Ted Scheinman
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Articles by Ted Scheinman
When a Photographer Turned His Focus on Social Injustice, It Helped Usher in the First Child Labor Laws
Did you know? Inside the National Child Labor Committee Established in 1904 and chartered by Congress in 1907, the committee was dedicated to exposing the conditions and ending the practice of child labor.
The First President Gives Notice
By Ted Scheinman George Washington's announcement that he wouldn't seek a third presidential term helped define modern statesmanship: The Republic had no need for a king, even an American one.
Miles Davis Emerged From Middle America to Become the ‘Picasso of Jazz’ and Taught Us All How to Be Cool
As we approach the 100th anniversary of the birth of a jazz legend, look back on the staggering impact of his work and its continued relevance Miles Dewey Davis III’s first memory was a blue-hot flame on the family stove. “I felt fear, real fear,” he recalled in his 1989 autobiography. He was also exhilarated.
Miles Davis Emerged From Middle America to Become the ‘Picasso of Jazz’ and Taught Us All How to Be Cool
According to legend, back in 1968, Jerry Garcia and Phil Lesh fired Bob Weir and Pigpen from their positions in the Grateful Dead. Or maybe it was …
How Canyon de Chelly Brought a Photographer Back to Life
Wayne Martin Belger’s photographs sometimes look like the product of time travel, or peculiar magic. In a way, they are. In his journeys around the globe, Belger takes on grim assignments and produces photographs that have a quality of revelation. He’s reported for Smithsonian from a refugee camp in Greece, made intimate portraits of Native activists at Standing Rock and embedded with Zapatistas at an armed compound in Mexico.
Where Did Butterflies Come From? This Scientist Is On the Case Original
When Akito Kawahara was 8 years old, his father took him on a members-only tour of the insect collection at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. His father, the renowned conceptual artist On Kawara, had introduced him to butterfly collecting early, and Akito had already amassed about 500 of his own specimens.
20 Years Later, 'School of Rock' Holds Up
We all keep our favorite artists in a little cabinet, arrayed in loose categories. One of the most cherished shelves in mine contains artists I think of as elephant-ballerinas: Great Big Boys who each, in their own way, wrought an art of exquisite delicacy. These include Samuel Johnson; David Crosby; W.C. Fields; Jerry Garcia; and, no greater or lesser a figure than these, Jack Black.
How One Forensic Artist Brings the Dead to Life
Hew Morrison specializes in bringing the dead back to life, in giving a face to the faceless. Born in Inverness, Scotland, and currently based in Thailand, Morrison is a freelance forensic artist. His canvas is a laptop, and he often works with the police and private investigators to reconstruct faces of unidentified corpses. He also works with archaeologists, among whom he has become the go-to guy for recreating likenesses of figures from centuries or even millennia ago.
How Graffiti Left a Mark on the Art Scene
The first hip-hop tag came in the late 1960s, either in Philadelphia or New York City—there is some squabbling over this milestone—but New York is inarguably where the new art form would take flight in the 1970s, eventually propelling many of its young, upstart artists into the heady, gatekept world of high art.
A Rap Legend Looks Back on 50 Years of Hip-Hop
They say it began in the Bronx. It was August 11, 1973, and 18-year-old DJ Kool Herc, short for Hercules, hosted a party in the rec room of his apartment building. Herc was a pioneer in a new form of free entertainment. In early 1970s New York, if you were a teenager and didn’t have much money, you could find entertainment in the streets.
You Could Own Nathaniel Hawthorne's Handwritten Notes on 'The Scarlet Letter'
“I send you the remainder of The Scarlet Letter and hope you will like it as well [as] the preceding part. Thank God, it is off my mind! My next story shall not be such a h[e]ll-fired one. Yet I deserve some credit for refraining from making this half so ugly as I might.” With these words to his editor, James T. Fields, in February 1850, Nathaniel Hawthorne washed his hands of the manuscript that would become his most famous novel.
