2020-04-01 Smithsonian Magazine

U.S.

128

articles

Cuba

7

Mexico

20

Brazil

19

Peru 7

Canada

27

articles

Antarctica

7

TO HAWAII

AMERICAN ICON

prologue

12 SMITHSONIAN | April 2020

N EARLY 1970 , an advertisement for a new magazine promised it would

examine the circumstances that shape the life of a human being—“this

harassed biped,” who faces “staggering problems... from oil spills to

famine.” Wildlife was in decline. Pollution was on the rise. An energy cri-

sis loomed. “Our articles will probe man’s disasters,” the ad continued,

“and join the battle for his improvement.”

Never mind the paternalistic “man,” “battle” wasn’t quite the right

word, either: The magazine would always strive to be nonpartisan. Still,

the fi rst issue popped up right in the midst of the cultural havoc of the

fi rst Earth Day, and many of the concerns and ideals behind that nation-

wide protest also inspired the editorial team who launched Smithsonian.

Justice was one guiding ethic. In the inaugural issue, the pioneering

black scholar John Wesley Blassingame, acknowledging “the juggernaut

of white supremacy,” documented the emergence of African-American

studies on the nation’s campuses. But it was “Life Is an Endless Give-and-

Take With Earth and All Her Creatures, ” an essay in the same issue by

René Dubos, a renowned biologist and writer, that articulated the maga-

zine’s point of view: “The optimist has good historical reasons to justify

his confi dence that the present environmental crisis will eventually be

overcome,” he wrote. There has indeed been progress. The Clean Air and

Clean Water Acts soon became law, and the nation’s natural resources as

well as its people have been better off ever since.

Smithsonian, meanwhile, has grown more than tenfold in print,

to some 1.6 million paid subscriptions today, and there are another 8

million monthly readers online at Smithsonianmag.com, a publishing

technology that didn’t exist, and wasn’t fully imagined, when the mag-

azine debuted. Over those fi ve decades Smithsonian has provided mil-

lions of dollars to the Smithsonian Institution in support of its mission,

“the increase and diff usion of knowledge.”

The magazine (or “unmagazine,” as some wags used to say, because it

eschewed trendiness) covers subjects far beyond environmental prob-

lems, and not every one of our more than 4,700 feature articles has aged

well (see the 11-page spread from 1980 defending seagulls against the

“rotten press” they receive ). Yet the magazine continues to explore, op-

timistically, the challenges and discoveries that promise to shape the

lives of bipeds, quadrupeds and every other creature on Earth.

March 1986

November 1981

March 1986

March 1991

December 2006

Thick Layers

of Life Blanket

Lake Bottoms in

Antarctica Valleys

Aquatic lichens

and algae off er an

unusual means of

studying possible

life on Mars

New Finds Could Rewrite

the Start of American History

In Chile, archaeologists

uncover early signs of

human migration

Living With Geese

A honking good

essay by

Paul Theroux

Tree Houses

Take a Bough

Why do some

Americans

choose to live

in trees?

Lords of the Arctic

on Cape Churchill

Getting to know polar

bears in Manitoba

Research by Michelle Strange and Lily Katzman

GL

OB

E:^

AL

AM

Y^

August 1997