Art
Alice Guy-Blaché, the First Woman Filmmaker
Alice Guy-Blaché is recognized as the first woman filmmaker, going back to an 1896 silent short, but her career remains unsung in the history of cinema.
Allison Meier
Books
Photographs of North America’s East Coast Capture Its Fragile Ecosystems
Photographer David Freese journeyed along the continent's eastern shoreline, documenting it in the face of climate change.
Art
A World Tour Through a Collection of Paper Architectural Models
The National Building Museum's recently acquired collection of 4,500 paper models shows an interpretation of the world in miniature, from black-and-white shtetls to nuclear power plants.
Art
A Rare Loan from Windsor Castle Brings Mark Catesby's Watercolors to South Carolina
A century before John James Audubon illustrated The Birds of America, English naturalist Mark Catesby journeyed across the Atlantic to systematically study the animals and plants of the "New World."
Art
The 65 Symbols on US Military Tombstones
While American military cemeteries may look uniform with their rows of cross-adorned tombs, look closer and you'll find Wiccan Pentacles, Atheist Atoms, and the Hammer of Thor.
Art
Midcentury Modern Design and the Anxiety of Selling Out
Behind each innovation of the period was a negotiation between a company's needs and a designer's creativity.
Art
Fading Memories of Chinatown in 1940s San Francisco, Preserved in Dioramas
"I want to capture my memories, and the only way for me to capture my memories is to make them in three dimensions," says artist Frank Wong in the short film Forever, Chinatown.
News
Dozens of Māori and Moriori Remains Return to New Zealand from European Museums
The Übersee-Museum Bremen and three other institutions are repatriating 59 Moriori and Māori ancestral remains collected in the 19th century.
Art
How a Smithsonian Naturalist’s Skeleton Ended Up on View at the Museum
The skeleton of 19th-century collector Robert Kennicott is on view in the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of Natural History's Objects of Wonder. The bones recently solved the long mystery of his death.
Books
A Photographer’s Uncanny Images of Amusement Parks at Night
After the sun set and the amusement park closed, photographer Stefano Cerio documented the surreal scenes of its vacant rides.
Art
Watch the British Museum Conserve Its Largest Print, a 16th-Century Dürer Woodcut
Albrecht Dürer's "Triumphal Arch" is one of the largest prints ever made, and after a century on view at the British Museum, its conservation was a colossal task.
News
Playlists of Protest Music and Endangered Languages on New Smithsonian Folkways Site
Online visitors can now access and navigate decades of folk recordings from around the world more easily.