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- Can Robots Replace Michelangelo?

- The Surprise Reappearance of a Rare Frog Has Scientists Leaping to Protect Its Habitat

- The Man Who’s Saving America’s Forgotten Grapes

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Innovation | December 2023

Can Robots Replace Michelangelo?

In the birthplace of Italian sculpture, a powerful automated machine tries its hand at an ancient craft

Pressurized water shoots from the drill’s head to cool the marble and prevent excessive dust (detail). Caleb Stein

Photographs by Caleb Stein

Text by Elaine Sciolino

To understand the magic and mystery of Carrara marble, I was told to start with a ride up a mountain. So one crisp afternoon last spring, I donned a blue safety helmet and an orange vest and hopped into a Land Rover with Michael Bruni, a local guide.

The two-way, one-lane road was badly paved, and halfway up the mountain it became a rutted track littered with rocky debris. The incline was so steep and the switchback curves so sharp that Bruni had to stop the truck before we could turn. Beneath our wheels rocks shook and bounced the truck like a toy. Bruni explained that chunks of the mountain break off from the cliffs during heavy rainstorms or when mountain goats clamber up the slopes. He gesticulated dramatically as he told me about past disasters.

“Both hands on the wheel!” I said.

The mountaintop quarries of Tuscany’s Apuan Alps have supplied artists and architects since the Roman era, producing more marble than anywhere else on earth. Caleb Stein

Eventually we arrived at a flat lookout. Cut into the mountainside, off to our right, was a base installation for water tanks, trucks, forklifts and other heavy machinery. Workers wielding power saws cut blocks of stone ten feet deep from the sheer face of the mountain. There was no silence, only the shrieking of machines drilling into stone. It was only when I looked out toward the jagged peaks of the Apuan Alps and saw them frosted not with snow but with white, chalky marble that I could appreciate the vibrant beauty of this precious stone, which has defined this part of Italy for more than 2,000 years.

Detail of Michelangelo’s Pietà. The master searched Carrara for months to find the perfect block of “statuario,” a revered type of pure white stone. Smith Archive / Alamy

In antiquity, Roman enslaved workers, free men and convicts removed marble from these mountains with wedges and picks to build Trajan’s Column and parts of the Pantheon. Great sculptors have been drawn to Carrara in the centuries since, from Bernini, Canova and Rodin to Jean Arp and Henry Moore. But nobody is more closely associated with Carrara than Michelangelo, perhaps the greatest sculptor ever to live. In 1497, when he was only 22, he came looking for the ideal pale stone for La Pietà, the first of his Renaissance marble masterpieces, now installed at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. Bruni explained that Michelangelo spent long stretches in these hills in search of perfect blocks of marble, especially the bright white “statuario,” a type of pure stone nearly devoid of silica that best captures the vitality and sheen of the human form.

Michelangelo cultivated relationships with excavators, cutters and carvers so that they would favor him with their best blocks, and he offered precise instructions about the shape and size of the marble he desired. Then, satisfied, he would hammer and chisel until the figure revealed itself. His ghost still hovers above the quarries here. You can hear the famous words attributed to the Italian master: “Every block of stone has a statue inside it, and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

The British-born, New York-based photographer Caleb Stein has long been fascinated with that moment of discovery, which he identifies as “the point where the suggestion of a shape of a figure begins to emerge from what is still a discernible block of marble.” Earlier this year, Stein learned that an industrial area outside Carrara was home to a group of up-and-coming marble sculptors—powerful, automated robots belonging to a company called Litix (formerly Robotor). Stein, whose photographs often highlight the sculptural nature of the human body, traveled to Carrara to document the process of a single sculpture’s creation by a robot from beginning to end, the subject of these accompanying photographs. “I was interested in making intimate ‘portraits’ of the robots at work,” he said. “I wanted to extend tenderness and sensuality to the process, just as I would when photographing a person.”

Marble blocks near Litix’s headquarters await carving. Although statuario deposits are thought to be gone, sculptors still swear by Carrara stone. Caleb Stein

Litix is the brainchild of Filippo Tincolini, a sculptor who was educated in Carrara, and Giacomo Massari, a local entrepreneur, both in their 40s. For decades, Carrara sculptors had been using small machines like electric grinders, diamond-beaded band saws and pneumatic chisels. Tincolini saw an opportunity to take the process further. “My father made electrical parts for assembly lines, and though I didn’t want to go into his business, I learned from him,” he said. The younger Tincolini bought an automobile assembly line robot and put it to work on stone. “I didn’t know how to use it, but little by little, and with a lot of marble dust, I figured out how it worked and how to improve it.”

Today, Tincolini, Massari, and their team of technicians and artisans create sculptures on commission for artists, architects and designers, and they sell their technology to clients around the world, including three sizes of Litix’s signature robot and a proprietary software that uses a digital scan of an artist’s 3D model or maquette to auto-program the robot for sculpting. They also use their technology for cultural preservation. A few years ago, for example, in collaboration with the Institute for Digital Archaeology, a heritage-preservation organization based in Oxford, England, their robot produced a one-third scale model of Syria’s Palmyra Arch, the 1,800-year-old monument destroyed by Islamic State fighters in 2015. The copy, a 20-foot-high scale reproduction made of Egyptian marble, took five weeks to manufacture. It toured several cities around the world, including London and Washington, D.C., and is now undergoing cleaning and maintenance in Carrara. The hope is that its final destination will be near the site of the original in Palmyra. “The message was, ‘You can destroy it, but we have the technology to make it live again,’” Tincolini told me.

The original marble block chosen for the sculpture, known as Flowered Slave, weighed more than 770 pounds. When the robot was finished, the remaining sculpture weighed about 300 pounds.  Caleb Stein

The robot proceeds from large-scale milling to detailed carving by selecting from increasingly fine-pointed instruments that attach to its “arm.” Caleb Stein

On a tour of the area, I passed through a warehouse and traditional workshop with shelves stuffed with marble funerary sculptures and crucifixes; lining the edges of the floor were decades-old hand-carved works alongside robot-created pieces such as a gigantic sculpture, carved from black marble, of a baby wearing a blindfold.

Massari has his best lines down pat. “What used to take months or even years can now be done in days,” he said. “Machines can run round-the-clock. They don’t get sick or sleep or go on vacation.” One of his favorite stories is about Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss, Antonio Canova’s 1793 neoclassical masterpiece that sits in the Louvre. “It took Canova five years,” Massari said. To make a replica “took our machine 270 hours”—less than 12 days.

When I asked Massari whether he thought Michelangelo, who like other great sculptors then and now relied on apprentices to create his masterpieces, would have used robot technology had it been available to him, Massari seemed to bridle. “Of course he would use robots—100 percent! I tell people who question what we do: How did you come here, on foot, on a horse or in a car? The car cuts time off your journey. So does a robot. An algorithm does what a caliper used to do. I have the time to contemplate a beautiful sunset because a machine does all the hard stuff.”

Photographer Caleb Stein sought to capture the moment when “a figure emerges from the clinical, methodical lines carved by the robot.” Caleb Stein

At Litix's studio, pressurized water shoots from the drill’s head to cool the marble and prevent excessive dust. Caleb Stein

Already, Litix has made sculptures for artists including the late Iraqi British architect Zaha Hadid, the American Jeff Koons and Giuseppe Penone, a luminary of Italy’s Arte Povera movement. Massari opened the door to a cavernous carving studio. “We’re working on a masterpiece—something crazy, big, huge,” he said. “A very special piece. The selection of the block was crazy, because finding a pure white block is very hard. It’s a famous sculptor. But we don’t want to talk too much.”

Inside, Robotor One, the company’s star robot, an 11-foot-long, zinc-alloy anthropomorphic arm, was busy at work, milling the block by moving methodically back and forth. The arm’s diamond-studded “finger” was spinning so fast that I couldn’t see it moving, and water sprayed out from the arm, cooling the tip, which was fashioning the intricate lacework of a woman’s voluminous skirt from the stone. “The final sculpture will be about four tons,” Massari went on. “The machine time is going to be 18 months.”

Inside a marble quarry in Carrara, Italy. Caleb Stein

“I wanted to extend tenderness and sensuality to the process, just as I would when photographing a person,” says Stein. Caleb Stein

At that point, the final details will be executed by human sculptors—even Litix’s techno-evangelist owners don’t pretend that its machines can match the finest subtleties of human artisanship. In an adjoining studio, I found a group of such artisans, streaked and frosted with marble powder, putting the finishing touches on several sculptures commissioned by a well-known British artist who wished to remain anonymous.

It took the robot four days to complete its work on Flowered Slave, what artist and Litix co-founder Filippo Tincolini calls “freeing form from excess matter.” Caleb Stein

Artisans then spent another 20 days finishing the work by hand—”giving life to the sculpture,” Tincolini says. “You have to know when to stop.” Caleb Stein

“I come from the old tradition, when everything was done by hand,” said Romina del Sarto, 53, who was working with a small hand tool. Her shoes, and even her braid, were caked with marble dust. Del Sarto began working in her father’s sculpting workshop when she was 17. “Everyone lives off marble here, and I’m grateful for the job,” she said. “But sometimes Carrara feels as if it’s losing a part of its history.”

I found a living link with that fading past in the nearby town of Pietrasanta, when one afternoon I visited Enzo Pasquini, who has worked only with hand tools since his days as an apprentice more than 70 years ago. He is now 83. Around town he’s known as a master who can carve the most elaborate details into stone.

His home is set in a small farm of olive and cherry trees, a vineyard, a fruit orchard, and vegetable and rose gardens. Taped to the wall of his studio was a yellowed photo of Michelangelo’s Pietà that, he told me, has inspired him for much of his professional life. “I always worked from beginning to end, from the huge block of marble to the delicate sculpture,” he said. “Chiseling the block—it’s a heavy, heavy job. I was strong when I was young and didn’t mind it.”

His tools include hammers, chisels, saws, rasps, files and curved steel calipers in several sizes. There are also tools he made himself, such as a hand drill called “the violin” that needs two people to make it work; one person holds the handle of the pointed drill, while the other pulls on a string that drives the point into the stone. “We used this in the days when there was no electric drill!”

To design Flowered Slave, Tincolini modified digital scans of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave in part by adorning the bust with blooming flowers. Caleb Stein

Robotor One’s technique creates a surface resembling a “topographic map,” says Stein, which is smoothed over by artisans. Caleb Stein

Pasquini has used his skills mainly to help other people produce their sculptures in marble; among his carving partners was film star Gina Lollobrigida, who went on to become a respected sculptor and photographer after her film career and who died in January 2023. “I am not an artist,” Pasquini said. “I’m just an artisan.” But he has made his own sculptures, many of which he keeps in his house and studio—a small, refined figurine of a boy fishing; a baby with tiny, delicate fingers; a pack of playing cards.

He picked up another tool made of two pieces of wood and a vise held in place with glued-in nails. “This is my robot,” he said. “If I want to do something that’s good—that’s mine—I have to do it the old way. But you have to go with the times. There are fewer and fewer young people who want to do hard physical labor. But machines won’t change the sensitivity of the work. You will always need the sculptor for that.”

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Caleb Stein | READ MORE

Caleb Stein is a photographer whose forthcoming book, How to Move a Mountain, will feature photographs from this series.

Elaine Sciolino | READ MORE

Elaine Sciolino is a Paris-based writer for the New York Times and the author of The Seine: The River That Made Paris.

Science | December 2023

The Surprise Reappearance of a Rare Frog Has Scientists Leaping to Protect Its Habitat

The marsupial frog, which incubates its young in a pouch on its back, was thought to be extinct in some countries

The horned marsupial frog, which carries its eggs in a pouch on its back, lives in the canopy of tropical rainforests. Javier Aznar Gonzáles de Rueda

By Danna Staaf

The word “marsupial” typically evokes a kangaroo or perhaps a koala, something furry and warm-blooded that protects its babies in a pouch. But a surprising variety of creatures have evolved this unusual means of parental care, including crustaceans, seahorses—and frogs.

With jaunty peaks sticking up from its eyelids that may help it camouflage as a dry leaf, the horned marsupial frog is “a fascinating creature that people can’t wrap their heads around,” says James Muchmore, founder of Save the Chocó, a conservation group dedicated to protecting this threatened region of Ecuadorean rainforest. Instead of laying thousands of eggs in water, like most frogs, female horned marsupial frogs produce only ten or fewer of the largest amphibian eggs in the world, at a whopping diameter of one centimeter. Males then fertilize these eggs and place them into a pouch on the mother’s back, which is what earns the species, and dozens of related frogs, the “marsupial” moniker. As the embryos grow, they develop structures similar to mammalian placentas through which their mother delivers oxygen, water and possibly nutrients. After about two months, horned marsupial frog eggs hatch as forest-ready froglets, skipping the tadpole stage. This remarkable adaptation frees them from the need to find ponds or streams for egg-laying. They spend their lives high in the trees of Central and South American rainforests, where the humid air is thought to keep their skin from drying out.

Since the second half of the 20th century, however, these forests have been devastated by logging and plantation clearing, a threat exacerbated in the 1990s by a global panzootic (a non-human pandemic) caused by chytrid fungus. For decades, the horned marsupial frog, which once ranged from Costa Rica south to Ecuador, was feared extinct in both countries, surviving only as endangered populations in Panama and parts of Colombia.

But Costa Rican herpetologist Stanley Salazar still searched the forest for remote areas similar to known Panamanian frog habitats. One evening in 2013, he says, “I heard the frog call I’d been hoping to hear for the past three years—like popping the cork from a bottle.” He cut a path toward the call with his machete, then turned off his flashlight. “When it sang, it was right in front of me,” he says. “I turned on the light and saw it. In that moment I was incredibly excited.”

Then, in Ecuador, in 2018, researchers headed to a little-studied region of the Chocó that narrowly escaped destruction after the nonprofit Jocotoco Foundation partnered with Muchmore to purchase land threatened by logging. They returned with joyous news: They’d seen—and heard—horned marsupial frogs. “It’s extremely loud for such a little animal,” says Muchmore, who later visited the area. “You could hear them throughout the jungle.”