How Marian Anderson Took the World by Storm
On Easter Sunday 1939, Marian Anderson, wrapped in a fur coat against the April chill, stepped to the microphone atop the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and launched into “America (My Country, ’Tis of Thee).” First lady Eleanor Roosevelt had assembled an integrated crowd of 75,000 people—an unprecedented honor for a Black artist—who listened in solemn awe.
When It Comes to String Instruments, Stradivariuses Are Still Pitch Perfect
More than 4,500 yearsafter an enterprising Mesopotamian stretched a few cords of catgut over a hollow wooden vessel to create the first lute, the craft of building string instruments reached a state of near-perfection in a humble workshop in Cremona, Italy. The craftsman’s name is still known around the world more than 300 years later, though his life story remains something of a mystery: Antonio Stradivari, maker of incomparable violins, cellos and more.
The Joys of Being a Jane Austen Bro
"I'm sorry," said the woman, drawing her lacy bonnet back from her forehead and gawking at me. I almost expected her to continue this examination through a lorgnette. "It's just a bit like encountering an endangered species." I looked down at my own getup: prim and shiny black shoes with gleaming brass buckles, a pair of tights that felt every inch as restrictive as they looked, and a waistcoat and cravat under a stiff-shouldered gentleman's jacket of the Regency period.
The Happiness Blues
A surfeit of joy in B.B. King’s early singles. B.B. King had near-limitless patience—a magnanimity toward his fans and a generosity that compelled him to nurture younger talents. This patience did not extend to white listeners who misconstrued the blues as a posture of grief, a ritualized performance of suffering. “Scholars love to praise the ‘pure’ blues artists or the ones, like Robert Johnson, who died young and represent tragedy,” King writes in his autobiography.
The Historical Roots of Racial Disparities in American Health Care
To many people, Henrietta Lacks, painted by Kadir Nelson in 2017, symbolizes inequity in medicine. Lacks died from cervical cancer in 1951, but her tumor cells— used in research without her permission—would enable medical advances, including the polio vaccine.
Constance Baker Motley Taught the Nation How to Win Justice
In the spring of 1963, Constance Baker Motley watched the protests in Birmingham, Alabama, with hope—and concern. The nation’s most segregated city, Birmingham had become the center of the struggle for Black equality. Previous demonstrations there led by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom she considered “an American hero,” had produced “no results,” Motley wrote in her memoir. Consequently, King and other leaders began planning more dramatic action, including the Children’s Crusade.
The Wrath of the Gods: Surviving the Pandemic with Petronius, Fitzgerald, and Eliot
DECEMBER 9, 2021 THE ERA OF COVID has prompted many strange adjustments, new obsessions, fresh habits, or a slippage back into old ones. My most bookish COVID obsession has been revisiting the Latin texts of my grad school years, especially Petronius, courtier to Nero and author of the Satyricon.
The Wrath of the Gods: Surviving the Pandemic with Petronius, Fitzgerald, and Eliot
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What the History of 'Spirit Photography' Portends for the Future of Deepfake Videos
Two years ago, Noelle Martin discovered someone had made a “deepfake” video about her. Martin is a 26-year-old Australian law graduate who has lobbied governments and corporations to take action against the online harassment of women. Now, someone on the internet had decided to attack her via a technique that uses artificial intelligence to swap one person’s face onto another’s body.
Culinary Detectives Try to Recover the Formula for a Deliciously Fishy Roman Condiment
Garum has long been considered the dodo of gastronomic history. The fishy sauce was beloved by the ancient Greeks and Romans, but until recently, classicists believed it to be as extinct as the flightless birds of Mauritius. And garum hardly sounds like something that would tempt 21st-century taste buds. Many recipes that survive from antiquity call for allowing fish to putrefy in open vats under the Mediterranean sun for up to three months.
