin of Lennon’s, was able to verify that it was the hardcover Mercury stamp album that he started and later gave to John to continue.

Kids tend to collect stamps between the ages of 7 and 12, says Cheryl Ganz, chief curator of philately at the museum. According to Parkes, Lennon took interest for a few years starting at age 9, when he was living with his Aunt Mimi and her husband George in Liverpool. In the inside, he half-erased Parkes’ name and inscribed his own with his address. Though it is impossible to tell which stamps Lennon added to Parkes’ collection, the album contains 565, organized by country.

Courtesy of National Postal Museum.

“Although there is not a rare stamp in there, I have to say I just find an incredible charm to it,” says Ganz, who especially likes the beards Lennon doodled over pictures of Queen Victoria and King George VI (right) on the title page. “We took it because the story there is much bigger. It’s about an emerging childhood of someone who turns out to be more or less a creative genius.”

The museum has made it a point to acquire artifacts related to famous stamp collectors. Among its collection are items once owned by Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal, actor Yul Brynner, president Franklin Roosevelt, violinist Jascha Heifetz and photographer Ansel Adams. But, as Smithsonian writer Owen Edwards suggests, the discovery that Lennon collected brings a certain cool factor to the hobby.

The stamp album was put on display in the fall 2005 in the exhibition, “John Lennon: The Lost Album” to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the musician’s birth, on October 9, 1940. The response was overwhelming. “We had the longest lines we’ve ever had to get into the museum to see something,” says Ganz. “I think it was a combination of things. For some people, it was a nostalgia, bringing back their own youth. For other people, it was all their great music and when it played in important moments in their lives. When a family came into the museum, it was about the parents telling their kids, ‘gosh, let me tell you about the first time I heard one of their songs, or the first time I saw them on TV, or which one I had a crush on.’ It triggers thoughts and moments that you want to share.”

The album is not currently on display at the museum but can be paged through on this web exhibition.