The frog’s rediscovery, says Martin Schaefer, CEO of Jocotoco, proves the importance of protecting remote, vulnerable habitats. “Hope is something we all can create with our actions,” he says.

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Danna Staaf | READ MORE

Danna Staaf is a marine biologist and the author of several books including Nursery Earth and The Lives of Octopuses and Their Relatives.

Arts & Culture | December 2023

The Man Who’s Saving America’s Forgotten Grapes

Bordeaux. Napa Valley. Missouri? This vintner wants to put this once-booming wine region back on the map

Stark-Star grapes—native to North America, and considered a “champion cultivar” by Jerry Eisterhold, founder of TerraVox Winery. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

By Alex Mayyasi

Photographs by Jenn Ackerman and Tim Gruber

The morning dew dampens my sneakers as we ascend the green, undulating hill. Jerry Eisterhold, wearing a wide-brimmed hat against the Missouri summer sun, pulls a bunch of grapes of a type known as Delicatessen off the vine. “I got this one from a guy who should have won an amateur wine competition,” he says. “But the flavors were so unusual, the judges didn’t know what to do with it.”

Eisterhold, 72, is giving me a tour of what might be America’s most unusual vineyard. He leads me through rows upon rows of grapes—varieties with names that haven’t appeared in wine stores in generations, if ever. There’s Captivator, Amerbonte, Marguerite.

As we stroll, Eisterhold gestures here and there, affably extolling his grapes and explaining their quirks and characteristics. In one row he stops to inspect his Rommel vines, which are growing poorly this year, and points out little bumps on the leaves—a telltale sign that Japanese beetles are getting to them. “But we forgive it its sins,” he says, of the grape’s susceptibility to the common vineyard pest. “It makes a nice white with tannins.”

Eisterhold is convinced that Missouri can help revitalize the global wine industry—again. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

An aerial photo of sun-dappled rolling hills of TerraVox’s 14-acre vineyard, not far outside Kansas City, Missouri. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

Eisterhold’s day job is designing museum exhibitions, but he has spent decades accumulating this collection of grapes that—despite an illustrious past—have been largely forgotten and were very nearly lost. His winery, TerraVox, situated on rolling hills just outside Kansas City, is a commercial business. Guests arrive most weekends for tastings, and local restaurants and bars sell TerraVox wines. But unlike most wineries, which specialize in a dozen or fewer popular grapes, TerraVox’s modest 14 acres grow around 40 varieties, most of them practically unknown—and all of them native to North America. It’s a wildly inefficient business model, but profit has never been the point. Instead, Eisterhold describes TerraVox, likely the only winery devoted exclusively to American grapes, rather than the European grapes grown in regions like Sonoma, California, as a “living museum.”

Long before California’s Napa Valley established its international reputation, Missouri was America’s leading wine region—the legacy of German immigrants who founded the town of Hermann, whose rocky soil and abundance of wild grapes inspired them to trade agriculture for viticulture. In the late 19th century, Missouri produced more wine than any other state, and Hermann’s Stone Hill Winery—famous for making one of the world’s best-selling wines—won seven gold medals at world’s fairs between 1873 and 1901. One of France’s most renowned wine critics wrote that the U.S. was “destined to become … one of the great wine-producing regions of the world,” and called out Missouri in particular as having the most prolific vineyards and “yielding the best wines.”

Prohibition swept it all away. “Even now the picturesque vineclad hills are being dismantled of the vineyards that for half a century have added beauty, fame and wealth to the community,” a Missouri newspaper lamented in May 1919. Hermann residents replaced the grapes with broomcorn, and Stone Hill Winery turned its cellars into mushroom farms.

After the end of Prohibition and World War II, Missourians replanted some local grape varieties. Stone Hill reopened in 1965, and hobbyists across the state harvested once again. Restarting from scratch, however, many Missouri wineries settled into a niche of producing cheap, sweet wines, as most Americans who could afford to bought European wine, which was increasingly easy and affordable to import by steamship.

Still, local wine culture endured. Eisterhold was raised on his family’s farm in the Gasconade River Valley, not far from Hermann, where the family tended subsistence crops of corn, wheat, oats and alfalfa—and where Eisterhold grew up making wine along with his parents and five siblings. There was nothing fancy about the hobby. “You’d get a very tall ladder, climb up a 50-foot-tall tree and cut down wild grapevines,” Eisterhold remembers. “To this day, I can recall those flavors. It was pretty solid wine.”

As an adult, he continued to make wine from grapes he grew in his backyard in his spare time. Then, one afternoon in the early 1980s, when Eisterhold was in his 30s, he traveled to Lincoln, Nebraska, for business. He was perusing a used bookstore with floors that literally sagged under the weight of stacked books when he pulled an obscure tome from a shelf: Foundations of American Grape Culture, originally published in 1909 by somebody named Thomas Volney Munson. “It was like finding a trapdoor in the basement that leads to Jules Verne’s lost world,” he says.

Stark-Star grapes hang in rich bunches—one of more than 40 varieties grown at TerraVox. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

Eisterhold’s vintage copy of American Grape Growing and Wine Making by George Husmann, sometimes called the father of Missouri viticulture, is a helpful complement to Eisterhold’s bible, a.k.a. T.V. Munson’s Foundations of American Grape Culture. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

The author, a Texan, described breeding hundreds of native grapes that he sold widely, especially to winemakers in Missouri and the center of the country. When Eisterhold flipped to a diagram showing some of these grapes, he’d never heard of them. “The only thing to do,” Eisterhold recalls, “was to plant the grapes and see what they had to say.”

What began as an experiment grew into an obsession. As Eisterhold tracked down Munson’s native grapes, which had almost disappeared during Prohibition, he became ever more determined to restore respect and recognition to America’s original wine culture. Referring to the French wine critic who predicted, in 1873, that wines from across the U.S. would one day rival the best in Europe, Eisterhold likes to say, “He may still be proven right.”

But Eisterhold’s goal is not only to preserve and promote obscure grape varieties and forgotten flavors. As he delved into the history of American wine, he learned that these grapes once saved the world’s wine industry—and he believes they could do so again.

Grapes grow all over the world, practically everywhere birds fly and spread their seeds. Making wine is as simple as crushing the grapes and waiting—the juice is so high in sugar that yeasts on the skin will ferment the juice, creating alcohol.

For this reason, evidence of ancient winemaking has been found around the world. Patrick McGovern, an archaeologist and an editor of The Origins and Ancient History of Wine, traces the emergence of a consistent winemaking culture—of grape breeding and standardized fermentation practices—to modern-day Iran some 7,000 years ago, or possibly to Georgia, in the Caucasus, perhaps even earlier.

Egyptian pharaohs drank wine; so did some Chinese emperors. It was an elite beverage, generally made from one species of grape, Vitis vinifera, that grows in temperate climates like the Mediterranean. Commoners tended to drink beer, made from grain that grew everywhere.

In A History of the World in Six Glasses, the British author Tom Standage points to ancient Greece, where vinifera vines grew happily, as the birthplace of a wine culture shared by peasants and philosopher-kings alike. The Roman Empire adopted Greece’s wine culture, and its legions spread the vines across Europe.

When Europeans colonized North America, they brought vinifera with them. But the vines died within a few seasons, undone by unfamiliar pests like phylloxera, a tiny insect, or by the intemperately cold winters and hot summers. The highest-profile effort to cultivate European grapes in the Americas was led by Thomas Jefferson, who enlisted an Italian winemaker to grow vinifera vines in his Monticello garden with the help of his skilled staff of enslaved agriculturists. Like other farmers up and down the East Coast, they failed.

Reilly Johnson, one of TerraVox’s vineyard workers, picks Delicatessen grapes off the vine in September 2023, the same month TerraVox announced a larger and higher-quality harvest than usual. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

Jean-Louis Horvilleur, TerraVox’s winemaker, prepares Delicatessen grapes for processing. Soon, the yeast will be added to spur fermentation. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

But North America is home to the world’s greatest diversity of wild grapes, and Europeans marveled that native grapes grew seemingly everywhere. Unfortunately, most are not very edible, says Andrew Walker, emeritus professor of viticulture and enology at the University of California, Davis. Native American tribes gathered wild grapes for juices, jams and medicine, but there’s little record of their fermenting grapes into wine. Most are so acidic, Walker says, that grape breeders even today lose the enamel on their teeth from tasting them. Early Americans who tried making wine from local grapes complained that it had a “foxy,” “wet-dog” flavor.

Before the colonists’ vinifera vines died, however, the wind carried their pollen to wild grapevines nearby. In lucky cases, says Stephen Casscles, author of Grapes of the Hudson Valley, farmers in New York or Virginia might find—next to their withered European vines—a healthy hybrid that had inherited the American grape’s hardiness and the European grape’s flavors. And so North American grapes managed to form the base of a new American wine culture. By the early 1800s, America boasted wine regions in New York’s Hudson Valley, the area around Cincinnati, and elsewhere—all based on European-American hybrid grapes by then bred intentionally.

America’s most important wine breeder and researcher was none other than T.V. Munson. From his home in Denison, Texas, in the late 19th century he roamed thousands of miles on horseback and by train, literally jumping off both to collect wild grapes. And he recruited others to do the same, offering a $10 reward to whoever returned with the most promising find.

At the time, the Hermann, Missouri, wine region was built on the Norton grape, a French-American hybrid developed in Virginia. But most hybrids developed out East couldn’t thrive in Texas, Kansas and Missouri. So Munson, working primarily with wild native grapes, found and bred some 300 grapes for the center of the country—some for eating, many others for wine. His grapes helped build the foundations of wine industries in regions where vinifera could not survive, from Texas to Florida. It was the world’s only robust, non-vinifera wine culture.

But Munson did not receive France’s Legion of Honor Chevalier du Mérite Agricole for breeding grapes for wine connoisseurs from Texas and Missouri. He received his agricultural knighthood for saving the European wine industry.

By the 1860s, phylloxera from North America had reached France, hitching a ride on grapevines imported by European botanists. (The reduced travel time of steamships likely allowed the insects, which eat the sap of grapevines, to survive the trans-Atlantic journey.) Within a few years, phylloxerae cut French wine production in half and invaded millions of acres across Europe. Winemakers flooded their fields in desperation, and the French government announced a 300,000-franc reward for a solution.

Familiar with Munson’s reputation, a French representative sought out this prolific American viticulturist. Munson suggested grafting French vines onto the rootstock of American grapevines, which had developed resistance to the insects over many generations. French vintners had already tried grafting and failed. But with his encyclopedic knowledge of American grapes, Munson suggested specific Texas grapevines that grow in chalky soil like that of Southern France. These grapes ultimately saved Europe’s vineyards. To this day, all of Europe’s famous grapes grow on vines that have been grafted onto American rootstock to protect against phylloxera.

American vineyards faced their own deadly foe in the temperance movement. Like the rest of the country’s vineyards, Munson’s personal vineyard was uprooted during Prohibition. Munson had died in 1913, and by the 1950s, he was mostly forgotten.

In the following decades, winemakers all over the world used modern pesticides in intensive efforts to grow varieties of vinifera, particularly the so-called noble grapes. These six grapes—Pinot Noir, Cabernet Sauvignon, Merlot, Chardonnay, Sauvignon Blanc and Riesling—originally hail from France or Germany. Along with a handful of other European grapes, such as Syrah, also a vinifera variety, they still dominate the fine wine industry.

Even today, the most respected wine regions in the United States, including parts of California, Virginia and New York, are those that manage to grow vinifera. And those where only European-American hybrids will thrive, including the area around Hermann, Missouri, are considered second-tier or even irrelevant.

Eisterhold never intended to get into the wine industry. When he left the family farm for agricultural college in Columbia, Missouri, in 1969, he studied soil, but he found his art classes more intriguing. “My reasoning was that you go to school to learn something that is unfamiliar to you—not what you know,” he says. He transferred to the Kansas City Art Institute, learned graphic design and graduated to a job at the Kansas City Museum as an exhibit designer. Six years later, he opened his own studio to help museums design new exhibits and experiences.

He still runs Eisterhold Associates Inc. today, with a client list that includes the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library and Museum in Independence, Missouri, and the Jurassic Park Discovery Center in Orlando, Florida. He’s best known for working on some of America’s first civil rights museums and exhibits, like the Rosa Parks Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, and Philadelphia’s African American Museum.

It was on that business trip to Lincoln, Nebraska, in the early 1980s, when he stumbled on the book that changed his life. Like a Rosetta stone, Munson’s dusty old book offered a record of a lost culture: grapes and wines that had been bred, shared and enjoyed across the Plains and Midwest. Returning home to Kansas City, Eisterhold was inspired to try making them himself. But he couldn’t find any nurseries that stocked Munson’s grapes. So he wrote to an administrator at Grayson, a community college near Munson’s long-closed nursery in Texas, hoping that Munson’s vines might still be growing there, and asked for any cuttings they might be willing to provide.

Throughout the harvest season, TerraVox isolates each variety for frequent lab tests—for sugar, pH levels and more—that will indicate the exact best time for picking. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

What came back in the mail looked like a bundle of sticks. Eisterhold stuck them in the ground and watered them with a garden hose, but his backyard was too shady, and critters stole the few grapes that grew.

Undeterred, in 1994 Eisterhold chartered a plane to find a site where he could build a home with a proper vineyard. From working on soil surveys in college, he knew which spots would be fertile but not so rich in organic matter that lush growth would overwhelm the vines. From the sky, he sought out suitable areas that were undeveloped and relatively close to Kansas City’s Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, where his wife, Kate Garland, worked as a conservator. They were in luck: One promising site was for sale.

As it happened, Garland had an uncle who taught at the University of California, Davis, home to a prestigious viticulture program. So on weekends the couple flew to California, stayed with her uncle and took extension courses.

At first, Eisterhold planted around 60 varieties of Munson grapes, which he sourced from Grayson and from agricultural repositories at Davis and in Geneva, New York, that stockpile seeds and plants. (He guessed, correctly, that Munson’s renown had led these genetic banks to hold on to these old grapes for researchers and breeders.)

