What's new this month?

Lift your voice in a choral program that celebrates memorable music across the United States. Conductor Melodia Mae Rinaldi leads the ensemble in arrangements of the hits you know and love. Songs may include favorites by Dolly Parton, Pete Seeger, Stevie Wonder, Irving Berlin, and others. No audition is required and rehearsals culminate in a free performance on June 15 for invited guests.

The 250th anniversary of the United States marks a milestone, representing two and a half centuries of upholding democracy, building communities, and working to become a more perfect union. In celebration, the Smithsonian Institution created a new book, The Promise of a Nation: Commemorating 250 Years of Patriotism, Resilience, and Aspirations from the National Collection, in which curators reflect on how objects and people have shaped the national identity. During an evening presentation, Smithsonian experts share the story of how this publication came together, focusing on selected decades from the 1770s to the 2020s.

Henry David Thoreau is widely known for Walden and “Civil Disobedience,” but he was also a pioneering environmentalist, an influence on nonviolence movements, and a geologist, botanist, inventor, poet, and early Darwinian thinker. Scholar Randall Fuller reexamines Thoreau as a figure shaped by post-Revolutionary America—an engaged artist-scientist who in many ways embodied the promise of a “new” citizen in the early Republic.

An ambitious expedition left central Mexico in 1540 as Francisco Coronado led nearly 2,000 Spaniards north in search of mythical golden cities. Instead of wealth, they confronted the vast, unmapped American West and formidable Indigenous nations who controlled it. Over two years, the expedition crossed more than 2,500 miles. Hard terrain, starvation, internal collapse, and Indigenous resistance devastated the force: nearly 90 percent never returned. Peter Stark, author of The Lost Cities of El Norte, examines how Indigenous power and the landscape combined to halt European domination of the Southwest and Plains for the next three centuries.

Tens of billions of birds share the planet with us, an astonishing array of species that are present nearly everywhere humans call home. They are delicate creatures with hollow bones and thin skin protected by feathers, but birds actually evolved from dinosaurs over 150 million years ago. Evolutionary biologist Steve Brusatte investigates why birds were the only dinosaurs to survive the cataclysmic asteroid impact 66 million years ago and chronicles how these survivors proliferated to produce the many species seen today.

At the start of 1776, few Americans sought independence, grounding their protests instead in the rights of British subjects. By year’s end, independence had become unavoidable. Historian Edward J. Larson chronicles this pivotal year in American history, from the inspiring appeals of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense in January; through midsummer, when the Second Continental Congress grounded independence in the “self-evident” truths of human equality and individual rights; to Paine’s urgent pleas of December, when “the times that try men’s souls” required Americans not to “shrink from the service of their country.”

Over nearly 250 years, the National Mall has evolved as the center stage of the nation’s capital. The Founding Fathers saw the District of Columbia as a shining beacon of democracy for a newly independent nation, reflected in the L’Enfant Plan’s vision of the National Mall as its ceremonial core. Carolyn Muraskin, founder of DC Design Tours, traces the Mall’s transition from pasture lands to military training grounds and from mud flats to grand monuments, sharing the complex and lesser-known history of some of the most enduring national landmarks. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

The Battle of the Atlantic was the longest and most technologically dynamic campaign of the Second World War, a vast contest in which engineering ingenuity, intelligence breakthroughs, and industrial capacity proved as decisive as bravery at sea. U.S. Naval Academy historian Marcus Jones offers a sweeping narrative of the struggle from 1939 to 1945, presenting the Atlantic war as a complex, interlocking system, one in which science, strategy, and endurance combined to determine the fate of nations: a story of innovation under pressure and survival against the odds.

Long before modern art found its home in museums, it thrived in salons, collections, and networks cultivated by women. From gatherings in Europe to avant-garde circles in early 20th-century New York, these women nurtured artists, championed emerging talent, and shaped the tastes that defined modern culture. In a 3-session series, art historian Jennie Hirsh highlights the salonnières and patrons who forged spaces where innovation flourished. This session focuses on European women. (World Art History Certificate elective, 1/2 credit)

Members Only: The semiquincentennial brings with it an opportunity to celebrate the identity and roots of some of the United States’ most vibrant cultural expressions, especially music. After opening remarks from Brazil’s ambassador to the United States, Maria Luiza Ribeiro Viotti, Georgetown University professor Bryan McCann spotlights the cross-pollination of bossa nova and New Orleans jazz and shares some of the key components of these unique art forms stemming from African rhythmic patterns. Following the lecture, Brazilian-born singer Rose Moraes gives a performance celebrating the heart and soul of bossa nova.