What's new this month?

Discover the power of reflective writing guided by the founding instructor of the National Gallery of Art’s popular Writing Salon, Mary Hall Surface. Inspired by contemporary works by American artist Margaret Boozer, poet Janet Hirshfield, and other sources, explore the bowl as a metaphor for our lives and the world.

Explore the heart of Italy during the first millennium B.C.E. through a journey into the enigmatic world of the Etruscans. Using three masterworks of painting, sculpture, and metalwork excavated from tombs in central Italy, art historian Laura Morelli offers a glimpse into how members of this lesser-known culture adorned the places where they planned to spend eternity and the incredible luxury objects they took with them. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

From Martha Washington to Jill Biden, each woman who has served in the role of first lady of the United States has a story. During a walking tour of the area around the White House, A Tour of Her Own staff share a few of these sagas.

Smithsonian Chamber Music Society audiences are privy to the unparalleled experience of being able to hear two magnificent quartets of instruments—one made by Antonio Stradivari, the other by his teacher Nicoló Amati—in this popular four-concert series on Saturdays. The concert features music composed by Schubert, Mozart, and Brahms.

Smithsonian Chamber Music Society audiences are privy to the unparalleled experience of being able to hear two magnificent quartets of instruments—one made by Antonio Stradivari, the other by his teacher Nicoló Amati—in this popular four-concert series on Sundays. The concert features music composed by Schubert, Mozart, and Brahms.

Experience forest bathing as Melanie Choukas-Bradley, a certified nature and forest-therapy guide, leads a 2-hour morning walk in the Enid A. Haupt Garden at the Smithsonian Castle. This unique and restorative celebration of the beauty of autumn in in one of Washington’s garden gems is the perfect way to learn why forest bathing is popular all over the world.

Discover how visual art can inspire creative writing and how writing can offer a powerful way to experience art. Join Mary Hall Surface, the founding instructor of the National Gallery of Art’s popular Writing Salon, for five online workshops that explore essential elements of writing and styles through close looking, word-sketching, and imaginative response to prompts. This writing session is inspired by 20th-century Hungarian-American artist Lily Furedi’s Subway.

Everything in nature is regulated, from the numbers of vital molecules in our bloodstream to the number of lions on an African savanna. Biologist and author Sean B. Carroll discusses the impact of the work of the pioneering scientists whose investigations uncovered the rules and logic of the human body—known as the Serengeti Rules—and the interconnectedness of the regulation of all of life's elements on the planet.

On Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, activist John Lewis led over 600 marchers across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, and faced attacks by state troopers. The confrontation shocked the nation, yet the previous year an even more brutal incident dubbed Bloody Tuesday took place in Tuscaloosa. Historian John M. Giggie examines one of the most violent episodes of the civil rights movement: a pivotal moment in a Southern city unwilling to shed its history of racial control and Klan brutality until forced by armed Black self-defense groups, a bus boycott, and the federal government.

For many years, dinosaurs were considered ponderous, overgrown monsters doomed from the start. However, a fundamental change in thinking occurred in the late 1960s when two Yale University paleontologists noted that many aspects of their anatomy and biology were much like those of warm-blooded creatures. Paleontologist Hans Sues of the National Museum of Natural History discusses the main researchers involved, the arguments behind the new thinking, and the impact on paleobiology.