He also planted rows of Norton, the well-established French-American hybrid, figuring that if the Munson grapes failed, he could at least sell Norton to other winemakers. And he planted other hybrids and even a vinifera, since he thought it would be neat if he managed to make some Zinfandel. (There are thousands of named vinifera varieties, including hugely popular grapes such as Tempranillo and Moscato.)

It took several years to set up trellises and coax the vines to grow, but in 2000, Eisterhold finally harvested grapes on his land. It didn’t go so well: He managed to gather enough grapes to produce exactly one bottle of wine, a hodgepodge vintage made from a few grapes from each vine. Eisterhold keeps it on display in the TerraVox tasting room, unopened. “It’s better as a story,” he says. “I’m sure it’s god awful.”

His University of California, Davis, classes helped him diagnose the vineyard’s problems: He needed a drip-irrigation system for the new vines, even though the hardy plants would rarely need it once they matured. He had to weed more. Sprays that killed pests were probably self-defeating since they also killed the pests’ predators.

Eisterhold’s biggest challenge, though, was the terrible reputation of American grapes. Even many breeders and sommeliers interested in local wines consider them subpar. Rather than share his plans with other winemakers, then, Eisterhold says he “learned to shut up” about Munson’s grapes.

Luxuriant bunches of the experimental grape known only as 09-28-2. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

To convert grapes into wine, workers at TerraVox add yeast to crushed Delicatessen grapes—and the magic of fermentation begins. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

The next year, the vines fruited, and Eisterhold invited friends to help with the harvest and winemaking. (He compares himself to Tom Sawyer, promising a good time, then recruiting new folks each year after the previous crew realized how much work was involved.) When Eisterhold tried the wine they made from Munson grapes, one or two tasted terrible, and he abandoned those vines. Most tasted fine, although Garland, who is French-American, tried only a few sips, passing ambivalent judgment with her body language, or what Eisterhold calls a “Gallic sniff.” If Missouri was destined to be the next great wine region, it wasn’t clear from these first vintages.

Eager to improve them, Eisterhold ditched most of the hybrids to focus on Munson’s native grapes. “Other people were growing hybrids,” he says. “The thing that needed to be done—because literally no one else was doing it, because it made no sense to do it—was to pull some of these grapes out of the dustbin of history.” Finally, in 2011, he sent a package of 24 small vials to one of his former teachers at Davis, a wine consultant named Clark Smith.

When Smith poured their contents into glasses, they were clearly wine, but he didn’t recognize the names on the labels: Lomanto, Hidalgo, Lenoir. “I almost thought it was some kind of practical joke,” Smith says. But Eisterhold had now harvested Munson grapes for more than a decade. (They’d improved enough that his wife even deigned to drink them.) “I tasted the wine,” Smith went on. “There were some technical flaws. But a lot of them were just plain good. … I thought Jerry was really on to something.” He agreed to visit Eisterhold’s vineyard, and by the end of his tour, he’d suggested that Eisterhold “just go for it” and open a commercial winery.

Smith, who became an adviser, helped Eisterhold hire and train staff and design a floor plan for a winery connected to his house and the offices of Eisterhold Associates Inc. They broke ground on TerraVox that spring. The name means “voice of the land,” a reference to Eisterhold’s belief that working with local grapes is a conversation between him and the grapes.

“Some of these wines will take you on flavor journeys that you don’t find anywhere else,” he says. One of the grapes, which Munson named America, tastes, remarkably, like meat. Another, Cloeta, tastes of cinnamon with smoky notes, which is common in dark beers and spirits such as Scotch, but rarer in wine.

Like a museum curator, Eisterhold continued to collect additional Munson grapes, such as Delicatessen, which he requested from a small Midwestern winemaker who had entered it in an amateur wine competition. He has never made profit-and-loss statements, instead subsidizing TerraVox with personal savings and not taking any salary himself.

To converse with Munson’s grapes and realize their value often requires a spirit of experimentation and uncommon patience. During my visit, TerraVox’s head winemaker, Jean-Louis Horvilleur, a well-bearded, Birkenstock-clad man whom Eisterhold and Smith hired away from a Texas winery in 2019, described how during his first harvest the challenge of working with dozens of unfamiliar varieties literally gave him nightmares. There were no ready-made charts, based on hundreds of years of winemaking tradition, telling him when to harvest the grapes according to their sugar and pH levels, or how the grapes and wine would change if he waited—as there were for, say, the Tempranillo he used to work with back in Texas. “There’s more looming fears with these grapes,” he says. “More uncertainty.”

One of Horvilleur’s main duties, once a vintage is ready, is testing alcohol content; TerraVox’s wines generally range from 7 to 21 percent alcohol, with most closer to the former. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

On a glass door in the TerraVox laboratory, Horvilleur records the progress of the Wetumka grape, including overall weight, expected volumes per grape and more. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

That uncertainty can lead to creative problem-solving. During that same harvest, Horvilleur loaded a batch of Wetumka, a bright-green grape that Munson first bred in 1893, into TerraVox’s wine press. The grapes were so pulpy that the press couldn’t separate the skins and flesh from the juice, which sprayed onto the walls and ceiling.

Horvilleur, soaked and sticky, ended the day scraping fruit matter from behind his ear as he measured the disappointing yield of juice.

But he made a note for next year: He’d pitch Eisterhold on fermenting the grapes with their skins on for a day before pressing, which would produce an orange wine—a style that’s grown in popularity for the past decade—and might break down the pulp. A year later, in 2020, they successfully produced a cheery, almost-tropical orange Wetumka that is now a fan favorite.

The Wetumka is what Eisterhold sometimes calls a “good missionary” for his historic grapes. He and his staff increasingly abandon varieties that don’t produce winning wine, winnowing their plantings from 60 grapes toward a target of 20, and in recent years TerraVox has received gold medals and silver ribbons from the San Francisco Chronicle and other wine arbiters. “One of the secrets of making good wine is that a hell of a lot of stuff has gone down the drain,” Eisterhold admits. “Because we can’t afford to have a bad missionary out there.”

When I ask him if he feels he’s succeeded in earning respect for Munson’s grapes, Eisterhold replies, “Not yet.” While TerraVox has produced palate-pleasing missionaries like Wetumka, he aspires to create a big market of customers devoted to American grapes, and even to cultivate champions that, as the 19th-century French wine critic predicted, would make Missouri a marquee destination for wine-lovers.

Today, as in Munson’s day, North American grapes have something unique to offer the wider wine world: Their unusual hardiness and tolerance of heat are distinct advantages at a time when the warming climate is already affecting harvests, with grapes ripening weeks earlier than in decades past and wineries struggling with water shortages, wildfire smoke and springtime frosts. Forecasters predict that eventually climate change could shut down as many vineyards as phylloxera once did (albeit with the twist that colder regions, like England, are seeing improved production).

At the moment, winemakers are not racing to uproot their “noble” grapes and replace them with American grapes, but the slow machinery of the global wine industry is beginning to adapt to evident threats. One organizing body in France, for example, recently gave Bordeaux vintners permission to use six new grape varieties (all vinifera, but less popular and more heat-tolerant) in their strictly controlled blends. Eisterhold has sent cuttings to European breeders who are concerned about climate change. And a small but expanding number of wineries and restaurants in the Northeast and Midwest are growing and selling French-American hybrids, attracted by their resilience and sustainability.

Eisterhold says the potential for native grapes to make the wine world more resilient, by increasing its genetic diversity, has always been central to his project. Growing more kinds of grapes, he says, “hedges your bets as we deal with what, I think, will be an increasingly uncertain and volatile future.” At the very least, wine breeders could develop new grapes that contain trace amounts of North American varieties—just enough to provide benefits like heat tolerance. At Davis, Walker bred grapes with resistance to Pierce’s disease, which kills vinifera but not American grapes, that was still 97 percent vinifera. The implicit promise is to provide resilience while minimally sacrificing flavor.

But if Eisterhold can help to garner respect and recognition for local grapes, that could go a long way toward convincing winemakers—and wine drinkers—that turning to non-European grapes is not a sacrifice or a downgrade but rather an opportunity for exploration.

Visitors enjoy a September 2023 wine tasting at TerraVox. Tastings generally last from an hour to 90 minutes. Jenn Ackerman + Tim Gruber

During the end of my visit to TerraVox, I’m struck by the contrast between these grand ambitions and the day-to-day work on the vineyard. At a tasting of five TerraVox ports, a group of guests listens attentively to Horvilleur explain the history of Munson’s grapes. Eisterhold adds that “until Prohibition, Missouri was the Silicon Valley of wine.” The patrons politely accept forms to sign up for a TerraVox wine club. Most tell me they came to enjoy a creative date night or catch up with friends. I find myself wanting to shake them, to make them understand how unique these wines are, how unlikely it is that this winery would even exist.

At the end of the evening, as I stand on the balcony of the tasting room, Eisterhold walks up to me. His cheeks are ruddy. From the sun, perhaps from the wine. He nods toward the nearest rows of vines, where earlier he’d showed me how to prune the canopies to ensure airflow through the vineyard. “I finished the section,” he says proudly.

This is what obsession and contrarian ambition look like: Eisterhold in his wide-brimmed hat, shears in hand, making his way slowly down the row, methodically restoring a living thing from historical obscurity and shepherding it into the future. Each year he learns more about these grapes, and he believes there are dimensions yet to be discovered. “These grapes deserve to live here because they came from here, they’re adapted to here,” Eisterhold told me. “Why haven’t they been nurtured?”

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Alex Mayyasi | READ MORE

Alex Mayyasi is an author and was the founding editor of Gastro Obscura.

Jenn Ackerman | READ MORE

Jenn Ackerman is one-half of the Minneapolis-based husband-and-wife photography duo Ackerman + Gruber.

Tim Gruber | READ MORE

Tim Gruber is one-half of the Minneapolis-based husband-and-wife photography duo Ackerman + Gruber.

Science | December 2023

The World’s Smallest Reindeer Get Their Day in the Sun

On Norway’s Svalbard archipelago, a rare animal is thriving—for now

Svalbard reindeer graze during an early snowfall. If temperatures rise again, food may be trapped under ice during a critical time for packing on winter pounds. Morgan Heim

Photographs by Morgan Heim

Text by Cheryl Katz

Perched on a snow-crusted hill in a glacier-flanked valley known as Reindalen, ecology graduate student Emma Djurberg looks like a modern-day Valkyrie on a quest. Long blond braids frame the scope at her eye as she searches for her target—a shaggy gray creature about the size of a large goat. It’s a Svalbard reindeer, named after the cluster of Norwegian islands it calls home, and Djurberg is waiting for it to poop.

“Reindeer are super-selective eaters,” which their droppings reveal, explains Samantha Dwinnell, a PhD candidate in ecology, who is accompanying Djurberg on this trip to gather data on the unique Svalbard subspecies. The researchers—who include Oline Eikeland, a master’s student in biology, and research assistant Ida Köhn—come from different institutions, but they’re all working on reindeer research at the University Center in Svalbard.

After hours of hiking, researcher Emma Djurberg uses a radio antenna to find a specific reindeer that’s been tagged with a number and fitted with a GPS collar. Morgan Heim

Thando the dog keeps watch as researchers scan the distance for reindeer. The dog was once smacked into the air during a confrontation with a polar bear. Morgan Heim

Guilbert Gates

In addition to feces, the group is collecting ancient antlers from the permafrost. Isotope analysis on these branching bones, shed and regrown each year, can reveal important details about past conditions.

The researchers are also doing a status check on 23 specific reindeer with ear tags. That means hours hiking around the valley with an antenna, following signals from a target’s GPS collar. Once they’ve located an animal, they hunt for a spot where it has grazed and painstakingly record the specific plant parts it has nibbled. They’re fascinated by the way the animals somehow know which plants—and which parts of the plants—are most nutritious at different times of the year. In the early summer, for instance, reindeer zero in on just the heads of certain specific flowers, such as a buttercup-type species called Coptidium spitsbergense. Studies show that animals that target the most nutrient-packed food have a higher body mass. “It makes sense,” Dwinnell says. “They’re not wasting their time on crap.”

A male Svalbard reindeer grazes in Reindalen. The layer of skin and fur that covered his antlers is now coming off, exposing blood that will eventually wash away. Morgan Heim

Oline Eikeland surveys plants where reindeer have grazed. The researchers want to understand why reindeer eat specific parts of plants at certain times of the year. Morgan Heim

As permafrost melts and shifts, bones and antlers emerge. The green color and brittleness indicate that this is a particularly old antler, and it will be sent to a lab for analysis. Morgan Heim

The researchers, however, are focusing intently on what comes out the other end, and after nearly an hour, the reindeer delivers. The team springs into action, scooping up the specimen. The marble-size droppings are a rich source of information on the animals’ diet and health, such as what they’ve been eating, how stressed they are and whether they’re plagued by parasites. During the week they spend here, the women collect roughly 11 pounds of droppings, which they’ll carry back to the lab for analysis.

The archipelago of Svalbard is halfway between Norway and the North Pole. Its largest island, Spitsbergen, holds the world’s northernmost town of Longyearbyen. The coal-mining town is now home to some 2,300 people, a busy tourism industry and the University Center in Svalbard, a Norwegian Arctic research institute. The scientists (along with Thando the dog) began their three-day journey to Reindalen here, carrying 70-pound packs and rifles to protect themselves from the potential threat of polar bears.

Upon locating one of their collared reindeer, Emma Djurberg—using the scope—calls out behavioral observations every ten seconds while Oline Eikeland, seated, takes notes.  Morgan Heim

On Day 1, they scaled a glacier in a whiteout, feeling their way carefully to avoid crevasses. They plunged into chopping wood, hauling water and other taxing chores before they could go to sleep in a rickety old hikers’ shelter. Day 2 consisted of a 17-mile slog over cold, wet tundra to another hut, where corny jokes and sour gummies helped keep their spirits up.

