The Latest Breaking News from Smithsonian

Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos once pledged that if his company's first rocket to reach space and land vertically back on Earth survived, he would put it in a museum. He has made good on his word.

The Smithsonian Museums in Washington DC is celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month with Walter Mercado's cape

"It should be in the Smithsonian or the Met. But it's on me."

Bernice Johnson Reagon, a musician and scholar who used her rich, powerful contralto voice in the service of the American Civil Rights Movement and human rights struggles around the world, has died at 81

Political history curators from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History are at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, collecting items from clothing to signs that will help tell the story of the 2024 presidential election. Conversation U.S. politics editor Naomi Schalit interviewed them last week, before they set out…

Thousands of Republicans, from a presidential candidate to grassroots party members, began assembling in Milwaukee on July 15, 2024, for that quadrennial political ritual, the party convention. Political history curators from the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History were there, too. They’re self-described “scavengers” of the physical objects that make…

One of the most desired gems in the world is believed to be cursed. But what is the Hope Diamond's history, value and worth?

A Texas Christian University professor and students probe the unsolved mysteries surrounding the 2001 thefts of dozens of artifacts.

Bao Li and Qing Bao will be the first pandas to reside at the Smithsonian zoo in Washington DC since last fall