The Surprising Artistic Life of Ancient Sparta
Illustration by Tracy Walker King Agesilaus II—who led the Spartan Army at the peak of its power in the fourth century B.C.—proclaimed that one of Sparta’s greatest strengths was its citizens’ “contempt of pleasure.” Nonsense. Spartans were devoted to all kinds of pleasurable pursuits, particularly the arts: It is widely believed that there were more poets in Sparta during the seventh and sixth centuries B.C. than in any other Greek city-state.
When Playing Video Games Becomes a History Lesson
The “Assasin’s Creed” series, famous for using real historical events as a backdrop to the games, have gone through scenarios such as the Crusades, the American Revolution and the Golden Age of Piracy.
The Secret Codes of Lady Wroth, the First Female English Novelist
Two summers ago, I found myself face to face with a 400-year-old mystery. I was trying to escape the maze of books at Firsts, London’s Rare Book Fair, in Battersea Park. The fair was a tangle of stalls overflowing with treasures gleaming in old leather, paper and gold. Then, as I rounded a corner, a book stopped me. I felt as though I had seen a ghost—and, in a sense, I had. Stamped onto its cover was an intricate monogram that I recognized instantly.
The Story Behind the Photography Studio That Captured America
For generations, Bachrach Photographers made everyone, from JFK to Duke Ellington to everyday people, look great Before donating the 45.5-carat Hope Diamond to the Smithsonian Institution, the jeweler Harry Winston had Bradford Bachrach photograph Eleanor Kidd—the face of Lucky Strike cigarettes—wearing the gem in 1958.
Kid Ory Finally Gets the Encore He Deserves
If you were sauntering through the packed-dirt streets of back-of-town New Orleans in the 1910s, anywhere between Storyville and Gert Town, chances are you would have encountered several brass bands blowing a new flavor of music from wagons that promoted upcoming performances. But none of them blew like Kid Ory’s band. Ory wowed onlookers by stretching his trombone slide over the tailgate and blasting competing groups with his signature goodbye tune, “Do What Ory Say,” as the crowd cheered.
Father Reginald Foster Used Latin to Bring History Into the Present Original
The death of Latin has been greatly exaggerated. Of course, Latin is no longer the default language for European learning and diplomacy, as it was from the Roman Empire through the early modern period. Since the implementation of Vatican II in the early 1960s, even many priests don't speak the language in a meaningful way.
Vivat Latinitas! On my summer vacation, I spoke a dead language.
Culturebox My lively summer speaking a dead language. A.E. Housman At the beginning of the last century, A.E. Housman, that cantankerous giant of classical scholarship, was already complaining about “an age which is out of touch with Latinity.” Around that time, philistines were excising classics from the popular curriculum, and the subsequent 100 years have hardly improved Latin’s apparent relevance in Western society.
John le Carré, Dead at 89, Defined the Modern Spy Novel
In 1947, a 16-year-old David Cornwell left the British boarding school system where he'd spent many unhappy years and ended up in Switzerland, where he studied German at the University of Bern—and caught the attention of British intelligence.
Celebrate Jane Austen's Birthday With a 360-Degree, Interactive Tour of Her House
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | Dec. 14, 2020, 7 a.m. Lizzie Dunford became director of the Jane Austen's House Museum at about the worst possible time: this past spring, shortly after the United Kingdom ordered nonessential workers to stay at home, all nonessential shops and other sites to shutter, Parliament to recess for 30 days and the Church of England to close its many doors. "I've overseen a strange period" in the house's life, Dunford says, with smiling understatement, via Zoom.
Ranking John le Carre’s novels in order.
The Completist Which is the master’s greatest? And where does his new one fall? Courtesy of Alfred A Knopf A Perfect Spy remains le Carré’s greatest novel, at once his most autobiographical, his most technically assured, and his most touching. I like to call it the author’s Tender Is the Night; Magnus Pym is a total Dick Diver, just with a few more passports. The Honourable Schoolboy beats out Tinker, Tailor at No. 2 for the simple reason that it contains le Carré’s finest prose.
Films based on John le Carre novels, ranked.
