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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.

Ever since the 2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine, the Smithsonian Institution has been a key player in the fight to protect Ukraine’s heritage. Corine Wegener, director of the Smithsonian Cultural Rescue Initiative; Hayden Bassett, a Smithsonian research associate and director of the Cultural Heritage Monitoring Lab; and Amber Kerr, the head of conservation at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, detail how the Smithsonian is working with Ukrainian cultural institutions to monitor cultural heritage sites, provide expert advice, detect and assess damage, and provide emergency supplies and equipment.

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 members share a few of these sagas.

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 members share a few of these sagas.

As the 2024 presidential election approaches, political history curators from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History are gathering materials and memorabilia to document this election cycle for the national collections. Curator Jon Grinspan covers why he’s been attending Democratic and Republican contests and rallies throughout the year, looking for materials that reflect debates, protests, and on-site and digital campaign activities—and how they provide insights into the evolving spirit and complexity of our political landscape.

Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are three influential philosophers whose ideas have significantly shaped political theory and the understanding of the social contract. In a fall series, join Georgetown professor Joseph Hartman as he explores these thinkers who offered distinct perspectives on the nature of human beings, the origins of political authority, and the formation of societies. This session focuses on John Locke.

The 2024 presidential campaign and national election are poised to shape America’s trajectory for the next four years and beyond, marking one of the most caustic, bitter and pervasively negative periods in U.S. political history. In a fact-based, non-partisan presentation, veteran White House correspondent, historian, and author Ken Walsh discusses the outcome of this historic election with a focus on explaining what’s ahead for our republic in this age of distrust and division.

As an impending crisis in Europe developed in the 1930s, Winston Churchill—out of government and with little power—turned his country home, Chartwell, into the headquarters of his campaign against Nazi Germany. Katherine Carter, Chartwell’s curator, discusses how the remarkable but little-known meetings with trusted advisers and informants that that took place there strengthened Churchill’s fight against the Nazis.

The principal architect of the party system and one of the founders of the Democratic Party, Martin Van Buren’s unparalleled skills as a political strategist won him the nickname “The Little Magician"—and a series of increasingly high-profile offices. Van Buren scholar James M. Bradley depicts the struggle for power in the tumultuous decades leading up to the Civil War as he charts the eighth president’s ascent from a tavern in the Hudson Valley to the White House.

Poet William Butler Yeats was a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival, the cultural movement that preceded the country’s political independence from Britain. Lucy Collins, editor of the Irish University Review and an associate professor at University College Dublin, explores the cultural politics of early 20th-century Ireland as the crucible within which Yeats’ work was formed and examines how the political and the personal combine in some of his greatest poems.