On Day 3, after another long hike, they arrived in Reindalen: a lovely, wide-open valley split by a meandering river. Reindalen is a paradise for Svalbard reindeer, also known as Rangifer tarandus platyrhynchus. Those “eight tiny reindeer” pulling Santa’s sleigh in the classic poem “A Visit From St. Nicholas” must be Svalbard reindeer—they’re the world’s smallest, averaging just three feet tall and five feet long.

Reindeer are the only deer whose females have antlers. They keep them almost a full year, while males shed theirs in winter. Morgan Heim

The team hikes across the valley to search for reindeer from a new vantage point. Morgan Heim

The last active coal mine in Svalbard, which powers Longyearbyen, is slated to close in 2025 and be replaced by other energy sources. Morgan Heim

Reindalen’s isolated location has largely protected the reindeer from disturbance by humans. And lately, as the rapidly changing climate greens the Arctic, these herbivores are thriving on a heaping smorgasbord of plants. In the fastest-warming part of the planet, the Svalbard reindeer’s relative success is a welcome contrast to the challenges facing many other northern animals. Thanks to extended growing seasons fueling abundant and nutritious vegetation, these reindeer can pack on enough pounds in summer to sustain them through the lean winter, when starvation is a leading cause of death.

As a result, the reindeer population in Reindalen has quadrupled over the past 30 years and now numbers roughly 1,700. Similar benefits are being seen throughout the archipelago, where the total reindeer population—22,000—has doubled since 1989. For the moment, at least, Svalbard reindeer seem to be in their “Goldilocks zone,” where conditions are just right. “These animals are at a stage where things seem to be going well for them,” says Dwinnell. “But it is climate change—and climate change is change.”

As the Arctic continues to warm, even the reindeer will undoubtedly become too hot. Because these animals are adapted to the cold, warmer temperatures require them to regulate their body temperatures, sapping the energy they need to forage for food. And warmer winters can increase rain-on-snow events, which lock away the animals’ food supply under an impenetrable layer of ice. The warming climate can also usher in parasites, invasive species and disease.

The landscape on the way to Reindalen features the types of ridges and slopes where reindeer like to graze during the winter. Morgan Heim

A shed antler at the edge of the Reindalen valley. Morgan Heim

Svalbard reindeer are adapted to their harsh climate. Their small heads and short legs help them conserve body heat. Morgan Heim

“We need to keep an eye on these animals,” Dwinnell says. “We can’t just assume that they’ll be good forever.”

What do the researchers think about while they’re out here, watching reindeer day after day? “You’re in this little bubble, and your life revolves around reindeer and dinner,” Eikeland says. “It’s a very comfortable life, very simple. You don’t have any mirrors. You don’t think about how much your socks smell.”

And they really get to know the animals over time. They have their favorites, like “weird” R380, a loner who hangs out atop glaciers and other unusual places, and “cutie” B255, who loves to cuddle with her calf. “They are so complex and they have so many little quirks,” says Djurberg. “You can really see that they have different personalities.”

That makes the knowledge of what’s ahead for Svalbard reindeer especially heartbreaking. “It’s really hard not to get either depressed or very angry,” says Djurberg, wiping her eye. As the group begins the long trek back to civilization, they’re already eager to return to Reindalen again. “I feel most alive when I am out in the field with these reindeer,” Dwinnell says. “It seems like a harsh environment to be working in, but it really is calming being out there. It really is a magical thing to be a part of.”

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Morgan Heim | READ MORE

Photographer Morgan Heim, based in Oregon, specializes in conservation stories.

Cheryl Katz | READ MORE

Cheryl Katz writes about the environment, with a special interest in the Arctic.

History | December 2023

Ukraine Planned an Ambitious Memorial at the Site of a Holocaust Massacre. Then War Came to Kyiv

The Nazis and Soviets sought to erase the mass killing of 33,000 Jews at Babyn Yar, but a new effort seeks to remember the dead even as Russia attacks

Babyn Yar, outside Kyiv, where 33,771 Jews were killed over two days in September 1941. The small portraits show unidentified Ukrainians, likely Jews, before the war. Timothy Fadek / Redux

By Joshua Hammer

Photographs by Timothy Fadek

In a forested park on the western edge of Kyiv, Ukraine, near the ravine known as Babyn Yar, Oleh Shovenko leads me to a 20-foot-tall steel frame that looms over a weed-choked field. This half-finished art installation is called the “kurgan,” a word for a type of prehistoric burial mound found in Ukraine and Russia. When it’s completed, Shovenko tells me, visitors will enter the roughly 260-foot-long tumulus through one of two portals. Then they will descend ten feet into an artificial canyon illuminated by a skylight.

Here a series of miniature dioramas, built to scale and making use of plasma screens and virtual reality displays, will bring to life an unfathomable horror: the murder of 33,771 men, women and children—a huge portion of Kyiv’s remaining Jewish population—at the ravine on September 29 and 30, 1941. The atrocity, carried out by an SS Einsatzgruppen mobile killing unit, Nazi police and several dozen Ukrainian collaborators, was by many accounts the single deadliest mass killing of Jews during the Holocaust. (As many as 70,000 more people, including other Jews, Soviet POWs and Roma civilians, are believed to have been murdered in the ravine in the two years that followed.) Remarkably, until now, the massacre of Kyiv’s Jews has never been properly memorialized.

To recreate the ravine as it looked 80 years ago, artists, architects and historians studied geological and aerial surveys carried out before the war by czarist and then Soviet authorities, plus all available historical maps, some dating to the 19th century. The images showed the original network of ravines as well as five cemeteries, including a Jewish one, which existed on the site before the Nazi invasion. The research and design team also had access to snapshots taken by a Nazi photographer immediately after the massacre. The plan for the kurgan, which is constantly evolving, now calls for using 3D printers to fabricate thousands of two-inch-tall, individualized figurines of victims and their Nazi executioners to recreate scenes from the massacre and its aftermath. Visitors will observe the gathering of Jews on the outskirts of Kyiv, their march to the execution ground, the mass shootings in the ravine and the Nazis’ desperate attempt, two years later, to cover up their crimes as the Red Army advanced toward Kyiv. “Finishing this is our priority,” Shovenko tells me. “It’s important to put a roof on it, so that people can spend some time here and get to know the story from beginning to end.”

The steel frame of an unfinished installation known as the “kurgan,” or burial mound, a centerpiece of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center. Timothy Fadek / Redux

A boy passes renderings of what the kurgan will look like when finished. The exhibit will feature detailed dioramas telling the story of the killings. Timothy Fadek / Redux

Shovenko is the deputy artistic director of the Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center, a $100 million complex, years in the making, that aims to combine meticulous research and artistic innovation to create the most grand-scale World War II memorial in the world. Originally, the center was conceived as a single large museum, but beginning in 2020 those plans evolved into a vastly more ambitious project, including many art installations plus at least four separate museums. One, the Museum of Victims of Babyn Yar, would recreate Ukraine’s vanished Jewish culture using photographs and the commonplace stuff of life: furniture, candelabra, vintage radios and other memorabilia gathered by the staff. Another, the Museum of Oblivion, would document both the efforts by the Soviet Union to whitewash the massacre after World War II and Jewish acts of resistance against Soviet denialism. Footpaths across the 370-acre former killing ground would link the facilities.

In October 2021, around the 80th anniversary of the massacre, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy was joined by Israel’s President Isaac Herzog and Germany’s President Frank-Walter Steinmeier to dedicate the partially built complex. The Ukrainian government expected that the site would soon take its place alongside other revered Holocaust memorials—Poland’s Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe—as a hallowed place for remembrance and contemplation. And as a symbol of the belated recognition of the atrocity, it was also regarded as a means of helping to cement Ukraine’s progressive new role in Europe.

Then, on February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. Troops occupied Kyiv’s suburbs and besieged the capital. A Russian missile strike near a TV tower adjacent to Babyn Yar killed five people, including four members of a family. Staff members fled the country or went off to fight at the front: Shovenko laid mines along the Belarus border until, he told me, an episode of PTSD compelled him to leave the army. Meanwhile, two of the memorial center’s main funders, the Ukrainian-born Russian Jewish billionaires Mikhail Fridman and German Khan, who had close relationships with Russian President Vladimir Putin’s circle, were sanctioned by Western countries, obliging them to withdraw their support. The center’s staff shrank to a skeleton crew, and the many ambitious projects came to a halt. Today, the kurgan, instead of being the memorial’s flagship installation, stands half-finished as a symbol of a violent disruption. “I lost my inner motivation after the war began,” Shovenko admitted.

In February 2022, the Russian Army occupied Irpin, a suburb of Kyiv ten miles west of Babyn Yar. Roman Ilnitsky, a church deacon who helped local civilians evacuate to Kyiv, documented scenes of the Russian occupation on his iPhone. The Russians retreated from Irpin after a month, leaving destruction in their wake. Later, Ilnitsky gave testimony to Babyn Yar Center staff members, who were collecting eyewitness accounts and other details for possible use in war crimes investigations. Timothy Fadek / Redux

Now, nearly two years into the conflict, the Babyn Yar Center, an organization dedicated to a distant atrocity, is reconceiving its mission and finding new relevance in the process. It has realized that it can’t ignore the atrocities being committed today—and that staff members can even put their skills as researchers and museum professionals to use. The work now is smaller-scale and lower-budget. But if the center’s ambitions have changed, they have not exactly diminished: They reflect a desire not only to properly commemorate, at long last, the historical injustice perpetrated here, but also to acknowledge and record the crimes and the suffering of this new war. In addition to preserving records of centuries of Jewish life and identifying the massacre’s victims, many of whom remain anonymous, the center’s staff members are compiling details about Ukrainian civilians killed in Russian airstrikes and artillery bombardments. Others have interviewed victims of Russian atrocities as part of ongoing war crimes investigations. “This is our current reality,” says Anna Furman, the center’s deputy CEO. “No one is immune from the risks and threats of death while in Ukraine.”

I visited Babyn Yar in early June, during a short lull in Russian attacks on Kyiv. Almost every night for four weeks Russia had launched Iranian drones and hypersonic missiles at the capital. Patriot missiles provided by the United States destroyed most of the incoming fire, but falling debris killed several people, including a mother and daughter who failed to reach a shelter in time. All through May, sirens and explosions jolted residents out of bed before dawn and sent them scurrying underground. When we met, Shovenko had barely had an uninterrupted sleep in weeks.

Shovenko led me along a tree-lined path through a public park, past bicyclists and couples on benches, to see how far the project had progressed before the Russians attacked. In a clearing near the kurgan, an operator flicked a switch, and an electric motor whirred into action. Slowly, a huge wooden pop-up book opened to transform itself into a walk-in model of Ukraine’s historic wooden synagogues, complete with Hebrew prayers on the walls and a ceiling exquisitely painted with the constellations that appeared on the first night of the killings. Ukraine’s small Jewish community and many visitors prayed here regularly before the Russian invasion. “But most of the Jews and the rabbis have left, and it’s not very much in use,” Shovenko said. I crossed a pathway to confront the somber stillness of the Crystal Wall of Crying, an installation by the internationally celebrated Serbian performance and conceptual artist Marina Abramović. It consists of a lengthy wall of black anthracite embedded with long pink quartz crystals, which represent healing power, and is meant to evoke Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, the only surviving remnant of the city’s ancient Jewish temple complex.

A model synagogue opens like a pop-up book. The design evokes the style of wooden synagogues from the 17th and 18th centuries, which are all gone. Timothy Fadek / Redux

The Crystal Wall of Crying, an installation meant to evoke Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, designed by conceptual and performance artist Marina Abramović. Timothy Fadek / Redux

Mirror Field, whose ten reflective steel columns, torn apart by 100,000 bullet holes, represent the damaged “tree of life.” Timothy Fadek / Redux

Nearby stood the Mirror Field, a stainless-steel platform with ten reflecting steel pillars pocked by bullet holes. The bullet holes had been made in 2020, before the outbreak of the current war, when Ukrainian special forces fired thousands of bullets, amounting to two tons of metal, into the steel—almost the exact amount of ammunition used to murder Kyiv’s Jews. Shovenko and I walked silently among the columns, meant to symbolize the broken “tree of life.” A pipe organ and audio player underneath the platform filled the air with the haunting music of Ukraine’s vanished shtetl culture, archival recordings of Yiddish songs of the 1920s and ’30s, and voices reading the names of some 18,000 Jewish victims—the number of Jews killed at Babyn Yar who had been positively identified when this installation was completed three years ago. (The figure is now up to 29,220.)

Not far away, in the middle of the footpath through the park, we came across a monument to an unrelated tragedy—a 160-gallon glass tank, filled with mud, and resting atop a column of bricks stamped with logos of Kyiv brick factories. The installation, conceived by Shovenko himself, serves as a reminder of the multilayered horrors that played out on this site during World War II and afterward. In November 1943, after the Red Army recaptured Kyiv, Soviet authorities began to fill in the ravine with liquid waste from nearby brick plants. On the morning of March 13, 1961, after heavy rains, one trillion gallons of slurry broke through a dam and inundated the city’s Kurenivka district. The deluge is thought to have killed more than 1,500 people. Soviet authorities, evading responsibility, never confirmed more than 145 fatalities.

Filling in Babyn Yar had a larger purpose than disposing of excess sludge. It was part of a systematic effort by Soviet authorities to erase all traces of the massacre, a coverup that has given the Holocaust memorial project even greater historical resonance. Driven in part by the antisemitism of Joseph Stalin and other Communist leaders, and in part by a resistance to singling out Jewish suffering at the hands of the Nazis, the Soviets built high-rise apartment buildings and a television tower on the site, turned some of it into a park, allowed much to revert to wilderness, and arrested those who sought to pray here or otherwise memorialize the victims. “They said, ‘Come on, we lost 27 million people, is that nothing because we were not Jews?’” says Patrick Desbois, a noted French war crimes investigator and Catholic priest whose 2008 book The Holocaust by Bullets documented the murder by gunfire of 1.5 million Jews in Eastern Europe during the first phase of Hitler’s so-called Final Solution. (As late as the 2000s, Desbois and his team faced obstruction from Russian authorities while researching the killings.)

