Meilan Solly

2 weeks ago | smithsonianmag.com | Meilan Solly

In May 1845, 129 British officers and crew members set out in search of the Northwest Passage on HMS “Erebus” and HMS “Terror.” None returned In one of his last letters home, John Irving, a British lieutenant bound for the Arctic on an ill-fated voyage to discover the Northwest Passage, advised his sister-in-law that “there must now be a long blank in our correspondence.”“Two years is a long time without any tidings, and perhaps we may be three years at least,” Irving wrote.

2 weeks ago | smithsonianmag.com | Meilan Solly

In May 1845, 129 British officers and crew members set out in search of the Northwest Passage on HMS “Erebus” and HMS “Terror.” None returned In one of his last letters home, John Irving, a British lieutenant bound for the Arctic on an ill-fated voyage to discover the Northwest Passage, advised his sister-in-law that “there must now be a long blank in our correspondence.”“Two years is a long time without any tidings, and perhaps we may be three years at least,” Irving wrote.

1 month ago | smithsonianmag.com | Jeanne Maglaty |Meilan Solly

Children used to wear the same white dresses, regardless of gender. But clothing styles and color preferences shifted in the mid-20th century Two-year-old Franklin Delano Roosevelt sits primly on a stool, his white skirt spread smoothly over his lap, his hands clasping a hat trimmed with a feather. Shoulder-length hair and patent leather party shoes complete the ensemble—a fashionable look for young boys in 1884, the year the future United States president sat for this portrait.

1 month ago | smithsonianmag.com | Christopher Parker |Meilan Solly

The pontiff, who died on Easter Monday at age 88, strived to make the church more inclusive. But critics believed his reforms either went too far or not far enough When Jorge Mario Bergoglio was 12 years old, he sent a love letter to a girl named Amalia, promising to buy her a house with a red roof and white walls when they eventually got married. Unfortunately for the lovestruck preteen, Amalia’s father refused to let the burgeoning romance continue.

1 month ago | smithsonianmag.com | Meilan Solly

A new exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London chronicles the German camp complex’s history, from its origins housing prisoners of war to its afterlife holding displaced persons In the final months of World War II, as the Allies advanced on Berlin, the Nazis evacuated tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners from concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe to Bergen-Belsen, a camp in northern Germany.