The author of The Lost World of James Smithson: Science, Revolution, and the Birth of the Smithsonian was the featured USC Libraries Literary Luncheon speaker on March 12. In this clip, recorded in the Hancock Memorial Museum at USC, Ewing describes James Smithson's childhood and complicated relationship to his birth parents.
Smithson was the illegitimate son of Hugh Smithson (who later became the duke of Northumberland) and Elizabeth Hungerford Keate Macie. He used the name James Lewis Macie until 1802, after the deaths of his parents.
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