All upcoming Lectures

Backyard birding offers a simple, rewarding way to connect with nature. With a window, balcony, or small outdoor space, says naturalist Matt Felperin, you can observe a surprising variety of birds in their routines. From the flash of color as a cardinal lands on a feeder to the familiar call of a chickadee in a nearby tree, these everyday encounters reveal the richness of the natural world outside your door.

Jancis Robinson has been writing about wine since 1975. She is the coauthor, with Hugh Johnson, of the new 9th edition of The World Atlas of Wine. Since it was first published in 1971, the Atlas has been widely recognized as an authoritative wine reference. In a conversation with Dave McIntyre, formerly the Washington Post’s wine columnist, she shares her expertise and insights on what’s new in the world of wine. The event also includes a wine tasting and book signing.

Discover the power of reflective writing guided by teaching artist and museum educator, Mary Hall Surface. Inspired by works of art by Hudson River landscape painter Jasper Francis Cropsey and poetry by Mary Oliver, explore the lessons that the season of autumn offers when we slow down, look closely, and reflect. Designed for writers of all levels, the workshop invites participants to look outward at paintings and poetry and to look inward through writing.

Historians view the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 as a turning point, igniting northern resistance to the expansion of slavery. Far less noted is the crucial role of political maps, which visualized that threat in meetings, newspapers, and pamphlets, helping forge the anti-slavery coalition that elected Lincoln. Historian Susan Schulten shows how these maps reshaped perceptions of the American West—and the nation itself.

The universe is far stranger than science fiction ... and it’s all real. Kimberly Arcand of the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory leads a journey through weird and wild places in the cosmos, from merely mind-bending to truly extreme. Along the way meet quasars powered by supermassive black holes, city-sized neutron stars, and pulsars that keep time more precisely than atomic clocks, plus some wild worlds orbiting distant suns.

During the Civil War, tens of thousands of Union and Confederate soldiers endured brutal conditions in prison camps such as Belle Isle in Richmond. Yet many prisoners found creative ways to preserve their humanity: they sketched, carved, wrote, and crafted objects from whatever materials they could find. Kelly Hancock of the American Civil War Museum highlights works from its POW art collection. These deeply personal pieces reveal not only suffering but also endurance, resourcefulness, and the human need to create even in the darkest of circumstances.

The story of the 1692 Salem witch trials is well known, but Salem actually marked the end of a long, widespread witch craze. Historian Kate E. Bush traces witch trials back to their origins in Europe during the 15th century. Bush explores how new beliefs about certain people, most often women, working in league with the Devil took hold during that time and led to witch hunts. She also examines the enduring stereotypes that defined the witch in popular imagination.

Built from scratch in the 1950s, the Modernist city of Brasilia was designed to express new ideas about urban living and city planning while relocating the national capital from the coast to a more central site in the Brazilian highlands. Historian Justin M. Jacobs surveys Brasilia’s carefully designed downtown landscapes and creative solutions to urban housing, all meant to synchronize with one another and provide a progressive model for a better world.

Washington, D.C.’s cemeteries offer a revealing lens into the city’s layered history, where landscape design, architecture, and memory intersect. Carolyn Muraskin of DC Design Tours explores four distinctive burial grounds: Oak Hill Cemetery, Mount Zion Cemetery and Female Union Band Society Cemetery, Glenwood Cemetery, and Rock Creek Cemetery. By examining their designs and symbolism and the lives they commemorate, Muraskin presents these sites not as static resting places but as dynamic cultural landscapes that continue to shape how we understand the city’s past.

Founded after the First Crusade to protect pilgrims, the Templar Order evolved into a powerful religious-military order, major landholder, and influential financial force. Its history reveals tensions between faith and violence, poverty and wealth, secrecy and authority. Medieval historian Jochen Schenk of the University of Glasgow traces its rise, dramatic suppression in the early-14th century, and transformation into a legend, exploring why it became influential, vulnerable, and enduring.