The Completist John le Carré on screen. Alec Guinness from 1979’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Gary Oldman from the 2011 version Courtesy of BBC, left, and Focus Features, right About half of Agatha Christie’s 66 mystery novels received a film treatment, whereas only eight of John le Carré’s 23 novels have made it to the big screen. (As it happens, 23 is also the number of extant James Bond movies.) This modest smattering of le Carré adaptations makes a certain sense.
All 23 novels and the movies, discussed.
The Completist I read all 23 of le Carré’s novels. Here’s my full and complete testimony to Control. ::::PERSONAL TESTIMONY & DEBRIEF:::: Released by personnel section five in accordance with Her Majesty’s Official Secrets Act to Slate magazine, 1350 Connecticut Ave. NW, Suite 400, Washington, D.C., 20036. Enacted by ORDINANCE III of 1923 (incorporating ORDINANCE IX of 1934) as amended by Act XXI of 1967; Legal Notice 46 of 1965; &c. &c.
How Denim Became a Political Symbol of the 1960s Original
In the spring of 1965, demonstrators in Camden, Alabama, took to the streets in a series of marches to demand voting rights. Among the demonstrators were “seven or eight out-of-state ministers,” United Press International reported, adding that they wore the “blue denim ‘uniform’ of the civil rights movement over their clerical collars.” Though most people today don’t associate blue denim with the struggle for black freedom, it played a significant role in the movement.
The Hunt for Julius Caesar's Assassins Marked the Last Days of the Roman Republic
By 30 B.C., the aspiring Roman dictator Octavian had dispatched all the meaningful enemies who stood between him and absolute rule over the fraying Roman republic. Octavian, the young man named by the assassinated Julius Caesar as son and heir in his will, had long been consolidating power while hunting the conspirators who stabbed Caesar to death on the floor of the Senate 14 years earlier. Already, a half-dozen of the assassins had fallen.
Saddle Up With Badger Clark, America's Forgotten Cowboy Poet
South Dakota’s first poet laureate lived much of his life alone in a prim cabin in the heart of Custer State Park. He wore whipcord breeches and polished riding boots, a Windsor tie and an officer’s jacket. He fed the deer flapjacks from his window in the mornings, paid $10 a year in ground rent and denounced consumerism at every turn. “Lord, how I pity a man with a steady job,” he wrote in his diary in 1941.
A New Edition of 'Pride and Prejudice' Crosses Its T's and Dots Its I's
Barbara Heller used period handwriting—and new material—to bring the novel’s colorful letters to life Letters are a key part of Jane Austen's novels (Illustration by Meilan Solly based on an Isabel Bishop painting of Jane Austen. The Morgan Library & Museum, Gift of Mrs. Robert E. Blum in honor of Charles Ryskamp on his 10th anniversary as Director, 1979.32:15. Photography by Steven H.
Is today’s global travel any better than the Grand Tour? – Ted Scheinman | Aeon Essays
I stood atop Mount Vesuvius with a small band of American classicists, reading a letter (it was not addressed to us but then that has never stopped classicists). This particular epistola was from Pliny the Younger to Tacitus and it recounted the great volcanic eruption during the reign of Titus that had incinerated, buried or drowned around 16,000 souls in Pompeii and Herculaneum – including Pliny the Elder.
The Remarkable Life and Work of Guitar Maker Freeman Vines
SMITHSONIANMAG.COM | Sept. 1, 2020, 8 a.m. Freeman Vines has spent almost half a century creating the most distinctive guitars in America. No two look or sound the same. A few of the 78-year-old’s guitars are carved to look like African masks; others partake in the famously boxy Bo Diddley style, and others resemble nothing so much as the leaf off a tree, or the flat part of a well-used oar.
What Autumn de Wilde Gets Right About Jane Austen
" (Focus Features via AP) Jane Austen’s irony thrives in the seams and slippages between satire and sentiment: She was a withering observer of the vanity of human wishes while understanding all too well those who suffer from it. Her 1815 classic,Emma, follows the story of Emma Woodhouse, the wealthiest of Austen's heroines, a young woman addicted to match-making (often with disastrous results) and delicately blends irony and earnestness.
