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PHOTOGRAPHS BY REBECCA HALE
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By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, History & Culture
As the Smithsonian Institution celebrates its 175th anniversary this year, its complex of varied museums sprawls across the National Mall in Washington, D.C., and beyond. The institution’s storage facilities cover football fields worth of warehouse space around the country, and Smithsonian research centers are doing groundbreaking work around the globe.
But in 1846, the Smithsonian was just a pile of money—about $500,000—donated by a British scientist named James Smithson, a man who’d never visited the United States. His bequest stipulated only that the institution be “an establishment for the increase and diffusion of knowledge.”
The Smithsonian has always taken its founder’s “anything’s game” philosophy seriously.
As Bill Newcott writes for National Geographic, “the sprawling museum-and-zoo complex counts just over 155 million items in its 20 museums and off-site storage facilities. Across more than 11 million square feet of exhibition and storage space . . . those artifacts range from slingshots to space shuttles, ants to elephants.”
Barely one percent of the vast collection is on exhibit at any one time, meaning most of the treasures are kept in conservation hiding most of the time. So, when Newcott and photographer Rebecca Hale were allowed a rare, behind-the-scenes look inside some of the institution’s secure storerooms, they were stunned to discover row after row of iconic cultural touchstones.
They include a Babe Ruth autographed baseball (pictured above), the original Muppets from Sesame Street, and Sylvester Stallone’s boxing shorts, with fake blood, from Rocky (both pictured below).
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