Finding joy amid a tragic pandemic

By Debra Adams Simmons, Executive Editor, History & Culture

Well, 2021 hasn’t necessarily been a return to normal, but it is the year that we adapted—and took control of our lives. Innovation delivered a vaccine that has enabled small steps forward. We have reasons to be joyful, grateful, thankful. We raised glasses and flipped tassels and filled stadiums.

We found moments of grace, even in tiny rooms (pictured above, photographer and Nat Geo Explorer Wale Oyéjidé‘s daughter, who found magic and a venue for boundless imagination in her bedroom in Philadelphia; below, families and friends enjoying a late summer weekend in Seoul.)

We got out of the house. Families reunited. I saw my own mother after nearly two years. In-person church resumed — in pews and parking lots. Delayed birthday, anniversary and retirement celebrations moved forward. Weddings and births happened, surrounded by loved ones. We publicly celebrated lives well lived.

Just as we prepared for a summer return to the office, COVID-19 gave us a painful reminder that the pandemic is not over. But this is a year when resilience prevailed. We worked remotely—from some of the world’s most beautiful places. We started new businesses. We adjusted to tighter family gatherings (pictured below, in Mexico, it was a smaller than usual birthday piñata.)

Families cheered on their graduates as high school, college and graduate school commencement proceeded live and in-person. Summer barbecues peppered the calendar. Fall sports, many of which were canceled in 2020, returned allowing volleyball, soccer, field hockey and football to take their place as the center of many communities. Family reunions and school reunions took us back to more blissful times. Time-honored HBCU homecomings filled fall weekends. We masked up and got on planes in order to hug the people we love the most. “In these ways and others, people across the planet have found happiness amid the despair,” Tucker Toole writes for Nat Geo.

From Arkansas to Chile, Ghana to Rimini, Italy (pictured above, in July), Nat Geo photographers found moments of grace, joy and beauty amid the chaos of COVID. As Thanksgiving approaches, we’ve had much to be thankful for as celebrate one of life’s most precious gifts—time spent among family and friends.

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TODAY IN A MINUTE

Seeking asylum: LGBTQ+ migrants make the arduous journey to the United States, seeking refugee from hate, slurs, harassment at work, and random beatings. They imagine the U.S. as a peaceful place, free from discrimination, where they can find a home and a job. Often, they find some of the same challenges when they arrive. Aurora Almendra and photographer Danielle Villasana, a Nat Geo Explorer, report on some of their journeys. (Pictured above, Alexa Smith Riosmakes a phone call outside the home in Memphis, where she lives with her boyfriend, Norlan Alexander Gonzalez Cruz, and other Central America migrants. Alexa spends most of her days inside— without a car, it's difficult to move around the city.)

Justice deferred: In 1892, shoemaker Homer Plessy bought a first-class train ticket in New Orleans. He was kicked off and arrested for being Black. The Supreme Court ruled against him in 1896, codifying second-class – called separate but equal -- treatment for Blacks until the 1954 Brown vs. Board of Education decision. On Friday, Louisiana’s Board of Pardons recommended that Plessy, who died in 1925 with the conviction on his record, be pardoned, the Washington Post reports.

Dealing with the past and present: German Historical Museum in Berlin has acquired 15,000 objects tracing the history of antisemitism, both to preserve them and prevent them from being traded on the open market. Wolfgang Haney, the previous collector who died in 2017 at 93, spent three decades and more than 1 million euro (about $1.15 million) amassing knickknacks, coins, photographs, and artifacts, Artnet News reports.

Photographing the animals: In real life, Nat Geo Explorer Joel Sartore is known for photographing nearly 12,000 of the world’s vulnerable species. Tomorrow, Sartore makes a cameo on the venerable ABC soap General Hospital, playing himself at an exhibition of his Photo Ark of animals in fictional Port Charles, New York. (The soap’s executive producer is a Photo Ark fan.) We hear that Sartore makes it out just fine, but (spoiler alert!) looks like someone is going to need medical attention.

PHOTO OF THE DAY

What’s up, mom? At a health clinic in Bangladesh, a young girl nestles into her pregnant mother's sari while her mom gets a checkup and advice on the pregnancy. This photo, which recently appeared in our Photo of the Day archival feature, was the cover image of the October 1998 issue.

Related: Giving birth during the pandemic: A love letter to my daughter.

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THE BIG TAKEAWAY

Cahokia, America's first metropolis: It is nicknamed “Woodhenge,” and also tracked the sun, moon, planets, and stars. It was just one of many impressive sites in a metropolis that flourished from about 1000 through the 1200s—though it was mysteriously abandoned afterward. The name of the settlement was Cahokia, built on mounds (pictured above) east of the Mississippi River in southern Illinois. It was the jewel of what was once the greatest civilization between the deserts of Mexico and the North American Arctic, Nat Geo’s History magazine reports.

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LAST GLIMPSE

Badlands: These rugged lands in western South Dakota are deeply tied to the Oglala Lakota people. The 1891 photo above, from Pine Ridge, shows a Lakota camp in the background. Yet most visitors to the sprawling U.S. national park “don’t get a whole lot of [Oglala Lakota] history tied directly to the Badlands.” That’s what filmmaker Jesse Short Bull, who can trace his Oglala Lakota lineage back five generations, tells Nat Geo.

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