What American Travel Looked Like Before COVID-19
Despite historic setbacks similar to today’s, Americans have become more dedicated travelers In 2018, more than 40 million Americans traveled overseas. (Alexander Spatari via Getty Images) By Ted Scheinman; Data by Matthew Browne Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe May 2020 Americans as well as others around the globe are facing peacetime travel restrictions unprecedented in the modern era because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Smithsonian Magazine Turns 50
The cover story of the debut issue was about elephant breeding in Sri Lanka.
What Autumn de Wilde's 'Emma' Gets Right About Jane Austen's Irony
Jane Austen’s irony thrives in the seams and slippages between satire and sentiment: She was a withering observer of the vanity of human wishes while understanding all too well those who suffer from it. Her 1815 classic, Emma, follows the story of Emma Woodhouse, the wealthiest of Austen's heroines, a young woman addicted to match-making (often with disastrous results) and delicately blends irony and earnestness.
Madam C.J. Walker Gets a Netflix Close-Up
A turn-of-the-century hair-care magnate who shared her wealth gets the spotlight Smithsonian Magazine | Subscribe March 2020 Madam C.J. Walker, born Sarah Breedlove in Louisiana in 1867, was the most successful black wellness mogul of her day. Now a new Netflix series will show how this enterprising daughter of freed slaves empowered generations of black women to prosper. Breedlove was in her 30s when she began treating her bald spots with beeswax, copper sulfate and sulfur.
On a Snow Day, Obama Disses D.C., Recommends "Flinty Chicago Toughness"
Jan 28, 2009 2 PM Tweet Share IN CASE YOU MISSED IT...HERE'S THE VIDEO! *** After Sidwell Friends canceled school yesterday, President Barack Obama had some harsh words for D.C. "Can I make a comment that is unrelated to the economy very quickly?" Obama asked at a morning economic briefing. "It has to do with Washington. My children's school was canceled today. Because of what—some ice?
Scenes From a Reenactment of a Slave Uprising
On the night of January 8, 1811, beginning on the Andry Plantation in Louisiana, several hundred enslaved black people overthrew their masters and began the two-day trek eastward to New Orleans, where they planned to free the region’s slaves and create a polity ruled by free blacks. It was the largest slave revolt in U.S. history—and quickly forgotten. On the second day, re-enactors strode along a levee near the Shell Norco refinery.
Breaking Down the Numbers of Americans' Drinking Habits
A century after Prohibition, we uncork a history of the nation’s shifting relationship with booze Mark Twain wrote a column in July of 1867 bemoaning the “compulsory temperance” movement then gaining ground in Massachusetts: “Prohibition only drives drunkenness behind doors and into dark places, and does not cure it or even diminish it.” The federal government would test that proposition starting 100 years ago in January.
The Psychology Behind Generational Conflict
Older people have groused about younger people for millennia. Now we know why Older people tend to believe that younger generations lack whatever traits they themselves possess in abundance.
Camp Austen | Ted Scheinman | Macmillan
A Paris Review Staff Pick and one of The Millions' Most Anticipated Reads of March A raucous tour through the world of Mr. Darcy imitations, tailored gowns, and tipsy ballroom dancing The son of a devoted Jane Austen scholar, Ted Scheinman spent his childhood eating Yorkshire pudding, singing in an Anglican choir, and watching Laurence Olivier as Mr. Darcy.
Can a Surprise Lawsuit in Oregon Save American Climate Policy?
Outside the COP22 international climate conference in Marrakech, Morocco, on November 9th, 2016. (Photo: Fadel Senna/AFP/Getty Images) In 2015, a group of young Americans filed a lawsuit against the Obama administration, claiming that the United States government had failed to take sufficient action on climate change, and that this failure was unconstitutional.
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