National Museum

'Pushing boundaries: African-Americans in Civil War Medicine' Where: National Museum of Civil War Medicine, 48 East Patrick St., Frederick When: Through Friday. The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday What: The traveling exhibit, titled "Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African-Americans in Civil War Medicine," was created by the Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health and details the history of African Americans who served in a medical capacity during the war. One of those profiled is Maj. Alexander T. Augusta, who took a stand— nearly 100 years before Rosa Parks — against discrimination by refusing to give up his seat on a streetcar in Washington.

Baltimore's year-old National Pinball Museum, a pinging, clanging, tilting tribute to the flipper machines that have been mainstays of American popular culture for decades, will be shutting its doors March 3. The museum, which re-located to Baltimore from Georgetown in January of last year, has once again fallen victim to the terms of its lease agreement, owner David Silverman wrote in an email Tuesday evening to supporters. Silverman, whose 600-plus machines formed the core of the museum's collection, said he could not afford to keep it open.

One sight tourists in Washington won't be able to visit this summer is the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History. Thank goodness. Before doors shut a year ago for 24 months and $85 million in renovations, it was one of the biggest disappointments in town. Unfortunately, interim exhibitions off-site suggest there's little reason to expect substantive improvement when the museum reopens in 2008. Before it closed, the museum didn't offer even a CliffsNotes version of its ostensible subject.

When the country's largest museum devoted to African-American history and culture opens in Washington, Maryland people and places will get a healthy share of the limelight. A two-story log house built by freed slaves from Montgomery County, dubbed the Freedom House, is one of the largest single objects planned for display inside the $500 million museum, for which ground was broken Wednesday. Other Maryland-related objects include a silk shawl given to abolitionist Harriet Tubman by Britain's Queen Victoria, a hymn book used by Tubman and a first edition of abolitionist Frederick Douglass' autobiography.

Philip Freelon, one of the lead architects of the Reginald F. Lewis Museum of Maryland African American History and Culture in Baltimore, will play a key role in shaping the even-larger African-American museum planned for the Mall in Washington. A team made up of Freelon's company, the Freelon Group of Research Triangle Park, N.C., and Davis Brody Bond of New York City has been selected to begin planning the project, which is expected to be the largest African-American museum in the country, a director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture said yesterday.

WASHINGTON - William Warwick bent over slightly and spread his elbows as if they were wings. With a shield in one hand and a spear topped with an eagle's claw in the other, he began to stamp his feet rhythmically, his head swinging back and forth. Faster and faster he went, twirling to the beat of the drums, his face intense. How could Warwick not dance, surrounded by a procession of more than 11,000 Native Americans representing more than 100 tribes? How could he not dance when the sky was the shade of the turquoise jewelry worn by his adopted sisters and aunts?

FREDERICK - Gordon E. Dammann's friends finally understood why he was so busy during the past 18 months when they toured the newly renovated, reopened National Museum of Civil War Medicine yesterday. Dammann, a 55-year-old dentist from Lena, Ill., whose collection of Civil War medical artifacts is the core of the museum's vast collection, has worked for more than a decade on the museum. During recent months, he and his wife, Karen, traveled repeatedly between Illinois and Maryland to make sure the finished product met their expectations.

WASHINGTON - As construction of the transcontinental railroad pressed forward during the 1800s, the iron horse wasn't the only thing to connect America's western frontiers with its populated East.With every new rail put down, photographers, bulky equipment and all, followed close behind, creating images of new and brilliant landscapes they encountered - works that ultimately became a visual link for many Americans to the vast, untamed reaches of their young and expanding nation.A remarkable body of these early renditions of the far West and a host of vintage photographs spotlighting life in 19th- and early 20th-century America are the focus of a special exhibition at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American Art through April 20.175 images"American Photographs: The First Century" provides a fascinating survey of the early development and popularity of photography in the United States.

Visitors to the Dr. Samuel D. Harris National Museum of Dentistry yesterday found teasers for their taste buds.The youngest visitors created a mystery flavor, entered a smelling bee, sampled spicy cookies and colored a big mouth in a celebration billed as "Bite Your Tongue." The program was one in a monthly series of family events that culminates with the museum's second anniversary celebration in June.Housed in a renovated century-old building at Lombard and Greene streets, the museum rooms once served as the dental school for the University of Maryland, Baltimore, which claims the world's first dental college.

