Teddy Brokaw

May 16, 2024 | smithsonianmag.com | Teddy Brokaw

From Alaska to Florida, these serene and exhilarating stretches beg you to take the scenic route “SEE AMERICA FIRST,” proclaimed an April 1, 1906, headline in the New York Times, encouraging American tourists to expand their vacation horizons beyond Europe.

Feb 15, 2024 | smithsonianmag.com | Teddy Brokaw |Chris Carra

In 1829, a group of explorers led by Spanish merchant Antonio Armijo moved west toward Alta California through the arid Mojave Desert—the ancestral lands of the Southern Paiute people.

Jan 8, 2024 | smithsonianmag.com | Maddie Bender |Teddy Brokaw |Gavin McIntyre

While digging a trench for the renovation of a local performing arts center in 2013, construction workers in Charleston, South Carolina, made a startling discovery: human bones. The crew called the police and coroner’s office, unaware they had stumbled upon a late-18th-century burial ground. The site’s location—along with the coins, ceramics and beads that had been buried with the bodies—suggested that the people had been enslaved Africans.