Still, the site was hallowed. In 1961, 20 years after the massacre, the Soviet writer Yevgeny Yevtushenko published his poem “Babi Yar,” the Russian-language name of the site, in the prestigious Russian periodical Literaturnaya Gazeta. The opening line—“There are no monuments over Babi Yar”—poignantly evoked not only the atrocity but also the policy of silence enforced by the Soviet regime.

Natan Sharansky, the Soviet dissident turned Israeli politician, was a 13-year-old boy in Stalino, now Donetsk, when he heard Yevtushenko’s elegy. “I remember how my father with a trembling voice was reading it from Literaturnaya Gazeta, saying, ‘Finally, we can speak about it,’” Sharansky told me recently. “Days later, they started attacks in the press on Yevtushenko, but the poem doesn’t disappear.”

The small portraits show unidentified Ukrainians, likely Jews, before the war. Timothy Fadek / Redux

Five years later, the Soviet monthly literary magazine Yunost published a heavily edited version of Babi Yar: A Document in the Form of a Novel by Anatoly Kuznetsov, who had been a 12-year-old boy in Kyiv at the time of the Nazi occupation. In 1969 Kuznetsov defected to the United Kingdom, carrying the unexpurgated version of his harrowing story, based in part on documents and eyewitness testimony he’d gathered in the decades after the massacre. (The book was published in the West the following year.)

In 1975, on the anniversary of the killings, Sharansky and a dozen other Soviet Jewish activists boarded a train to Kyiv to visit Babyn Yar; the KGB arrested them before they reached the city and detained them for two days. “Babyn Yar is not only the biggest grave of the Holocaust,” says Sharansky, who is now chairman of the memorial center’s supervisory board. “It’s also the biggest symbol of this effort of the Soviet Union to erase it from the memory.” After concerted pressure from international and Soviet Jewish groups, the Soviets agreed in the 1970s to place a small memorial at the site—but it referred only to “Soviet” victims.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine’s leadership lifted the veil of secrecy and denial. In 2016, President Petro Poroshenko, the billionaire owner of a confectionary company, gathered commitments to fund the project from Fridman, Khan and the Ukrainian-born Jewish oligarchs Victor Pinchuk and Pavel Fuks. But in 2014 Russia had illegally annexed Crimea and started the war in the Donbas, and many Ukrainians bitterly opposed any Russian participation. Some believed that Fridman and Khan planned the project as a Trojan horse to somehow push a pro-Putin agenda. But Sharansky says that Fridman, who lost several family members at Babyn Yar, never made any attempt to disseminate Russian propaganda.

Besides donating millions of dollars to the project, Fridman also recommended that the supervisory board bring on Ilya Khrzhanovsky, an enterprising, avant-garde and sometimes controversial Russian Jewish filmmaker, to design the memorial. Fridman had visited the production offices of Dau, Khrzhanovsky’s ambitious series of films about the Stalin-era physicist Lev Landau. To shoot the films, the director had constructed a vast mock-up of a fictional Soviet research center in Kharkiv, Ukraine, and populated it, Truman Show-like, with thousands of extras who lived there around the clock for years. Dau reflected the kind of grand-scale cinematic vision that Fridman and the board hoped would energize the Babyn Yar project. “He mobilized a huge field of people,” Sharansky told me. “He brought in dozens of talented young Ukrainians, specialists in history and art.”

I met Khrzhanovsky on a summer evening at a café in the Wilmersdorf neighborhood of western Berlin, where he lives for much of the year. (He has Russian, Israeli and German citizenship.) A baby-faced 47-year-old, wearing a black trench coat and black pants, he had taken a break from the editing room, where he was finishing work on a new film.

When he arrived in Kyiv in 2019, he told me, lighting a cigarette, the board envisioned a single large museum on the site of the killings. Khrzhanovsky, whose mother fled central Ukraine on the last train ahead of the Nazi onslaught in July 1941, tossed out the plan. “If you’re a child and have no connection to the Holocaust, how can we make you want to come?” he said. “I felt we needed to build something interactive, different installations where people can feel something about evil, about the fragility of life, and can understand what a Jew was, what kind of world disappeared.” Oleksiy Makukhin, the center’s chief executive, told me that Khrzhanovsky’s arrival marked the moment that “the idea of a single museum was replaced with a new concept—taking over the whole territory.”

Oleksiy Makukhin, the center’s chief executive. The staff’s experience “investigating crimes of the past,” he says, prepared them to track Russian crimes in real time. Timothy Fadek / Redux

Khrzhanovsky poured forth hit-or-miss ideas that delighted some observers and infuriated others. His first idea was to dig a 300-foot-deep “scar” at the exact site of the killings, build a museum at the bottom and place the soil in a huge glass container; the project was abandoned because it would have meant excavating part of an old Jewish cemetery. Another proposal aimed to use videorecorded testimonies of Holocaust survivors gathered by Steven Spielberg’s Shoah Foundation to generate holograms of people from the past, who would share their stories with visitors. Yet another potential project, only briefly discussed, would have taken advantage of “deep fake” technology to transport a visitor into the execution scene at the ravine—and plant the viewer’s face onto a Jew about to be executed. Critics accused Khrzhanovsky of seeking to turn the site into a “Holocaust Disneyland.” The attacks against him widened, focusing on his Russian background and on an unfounded accusation that he had violated child labor laws on the set of Dau. (Charges against him were later dropped.)

Khrzhanovsky endured the attacks on his leadership. He attended the opening of Mirror Field in 2020. Soon afterward he broke ground on the kurgan, named after the tumuli that Bronze Age nomads on the Caspian steppe erected over graves and filled with chariots, weapons and other possessions meant to accompany the soul in the afterlife.

Months later, Putin began massing troops at the border. Khrzhanovsky was at his parents’ home in Israel when he received a call that Russia had invaded Ukraine. In Kyiv, Makukhin, a former media consultant for the Ukrainian Defense Ministry, helped organize an evacuation from the capital and nearby towns. Dozens of staffers, a handful of nonagenarian survivors of the Babyn Yar massacre and the descendants of “righteous” people who had hidden Jews during the Nazi occupation piled into cars and headed to safety in the Carpathian Mountains. Makukhin and his colleagues had reserved most of a hotel at a ski resort, where many evacuees remained for weeks.

Khrzhanovsky has not returned to Kyiv since the invasion, and in September 2023 he publicly announced his resignation from the project. His Russian identity, he had told me back in June, had made it impossible for him to continue. “When I was growing up, there was no difference between ‘the Germans’ and ‘the Nazis,’” he said. “And it’s logical that it’s this way with Russians now. It doesn’t matter what I did for Ukraine or what I want to do. They don’t want it and they don’t need it.”

One afternoon I went with Iryna Irchak, a Babyn Yar Center researcher, to the State Archive of Kyiv, a hulking brick tower built in 1972, where the center is in the midst of an ambitious digitization project to preserve millions of historical documents. The trove dates back to the late 17th century and contains important records pertaining to the 1941 Nazi occupation and killings, including, for example, the original posters in Russian, Ukrainian and German that appeared days after the Wehrmacht occupied Kyiv on September 19, 1941. The placards ordered Jews to gather their “documents, money and valuables, also warm clothing [and] linen” and assemble at 8 a.m. on September 29 at the corner of Melnikova and Dokhterivskaya Streets. Anyone who failed to appear, the poster warned, “will be shot.”

Desbois, the French author and war crimes investigator, said that most who gathered that morning believed they were going to be deported or sent to labor camps. “The Germans were forbidden to kick Jews,” he told me. “The Jews had to think that they were just moving somewhere else.” Reality didn’t sink in until moments before their execution, when they were stripped naked and marched to the edge of the ravine before being shot with Mauser semi-automatic weapons. Bodies fell on top of bodies. To save bullets, children were sometimes pushed into the pile alive to be smothered and crushed.

In September and October 1941, a Wehrmacht photographer named Johannes Hähle produced 29 color slides from Kyiv and Babyn Yar. These images documented preparations for the massacre and its aftermath, although Hähle was careful not to show actual killings, per Nazi policy. The selections here show Kyiv’s Jews marching to the ravine, bypassing murdered civilians; Soviet POWs burying piles of corpses; and German soldiers picking through belongings left by victims before they were shot. Johannes Hähle / Hamburg Institute for Social Research

Desbois himself turned up lurid details about the murders in German archives, including an account of a food vendor who accompanied the executioners and provided them with sandwiches and drinks during the killings. “He had to walk with his small van around the naked people who had come to be shot,” Desbois tells me. “He had to set tables and make tea, and each team was shooting, stopping and going to eat.” Desbois also studied rare color slides taken by a Nazi photographer who captured the massacre’s immediate aftermath, when Soviet POWs were ordered to collapse the walls of the ravine on top of the bodies. The images show arrangements of the belongings Jews left behind—the artificial leg of one victim with a coat and hat, a woman’s boots beside a canteen, and a small family photograph.

When I arrived at the archive in Kyiv, employees were examining the “interrogation protocols,” or interview transcripts, of 18 Soviet prisoners who had escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in November 1943. That summer, the Red Army had launched a massive offensive, rolling back German lines along the Eastern Front as it advanced toward the Dnipro River and Kyiv. With the Soviets moving swiftly across Ukraine, the Nazis rushed to destroy all evidence of their crimes; the Soviet prisoners were among 321 captives whom the Nazis ordered to reopen the mass graves and cremate the corpses of Jewish victims just before the Wehrmacht’s withdrawal. Prisoners who didn’t escape were shot upon finishing their gruesome work. After the war, two dozen Einsatzgruppen leaders were put on trial for war crimes, and 14 were sentenced to death, though only four were ultimately executed. The vast majority of the participants in the killing were never brought to justice.

The Russian invasion has given the digitization program a new sense of urgency: In the war’s early days, Russian missiles leveled the Ukrainian Security Service archive in Chernihiv and badly damaged the municipal archive in Kharkiv. “All these documents are at risk,” an archivist told me. She was digitizing a notebook listing the names of 2,088 Jews from the Petrovsky district of Kyiv who were murdered at Babyn Yar. It was, she said, one of only a handful of registries of victims compiled by Soviet authorities. I thumbed past page after page of names penned in Cyrillic script, compiled from interviews with house managers and surviving relatives and neighbors. “And this is only a partial list,” she said. Among the names of the dead I read were 28-year-old Evgenia Direktor and her three daughters, Genya, Roza and infant Lyusya. Babyn Yar Center staffers are also working in the state archives in the cities of Mykolaiv, Sumy and Chernihiv to digitize records of Jewish life there from the 18th century to the years immediately after World War II. So far, they’ve scanned 3.5 million pages of documents, including records of births, deaths, weddings, and relocations both within and outside Ukraine, with about 13 million more pages to go.

Babyn Yar Center researchers consulting records at Kyiv’s State Archive to compile a complete list of victims along with biographical details. Timothy Fadek / Redux

Another ongoing archival project is called “Names,” overseen by Furman, the center’s deputy CEO, which focuses on adding biographical details to the 33,771 Jews murdered at Babyn Yar—including about 1,200 previously unidentified victims discovered by staff researchers over the past two years. In 2020, the center signed an agreement with Yad Vashem, the World Holocaust Remembrance Center in Jerusalem, and obtained access to its database. Staffers cross-referenced those records with documents from Ukrainian state, synagogue and military archives; digitized the material; and made it available online. The result has been a flood of new information—photos, personal testimonies—from victims’ relatives, who for the first time have access to material once buried in hard-to-access archives.

After the Russian invasion, Furman realized that her team could use their skills and experience to a new purpose: documenting current atrocities. The “Closed Eyes” project uses materials such as digitized media records, relatives’ testimony and information gleaned from state authorities to identify civilians killed in Russian missile and artillery strikes and summary executions stretching back to Russia’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. More than 3,800 people have been named so far. Their names and, whenever possible, photos and short biographies, appear on a website hosted by the center, what Khrzhanovsky calls “a digital cemetery.” This effort has gone hand in hand, Furman told me, with the compilation of filmed testimony from eyewitnesses and survivors.

As evidence of widespread torture and other abuses mounted, half a dozen staff members received training from Yahad-In Unum, a Paris-based nonprofit founded by Desbois, in how to gather testimony as a part of war crimes investigations. Desbois, who has extensive experience interviewing war crimes survivors in Guatemala, Syria, Iraq and other conflict zones, has himself visited Ukraine three times since the war began, compiling eyewitness testimony in Kherson, Mariupol and other cities. Last year he signed a contract with the Babyn Yar Center to collect testimony for Yahad-In Unum to use in future war crimes trials.

Mariana Teklium, a former memorial center staff member who assisted in investigating Russian war crimes. Timothy Fadek / Redux

One morning I accompanied a young Babyn Yar Center war crimes project researcher, who asked not to be named given the sensitive nature of her work, to Irpin, outside Kyiv, to interview a church deacon who had survived the city’s monthlong Russian occupation. Every day Roman Ilnitsky drove around Irpin, eluding Russian tanks and troops, to pick up civilians who were too frightened, sick or frail to leave their homes and bring them to the church. From there, he organized their evacuation on foot across a heavily damaged bridge to Kyiv.

A burly man in his 50s, Ilnitsky said that the Russians fired artillery at a stretch of road used only by civilians, and he named a fellow church member, Anatoly Berezhnoy, who was killed by a Russian shell. He had seen the bodies of a woman and her two children struck by shrapnel while walking toward the bridge. He described a friend in Bucha who was tortured by Russian soldiers for three weeks, and another who, he said, was shot twice in the leg for talking on his cellphone and was forced to crawl back to his home. But Ilnitsky had not personally observed these assaults, which meant that his testimony, however searing, would probably be of limited use in court. Desbois says that the Babyn Yar Center is doing the best that it can with limited resources. “They lost their staff and their funding,” he told me. “Suddenly they’re a small team, they’re trying to survive, and it’s not easy.” Most testimony gathered by the Babyn Yar team, he says, has fallen short of Yahad-In Unum’s rigorous standards, though the interviewers have provided valuable leads in tracking down eyewitnesses and victims. Last summer, the center staff decided to stop conducting interviews to focus instead on organizing visits and providing other logistical support for Desbois’s investigative teams.

