Meilan Solly is a senior associate digital editor at Smithsonian. She focuses on culture and society, exploring themes related to cultural movements, fine art, and social interests, including women's issues. Meilan's work has been featured in Smithsonian Magazine and MSN.
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Meilan Solly’s coverage leans heavily toward historical and archaeological storytelling, with a strong emphasis on objects, sites, and discoveries that connect the past to broader social and cultural narratives. She seems most responsive to pitches that offer fresh research, newly uncovered artifacts, or compelling reinterpretations of well-known events.
She also regularly highlights human-angle stories tied to conflict, disaster, and how communities remember or forget major events, so pitches with a strong archival angle or a new scholarly finding would fit well.
Given her global scope with a UK emphasis, outreach should foreground stories with British relevance when possible, while still being broad enough to appeal to an international audience.
This information evolves through artificial intelligence and human feedback. Improve this profile .
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By: Meilan Solly
Archaeologists discovered the roughly 2,500-year-old sculpture of a young man while conducting excavations at Sardis in western Turkey. The artwork reflects the different cultures that wielded control over the city in the first millennium B.C.E.
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By: Meilan Solly
A skeleton unearthed in Scotland likely belongs to a soldier struck by a high-speed projectile during Edward I's 1304 siege of Stirling Castle. The man suffered more than 160 fractures
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By: Meilan Solly
On August 23, 1944, a test flight over the village of Freckleton, located in northwest England, ended in disaster, claiming the lives of 61 people, including 38 students between the ages of 4 and 6
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By: Meilan Solly
No written records mention a fight in this specific part of Vienna at the time of the men's deaths. But the brutal nature of their injuries, particularly to the pelvis area, indicates that these individuals died on the battlefield
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By: Meilan Solly
New research suggests that the people who buried the young woman took precautionary measures to stop her from coming back to life and exacting revenge on them
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By: Meilan Solly
Recently discovered archival records indicate that workers constructing an extension of the Constable's Gate at Dover Castle in the late 19th century reused fragments of the Tudor-era Sandown Castle
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By: Meilan Solly
The National Museum of American History houses hundreds of objects linked to the attacks. Ahead of the 25th anniversary of the tragedy, learn the stories behind some of the most poignant items in the collections
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By: Meilan Solly
Paul Greengrass' new film stars Andrew Garfield as a fictionalized, unnamed farmer who leads a rebellion against unfair taxes and the system of serfdom
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By: Meilan Solly
The graphic designer revamped his world-famous emblem in response to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The updated design underscored the city's resilience in the face of tragedy
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By: Meilan Solly
Archaeologists excavating Chan Chan, the capital of the pre-Inca Chimú civilization, found an undisturbed mausoleum that held the remains of at least 38 individuals, as well as a trove of rich funerary goods
