Sidedoor

For more than two decades, the StoryCorps silver Airstream trailer has crisscrossed the country, recording the stories of everyday Americans. In this episode honoring the 250th anniversary of the United States, our...

In 1935, a diver searching Lake Champlain found something extraordinary: a nearly intact warship from the American Revolution. It was the Gunboat Philadelphia. In this episode, we dive into the story of how a ragtag...

In the 1880s, a conservator at the Smithsonian set out for Montana to capture an American bison before the dwindling species vanished forever. He returned with six taxidermied bison that he displayed in the museum. The...

Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III has spent a lifetime thinking about how history gets told. Before becoming the head of the Smithsonian, he was a curator, someone whose job is deciding which stories, people...

A screw. A stuffed possum. A shoe-sizing device. What could any of these objects possibly tell us about the history of the United States? When we think of historic artifacts, we tend to picture the extraordinary...

Everyone thought ghosts lived in the basement of Stockton, California's old Daguhoy Lodge. So, nobody went down there. But when one man refused to be spooked, he made a discovery that would bring the ghosts back to...

How did a car with chopped suspension and hydraulics become a symbol of pride and self-expression for an entire community? We'll cruise back in time to see how lowriders emerged from the post-WWII car craze and became a...

At the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, archivists are working with Native communities to correct the historical record … one photo at a time. In this episode, we go inside the archives, where...

A long time ago, in movie theaters not far away, Star Wars: A New Hope revolutionized American entertainment. In honor of May the 4th, we explore how a scrappy space fantasy reinvented a tale as old as time — and gave...

As we approach the nation's 250th birthday, we are looking back at some of the most important moments in American history. One of those moments is when Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag. But, as we discovered...

When a Smithsonian archaeology intern opened a dusty box of bones in a Panamanian warehouse, she didn't expect to find a mystery, let alone a potential crime scene. But Nina Hirai’s discovery of a tapir skull riddled...

What does it look like for something to be made in America? Through the photography of Christopher Payne, we journey across the past, present and future of American manufacturing to answer this question. From...

Something dark and invisible makes up as much as 90 to 95 percent of the universe—and it took a little girl staring out a bedroom window at the night sky to bring it to light. As a child, Vera Rubin built her own...

A string of unsolved murders in San Francisco's Chinatown in the 1970s led police to the door of a young Korean immigrant named Chol Soo Lee — who was quickly arrested and sentenced to life in prison. But when...

Orville and Wilbur Wright have been immortalized as the men opened the skies to human flight. But could they have achieved such great heights without the wind beneath their wings — their sister? Katharine Wright was her...