On my last day in Kyiv, Makukhin led me on a tour of the neglected forest that forms the outer reaches of the former killing ground. Leaving the art installations and the landscaped public park behind, we followed a dirt-bike trail and found ourselves swallowed up by sunless, mosquito-infested woods. “For decades this whole area has been abandoned ground,” he told me. I stared into a forested abyss—one of the last surviving spurs of the original ravine. “All these trees are younger than 80 years old,” Makukhin observed, many planted by Soviet authorities, perhaps to further obscure the area’s history. Near the ravine, we came across a few broken gravestones from the 19th century, all that was left of a cemetery that had fallen apart.

Makukhin and I soon arrived on the campus-like grounds of the historic Ivan Pavlov psychiatric center at the eastern boundary of Babyn Yar, the largest state-owned psychiatric institution in Ukraine. In the days after occupying Kyiv, Nazi troops seized 752 patients from the hospital, shot them and dumped their bodies into the ravine. “They were the first victims at Babyn Yar,” Makukhin told me. Two years ago, the Babyn Yar Center’s board entered negotiations with the Pavlov hospital to lease a derelict, three-story structure that was allowed to fall into ruin in the 1970s, and to turn it into an arts therapy center for war veterans and other victims of trauma. It was to be part of a development project aimed at radically reshaping this wasteland.

The small portraits show unidentified Ukrainians, likely Jews, before the war. Timothy Fadek / Redux

Illuminated pathways, ravine overlooks, an elevated walkway at treetop height and several museums would have transformed a forbidding expanse of wilderness—now “used mostly as a drop zone for drug dealers,” Makukhin said—and connected it with the rest of the memorial in the more frequented part of the Babyn Yar grounds. “The psychiatric center was happy about our interest,” Makukhin told me. Because the Soviet regime often imprisoned and tortured dissidents in mental institutions, he said, “all these clinics inherited this negative reputation.” Incorporation into the Babyn Yar project would not only have memorialized the murders of the psychiatric patients but also lifted a decades-long stigma. But the Russian invasion put those plans on hold. “It’s hard to say what will happen here,” Makukhin told me as we stopped in front of a squat building peeking out from behind a concrete wall topped by barbed wire. It was the hospital’s wing for criminals diagnosed with severe mental illness, and is still in use today.

As we walked back through the forest, Makukhin insisted that, even without a resolution to the conflict, at least one more installation will soon be finished. The center is raising money to finish the kurgan—the burial mound-museum. “If we have this kurgan, we can tell much of the story,” he told me. “The basic circle will be completed.” The war, however, is compelling the staff to reconsider its original idea of assembling vivid dioramas of roundups, murders, exhumations and incineration. In the face of ongoing violence and suffering, there’s a feeling that such horrors can’t simply be relegated to an exhibit devoted to the past, however viscerally evocative it is. “We will have to rethink how to memorialize the tragedy,” he went on.

In late August, fragments of a Russian missile or drone shot down by Ukraine’s air-defense system landed beside the Babyn Yar synagogue, damaging the wooden walls and a window. They were “quickly repaired,” said Makukhin, but the shock of the impact lingered. At a hallowed piece of ground that has become synonymous with the unthinkable horrors of war, the final chapter has not been written.

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Joshua Hammer | READ MORE

Joshua Hammer is a contributing writer to Smithsonian magazine and the author of several books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts and The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird.

Timothy Fadek | READ MORE

Timothy Fadek is a photographer who has worked in dozens of countries across six continents.

MAGAZINE

Readers Respond to the November 2023 Issue

Your feedback on Vietnam veterans, the value of stagecraft and one very adventurous anthropologist

Smithsonian magazine December 2023

A Return to Vietnam

The aptly named “Healing in Hanoi” (November 2023) is a well-balanced examination of the thoughts and feelings people on both sides have about the Vietnam War. I have traveled many times to Vietnam as a media adviser to the national television network VTV. I will admit that I was nervous on my first visit because I was not sure what I would find. What I found was a people who were friendly and welcoming. I am proud to say that I now have several hundred Vietnamese friends. —Michael Castengera | Athens, Georgia

In 1966 I enlisted in the U.S. military to help our country achieve its goals against North Vietnam. Looking back, I made a terrible mistake. North and South Vietnam did not deserve the death and destruction that we created. I lost several friends from high school and college, and I ask myself, “Why?” Those friends are a part of the 57,000 who gave their lives for a cause that was not needed. If I had to do it over again, I would do everything in my power to avoid serving, even if it meant leaving the country. Reading “Healing in Hanoi” was a moving, emotional experience for me. I was living vicariously in my fellow servicemen’s capture, torture and survival. At the same time, I do not blame the Hanoi citizens for reacting the way they did against the prisoners. I asked myself how I would react if the roles were reversed with a bombing of my neighborhood. I am impressed with the current welcoming attitude of the Vietnamese people and the acceptance of American military visitors. It should show the rest of the world, especially the Middle East, that there is still hope for peace. —Jack Afflebach | Lakewood Ranch, Florida

Setting the Standard

Zelia Nuttall (“Trailblazer,” November 2023) traveled a path few women dared to at the time. She learned so much by observing what was around her and advanced far above even her own expectations. —Willis Van Norman | St. Charles, Minnesota

Even though I have studied anthropology, I had never heard of Zelia Nuttall. I am fascinated to read about the person who decoded the Aztec calendar. I am impressed with her other accomplishments and am pleased to see her get this overdue recognition as a woman of science. —Henry Simpson | Layton, Utah

Many people cannot comprehend how difficult mentally, physically and emotionally Nuttall’s life choices were in that time period. —Patricia Washington Kline | Milford, Virginia

An Ideal Production

Thanks for shining the spotlight on stage and screen audiences and makers at such a time of tumult (“It Can’t Happen Here,” November 2023). I wonder if the theater can ever regain the ground lost to online, privatized dramatic interpretations of social experience. —G P Witteveen | Grand Rapids, Michigan

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OFFICE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE SMITHSONIAN

What Comes Next for the Smithsonian’s New Human Remains Task Force

As the Smithsonian grapples with a dark legacy, a new task force will recommend ethical policies for handling human remains

Lonnie G. Bunch III    November 30th, 2023

The exterior of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. Smithsonian Institution

For more than a century, anthropologists at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History have obtained, studied and stored thousands of human remains. While the practice can reveal critical details about past civilizations, it now comes with a host of ethical considerations, which have significantly changed the scientific process. Most of the remains still in our possession were acquired decades ago without the proper consent of the individuals, their close relatives or their tribal communities. The Smithsonian is currently taking steps to rectify these wrongs and prevent any future recurrence.

This month, the Smithsonian’s new Human Remains Task Force will deliver its recommendations on how we should best proceed with the repatriation of some 30,700 human remains in our collections.

Most of those remains were obtained between 1903 and 1941 when Aleš Hrdlička served as head of the physical anthropology division at what is now the National Museum of Natural History. With the goal of scientifically proving the since-debunked myth of white superiority, Hrdlička was a leading figure in a scientific community that espoused notions of white supremacy, and he took particular interest in the remains of Indigenous people and people of color. Hrdlička and others in his field looted graves and obtained remains without individual consent from morgues and hospitals in more than 80 countries, sometimes with the help of physicians whose patients had died.

Today, left to reckon with the aftermath of that dehumanizing practice, we are working toward repatriating remains from Hrdlička’s tenure. It’s a collection that should have never been amassed, and we’re committed to dismantling as much of it as possible in a way that recognizes and honors the people affected.

Since the passage of the National Museum of the American Indian Act in 1989, the Smithsonian has repatriated the remains of more than 5,000 people, and we are working to accelerate that pace. There is no legislation that addresses the unethically obtained remains of non-Native people, but the Smithsonian’s forthcoming policy will steward the return of all remains regardless of cultural affiliation.

This challenging task involves using the limited records we have to identify who these people were and who their surviving relatives might be. When it’s not possible to identify a direct descendant, we will work with descendant communities. That said, we are committed to standardizing the ethical return and repatriation process as much as possible, while maintaining the flexibility to accommodate the wishes of descendant communities. The recommendations will also outline what types of research on human remains we will allow going forward.

This forthcoming policy will be heavily informed by the task force’s recommendations, and I trust it will be historic, for the Smithsonian and the museum field worldwide. I am determined to position the Smithsonian as a leader, not just in scholarship, but also in the ethical considerations that inform that scholarship.

HISTORY

The Teddy Bear Was Once Seen as a Dangerous Influence on Young Children

Inspired by a moment of empathy from President Theodore Roosevelt, the huggable toy had a rocky start before it became the stuff of legend

Alice George Museums Correspondent December 2023

An original Michtom teddy bear once held by two of Teddy Roosevelt’s great-grandchildren, Mark and Anne. NMAH

A true history of the teddy bear begins in the American wilderness. In November 1902, President Theodore Roosevelt embarked on a hunting trip in Mississippi with one main goal: to bag a black bear. As the tale goes, after Roosevelt had scoured the brush for several days without so much as spotting one, some of his hunting companions corralled an injured old bear and tied it to a willow tree. Here, they said, was Roosevelt’s opportunity to slay one and declare victory. Horrified, the president refused, saying it would be unseemly—unsporting!—for a man of honor to kill this vulnerable creature. He ordered the decrepit bear to be euthanized, and this odd show of mercy quickly became news.

Editorial cartoonist Clifford K. Berryman captured the scene in several Washington Post drawings—one showing a thin Roosevelt refusing to kill a bear, another picturing a more realistically stocky Roosevelt near a smaller bear with a wide-eyed, babylike face. To Brooklyn candy store owner Morris Michtom, the cute cub from the cartoons also looked like a marketing opportunity. He asked his wife, Rose, to sew a stuffed version, and that single prototype sold shortly after the couple placed it in the store window. Rose made more, and with demand exceeding what busy fingers could create, the two began factory production in 1903. Michtom called his cushy new companions “Teddy’s bears,” after the president. By late 1906, the name had shifted to “teddy bear.”

A 1902 Clifford Berryman cartoon depicting President Theodore Roosevelt’s famous refusal to shoot that fateful bear. Smithsonian Archives

At about the same time, the Steiff company of Giengen, Germany, was coincidentally creating a bear of its own. In 1903, Steiff sold 3,000 of the critters to a New York department store. A year later, Roosevelt, who couldn’t abide the nickname “Teddy” (he had once called it an “outrageous impertinence”), nevertheless deployed his lovable namesake as a mascot in his re-election campaign, prominently displaying a Michtom bear at the White House. That helped propel the animal to further fame: In 1906, one Manhattan store sold more than 60,000, and soon even the German maker Steiff adopted the American “teddy bear” name.

Not everyone was enthralled, though. A few social commentators saw teddy bears as ominous: They feared that some girls’ preference for soft animals over humanlike dolls would become all-consuming, replacing the female urge to nurture babies—and eventually lead to childless marriages. In 1907, the Rev. Michael G. Esper of Michigan warned his congregation that “the fad for supplanting the good old dolls of our childhood with the horrible monstrosity known as the teddy bear” would lead to falling birthrates. The issue roiled the country, though most did not share Esper’s paranoia. A few days after Esper’s tirade, Nevada’s Reno Evening Gazette ran a piece with the headline “Teddy Bears Rule Supreme,” in which a local woman rebuts Esper: “The teddy bear is only a fad, and I do not believe that it is at all harmful for children to play with them.”

The nation seemed to agree, at a time when a more “tolerant, permissive view of childhood” was emerging, says Gary Cross, a historian at Pennsylvania State University and author of Kids’ Stuff: Toys and the Changing World of American Childhood. There was, Cross says, a new “willingness to let children remain childlike for a longer period of time.” Notably, teddy bears helped launch and feed a growing demand for children’s goods—a largely new market in the early 20th century, when child labor was declining.

In the next few decades, bears became a source of comfort during turbulent times—even for those long past childhood. Soldiers carried their own teddy bears, tucked into knapsacks, during both world wars.

The bears soon found a welcoming habitat in literature and pop culture. In 1921, English author A.A. Milne gave his 1-year-old son a fluffy pal who went on to become the world’s most famous bear, because he did what every child wanted from their toys: He came to life! After Milne wrote the Winnie-the-Pooh series, his American publisher, E.P. Dutton, sent the stuffed Pooh on a tour through the U.S. And in 1957, when Elvis Presley performed “(Let Me Be Your) Teddy Bear” in the film Loving You, fans expressed their admiration by sending him thousands of stuffed bears.

More than a century after their debut, collectors are still bullish on the bears. In November 2022, a 1906 Steiff bear sold for £10,500 (around $12,746), a number that did not approach the Steiff Louis Vuitton teddy bear (outfitted in a beret and trench coat with the designer’s signature logo) sold in 2000 for $182,550, which still holds the Guinness World Record for a teddy bear sale. The Ideal Toy Company, which the Michtoms founded in 1903, at one point became the biggest dollmaker in the U.S. To mark the bear’s 60th birthday in 1963, the Michtoms’ son, Benjamin, presented an original bear to Roosevelt’s grandson, Kermit. Though Kermit intended to donate the critter to the Smithsonian, his children had other plans. “They didn’t want to part with it yet,” his wife, Belle Roosevelt, confessed. After the children relented a year later, the historic toy finally made it to the National Museum of American History, where it still resides, a reminder of a child’s innocence—and a president’s sportsmanship.

Home Games

Simple toys from past millennia evoke humanity’s undying urge to play

by Jaimie Seaton

Lance Encounter

Germany, Middle Pleistocene, c. 300,000 B.C.