Until the yellow school buses started pulling up at the National Museum of Dentistry's door, visitors to the $5 million gallery were as scarce as crooked teeth in a beauty pageant.The exhibit hall on the edge of the University of Maryland's downtown campus, which opened in June, still has a tough time attracting large numbers of casual, walk-in patrons such as those who visit the Babe Ruth and B&O Railroad museums, two neighboring institutions on the western side of downtown Baltimore.The dental museum has adopted a different strategy.

When it comes to pinball, Washington's loss is Baltimore's gain. The National Pinball Museum, unexpectedly and unceremoniously kicked out of its Georgetown location last summer, opens Jan. 14 next to Power Plant Live. Soon, in addition to checking out Port Discovery , eating a good meal and listening to some live rock 'n' roll, downtown visitors will be able to exercise their wrists and develop the fine art of keeping a metal ball in play without tilting the machine. In a city where John Waters is king and the delightfully quirky American Visionary Art Museum is one of the most vibrant tourist attractions, a museum devoted to pinball should be right at home.

The National Pinball Museum, forced out of Washington after losing its lease earlier this year, will be moving into the Power Plant Live complex. Trucks began moving owner David Silverman's vast collection of flipper-type pinball machines into a building at 608 Water St. Wednesday. Silverman, a Silver Spring-based landscape designer who has been collecting the machines for some 40 years, said he hopes to open for business by the end of November. "We're moving in now," he said early Thursday morning as he drove into Baltimore.

'Pushing boundaries: African-Americans in Civil War Medicine' Where: National Museum of Civil War Medicine, 48 East Patrick St., Frederick When: Through Friday. The museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Monday-Saturday and 11 a.m.-5 p.m. Sunday What: The traveling exhibit, titled "Binding Wounds, Pushing Boundaries: African-Americans in Civil War Medicine," was created by the Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health and details the history of African Americans who served in a medical capacity during the war. One of those profiled is Maj. Alexander T. Augusta, who took a stand— nearly 100 years before Rosa Parks — against discrimination by refusing to give up his seat on a streetcar in Washington.

Pinball machines can trace their lineage all the way back to 18th-century France and Marie Antoinette. Who knew those pinging flipper games, with the frenetic metal balls and the constantly blinking lights, had a royal bloodline? David Silverman knew. And beginning Saturday at his new National Pinball Museum in Georgetown, visitors can learn the story of how the Count de Artois invented an early ancestor of pinball, known as bagatelle, on a dare from his sister-in-law, the queen.

As recently as the late 1960s, the very existence of the National Security Agency — the Fort Meade-based defense organization that gathers intelligence from foreign countries — was such a closely held secret that insiders jokingly called the place "No Such Agency. " So when a New York newspaper reporter named David Kahn stood ready to illuminate it in a big new book in 1967, the government was less than pleased. "According to my editor [at Macmillan Publishers]

The National Sailing Hall of Fame plans to move aggressively, despite the sour economy, to raise the $30 million in private funding required by its recently approved state lease to begin building the museum on Annapolis' waterfront. "We're very bullish about it happening [quickly]," said Lee Tawney, executive director of the nonprofit educational institution. "We have a good project. We would like to get this done as soon as possible." The museum has hired Odell Simms & Associates Inc. of Falls Church, Va., to organize its national fundraising drive.

Philip Ravenhill,52, chief curator at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of African Art for the past 10 years, died of a heart attack Monday in Washington.An anthropologist with an interest in the visual arts, he joined the National Museum of African Art in 1987 and played a major role in selecting and recommending works for the museum to acquire.Adil Carcani,75, prime minister of Albania's last Stalinist government, died in Tirana, Albania, Monday after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage.

Ellen D. Reeder, a former curator at the Walters Art Museum, has been named director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington. Reeder, who was curator of ancient art at the Walters from 1984 to 1999, will assume her new post Monday. Until recently, she was deputy director for art at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York, where she was responsible for collections, curatorial activities, exhibits, education, conservation and reference libraries. "I consider it an honor and privilege to serve as director of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, and look forward to bringing the work of this exceptional museum to an even larger national and international audience," Reeder said in a statement.

Dr. John Miller Hyson Jr., a retired dentist and former director of archives and history at the National Museum of Dentistry at the University of Maryland Dental School and an author who wrote widely on the history of dentistry, died Saturday of a stroke at Gilchrist Center for Hospice Care. The longtime Timonium resident was 81. Dr. Hyson, the son of a dentist and a homemaker, was born in Baltimore and raised on Ellerslie Avenue. After graduating from Loyola High School in 1945, he attended Loyola College for a year before transferring to the University of Maryland Dental School, from which he graduated in 1950.