V. Minkus

In the 1990s, archaeologists in Schöningen, Germany, discovered the earliest large-scale record of tools made by Middle Pleistocene humans, including a 30-inch double-pointed lightweight curved stick that was shaped and smoothed into an aerodynamic tool. Archaeologists believe that children in the Middle Pleistocene played with these pointed sticks and thereby developed throwing and hunting skills. In support of this theory, researchers have also noted that in later periods, children in far-flung countries like Chad and Indonesia once played with similar implements.

Motion Pictures

Ice Age Europe, 16,000-9,000 B.C.

Florent Rivere

The Upper Paleolithic version of flipbooks, rondelles are small disks made of bone, antler or ivory, with an image carved on either side and one or two holes for a cord in the middle. Tug the cord back and forth, and the disk swings, giving the illusion of a moving image. One ice age example found in France in 1868 shows a doe with her legs tucked under her on one side and extended on the other, so it looks like she is running when the rondelle is swinging.

Doll in the Family

Roman Empire, c. A.D. 1 to 400

Capitoline Museums, Rome

Since the 1800s, archaeologists have excavated more than 500 doll-like figures from the Roman world. Scholars long thought these were principally used as burial objects, but the extensive wear on the jointed limbs has led archaeologists in recent years to conclude that children did indeed play with these dolls. Toy figures representing adult women were made of ivory or bone, and some even had miniature jewelry and intricately carved hairstyles.

Gift Horse

Egypt, 250 B.C. to A.D. 500

University of Michigan

When archaeologists excavated the small ancient farming village of Karanis, Egypt, between 1924 and 1935, they found numerous toy horses. The best-preserved has small wheels, with a harness and saddle painted on its body. A tiny eyehole in the head may have been used to hold a cord, so a child could pull the horse along the ground.

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Alice George | | READ MORE

Alice George, Ph.D. is an independent historian with a special interest in America during the 1960s. A veteran newspaper editor, she is recently the author of The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn and has authored or co-authored seven other books, focusing on 20th-century American history or Philadelphia history.

HISTORY

Why America Is Just Now Learning to Love Thaddeus Stevens, the ‘Best-Hated Man’ in U.S. History

The Pennsylvanian was one of America’s greatest heroes. Why hasn’t he gotten his due?

Tracy Schorn December 2023

A portrait of the congressman by the famous photographer Mathew Brady, c. 1860. Library of Congress

Arguably the most important opponent of slavery in American history, Thaddeus Stevens is also the most forgotten. If the abolitionist Pennsylvania congressman is known at all today, it’s thanks to Tommy Lee Jones’ portrayal of Stevens in the 2012 film Lincoln, where he is the moral absolutist to Lincoln’s pragmatic deal maker on the 13th Amendment—a righteous scold with vicious one-liners and a bad toupee.

Yet at the time of Stevens’ death in 1868, he was one of the most revered men in the country. When he died, he was only the third American ever to lie in state at the U.S. Capitol. (Former Secretary of State Henry Clay was the first, in 1852. Lincoln was the second, in 1865.) Thousands of mourners attended his funeral. But within years, he lay in an unkempt grave in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, his legacy uncertain. Indeed, as early as the following decade, Stevens could “lay claim to being one of the best-hated men in our past,” his biographer Milton Meltzer wrote in 1967.

Today Thaddeus Stevens is finally getting his due. In Gettysburg, a scrappy band of citizens erected a bronze statue of Stevens in front of the Adams County courthouse in April 2022. But the biggest honor is yet to come for Stevens and his companion Lydia Hamilton Smith, when, in the city of Lancaster, the preservationist group LancasterHistory will open the Thaddeus Stevens and Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History and Democracy in 2025. Designed by the same firm that built the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C., the $25 million complex is a paean to Stevens’ life’s work. The site will also showcase regional heroes of the Underground Railroad, including the work of Smith, a freeborn woman with African American heritage who spent 21 years of her life as Stevens’ house manager and confidante (and, some speculate, his common-law wife). The center will celebrate their shared work helping freedom seekers—and their rare working relationship of close respect across color and gender lines.

As characters in American history go, Thaddeus Stevens does not cut a dashing figure. Born poor and club-footed, he was ridiculed for his disability, which at the time was considered a punishment from God. When he was 12, his alcoholic father abandoned the family, leaving his mother to cope with a farm and four children. She worked nights as a washerwoman to afford her sons’ school fees—a sacrifice that instilled in him a lifelong commitment to free public education and a disdain for hereditary privilege.

The Thaddeus Stevens & Lydia Hamilton Smith Center for History & Democracy will be housed at a restored historic site in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. LancasterHistory

In 1815, he left his native Vermont for Pennsylvania to take a job as a schoolteacher, but he soon made his way into a law career, passing the bar in 1816 and moving to Gettysburg. Over the next 21 years, Stevens became a renowned trial attorney, businessman and maverick politician in the state and federal legislature. He paid his mother back for her investment in him: One of his proudest accomplishments was purchasing her a 250-acre farm with 14 cows.

In the decades before the Civil War, Stevens’ corner of southeastern Pennsylvania was a crucible of pro-slavery and antislavery forces. The Maryland-

Pennsylvania border “was one of the most significant battlefronts in the fight around American slavery,” says Richard Bell, a historian at the University of Maryland. Pennsylvania had passed a law abolishing slavery in 1780, but in Maryland, less than 20 miles away from Gettysburg, it was legally protected.

“There are endless documented cases of Black people being apprehended and then stolen away as they tried to enjoy the first fruits of freedom in Pennsylvania,” Bell says. Not only did enslavers pursue fugitives, but there was also a reverse Underground Railroad, where predators kidnapped legally free Black people, often children, and sold them south into bondage. Bell estimates that there were tens of thousands of such abductions across the U.S.—and Gettysburg was especially target-rich for bounty hunters.

Stevens joined the front lines of resistance. By 1837, he was an avowed abolitionist, and that year he founded an ironworks outside Gettysburg, with the specific aim of employing free Black men and freedom seekers. (During the Civil War, Confederate General Jubal Early burned down Stevens’ forge en route to the Battle of Gettysburg.) In 1842, Stevens left Gettysburg for Lancaster to expand his law practice but also continued his dangerous work harboring fugitives—and running a resourceful antislavery spy ring extending throughout southeastern Pennsylvania. Stevens’ spies managed to infiltrate groups of bounty hunters who regularly traveled to Adams and Lancaster Counties. One of his most daring ploys was to pay off the secretary of notorious bounty hunter George Hughes, whose office on King Street in Lancaster was around the corner from Stevens’ office on Queen Street. Hughes’ secretary would copy the names of the wanted and immediately pass this information to Stevens’ agents, who alerted anyone harboring freedom seekers.

But Stevens’ greatest legacy came from his chairmanship of the House Ways and Means Committee during the Civil War, and later the Appropriations Committee during Reconstruction. Through indomitable grit and spirited political maneuvering, Stevens played the primary role in ushering through Reconstruction via constitutional amendments. He was the most radical of the Radical Republicans, the fervent antislavery bloc; Stevens was thus a thorn in Lincoln’s side who agitated to end slavery with more force than the president would ever muster, calling it “the most hateful and infernal blot that has ever disgraced the escutcheon of man.” Stevens’ arguments were crucial in ensuring the passage of the 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, and historians acknowledge Stevens as the main architect of the 14th Amendment, which enshrined equal protections under the law. He also fought for universal suffrage, though he died 19 months too early to see Black men casting their first votes under the 15th Amendment in 1870.

Many of Stevens’ boldest ideas never came to fruition, such as seizing enslavers’ land to redistribute it to the formerly enslaved. Even so, he was unmatched as a political strategist. “It’s amazing what he does after Lincoln is assassinated,” says Manisha Sinha, a historian and author of The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition. By the end of 1865, President Andrew Johnson—whom Stevens called a “damned scoundrel”—had issued pardons to Confederate leaders, some of whom were then elected to Congress. Stevens, though by then nearing the end of his life, reminded the Confederate states who had won: He led the effort in Congress to require Southern states to ratify the 14th Amendment before those states could regain federal representation.

The Jim Crow era was not kind to Stevens and his ideals of a multiracial democracy. In the white supremacist film Birth of a Nation, Stevens is embodied by the villain “Austin Stoneman,” a power-hungry ogre intent on punishing the South, complete with limp and ridiculous wig.

“I started school in 1947 and suffered through Pennsylvania history, and I do not recall the name of Thaddeus Stevens ever being mentioned,” says Leroy Hopkins, 81, a retired professor and local historian, whose family has lived in Lancaster County since the 1700s. The Black community, though, including members of Hopkins’ church—Bethel AME—remembered Stevens and, from the late 1800s until around World War II, even led yearly processions to decorate his grave, Hopkins says. Yet post-Reconstruction historians deliberately erased Stevens’ legacy, in both mainstream academia and popular culture.

“The forgetting and erasure of men like Stevens was willful after the fall of Reconstruction and the triumph of Jim Crow,” Sinha says. “Most white Southerners hated him, and Northerners wanted to forget about the failure of Reconstruction. … It was not an accident that Stevens was forgotten.”

Radicals like Stevens, Sinha says, were seen as having overreached in championing Black citizenship, and in the 1868 impeachment of Andrew Johnson for blocking Reconstruction. “The myth that they achieved nothing” is false, she argues. Reconstruction was the direct result of Stevens’ “parliamentary acumen and his devotion to egalitarian principles.” Yet at the turn of the 20th century, Reconstruction was widely presented as a wicked, aberrant episode in U.S. history. “We still live with those legacies,” Sinha says. Which makes it all the more important to recover a true idea of Stevens.

Today, the battlefield town of Gettysburg finally has a new statue of Thaddeus Stevens, defiantly clutching the 14th Amendment in front of its courthouse. The prime mover behind the statue was Ross Hetrick of Gettysburg, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, who in 1999 founded the nonprofit Thaddeus Stevens Society. Hetrick argues that Stevens’ memory was unfairly subordinated to that of Abraham Lincoln’s. “The genius of Lincoln is that he listened to Thaddeus Stevens,” Hetrick says.

A statue of Stevens by Alex Paul Loza was unveiled in 2022 before the Adams County Courthouse in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. Alex Paul Loza

With just 237 members, the society began organizing for a bronze statue in 2015, when Michael Charney, a retired public-school teacher from Cleveland, and his wife, C.J. Prentiss, a former Ohio state senator, stepped in to fund the venture. “He was squelched. He never had the kind of impact he should have,” Charney says of Stevens. In an evangelizing effort, Charney once even went so far as to name his dog Thaddeus Stevens, so that he’d have daily opportunities to strike up conversations with strangers about this American hero.

Meanwhile, in 1999, Lancaster activists managed to save Stevens’ home office from the wrecking ball when it was slated to be demolished for a new development. Then, while excavating in 2002, workers discovered a series of tunnels and an adapted cistern beneath the back of the property that archaeologists came to believe were hiding places for freedom seekers—physical evidence of Smith and Stevens’ work on the Underground Railroad. The discovery galvanized a new round of community fundraising for the center, says Thomas Ryan, president of LancasterHistory.

Stevens died in 1868, at the height of Reconstruction, a time of great promise. Just nine years later, by 1877, Reconstruction had ended with the withdrawal of federal troops from the South, and Stevens’ reputation was trashed. Yet those who remembered Stevens’ fading legacy made pilgrimages to his grave. In the summer of 1886, a group of Black Civil War veterans gathered there and welcomed D. Henderson, a fellow veteran from New York City who had come to pay his respects at what he called the “sacred spot.” The men stood in formation and sang “Nearer My God to Thee,” after which Henderson thanked Stevens for his “hopeless fight” in holding America to its stated ideals of justice and liberty for all.

The basement below a Lancaster tavern owned by Stevens—believed to have been a stop on the Underground Railroad. LancasterHistory

“[His] virtue, and the world’s memory of his virtue, will endure as long as time itself,” Henderson said.

To the veterans assembled that day, Stevens was the man who had championed their right to fight for the Union. He fought for the abolition of slavery, equal protection under the law, universal suffrage and free public education, and he achieved it all, at least in the letter of the law. For his final act, Stevens chose to be buried in Lancaster’s only integrated cemetery, his grave emblazoned: “EQUALITY OF MAN BEFORE HIS CREATOR.”

Boon Companion

The remarkable life of Thaddeus Stevens’ trailblazing female partner

by Brandon Tensley

LancasterHistory

Lydia Hamilton Smith is often referred to as Thaddeus Stevens’ housekeeper—and, perhaps, his common-law wife. In fact, she was a great deal more: a fervent Catholic, a smashingly successful real estate entrepreneur and likely a daring participant in the Underground Railroad whose deeply held faith led her to pursue good works at nearly every juncture.

Smith was born near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, around 1815 to a white father and a mother of both African and European heritage. She married once, around the age of 20, to a barber and musician named Jacob Smith, with whom she had two sons. Smith eventually left Jacob—perhaps, some histories say, because he was abusive—and in 1844 moved with her boys to Lancaster, to work for Stevens.

There, her duties were expansive. Besides overseeing Stevens’ houses in Lancaster and Washington, D.C., Smith counseled him on business affairs and was his constant companion at social events; shortly after the end of the war, the Lancaster Intelligencer reported that, at town gatherings, Smith “is constantly spoken of as Mrs. Stevens.” In 1860, she bought her first property from Stevens for $500. On his death in 1868, Stevens left her a $500 annuity, which she used to expand her prosperous real estate business.

Like Stevens, Smith was dedicated to Black liberation and is believed to have helped her boss shelter enslaved people seeking freedom. Stevens’ physician, Henry Carpenter, said that the lawmaker’s life “was prolonged six or eight years by faithful nursing and close attention” from Smith. Smith thus materially changed the course of American history: During this time, Stevens advocated for the passage of the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

When she died in 1884, Smith’s obituary noted that her towering reputation crossed racial lines: “Among the people of Washington, white and colored, she was respected highly.” She was buried in the cemetery of St. Mary’s Catholic Church in Lancaster. As a final sign of her unfailing bond with Stevens, she bequeathed $500 for the continued care of his grave.

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Tracy Schorn | READ MORE

Tracy Schorn is a journalist based in Waterford, Virginia.

ARTS & CULTURE

The Uniquely American History of Eggnog, Everyone’s Favorite—or Least Favorite—Holiday Quaff

This Yuletide mainstay continues to warm cockles and ventricles everywhere

Taryn White December 2023

A glass of homemade eggnog dusted with cinnamon is a mouthwatering prospect to some—and an abomination to others. Getty Images

In early 1815, distinguished representatives from the United States and Britain gathered in Belgium to ratify the treaty that ended the War of 1812. To celebrate the success of the peace talks, Massachusetts’ Pittsfield Sun reported, President James Madison’s stepson and secretary, John Payne Todd, “invited some gentlemen from his country and some others, to partake of a liquor with which the Americans used to treat their friends on Christmas Day.” That drink was already an American staple: eggnog.

The creamy, spiced beverage is believed to have originated in medieval Britain as “posset,” a comforting mixture of hot milk or cream, wine or ale, and spices. In the 13th century, some monks even began adding whipped eggs and figs to their possets—but the scarcity of the more expensive ingredients, including eggs and sherry, made this proto-eggnog a luxury reserved mainly for the British elite.

When the beloved drink crossed continents to North America in the mid-1700s, it became known as “egg-n-grog,” a term derived from the Scottish and Gaelic word noggin, which means cup, and grog, an English term for hard booze, often rum. The American colonists soon shortened that to “eggnog,” a term that first appeared in a poem by Maryland minister Jonathan Boucher around 1774.

George Washington was known to serve his own version to guests at Mount Vernon. The drink even once sparked a riot at the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1826, when campus staff intervened after cadets, possibly including a young Jefferson Davis, served eggnog at a boisterous Christmas party despite the school’s ban on alcohol. The drink’s wintry spices, and the preference for serving it hot, made nog a Yuletide mainstay.

As milk, eggs, sugar and rum became more affordable and abundant, eggnog became accessible to everyday Americans. Today, people around the world enjoy it, often putting regional spins on the recipe. Versions include Puerto Rican coquito, which contains coconut milk or cream, and Mexican rompope, which uses egg yolks and a few pinches of baking soda.

Despite its origins, eggnog has not always been widely loved in Britain. One contributor to its decline there is another hot beverage—tea, which took the country by storm in the 17th century, when the East India Company began importing it in large quantities. And while eggnog isn’t universally loved in the U.S.—some Americans loathe it—we nonetheless consume more than 15 million gallons of eggnog annually. That works out to around 240 million cups of eggnog each year—enough to ensure that every adult American can enjoy a seasonal tipple.

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Taryn White | READ MORE

Taryn White is a Washington, D.C.-based travel writer.

AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Why Collectors Fall Head Over Heels for the ‘Inverted Jenny’ Stamp

One of the rare 24-cent misprints sold at auction this week for a record-breaking $2 million

Meilan Solly Associate Editor, History December 2023

The "Inverted Jenny," 1918, one of the rarest and most valuable stamps in the world, celebrates the first air mail in the U.S.—by depicting an inadvertently upside-down airplane. Hannah Whitaker

William T. Robey spent the evening of May 14, 1918, riding streetcars around Washington, D.C., carrying a treasure-filled briefcase and fleeing representatives of the United States Post Office Department. When he finally made it home later that night, the 29-year-old stamp collector and stockbroker’s clerk told his wife, Caroline, that postal inspectors were eager to recover 100 unusual stamps—now known as Inverted Jennies—that had come into his possession. “A little disturbed,” as Caroline later recalled, the couple stashed the briefcase under their bed and settled in for a fitful night of sleep.

Just a few days earlier, the Post Office Department had started printing more than two million new 24-cent stamps with a special design celebrating the launch of the world’s first regularly scheduled airmail service. Clair Aubrey Huston, a designer at the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing (BEP), based the stamp’s central illustration on a photograph of the Curtiss JN-4H “Jenny,” a single-engine biplane that would be used in the service’s inaugural flights. The stamp, which replaced the Jenny’s front cockpit with a mail compartment, embodied the “romance of early aviation,” says Daniel Piazza, a curator at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum.

Ahead of the stamp’s release, though, the collecting world was abuzz with discussion of a possible error. Philatelists across the country gossiped about Huston’s design, noting that it was complex, requiring two separate engraved plates, one to print the blue center image and a second to add the dark-red frame. That meant the paper had to go through a hand press twice. Collectors like Robey knew that any multistep printing process was prone to human error. Plus, the BEP was already overwhelmed with demands to produce bonds and stamps supporting the Allied effort in World War I.

The collectors were right: The bureau made nine sheets of errors, each with 100 stamps depicting an upside-down plane. Staff found and destroyed eight of the erroneous sheets and shipped the other stamps to offices in Washington, New York and Philadelphia—the cities selected for the first airmail flights. But one sheet slipped through.

On May 14, one day before the first mail plane took off, Robey visited a Washington, D.C. post office and asked whether any of the new Jenny stamps were in stock. When a clerk showed him what turned out to be the sole surviving sheet of inverts, his “heart stood still,” as he put it later in a 1938 article for Weekly Philatelic Gossip. “It was what you might call a ‘thrill that comes once in a lifetime.’” Robey bought the stamps for their face value of $24 (around $510 today), only informing the clerk they were inverts after the transaction was complete. The anonymous clerk alerted officials that an error sheet had slipped past quality control, prompting a delay in further sales of the stamps as postmasters in D.C., New York and Philadelphia checked their stock for misprints.

Though postal inspectors tried to confiscate Robey’s sheet, stopping by his workplace within hours of the sale and later questioning his wife at home, they had no legal grounds for seizing the stamps, and he repeatedly rebuffed them. “No doubt,” Robey concluded with obvious self-satisfaction, “a novice might have been scared into relinquishing the sheet.” Eager to get the inspectors off his back—and to offload the stamps before other examples turned up—Robey started advertising his find. A week later, he sold them to Philadelphia stamp dealer Eugene Klein for $15,000 (around $317,000 today). The Robeys used the money to buy a house and a car.

In the 105 years since their creation, these Inverted Jennies have been divvied up, changing hands dozens of times. Number 78, identified as such based on its position in the sheet of 100, was retrieved after spending time inside a vacuum cleaner. Number 66 was stolen while on display at a philatelic convention in 1955 and has never been recovered. Two of the inverts—Numbers 2 and 70—are on view at the Postal Museum in Washington.

Much like the stamps issued to celebrate its launch, the first airmail service—supported by Army planes and pilots, as no commercial airlines were in operation at the time—didn’t go quite as planned. George Boyle, the Army lieutenant tasked with flying the first airmail between Washington and Philadelphia, was a novice who’d only been assigned to the mission because he was engaged to the daughter of the head of the Interstate Commerce Commission. On his first attempt, Boyle literally inverted his trip, heading south instead of north, then had a rough landing in rural Maryland; during his second flight, he again flew in the wrong direction, stopping in southern Virginia to refuel before crash-landing on the grounds of a country club in the Philadelphia suburbs, around 15 miles from his intended destination. Despite his high-ranking connections, Boyle didn’t get a third chance.

Taken together, says Piazza, the inverted stamp and botched flight represented “a very inauspicious start for airmail in America.” Still, the service recovered quickly, going transcontinental by 1920. The Inverted Jenny, meanwhile, retains its topsy-turvy allure: In 2021, a block of four Jennies sold at auction for a record $4.9 million. And earlier this week, Number 49, which resurfaced in 2018 after spending decades tucked away in a safe-deposit box, fetched $2 million at auction, making it the most expensive U.S. stamp ever sold.

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Meilan Solly | | READ MORE

Meilan Solly is Smithsonian magazine's associate digital editor, history.

ARTS & CULTURE

How Lee Miller, a Magazine Model and Muse, Became a Daring World War II Photographer

The bold journalist, who made a splash on both sides of the lens, is the subject of a new biopic starring Kate Winslet

Kate Wheeling December 2023

Left, a 1932 self-portrait by Lee Miller. Right, a 1943 portrait of Miller by American photojournalist David Scherman. © Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk; David E. Scherman © Courtesy Lee Miller Archives, England 2023. All rights reserved. leemiller.co.uk

Lee Miller’s big break began with a near-death experience. Miller was discovered at 19 by publishing scion Condé Nast himself when he pulled her out of the way of an oncoming car in Manhattan—then put her on the cover of Vogue. But Miller, born in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 1907, was not content to be a muse for male photographers.

Instead, she moved to Paris, where she stepped behind the lens and studied with Surrealist photographer Man Ray, her mentor and lover. Miller mastered the technical aspects of photography quickly and distinguished herself among the few high-profile women photographers of the day by opening her own studio in the City of Light. There she took portraits of royalty, literary elites and even the pet lizard of a French socialite, who paid $100 for the image. Soon, Miller turned to photojournalism, ultimately producing some of the 20th century’s most groundbreaking images for the magazine whose cover she once graced.

During World War II, ignoring personal warnings from U.S. diplomats to return stateside, Miller embedded with the U.S. military. She chronicled the war across Europe, capturing unforgettable images: Londoners huddled in underground stations during the Blitz; bloodied patients at an Allied field hospital in Normandy. Miller pushed the bounds at Vogue: At a time when the 1940 bombing of Vogue’s London office didn’t merit a mention in its own pages, Miller ensured that her images went to press: She was among the first reporters to enter Dachau after its liberation and sent a message with her photos to her editor, “I IMPLORE YOU TO BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE.”

After the war, she settled on a Sussex farm, where artists like Pablo Picasso and Jean Dubuffet were regular visitors. Yet Miller struggled to find a sense of purpose and was largely forgotten until a trove of her photographs was rediscovered in her attic, several years after her death in 1977.

Now a feature film is helping rescue Miller from obscurity: In Lee, which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2023, Kate Winslet (center) is magnetic in the title role, and was so inspired by Miller’s story that she wrote the foreword to Lee Miller: Photographs, a book by Miller’s son released this past October.

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Kate Wheeling | READ MORE

Kate Wheeling is a former staff writer at Pacific Standard.

AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Why Can’t Machines Process CO2 Like Trees? And More Questions From Our Readers

You’ve got questions. We’ve got experts

Smithsonian magazine December 2023

Why can't machines process CO2 the way trees do? Illustration by Daniella Ferretti

Why can’t machines process CO2 the way trees do? Tom Brewer | Ponder, Texas

There are machines that absorb CO2, but they do it differently from trees. When plants perform photosynthesis, the carbon becomes part of their leaves, stems and trunks. Machines, on the other hand, turn CO2 from a gas into a liquid and store it underground. As of now, forests and wetlands are much more effective than machines at pulling carbon out of the air, and they provide other benefits like oxygen, water filtration and animal habitats. The main drawback is that plants eventually decompose and release the carbon. Better technology might someday help us store huge amounts of carbon deep in the earth for as long as 10,000 years. To solve the climate crisis, we’ll need to use both nature and technology—and, above all, reduce the amount of CO2 we release. —John D. Parker, senior scientist, Smithsonian Environmental Research Center

We know that stars are round. Why do humans see (and draw) them with points? James Cloonan | Rochester, New York

Stars are so far away that they appear very small—too small for their round shapes to be seen. When we look at a star, the Earth’s atmosphere distorts its image, the way heat rising from a campfire seems to create ripples. This makes the starlight bounce around and “twinkle.” (Artists often depict stars with points, though not always. Vincent van Gogh painted them as glowing balls.) Planets in our solar system can be identified by eye because their apparent sizes are large enough that they don’t twinkle. —Howard Smith, senior astrophysicist, Center for Astrophysics | Harvard & Smithsonian

How are insects able to hover? Ken Dias | Toronto

Many insects hover, but how well they do it depends on how big they are and how rapidly they flap their wings. Flap too slowly for your size and you can’t remain stationary (think big butterflies). Insects typically hover by flapping around 110 beats per second, using a combination of strokes that creates a three-dimensional figure-eight pattern. Hummingbirds evolved to use a similar figure-eight pattern, though they’re anatomically very different from insects. —Floyd Shockley, entomology collections manager, National Museum of Natural History

What was the evidence or theory behind the Dick and Jane books? Ellie Duram | Wichita, Kansas

Students in the 19th century learned to read from the Bible, primers, Webster’s Blue Back Speller and McGuffey Readers, which taught morality along with phonics—the sounds made by individual letters and letter combinations. By the 1920s, reading specialists—such as those working with John Dewey and William Scott Gray at the University of Chicago—were advocating for the “whole word” method, in which children learned to recognize shapes of words. Gray’s colleague Zerna Sharp is credited with the idea for the Dick and Jane books, which used a limited vocabulary and clear pictures to tell stories about suburban siblings. In 1955, Rudolf Flesch’s best seller Why Johnny Can’t Read—And What You Can Do About It criticized the “whole word” method for not preparing students to read at higher levels the way phonics-based methods do. The publisher updated Dick and Jane in 1967, but phased the series out by the 1980s. —Debbie Schaefer-Jacobs, curator of Home and Community Life, National Museum of American History

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Table of Contents

Smithsonian Magazine: December 2023

All articles

Can Robots Replace Michelangelo?

The Surprise Reappearance of a Rare Frog Has Scientists Leaping to Protect Its Habitat

The Man Who’s Saving America’s Forgotten Grapes

The World’s Smallest Reindeer Get Their Day in the Sun

Ukraine Planned an Ambitious Memorial at the Site of a Holocaust Massacre. Then War Came to Kyiv

Readers Respond to the November 2023 Issue

What Comes Next for the Smithsonian’s New Human Remains Task Force

The Teddy Bear Was Once Seen as a Dangerous Influence on Young Children

Why America Is Just Now Learning to Love Thaddeus Stevens, the ‘Best-Hated Man’ in U.S. History

The Uniquely American History of Eggnog, Everyone’s Favorite—or Least Favorite—Holiday Quaff

Why Collectors Fall Head Over Heels for the ‘Inverted Jenny’ Stamp

How Lee Miller, a Magazine Model and Muse, Became a Daring World War II Photographer

Why Can’t Machines Process CO2 Like Trees? And More Questions From Our Readers